How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  A Cylon strolls through Forrest J. Ackerman’s foyer in Los Angeles, California. The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica spoke through an EMS 2000 vocoder. (Photograph by author, 1998) (illustration credit 9.4)

  Afrika Bambaataa, who gave humanity a shot, does not recall how much his vocoder cost. He lost one to a fire and another to Germany, which was different than the one that accompanied him to DC, when Soulsonic Force opened up for Trouble Funk and got blasted off the stage by “Trouble Funk Express.” The idea of losing track of one’s robot brought our conversation, somehow, to the TV show Bewitched. “Bewitched had a vibe on me,” Bam says. “Seeing the magic and all that jumping in. I was always into all that, powers of wizards and teleportation. Things have definitely been flipping since 1947. The World’s Fair saw the future. I’m just surprised they haven’t caught up with The Jetsons yet.”

  Bam is a fan of homeland teleportation, it turns out. Samantha’s ability to vanish by twitching her nostrils would be useful to someone like Bam, who is hard to track down. Though it takes more than a wrinkle in nose for someone to get around the Bronx, it does allow him to emulate a Cylon’s monotone, if not smell the neglect and poverty. Though the olfactory receptors may be our strongest mnemonic cue to the past, the future is in the sinuses, or as Bam calls it: “The Funk.” We shrug our nose (and occasionally go pig-squint blind) when we hear something nasty, something never heard before.

  Afrika Bambaataa & the Cosmic Force’s unreleased vocoder 12 inch “Cosmic Punk Jam,” allegedly recorded in 1982. “Cosmic Punk Jam” was cosmic because it was of the unknown and unheard. It was punk because it sounded broke as lint and got bootlegged. (Courtesy Freddy Fresh) (illustration credit 9.5)

  Humans always scrunch their glabella when saying “Rock, rock, Planet Rock,” as if trying to birdcall the chorus, mating a loon with the Penguin. Arthur Baker, co-producer of “Planet Rock,” says there is no vocoder in the song. “It’s been mythicized. It’s a PCM 41 with just a really slight delay. So it’s basically a flange.”

  Though the collective hip-hop memory often begins with “Planet Rock,” the song itself is grateful to a moment in 1981, when Afrika Bambaataa, Collector of Records with Artificial Voices, saw Kraftwerk play New York in support of Computer World. During “Numbers,” which would become the 127-bpm pulse of “Planet Rock,” Ralf Hutter allowed the front row to play their wonky calculator. “You know I was right up there on it!” says Bam. “Waiting to play that joker! They put it down and people come up and start hitting the stuff. It was all that veep-voodoo-doodoo—the way the record goes. You’re hitting it and it’s vibing with the music. It was no joke.”

  “Planet Rock” essentially gave us Miami Bass, due to its speed, sub-frequency (a sine wave generated by the Japanese-made Roland-808 Drum Composer) and an orchestral stab. This symphonic pounce, played by co-producer John Robie, was a preset function of the Fairlight synthesizer, the prototype of which now sits in Vivian Kubrick’s basement. Called ORCH-5, the sound was recorded in 1979 by computer programmer David Vorhaus, who’d sampled it from a piece composed by Stalin pawn Dmitri Shostakovich, or maybe it was Stravinsky. (“One of those ‘S’ composers,” Vorhaus thinks.) Orchestral pit becomes crater, making deep space for a gloomy synth figure, played on the Fairlight but abducted from Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.” “Planet Rock” is truly the sum of its machines: Russian stab, artificial German strings, Japanese bass—all for an (African) American song about a global utopia. Live it up, shucks.

  I once heard a father chanting the chorus to his newborn in a stroller. “Planet Rock” can still hold the floor when backwards masked in its entirety, powered by its own myth-machine, as if retracing its steps. The forgotten ad-lib zuh-zuh from Pow-Wow—who once claimed the bassline had been inspired by a Danny Kaye dance routine—makes sense.

  DOES YOUR DOG BITE?

  Battlestar Galactica nerds have started Internet wars over whether the vocoder barks of Muffit—a duct-taped dog/bear—were done by a Sennheiser or an EMS.

