How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  The Nasty Rock Clock: James Garrett, creator of “Nasty Rock,” photographed six times inside one of his customized clocks in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. Garrett also recorded a vocoder track called “Freakenstein” and Glenda McCleod’s fast boogie “Stranger to Love.” (illustration credit 9.9)

  I remember that night in 1983 when my friend Nate called and said Les Norman had been killed. Mom burnt the meatloaf and I yelled “Fuck.” I remember Nate’s subdued wheeze on the other end of the line. He’d heard the news on the radio. A single bullet to an artery in the leg and the Night-Time Master Blaster bled to death in a ditch in Biddleville, North Carolina. “Nobody really knew what happened,” says Fred Wellington Graham III, PEG’s program director at the time. “It was really hard on the black community. Les knew everybody. He was the Night-Time Master Blaster.”

  I first heard “Nasty Rock” the day I accidentally put my best friend in the hospital. I had just mowed the grass when Nate tore through on his purple Schwinn Mongoose. He cut a power slide at the front porch and kicked up a williwaw of unbagged yard hair. My older brother sneezed. I said, “How’s it going?” Nate said, “I can’t breathe.” He handed me a tape and barfed. We looked at Nate’s shoes—fruit-stripe Chuck Taylors, spattered in wasabi green. Mom’s porch caught the worst of it. I said, “Nate’s got asthma.” My brother squinted through the gnat panic. Nate said, “Hospital.”

  Nate always had two things in his pocket: inhaler and tape. The inhaler hissed like bus brakes. The tape was from a Les Norman shift at WPEG. (We say, “PEG it!” when anywhere near a radio.) Despite Nate’s near-fatal run-in with lawn particulates, I realized he wasn’t going to just up and die on me, not with the Master Blaster on the air every night. So once back from the hospital, we listened to “Nasty Rock” while Nate lay in bed, shot up with epinephrine, waiting for his bronchial trees to deconstrict.

  SCORPIO UPCHUCKING

  The shit erupted so much it scared me.

  — Scorpio on “Scorpio”

  My mom and I did aerobics to this song.

  — Sara Roy on “Scorpio”

  While “Nasty Rock” was locally grown, the next track on Nate’s tape made you forget your asthmatic friends and yell “fuck” in front of your own mother. Called “Scorpio,” its vocoder could’ve belonged to the giant adenoid of Lord Blatherard Osmo, which grew the size of a city block and had to be neutralized with electroshock, gas and cocaine. Recorded in 1982 for Sugar Hill Records by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “Scorpio” was the eponym of Eddie Morris, the group’s in-house wardrobe consultant. (“If they had fifty suits, I had seventy suits.”) This song didn’t begin as much as it sneezed lasers and blinked out the lights. “Ahh Scorpio!” For all that hype about electro and video games, “Scorpio” shot the arcade to pieces.

  Stacey “Nate McMillan” Moore, photographed in Def Jam Recordings T-shirt, Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina in 1987. Nate introduced me to Grandmaster Flash’s “Scorpio” after a near fatal asthma attack. (illustration credit 9.10)

  “Scorpio” is what happens when Rick James tells you to show no shame. The Furious Five, who toured with Rick, took it to heart. One night at Sugar Hill Studios in Englewood, New Jersey, Melle Mel and Scorpio had a mini-orgy with some fans under a piano. Mel, who signs his gym memberships as Melvin Glover, then went into the booth and started punching out robots. “If you want the truth, the truth is The Truth,” Scorpio told me. “What I brought to the group was beyond style. It was my freakiness.”

  “Scorpio was always doing some abstract shit,” says Mel. “Show no shame” became the Furious Five’s universal fancy handshake leather lightning-bolt motto. Yet it was a Rick James stomach bug in Dallas that made “Scorpio” officially shameless. After the Furious Five tore through their opening set, the promoter asked if they could go back out and kill another twenty minutes while Rick tried to talk his way out of the bottle. Scorpio said they didn’t have shit to do. They’d already used Grandmaster Flash’s “deep bubbly space music” record, which sounded like the alien in Rick James’ stomach when Scorpio described it to me. “We just did our whole show! When we was touring we never did ‘Scorpio.’ It was basically filler on the album. Then we went ‘Ahhhh Scorpio’ and the crowd lost their motherfuckin’ minds.”

  Bless Scorpio. Bless the Night-Time Master Blaster.

  Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “Scorpio” (Sugar Hill Records). This song was inspired by a Rick James stomach ache. (illustration credit 9.11)

  1984. My front yard has settled into October decay. Nate and I are waiting on my stepbrother Tad to give us a lift to Shazada Records in downtown Charlotte. Tad liked to stay up all night red-eyeing old Westerns, scratching his feet and drinking iced tea. He wore Kool Moe Dee sun dimmers and loved “Scorpio” as much as he loved Rush, playing it between “Witch Hunt” and “YYZ.” Tad possessed a brand of not-all-thereness that could get us to Shazada in outlaw time.

  Furious Five’s Scorpio, Melle Mel, Dynamite, and friend, circa 1984. Old school rapper gym rats, Mel and Scorpio learned to do the “Back Bump” while training at the WWE semi-pro wrestling camp in Atlanta. (Courtesy Dynamite)

  A ’68 Camaro finally rumbles up in gamecock burgundy, a mother’s nightmare with fat tree-swing tires and twin-exhaust backtalk. You imagine this car leading an all-county chase through someone’s crops, smearing aphids, corn shocks flying into the air picking off birds, nylon husks slapping at the windows. Nate shares the front seat with a pair of hedge clippers. I hop in the back and land on a homemade machine gun tangled in speaker wire. “Safety’s on,” Tad says. The soldered barrel is cool under my legs, the business end, mugged by an oily dishrag. The butt’s wrapped in silver duct tape. Nate says, “PEG it.” Tad nods, puts in a tape and stomps the gas. The speakers sneeze into the back of my head. Ah. Scorpio. I notice the volume knob, popped off in Tad’s hand. Jumper cables are on the floor, grinning like baby gators. I can’t seem to get control of my seatbelt, dadgummit. Tad thinks I say “Tadgunnit” and slaps the speedometer past license revoked, now making jail time. Windows vanish. Tad tries to light a cigarette with the volume. Rearview mirror, full of sun dimmers. Nate, laughing in the clear.

  Tad Adams’ 1968 Camaro, photographed in Rock Hill, South Carolina, circa 1985. I highly recommend listening to “Scorpio” while taking a short cut through a cornfield in this car. (illustration credit 9.13)

  THE F-4000

  When the Fearless Four imagined what rap would sound like in the year 4000, it would be like “Scorpio,” only with pods and anchormen. “We loved ‘Scorpio,’ ” says Tito, one of the group’s writers. “We came right behind them with ‘F-4000,’ three months after. The reason it was so effective—you’re able to run with somebody else’s style of music. But we gonna slow it down so you can hear exactly what we’re talking about. We wanted to base ours around lyrics. ‘Scorpio’ was cool, but it was a party joint.”

  Tito and I are sitting on a park bench in Harlem discussing the importance of outer space and skull masks when making an impression on a bunch of kids in a high school gym. At sixteen, Tito wore wrist-activated flamethrowers onstage. He demonstrates the motion, a sort of Spider-Man web-fluid release. “We’re talkin’ about levitatin’ and shit! What are we gonna do? Sparks and fog? Fuck that! We had fire comin’ out our hands!”

  There’s much to like about Harlem’s Fearless Four. They battled their heroes. They followed the classic old-school model where nobody ate lunch because the entire cafeteria was making nose milk watching MC Shoe getting clowned backwards and forwards by Kool Moe Dee. They could actually sing. They rapped over a Cat Stevens electro song about dogs and doughnuts. Their 1982 hit “Rockin It” was created when a producer named Pumpkin replayed a Kraftwerk synth riff 137 times, by hand. Fearless Four are the first (and only) to speak the words “pod” and “anchorman” through the vocoder. Released in 1984 on Elektra Records and produced by Kurtis Blow, “F-4000” would be the first song rapped entirely thro
ugh the vocoder and released on a major label. The F-4000 sounds like the kind of thing you order from Captain Catalog, wait four-six weeks, and rip out of the box in a flurry of amoebic Styrofoam—a product of Acme wizardry that ends up in the coyote inventor’s garage next to the electric swordfish clippers and the Atlas Vaporizer. The A-side, “Problems of the World,” came with a B-side resolution: Let’s cryogenically freeze ourselves and skip the blight and millennial apocalypse (Earth needing an extra 2,000 years to sort itself out) and thaw out on the beaches of 4000, call ourselves “God of the Pods,” and catch up on our legend and retro-jock our savoir faire.

