How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  Nobody seemed to know what “Clear” meant, other than the fact that Detroit’s abandoned factories made good party spaces and that the song fit nicely between Kraftwerk and Debbie Deb, between clean German automation and debauched Miami strip malls. Though designated as the birth of Detroit techno, “Clear” couldn’t wait to get down to South Florida, where the song was adopted and sainted, a reason for pirate DJs to shout out the clarity of bass sub-frequencies before blowing their woofers out to sea. The lyrics “Clear, you’re behind” could have meant “make room for that bottom.” And so Miami backed into the future through a garrison of speaker cabinets, in the rear with the gear.

  To the generation that discovers these conspiracies on the Internet, “Clear” would be recognized for what it isn’t, something Missy Elliott sampled for her 2002 single “Lose Control.” The conceit was simple: Music makes you hallucinate blue Lamborghinis airbrushed by a Ciara chorus while Fat Man Scoop, the drill sergeant of hype men, berates the freaks, freaking the club. It’s all seizures and tracksuits, boneless and acrylic.

  “Lose Control” enabled Rik Davis to drive off in a black Corvette C6, paid in full with sampling dividends and pictured on his MySpace page along with a photo of Missy in designer combat fatigues. Yet talking to Davis, you immediately sense that “Clear” was everything but the club. It was someone simply trying to deal, making room inside his head. Whatever passed through the vocoder from Washington to Saigon, Rik Davis lived it in the clearing of the jungles, where Kissinger had quantified bombing to “the bejeesus,” as if unaccountable. “Clear has a military value,” Davis says. Securing an area of operation could mean slaughtering the village. “Clear our displays,” their actions. Clear is classified, redacted. The human blank. A contradiction that would never admit as much. In itself, a white sky mindfuck.

  Much of Davis’ Vietnam tour is restricted as “need to know.” He says “Clear” was a way for him to vent his spleen. “I’d seen too much death. Destruction is something I’ve dwelt in all my existence. My motivations—what would be the use or sense in trying to explain these things? I’m only telling you now as a post-mortem.” Juan Atkins remembers his friend’s accounts in the bush. The snakes, the leeches, the artillery pop, the swamps, the bugs, the elephant grass. “It was the worst mistake of his life.”

  Davis’ motive for enlisting had less to do with godless communist aggression than it did with just getting out of Detroit, a city that nearly burned to the ground in the riots of 1967. Davis, then sixteen, witnessed it from the gutted grocery store where he worked. “I was born in the ghetto of Detroit in Black Bottom,” he says. “Politically, I wasn’t pro or anti [war]. A chance to escape the ghetto became more imperative than anything else.” Once thriving from wartime industry and the migration of black families from Alabama and Mississippi, Detroit underwent slum clearance in the Fifties, a policy of racism and deindustrialization that leveled and displaced entire communities. By the Sixties, when Davis was catching every Roger Corman film in town, Interstate 75 had ploughed through Black Bottom, formerly Paradise Valley. Clear was desolation. “I have been on the wrong end of urban renewal all my life,” says Davis. “The population was cleared out, for a highway. They dug a big ditch straight downtown, straight to the riverfront.”

  Rik was one of those kids who had to run to the library to avoid getting mugged, finding refuge in a fanzine called Famous Monsters of Filmland. He would do the gauntlet through Detroit’s East Side, past the Arcadia roller rink and Brewster Projects, so he could catch a double feature of The Lost Missile and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. “You’re not going to believe this, but I joined the Marines to sail the Seven Seas with Captain Sinbad. Adventure and thrills.”

  During grunt training at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, Davis went AWOL and caught a bus to Los Angeles, where he was taken in by a branch of the Diggers commune, another disillusioned seventeen-year-old chasing flower girls in his uniform. (“I was just trying to get laid before I died.”) But the escape was abbreviated by the news of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. “I heard it from an old white guy. I was in uniform. He stopped me in the street and said, ‘Well, what do you think of him now?’ I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, ‘They’ve killed him! He’s dead.’ ”

  The first pressing of Cybotron’s “Cosmic Cars.” Released in 1982 on Deep Space Records, a label Rik Davis helped fund with his VA disability check. (Courtesy Asaf Segal) (illustration credit 8.7)

  Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, early mentor of Rik Davis, photographed in front of his house in Los Angeles, fending off the same Allosaurus that menaced Raquel Welch in Ray Harryhausen’s dinomation classic One Million Years BC. (illustration credit 8.8)

  Confused, high and broken, Davis turned himself in and was shipped off to Vietnam. He wasn’t allowed to pack his Dunwich Horror, not even the special GI Armed Services Edition, published in 1943. The Marines did provide a bible—all the same for Lovecraft and Cybotron, only more deluxe ichor, more rot. Revelations would become “R-9,” a 1985 Cybotron single about being trapped in the Good Word. “Human life does not depart from the word,” says Davis. “So you’re forced to step in synchronization, whether you believe it, whether you want it. Irrelevant. You’re programmed to fulfill it.” (I wouldn’t have skipped Sunday School had I known they were teaching the bible with cosmic electro lasers from Detroit.)

  Davis would be sent to Quang Tri, the northernmost province of South Vietnam, a region overrun by the NVA but ruled by the jungle—the most dangerous place to be in 1968. Davis’ first duty was accidentally torching a row of wooden toilets. “It was better that way,” Davis laughs. “They got new latrines.” Christopher Lee’s biggest fan was then deployed north of Dong Ha to fight the Pathet Lao Insurgency, a group of communist guerrillas backed by the NVA. “We did ops that don’t exist. Ops that weren’t allowed to exist.”

  On Cybotron’s 1983 debut album Enter, Davis used an ARP Axxe synthesizer and a vocoder to get from Vietnam to El Salvador. Filtering noise through a modulated wave, he created machine-gun patter and helicopter drumming, sampled from combat memory in the 17th Parallel and mixed down in his nightmares. (Davis had purchased the Arp after watching Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria, scored by Goblin in quadraphonic sound and adopted by a ballet school run by witches, filling the gate to hell with reverb. Goblin would later go disco vocoder on the soundtrack to Argento’s Tenebrae.) Listening to the Clash’s Sandinista and keeping with the Reagan-backed junta of the times, Davis called the song “El Salvador.” The lyrics quaver like algae’s grandmother, sub-tarn and only understood by Davis himself, who was then processing some post-traumatic demons through a Korg vocoder. When I ask for a translation (all I caught was “El Salvador”), he repeated the hook: “I don’t want to kill you but I have to.”

  “El Salvador” was not chosen as a single. With a sluggish zombie pulse, the song can’t get out of its own head much less to the dance floor, instead choosing to melt into a dark corner best avoided.

  Rik Davis’ first single, “Methane Sea,” was released in 1978 (Deep Sea). Not suitable for the roller-rink. (Courtesy Asaf Segal) (illustration credit 8.9)

  When Rik Davis returned from Vietnam, there were rehabilitative stays in VA hospitals and trips to record stores in downtown Detroit—the black kid asking for Tangerine Dream only to get weird looks and end up on the same label as Creedence Clearwater Revival. “How are you gonna fit into that?” says Davis. “There’s no place for you. You never assimilate. One side of you wants to be a hippie and the other side wants to fit in. Neither can ever happen. The time of your youth is gone. Everybody has moved on. What you had is gone. It’s not coming back. Sometimes this place is so foul … I can’t swear to you that Rik ever actually came back out of the jungle.”

  One night, during the recording of “R-9,” Juan Atkins walked into Cybotron’s studio above Tee Tee’s Speakeasy in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Th
ere he found Davis in his pajamas holding an assault rifle. “He’d be on guard duty in the middle of the night, aiming the rifle around, cocked. Doing maneuvers. I never felt he was crazy or anything—we were best friends. It was something that just caught me off-guard a little bit.” When Atkins asked if everything was okay, Davis said, “Yeah, man … I just sometimes have these dreams.”

  Outside the studio, the crickets chirped. This would be Cybotron’s only field recording, a decision to drop a mic out the back door and see what a Detroit evening had to offer. Stridulation would be the way out of “El Salvador” and into “Clear,” the last track on Enter. The helicopter and machine guns fade into cries of “dear mother of God” in Spanish. You’re left alone with the ghost of your nonexistent ops and some bug-wing friction before everything disappears. It’s kind of pleasant. There’s nobody else out there.