  “Cosmic Punk Jam,” a song Bambaataa did with the Cosmic Force, had “Planet Rock” ambitions but never smelled retail. I first heard this unreleased vocoder track while immobilized by a stomach virus—on an unlabeled cassette, a dub of a dub’s second generation lo-bias bag of Cheetos half-cousin, once removed from the back of a furniture store somewhere north of Boston. “Cosmic Punk Jam” was cosmic because it was of the unknown, and the unheard—an infinite eight minutes that was never allowed to be a record. It was punk because it sounded broke as lint, as if recorded in Jazzy Jay’s sock drawer. Bam’s sustained vocoder drone was soothing, an electric toothbrush on low batteries. “I was trying to make it sound like a bunch of voices harmonizing like the churches,” Bambaataa says. “Funky and spooky. I didn’t know that tape still existed. It was great for the clubs.”

  Cosmic Force were teenagers chanting their name into our memory over the melody of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgetting,” ten years before Warren G hit the same doobie for “Regulate.”

  “That song doesn’t exist,” Jazzy Jay says, sitting in his Brooklyn basement, his record shelf about to topple. “If you got the ‘Cosmic Punk Jam’ on tape, I guess it does. But don’t ask me what happened to it.”

  Man Parrish’s self-titled debut album (1982, Importe): “Be naked and talk with a vocoder—that’s my philosophy.” Man Parrish listened to a lot of TONTO’s Expanding Head Band. The Original New Timbral Orchestra synthesizer was built by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff and used by talk box maestro Stevie Wonder. When Cecil told me “we live in a nine dimensional universe, for sure, minimum,” he could’ve been referring to TONTO’s room-swallowing need for space. (TONTO courtesy of Jeremy Campbell) (illustration credit 9.6)

  TONTO JUMP ON IT

  In 1976, executives at CBS Records weren’t getting their promos because some kid in the mailroom was sticking them in his pants and taking them home. Back then it was good being Manny Parrish. It was good being sixteen and David Bowie’s biggest fan, hanging out with Bowie’s publicist, Cherry Vanilla. It was good to have purple hair and know something about computers.

  Manny Parrish liked to do things big. At fourteen, he was out of the closet after seeing a Bette Midler and Barry Manilow duet at Manhattan’s Continental Bath House. At sixteen, he was ejected from the School for the Performing Arts for “being a hyperactive asshole.” By twenty-five, he was the gayest vocoder expert to make a hip-hop ode to the Bronx, sell over a million records, make a “waist-down” cameo with indefatigable porn star Vanessa Del Rio (Girls USA!), road manage the Village People, and headline over Madonna at Studio 54. “A very resourceful young man,” says Cherry, a proud grandmother, now working with the synth composer Vangelis Papathanassiou. Adds Parrish, “Be naked and speak through a vocoder. That’s my philosophy.”

  Parrish felt pretty lucky to have the groomer of Ziggy Stardust as a chaperone. With hair of Muppet drummer red, Cherry Vanilla ran Tim’s Fantasy Phone Service, one of the first phone sex services in Manhattan. Feats like this impressed Parrish, who was more than happy to tag along one night when Cherry went down to Electric Ladyland Studios to hear a new Bowie track. “Give me glitter,” he sighs before finally meeting his glam idol. Yet while Bowie auditioned “Young Americans,” Parrish went for the blinking wall of Moog across the studio, a massive synth with a co-dependent relationship with space, inner and outer. “There’s Bowie, my hero, but I’m such a gear whore I want to touch the synthesizers. I’m standing in front of this monolith, completely starstruck. Like, ‘Duuude, that’s what Keith Emerson used.’ The studio engineer says it was named ‘TONTO.’ I was like, ‘TONTO?’ Oh yeah. I smoked pot to this.’ ”

  “We live in a nine-dimensional universe for sure, minimum,” says Malcolm Cecil, TONTO’s creator, on the phone from his home in England. “It was easier to take acid than pot back then.”

  Parrish spent afternoons popping brain cells in his midtown stoner’s paradise, listening to TONTO’s Expa
nding Head Band and Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery amid the violet incense, an armadillo tank named Tarkus, “state-of-the-art speakers the size of dishwashers,” and Christmas lights blinking behind frosted Plexiglass. “Space between world and beyond is like space between soul and another. Nothing and everything,” said the drowning ghost in TONTO’s “Riversong.” “The robot said something,” thinks Cecil. “Nobody’s really sure. ‘Current’ sounded like ‘urrrrrr.’ There’s so much folklore from TONTO—the one about ingesting psychedelics through a headband. I usually leave it to people’s imaginations and let them come up with whatever.”