  Looking at the cover of “Problems of the World,” one can’t help but admire how Tito’s blue Le Tigre golf shirt matched Tito’s Italian boating shoes. “The Baller’s dock shoe,” he says. They used to call him “Gorgeous George.” “I wanted to look good. I wasn’t interested in looking like the asshole.”

  Fearless Four, “Problems of the World” b/w “Fearless Freestyle” and “F-4000” (1984, Elektra). Produced by Kurtis Blow and Davy DMX, “F-4000” is the first vocoder rap on a major label. Tito is pictured here in royal blue Le Tigre and “baller’s dock shoes.” Also pictured: DLB (“F-4000” songwriter), Great Peso and Mighty Mike C. (illustration credit 9.14)

  SOMETHING PUMPKIN DID

  The Fearless Four’s producer, Eroll “Pumpkin” Bedward, was a multi-instrumentalist from the Bronx who produced classics by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Treacherous Three and Spoonie Gee. When asked about these records, his peers often helplessly shrug and say, “I don’t know. It was something Pumpkin did,” as if there was nothing he couldn’t do. Pumpkin was called “Pumpkin” because his smile was bigger than his head. Little is known about him other than that he was jolly, in demand, underpaid and, in a tragic footnote, died on August 24, 1988.

  “I don’t know what Pumpkin was hearing when he came up with some of these beats,” says Larry Smith, producer of Whodini and Run-DMC. Pumpkin may not have known either. Dave Ogrin, a popular session engineer, says Pumpkin was fairly deaf. They had to design “extra-crank-able” headphones to keep Pumpkin from destroying the studio’s amps. He could’ve worn a hearing aid with a vocoder chip that transposed high frequencies—often lost on the deaf—to a lower audible range.

  Released in 1983, Pumpkin’s productions for the Fantasy Three, “It’s Your Rock” and “Biters in the City,” seemed to be test-driving new technology at a time when folks were just happy to get out of the studio without blowing up the drum machine. The Fantasy Three B-sides are instrumentals only in the nominal sense, so improbable that we nearly thank the woofer that blew away Pumpkin’s eardrum. Things are heard where they are not, headphone figments of a guy that Spoonie Gee once described to me as “never a day without a smile.” Vocals are taken from Side A and spliced into “The Other Side” (the best dub versions being paranormal), not so much voices but half-awake memories trying to get a word in bladewise. A vocoded appliance. A blurt that cannot contain itself. Phrases are snatched away as suddenly as they appear, caught speaking out of turn in an empty room.

  Fantasy Three, “It’s Your Rock” (1983, Specific Records). Fantasy Three was produced by Pumpkin, a near-deaf drummer from the Bronx. Though Pumpkin’s hearing could have benefited from Bell Labs’ vocoder-based digital hearing aid, it may have placed this record in immediate danger of sounding ordinary. Said Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, on the vocoder with Churchill in 1943: “Pumpkin, sir? I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.” (illustration credit 9.15)

  The instrumental of “It’s Your Rock” was done alone in the studio at night while the rest of us dreamed it. The track doesn’t begin so much as emerge, a subway at the tunnel’s mouth, a roar that never actually passes, looped four times, each haunted by its own reverb. This is the sound of what you cannot see coming, the approach of tunnel darkness itself. It swallows the track, as if Pumpkin had squished his headphones to his ears and released, either making sure he’s hearing things or deciding to let the outside world in on it. Do this with cupped hands and the act of vanquishing noise is stronger than the noise itself, winter in a conch shell.

  I know this part well. It was the first thing I heard after learning that my oldest brother had died of an aneurysm. I had been listening to the vocal side of “It’s Your Rock” with a friend, marveling at how it had been sampled by Three 6 Mafia (“Fuck All Dem Hoes”) or maybe how Pumpkin’s bass line mimicked a playground chant (There’s a girl from France, something something underpants, etc.). The song ended with the telephone ringing—my dad with the logistics. The posterior cerebral artery had burst at a farmhouse in west Georgia. Your mother and I are going to Atlanta tomorrow to see the body. I hung up and sat on the living room floor, holding my head, recalling the last conversation with my brother. (Vocoders, toad lasers, carpenter bees.) My friend then flipped the record over to the instrumental because that’s what you do—the only way back to life before the phone rang. Down the hallway, the approach of tunnel darkness, the rush of blood. What we can’t see coming. What we can’t believe we hear. Then the beat kicks in. The song actually begins.