  Rockets, On the Road Again (1978, Tom N’ Jerry). Rockets were bald, silver and French. The title cut was cosmically stretched by New York disco remixer Tom Moulton. That’s German producer Zeus B. Held on the vocoder, giving the machine top billing over regular “vocals.” Zeus B. Held’s Talk Box vamp on Rockets’ “Future Woman” sounds like a gargling grackle. (illustration credit 8.10)

  POWER TO THE POWER WINDOWS

  What do you think every electrofreak dreams about?

  — Thomas Pynchon

  The Electrifying Mojo says he designed the formula and personally feels it’s exactly what you need on a hot Wednesday night. To devout listeners of WJLB in Detroit, this means Prince, Kraftwerk, and more Prince. Then an hour or so of Parliament bootlegged live, uninterrupted save for the part where Mojo says, “Funk kicks ass” while a Mothership synth does an admirable job of giving the Close Encounters theme a chocolate swirly. Detroit has come to expect this from Mojo. Porch lights flicker in anticipation. The Midnight Funk Association has convened, and according to your host, it’s time to dance on your back in Technicolor.

  It’s now sneaking up on three in the morning, and Mojo’s talking over “Pocket Calculator,” a Kraftwerk song that saw it coming, waiting for us to catch up. Its patient minimal pulse is at odds with Mojo’s story—apparently he had a wild cab ride down I-96 to the station. “Record-breaking speed.”

  It’s 1982. Mojo has introduced Detroit to “Cosmic Cars.” The Ford Motor Company logo is on an Airborne Audio Frequency Vocoder called KY-585. Munich-based electronics giant Siemens presents an articulate Renault at an automobile expo in Frankfurt, a car that allows paraplegics to drive with their voice. That year, Kraftwerk releases Computer World in the United States, plays Detroit and sees its real audience for the first time. Kosmichelin Man meet Cosmic Cars. “We were in Detroit in a weird place,” says Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, on the phone from Düsseldorf. “What is this? The room was full of black people. They loved our music, which was a big thing for us because we admired all these masters of funk. In some parts we had white people, but Detroit … they were using our sounds.”

  Kraftwerk’s new-smell ride was austere and fastidious, popularly described by Brian Eno as “nostalgic for the future.” Released in 1974, their unfolding travel brochure, “Autobahn,” was the first song to put the vocoder on the road. Things bob along for ten minutes until a tunnel-of-death gasp fogs up the rear-view and the sky disappears. It’s kind of startling, articulated slowly, like a puppet’s chin. This was the machine’s first time out with the word, though its grumpy phoneme bah had already made several passes through Homer Dudley’s vocoder back in 1935. “ ‘Autobahn’ is a very good word in the vocoder,” said one German electronics dealer. “It has beautiful vowels—autooobaaahn. Like, I love you.” Nothing says love like a highway, when half the fun is getting there while the other half wants Waffle House.

  As a friend once said, “We should be thankful that Kraftwerk did not know how to sing.” Kraftwerk was the first group to use nonhuman voices for songs about roads, railways, cafés, quasars, radiation, the dance floor as virtual networking site for romance, robots who might be models, men who might be machines, machines gracefully making fun of rock stars, and pineapples. Florian admits to using the vocoder to “a certain excess.” “It’s just a trademark,” he said. “That’s what we got out of it.”

  KINSKI AT THE ZOO

  In 1979, Klaus Kinski appeared in the French film Zoo Zero, smoking away his vocal cords while speaking through a vocoder. Kinski’s “speech” is triggered by a computer keyboard and some no-look typing while he exhales bloodless blue ghosts. A couple of lions have to listen to whatever he says (something about a car crash and Mozart), as does a woman in an evening gown, one cage over.

  Siemens vocoder circa 1969. Munich-based electronics giant Siemens developed a 50,000 DM vocoder for their music studio in 1959. The Siemens model would later be used for talking cars, Swiss chocolate commercials and data-processing systems. (Courtesy Siemens Corporate Archives, Munich) (illustration credit 8.11)

  THE FEDERAL SCREW WORKS, WITH A LITTLE URANIUM

  Had the Electrifying Mojo’s cab taken I-75, he could’ve ended up at the Federal Screw Works, an automotive parts company based in Troy, Michigan. In 1971, the Federal Screw Works introduced Voltrax, a Vocal Interface Division that developed a line of speaking machines controlled by fingers, eye movements and breath. Called “Handi-Voice,” the Votrax text-to-speech chip originated in a declassified military algorithm, foreshadowing chips that would be implanted in arcade robot shootouts like Berserk. The Votrax market would include outgoing office phone messages, children with paralyzed vocal cords and, by accident, Kraftwerk.