  Since Manny Parrish couldn’t afford a TONTO, he bought a dinky Radio Shack keyboard with see-through circuitry. He set up a bedroom studio and made ambient “cocktail polka porn” soundtracks, one of which was used for Joe Gage’s Heatstroke. One night at the Anvil, a club at 14th Street near the West Side Highway, Manny saw a guy onstage launching dildos from his rear over heads and across the room, nearly taking out Phillipe of the Village People (in Tontastic headdress), who happened to be dancing on the bar to something familiar, fuckingly familiar if you’d seen Heatstroke.

  “The DJ was playing one of my soundtracks,” Manny says. “I didn’t even know they pressed it up. He said these guys from Importe Records were looking to sign me and I immediately did.” The contract was a paragraph (maybe a page), and Parrish didn’t see a dime but didn’t care because he was having too much fun freaking out the neighbors, building synthesizers and living life with his pants around his ankles. Released under the name Man Parrish, the follow-up to “Heatstroke” was “Hip Hop, Be Bop,” which became an instant electro classic at clubs like Danceteria and the Roxy, selling 2.5 million copies. The eponymous Man Parrish LP included “Planet Rock” co-producer John Robie on keyboards, the stratospheric Klaus Nomi (“operatic angel robot”) and Parrish himself on vocoder.

  Parrish first heard the vocoder while passed out in a cab in front of his apartment, listening to Alison Steele, “The Nightbird” of WNEW. (Driver: “Hey, weren’t you in Bad Girls Dormitory?”) “She sounded so sexy. You were thinking voluptuous Vampirella, but what you got was an old mountain woman with long gray hair.” Somewhere between Iron Butterfly and the Doors, the Nightbird played Kraftwerk. The driver killed the meter. Six minutes and one “Trans-Europe Express” later, Parrish remembered he actually was in Bad Girls Dormitory and decided he needed a vocoder. “But back then you didn’t just go out and ‘buy a vocoder.’ Nobody knew what it was. I went to Sam Ash and they had this thing the size of a VCR under the counter. They were like, ‘Take it! We can’t get rid of it. Some guy from ELO dumped it on us. We don’t know what the hell it is.’ ”

  FREEWAY HICKIE

  “Hip Hop Be Bop” appears on the soundtrack for the videogame Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, introducing Man Parrish to a new generation of kids eager to shoot up Miami in a pink-finned Cadillac.

  THE FLOOR BELOW

  In fall 1983, Parrish reports to Studio 54 to perform at an anniversary party for Fiorucci Jeans, a Fifth Avenue store where live mannequins did the robot in the window. The line outside is a reach-around guest list, someone who knew someone who mistook themselves for somebody. Madonna is set to go on at, say, four in the morning, and Parrish’s ex-boyfriend is already drunk at the fog machine. Parrish himself is unglued. He’d spent the after noon grave side at his mother’s funeral and is now suspended twelve feet above the stage, waiting to Geronimo into a dry-ice cloud that’s supposed to be Yoda pond high but now calls for a foghorn.

  Parrish wears a black hooded cape by Kansai Yamamoto, a Stardust perk. Two plastic beer-helmet tubes snake up to his head. One tube pumps frozen carbon dioxide into his face, which is painted gold. The other keeps Parrish from suffocating. Down below, a troupe of Dark Crystal “midgets” marches across the stage in purple robes carrying lanterns—the borrowed kids of a friend. Parrish can’t see a thing. “I kept thinking, ‘Where’s the floor? Don’t land on the vocoder. Just near the vocoder!’ ”

  Parrish lands on his ankle instead. The kids with lanterns don’t notice. They’re just happy to be up past bedtime at Studio 54 bobbing around in fake smoke. A “freaky leather two-headed lizard bird puppet” pops out of the smoke—a Skeksis—and rips off Manny’s hood. The lizard bird has glass eyeballs which, according to the prop stylist, did not come cheap. Madonna’s pretty into it. Purple robes are bumping into each other. Parrish hobbles over to the vocoder, an EMS-2000. His ankle throbs to the same ambient Radio Shack pulse that inspired Del Rio to blow the cast of Girls USA.

  Next week: Return of the Jedi party.