  “ ‘It’s Your Rock’ is really superior,” says Danny Krivit, resident DJ at the Roxy when the club first opened in December 1979. “It was editing at its finest; that’s really what made it. When that came out, hip-hop was pretty sparse. There was not a lot going on. More than half of it was borrowing familiar songs. ‘It’s Your Rock’ was made from editing and different sounds. It really stuck out. We had a thing called skate-in-place where we stop everybody on the floor and they would just skate where they are. That was the perfect opportunity to play Fantasy Three, a great jam but a little jagged. That’s the one people went home remembering. You play it just to be different.”

  They woke with it in their heads the next morning as Pumpkin’s snare seemed to be clanging on pipes, filtered through a basement vent. A syncopated duct tap, the phantom pings of heat in a building, groggy on a winter day.

  THE GREAT PUMPKIN

  Pumpkin, who went by aliases like B. Eats and Jack O. Lantern, invented the disco skip during the recording of Spoonie Gee’s “Love Rap.” Run-DMC producer Larry Smith, once a rival drummer in the Bronx, told me it was “lazy but on time.” Smith and I listened to Pumpkin records when he visited my apartment in Brooklyn—it was my first interview upon moving to New York. Smith also once based an entire song around the Whodini line “Voodoo-on-a-Stick” as a tribute to Art of Noise producer Trevor Horn.

  THE VAMPIRE IN YOUR VACUUM CLEANER

  That people are prone to bite: and that biters may sometimes be bitten.

  — Martin Chuzzlewit

  Tonsillectomies are performed with a vacuum cleaner.

  — Werner Herzog

  A friend once informed me that the vacuum cleaner is on the tarmac. “It’s on the runway,” he said. “You have to let it go. The vacuum must leave the tarmac.” He’s referring to a moment from the Fantasy Three’s “Biters in the City,” a vocoder drone on the instrumental. As with “It’s Your Rock,” the Biters dub was the A-side letting its demons out for air. Though electronically realized, it’s far from automated—you hear Pumpkin fooling with the new gear, crashing up hi-hats while a humming lightsaber makes a few passes, just grazing. The Fantasy Three themselves weren’t happy with “Biters,” complaining that it was too fast for the streets. “It’s a really creative record,” says Larry Mack, the all-state swimmer of the group. “ ‘Biters’ was a little much for me. It was too out there.” When I played “Biters” for engineer Dave Ogrin, he smiled. “A lot of that was homemade and improvised. Pumpkin and I experimented with a lot of different sounds. We didn’t have digital reverbs then, so we were mic’ing hallways, bathrooms and toilets to get these weird wooshy sounds.”

  “Biters” only exists as vengeance, a riposte to the Crash Crew, a Bronx group who copied the arrangement of “It’s Your Rock” for “On the Radio” (which became a hit for Sugar Hill Records). One
can hear why “Biters” was strange enough so as to never be duplicated. Who would even try? In a time when everyone held on by the skin of their fronts, trying to mimic a hit, this song remains alone. Alive and well on the friendless voyage.

  When most of the old school was in the tri-state area, figuring things out, Reggie Hobdy, the Fantasy Three’s writer, lived on a military base in Alaska. When he returned to the dirty-sock snow of New York, he was calling himself “Silver Fox,” after a new Audi coupe and because his old name (McCoo) reminded people of a nearsighted cartoon. Fox would mentor LL Cool J and Kool G Rap, and was the only MC to carry his own mic—a Shure EK-G—in a barber’s briefcase. “The shaving kit was one of those old fashioned zip-up-the-middle, brown leather jobs,” he says. Instead of lather, razor, brush and scissors, it was microphone, green rhyming dictionary, blank tapes, pistol and a few joints.

  According to Tito, Silver Fox was the only MC that Kool Moe Dee feared. “Fox brought that mic with him everywhere. A lot of cats did it for fun but Fox took his trade serious.” “The EK-G was my vampire,” Fox adds. “The vampire slept in this old shaving kit. My shaving kit was my coffin. When it was time to battle, I had to let the vampire out the coffin and go for blood.”

  “Biters” ends with the vocoder caught boosting somewhere between a mirror and the hardware store. It could say “You are” but it would sound like “Myyylar”—a polyester resin that turns wrapping paper into a funhouse face-melt, catching our duplicates in the act of trying to be something else.

  Biter’s cassette courtesy of Phil Most Chill, inspired by Fantasy Three, customized and detailed in 1983. (illustration credit 9.16)