  “The machine sounded strange”: A text-to-speech device manufactured by Votrax, the vocal interface division of Federal Screw Works in Troy, Michigan. The Votrax was a speaking aid for deaf-mute children. A rack-mount version of the Votrax was used on Kraftwerk’s “Uranium.” (illustration credit 8.12)

  A self-described “collector of artificial voices,” Florian Schneider was introduced to the Votrax Audio Response System by an engineer at Siemens. “It was an artificial speaking device made in Detroit. You tap in the names and the output was speech. The machine sounded strange.” The Votrax made its musical debut on “Uranium,” a brief passage of croak and choir that appeared on Kraftwerk’s 1975 album Radio-Activity. “Nobody liked that in America,” says Schneider, recalling insinuations that the album was an endorsement of nuclear power. “They didn’t want to touch it. It was a mental movie. An end-of-time scenario—the radiation of sound and radioactivity.” In July 1945, radiation traveled in a whisper. Harry Truman sat at the Potsdam Conference, dissecting Germany with Stalin and Churchill, when he received news of the plutonium explosion at the Trinity proving grounds in New Mexico. It was unvoiced hiss energy encoded as the birth of a baby boy: “The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold.” The future appeared bright enough to be blind, wiped from existence as the break of dawn came from the entirely wrong direction. Die sonne scheint.

  Appropriately, the polyphony on “Uranium” is created by light—an optical celluloid disk (marked “CHOIR”) inserted into the Vako Orchestron, a voice-modulating keyboard. “It was a very strange thing, similar to the Mellotron,” says Schneider. “They had photo cells to transform light into sound through plastic film. [It was] what you had in the early movies instead of magnetic tape. That’s what we used in conjunction with the vocoder and Votrax.” “Uranium” covers a lot of wasteland in ninety lizard-sizzling seconds flat. The polyphony reckons into the toxic highhold, an afterimage of burnt angels peeled from the eye. Then a gulch gasp, tapped from the Federal Screw Works, pulls us down to Ground Zero: “Through constant decay, Uranium creates the radioactive ray.” It’s the sorest throat on record, bonecake-dry.

  “I got what I wanted,” says Florian. “A nonhuman.”

  Promotional insert for Kraftwerk’s 1975 LP Radio-Activity. Artificial voices sounded perfectly normal with Kraftwerk, who made the once sterile world of electronic music seem warm and wistful. “We were
outsiders in the early days,” says Florian Schneider. “People were laughing but at least they were listening to it.” (illustration credit 8.13)

  In May 1976, the WDR (West German radio) broadcast a play about a man who was accidentally put to death by his own book club. Adapting the Gordon R. Dickson story “Computers Don’t Argue,” the WDR used a $10,000 vocoder to send the story’s protagonist, Walt Child, straight to Amazon hell. “In a way, [the play] envisioned the Internet,” says Ludwig Rehberg, a dealer for EMS-Germany who worked on the project. “You ordered everything online, and it was processed by computers. The whole play was really over the top.” “You are continuing to dun me with computer punch cards,” said Child, just trying to exchange Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped) for Rudyard Kipling (Kim). While racking up late fees ($15.66), his account is misfiled as Criminal Code 1567, Kidnapping. Walt is then arrested for abducting a child named Robert Louis Stevenson, who according to the Bureau of Statistics is not missing but dead. Murder is tacked onto the overdue charges and terms of a simple misunderstanding are scrambled into a death sentence, with Walter Child of Paduk, Michigan, still out one copy of Kim—a morbid failure of quality assurance.

  Siemens held a sunnier outlook on the relationship between humans and computers. A 1973 press release for the vocoder describes the computer as “a conversational companion” and follows that “communication between man and machine is a desirable goal.” The German rendition of “man and machine” appears on the press releases as “Maschine-Mensch,” replacing conjunction with hyphen and allowing robots to make the band, one and the same. According to Florian Schneider, the recording of Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981) were covert operations themselves, no less neurotic than Dickson’s story. “The mysterious thing about these machines, sometimes when you use them you feel like a secret agent of sounds. We closed our studio—nobody could go inside. We were very paranoid.”