THEY HAD TO KILL BEARS
Peter Frampton always thought Roger Troutman used a vocoder, ever since his wife first played him “More Bounce.” When I broke the news to him a few years ago, he was shocked: “Wow. I thought, ‘That’s the best vocoder I ever heard!’ He had a very clean sound with it. That’s why I liked Roger. Because he was using a synth. That’s what made it sound so vocoder-like.”
As with T-Pain and Auto-Tune, Roger Troutman is the most famous vocoderer to never use a vocoder. Talk Boxes and vocoders are confused more than bad for good. “People don’t know what to call [the Talk Box],” Frampton sighs. “They think it’s a vocoder. That’s the word they’ve got, and that’s the word they want it to be.” Nor was Roger Troutman in any hurry to clarify. He’d refer to his Talk Box as “the Ghetto Robot” or “the Electric Country Preacher.” Not one to miss out on some good nomenclature, Bootsy Collins had his own ideas: the Secret Magic Babbler, Roger’s Snake Charmer, Cosmic Communicator—as if “Talk Box” was just too square, so to speak. Too British-for-phone-booth.
Roger Troutman performs “Computer Love” at a low rider show in Fresno, California, June 1998. Influenced by early Talk Box pioneers like Sly Stone and Stone’s bass player Larry Graham, Troutman was the first to articulate entire songs through the tube. (illustration credit 6.9)
Watching old video clips, it’s strange hearing Roger address the crowd with his dinner-table voice. We always assumed the Talk Box was his voice, as if he’d permanently swapped out his pipes for the tube. “I would say that what you hear is the way he talks,” continues Bootsy. “I told Roger that when you go do an interview, you have to take the Talk Box with you. That has to be your voice.”
Bigg Robb began serving as Roger’s tube tech and security in 1987. Often he’d guard the Talk Box between sound check and when Zapp took the stage, or just take it with him back to the motel. “I didn’t want anyone messing with my dude’s stuff,” he says. Bootsy calls the Talk Box a drug addiction. “Everybody wants to use it. It is a special gift, and it is forbidden for you to know the secrets. It will always be a mystery.”
H.P. Lovecraft, a writer well acquainted with the unspeakable, might have consulted Bootsy when pondering: “From what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness … were those half-articulate thunder croakings drawn?”
They were unplumbed from a meat freezer in a garage in central Ohio and plugged into Roger Troutman’s amp. “I shouldn’t be giving you these secrets,” says Lester Troutman, who helped Roger build Talk Boxes. “But we took the tube off the deep freeze in our garage, for meat. They had drains on them.”
Drains being drains, I had to ask Lester about the hygiene situation. He clarified it:
We had no money, man! You think we went over to the Guitar Center and said, ‘Give me one of those tubes, and, by the way, better call the family doctor and see if this stuff is going to give you toxic poisoning’? You think that when Daniel Boone went from Kentucky to California he hopped on I-40? They had to kill bears! We spent hard-earned hours. It was a rig from somebody’s mind, and we emulated what we saw. The whole thing with the Talk Box was a struggle. We were hungry entrepreneurs. With the Talk Box, we had to go out there and hurt for it. So when you ask ‘Was the tube clean?’—you want the answer? Hell no, it wasn’t clean! But I didn’t put the shit in my mouth, so I didn’t give a doggone what Roger did.
Every spring, the dogwoods bloom, birds trill and low-riders blast “Computer Love,” co-written by Charlie Wilson of the Gap Band. A secret weapon from the same album is the minimal vamp “Ja Ready to Rock,” with its rubber-duckie squeaks, Prince howls and System-ish bassline. (illustration credit 6.10)
IS IT SAFE?