  Print ad for Korg’s VC-10 Vocoder: “Vocoded effects can be spacey. So can their prices.” One of the first affordable vocoders ($1,299), the VC-10 should’ve been hired for the Dark Crystal bog burp. Allegedly used by Aerosmith on “Prelude to Joanie” and Jonzun Crew for synthetic substitution. (Courtesy Korg) (illustration credit 9.7)

  THE NIGHT-TIME MASTER BLASTER

  I hear you in the shadows. I don’t care about your DNA. I just want to see your fucking heart.

  — Tattered man speaking to air conditioner window unit, Manhattan

  Germany still calls me asking for “Freakenstein.”

  — James Garrett

  In 1983, I heard the vocoder demolished by Run-DMC, with Michael Jordan as my witness. I was at UNC’s youth basketball camp in Chapel Hill. Jordan and future NASCAR analyst Brad Daugherty were lounging poolside by the dorm, listening to Tyrone Brunson’s “Sticky Situation,” an a capella vocoder born from a chlorine sinus tickle. I walked by thinking, “Seventeen seconds left against Georgetown. Huh! And Jordan likes Tyrone Brunson.” A visiting coach from New York then entered the pool area and Radio Raheem’d them with “It’s Like That.” My priorities shifted from getting Jordan’s autograph to befriending a stranger from the Bronx who had the good sense to push the RECORD button while listening to Mister Magic’s Rap Attack.

  Chapel Hill was home to “Nasty Rock,” a vocoder track recorded by the Garrett’s Crew. “Nasty Rock” has what my knee surgeon would call “intra-articular space.” It took “Word Up” out in the woods by its underwear, tore out the elastic and whipped it silly. “Nasty Rock” calls for hyperbole because it was a stretch—driven and pitched all across North Carolina’s back routes, released on three different labels (Hol-Gar, Clockwork and Prelude), and “acquisitioned” by Patrick Adams, a prolific disco producer from New York. “Nasty Rock” was limber yet Ohio-tight and, unlike its electro peers, minimal to the point of almost being quiet, but still letting you in on it with ample room to glide. Hi-hats were lisping rattlesnakes, keyboards were amulets, and hand-claps boxed your ears. The vocoder went: Do it, do it, so nasty, do it.

  “Dude, that’s retarded!” said New York Times critic Jon Caramanica, impressed by how that gravelly larynx popped monster tires. The song was originally called “Master Rock” until James Garrett’s five-year-old daughter Latisha started dancing around the studio squealing “Nasty rock! Nasty rock!” What the kid said, went. The only catch was that the songwriter John Mitchell was on the run and in arrears down in Fayetteville. To protect Mitchell’s identity, the publishing was credited to Latisha’s eleven-year-old brother, James L. Jr. Not too many kids at Fuquay-Varina Junior High had a vocoder radio hit in their name back in 1983, a novelty fully grasped by James L. Jr., beaming his way through the lunch line. Corndogs and Nutty Buddies on the house.

  James Garrett, Sr., now runs Garrett’s Amusements from an indoor flea market in Fuquay-Varina, selling Apple Jacks out of a gumball dispenser. For ten dollars you can get your picture taken and framed inside a license plate or customized clock. The walls at Garrett’s Amusements are covered with these picture clocks, friends and lovers who passed through, copped some Apple Jacks and smiled for the Nasty Rock camera while kids ran around licking magic sugar dust off their hands. When I visited James Garrett in May of 2004, we laughed about the difficulties of clapping inside a Red #
40 space vacuum. I asked if I could get a clockface photo of him and he said, “There’s already a clock on the wall over there—with six James Garretts on it.” When I thanked him, he said, “No problem, Dave. I like making people happy.” He put his hands behind his head and smiled. “That’s what time it is.”

  When James Garrett finally drove “Nasty Rock” to WPEG in Concord, DJ Les Norman, the Night-Time Master Blaster, had it on the air before Garrett was back on the interstate. “Les had a good heart,” says Garrett. “He reached out when he didn’t even know us. That’s how we got to New York. That’s how we opened for the Isley Brothers and the Manhattans.”

  Garrett’s Crew, “Nasty Rock” (1983, HGEI Music). North Carolina vocoder classic named by a five-year-old. Future synth boogie optimist Dam Funk wants to know what machine made those handclaps. (illustration credit 9.8)