One morning on The Today Show, host Katie Couric generated respectable incoherence while attempting to use Frampton’s Talk Box. Then Al Roker flubbed it, as if taking his first bong hit. “Al Roker tried it but he didn’t let any air out, so it was just blowing his mouth up,” Frampton says. “Al said, ‘Oh, that’s very strange.’ I asked Matt [Lauer] if he wanted to try it. He was like, ‘Nooooo, not after you, Al.’ ”
The Talk Box is a personal commitment to one’s own drool. It’s the one thing you cannot return to the guitar store, no less intimate than sharing a toothbrush. The Talk Box’s failing sanitation grade would be a problem when combined with Zapp’s exhaustive touring habit. The tube itself wasn’t visible from the crowd, so Roger appeared to be showing off a funky sore throat—which wasn’t far from the truth. When your mouth is open for fifteen minutes of “More Bounce,” there’ll be some bacterial backwash waiting for you when it is time for “Computer Love.” “You go through a lot of tubes,” says Bigg Robb, who occasionally rushed Roger to the emergency room to treat some alien stomach aches. “A lot of Dr. Tichenor’s and Listerine was involved. And a lot of hot water. Before I was handling the tubes, Roger had gotten sick many times, getting these weird stomach viruses. I would go buy a fifty-foot spool of nontoxic vinyl tubing from a plumbing or hardware store.”
“Once you master it, it’s a lot less drool,” says producer Teddy Riley, who first befriended Roger in 1987. “It vibrates your saliva in.” Roger would often discourage Talk Box use, perhaps to filter out the rookies who didn’t have the heart for it, maybe for their own good. “In the early days, we were getting zapped in a hot second,” says Lester Troutman. “When you’re fourteen, fifteen years old, that was nothin’, man.” “I don’t go near the tube,” says T-Pain. “It’s weird. You gotta not get slobber in it. I’m real crazy with electricity—since I was a kid, sticking my fingers into plugs.”
“It’s not human,” says Patrick “P-Thugg” Gemayel, who first electrocuted himself while building his first talk box at age sixteen. “[The tube] is not supposed to be there. But you get used to it and become a hybrid.” As the Talk-Boxing half of Chromeo, Gemayel took his first memorable jolt while learning Zapp’s “So Ruff, So Tuff.” So began a habit and a hazard. “We still don’t know the effects of repetitive Talk-Box use. You get migraines. You faint.” Gemayel once passed out on a stage in Montreal after making the word “baby” last for thirty seconds. Breathing is a hindrance in the art of phantom enunciation—oxygen deprivation in itself is raw talent. The less you breathe, the better the sound. “You have to know when to breathe out so you don’t hear it in the microphone—so the mic doesn’t pick up all the crap sounds. When you pronounce, you stop breathing and open your throat. You have to block your trachea during an extended phrase. So it creates a room inside your mouth—a resonance box. That’s what gives a flangey effect.”
Yet, it’s the teeth, the last forensic survivors of fire and time, which take the real beating. The Talk Box will hurt your fillings. When we spoke, Frampton had complained of a “chronic sore tooth.” His dentist blamed the tube. Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider—who is more of a vocoder guy—attempted the Talk Box after seeing Zapp play a small hall in Cologne. “I thought I would lose my teeth,” he tells me. “After five minutes I couldn’t talk anymore. All those vibrations!” P-Thugg solved the problem by becoming his own dentist and hasn’t seen one since.
“I’m almost out,” says Michael “Mico Wave” Lane, a former Troutman rival who lost eight teeth to the Talk Box when playing in Japan. “It’s like hockey players. If you play hockey and you have teeth, then you ain’t in the game. We need to invent a Talk-Box-proof tooth.”
Teddy Riley, on the other hand, ingeniously uses the space vacated by a rear molar as a placeholder for his tube.
CELINE DION
Patrick “P-Thugg” Gemayel once accidentally picked up a French soft-rock station in Montreal while using the Talk Box. He found himself with a mouthful of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” while only hearing it inside his head. It took an iceberg-splitting migraine to clear her out.
THE EFFECT OF A G
“More Bounce to the Ounce” could be a new way to study streptococcal pathologies. One of the best things about having strep throat is openi
ng your mouth first thing in the morning and just vibrating. Issue a few boa-whoa-wows, gut deep, before your formant resonances get wise to what’s happening. On “More Bounce,” the word “bounce” carries itself with a phonetic elasticity that turns one syllable into an exaggerated country mile, with Roger Troutman riding the assonance of “wow” and “whoa” in a low-riding stretch diphthong, as if amazed at the effect. Terms of elocution become dirty words and everyone’s dancing in their underwear to the sacred thunder croak.
“Roger practiced the enunciation part, all day, every day,” says Lester. “A lot of words people still can’t say to this day. Some words were impossible to sing with [the Talk Box]. Like U words. Y is all right. F words and s words are okay. Roger would practice the whole alphabet. Most artists do the effect of Peter Frampton or Stevie Wonder. We covered a little Frampton, but Roger was so much better than that. He actually formed words. Roger was the first to do the whole song, then the whole album.”
Teddy Riley would often practice on the phone. “I’ll have conversations through the Talk Box. I could be talking to you through it right now.”
“Consonants are hardest,” says Patrick Gemayel. “Everybody wants to say ‘girl.’ It’s super hard to pronounce. You can never have a good G come out. You have to give the effect of a G.”
“The G is cool,” Riley tells me. “I do the G very well.”
On “More Bounce to the Ounce,” the g is understood. The song was intended as a brief reprise of “Funky Bounce.” Bootsy, who was in the studio with Roger, remembers being airborne most of the session. “When we were recording ‘Funky Bounce,’ we were both jumping up in the air, as if to say, ‘who is going to jump for the longest time?’ and neither of us would stop until the take was done.” With George Clinton helping with the edits, Troutman then stripped the track until it was all skin and drums. Then he went in and replayed the bass, synth and guitar. “If you listen carefully, it’s a repeat-add-repeat kind of thing,” says Robb. “That song’s really only a minute and a half long. But he keeps editing. Takes stuff in, takes stuff out.” At ten minutes, “More Bounce” doesn’t end, it veers off and drives over to the next county, giving the impression that it’s always happening. The loop—the bow, the boa, or whatever snake-eat-tail rig you’re rolling with these days—would be perpetuated in the countless rap songs that later sampled it. EPMD’s 1988 hit “You Gots to Chill” could have been a sleepy accidental nod to the Troutman drain freeze in Hamilton, Ohio. Yet Troutman wouldn’t truly get hip-hop recognition until appearing in the video for Dr. Dre’s “California Love” in 1996, leaning out of a helicopter above the Mojave Desert, chewing on a nasty straw. This would reboot Troutman’s career. Kids born in the juice-box era, who were in diapers when EPMD were in fishing hats, were getting their first look at a G-funk legend. Not bad for age forty-four.
MAGIC BABBLE OUTREACH
In the nineteen-nineties it was easier just to sample Roger and pay the man than relearn the alphabet and glean the tube yourself. (No YouTube hours to squander on Talk Box instructionals back then.) Roger himself was impressed when he heard DJ Quik use it on a Shaq album, of all things. (Quik was already miles around the bend for sampling Kleeer’s classic boogie vocoder for his single “Tonight.”) Quik remembers Dr. Dre telling him that Roger was the most talented person he ever met. “He was kind of intimidating with music,” Quik says after finally meeting Roger in Vegas. “Dude was too far beyond good, and it freaked us out a little bit. I was green to what he was doing.” Quik and Teddy Riley both remember one thing: While Roger spoke to them about “life, music, ice cream, whatever,” he was playing the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, on acoustic guitar—the desolation of being abandoned by your own IBM somewhere outside of Jupiter, in Cinerama no less, captured in a few choice strums. Quik’s own guitar player, Bacon, couldn’t believe it. “It freaked Bacon out,” says Quik. “Freaked him right out.”
Sadly, Quik’s next Talk Box track, “Roger’s Theme,” would be a posthumous ode. “I wanted to do a real moody, solemn dedication to him. Just hearing the Talk Box and knowing that man was dead was a little too cathartic for me.”
The vocoder thrived in the Rust Belt after Roger made it downright foolhardy for anyone to go near a Talk Box. Best known for “Cutie Pie,” Detroit’s One Way scored a minor hit with “Mr. Groove” in 1984, some premium freak sauce sampled by De La Soul for “Shwingalokate.” (illustration credit 6.11)
Dayton’s “Sound of Music” (1983) may be the classiest, Saturday morning-est vocoder song ever invented. Makes you want to headbutt the sun. Makes you want to pull a Vida Blue hologram baseball card out of your Frosted Flakes. The hills are alive with electronic handclaps in Ohio.
Early in the morning of April 25, 1999, Roger Troutman was shot and killed by his oldest brother Larry, just outside the family’s studio, Roger Tee Enterprises, in Dayton, Ohio. Larry Troutman would then drive off and take his own life. Roger was forty-seven; Larry, fifty-four. The entire community was stunned. Among the speculations was the fact that Roger wanted to break out on his own, inspired by his revival with “California Love.” “At a certain point, Roger wanted to do his own thing, which presented a conflict,” Terry Troutman would tell New Times LA in August 2002. “It was their whole life they’d been together. And then for it to break off? That was a strong move, man.”
Bigg Robb was one of the pallbearers when the funeral took place six days later at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio. “On that day, there was a double funeral. We didn’t lose just Roger. We lost Larry as well. And Larry was just as much the mastermind and just as much part of the group’s success and part of Roger’s success as anybody. Everybody talks about Roger, but nobody talks about Larry. Nobody knows what happened, or why it happened. That’s water way under the bridge, trippin’ on that. It’s not gonna bring my friends back.” “My mom was hurt the most,” says Lester Troutman. “I told everybody who interviewed me, ABC News, BET—that I don’t know. Roger is dead. Roger is gone. And I am sick about that more than anybody will ever know.”
The funeral service concluded with Larry’s son, Rufus Troutman III, singing “Amazing Grace” on the Talk Box.
“The first note he hit sounded like Roger,” says Mico Wave. “Then I burst into tears. Everyone started crying. Imagine if I’m talking to you and you die. And I get onstage and sound exactly the way you’re talking. It hit us then. We’re never gonna hear this guy’s voice again.”
“The magic was infused in Rufus at that time while Roger laid there and watched,” says Bootsy. “Not the passing of the torch but the outreach of the magic babble that was first born in Roger himself. Once you pass over, you are connected to the magic without distractions, so Roger got a chance to see the power of what was first gave to him.” “We all gotta leave here sometime,” says Bigg Robb. “And hopefully, it’ll be at ninety-five, in our sleep, with a couple of big-booty old ladies feeding us grapes and ice cream.”
Satellite, “You Can Drive My Space Ship” (1984, High Altitude). Talk box song by Satellite of Cincinnati, freaking in the shadow of the Dazz Band hit “Joystick.” Other talk box necessities: Jackson 5’s “Different Kind of Lady,” Syreeta’s “He’s Gone,” and Rufus (Roger covered Chaka Khan’s vocals through the Talk Box). (illustration credit 6.13)
COMPUTER LOVE IS IRON MAN
I’m telling Lester Troutman about a Zapp show I saw in 1987, as if he wasn’t there. R.J.’s Latest Arrival did “Shackles” on the vocoder. Fresh Gordon played the Andy Griffith theme on his “drum computer,” channeled through Aunt Bee’s dentures. Doug E. Fresh cracked knuckles inside his mouth. And Roger came out in his electric suit and did “Computer Love,” twice.
The phone is quiet, then Lester roars, “I am Iron Man!” This was the effect Zapp was going for at the beginning of “Computer Love,” though Ozzy’s Talk Box seemed to have been tortured into existence from peasant bones and bubonic mud. “That was me,” says Lester, who practiced Black Sabbath with Rog
er. “I am Iron Man! ‘Computer Love’ was ‘Iron Man’!” “Computer Love” was once described to me as “a ballad for AutoCAD engineers with the vectors and flying-toaster screen saver.” It’s the only quiet-storm classic with enough bass to crack the low-rider scene in Los Angeles.
“Computer Love” is the encore that night at the Charlotte Coliseum. Roger Troutman wears his photon-studded suit. According to Lester, he’d borrowed the suit from Robert Redford’s rodeo cereal spokesman in The Electric Horseman. The swooning twinkle of lighters is pretty into it. So is Roger, probably four tubes deep by now. Zapp cuts the music so the crowd can hear itself do the chorus, replacing Roger’s larynx with the voice of thousands, singing “Thanks to my technology.”
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