How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  The scuffed edit block at Cutting Records studios, used by Latin Rascals and Aldo Marin to hold 2-inch recording tape for cutting and splicing remixes. Aldo Marin’s edits for “It’s Your Rock” were done in this studio. (Courtesy Gabriele Caroti) (illustration credit 9.17)

  In Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, San Francisco has been repopulated with biters, dub versions that drift the Haight while their originals remain cocooned in strands of cotton-candy goo. Their doubles appear in New Age mud baths or pupating in lawn chairs in the back yard.

  It’s morning. Donald Sutherland strolls in Golden Gate Park, a frizzy hatrack in a beige raincoat. A friend approaches, eyes bloodshot from sleep deprivation, stifling hysteria. A warped, ain’t-right bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace” plays nearby. She whispers. (It’s really me!) Sutherland, who spent the night getting cloned, opens his mouth and points. The drone escapes through his mustache, Silver Fox chased across the ice by an Inuit throat sled, tarmac to tundra, a chorus of dupes tricked out of the pipes their mother gave them. She cups her ears and screams. The camera zooms into Sutherland’s tonsils, taking us into the blackness, ducking Sutherland’s uvula, which should have a screaming face of its own. Biters, all of them.

  TRYING TO BARF OUT THE UNIVERSE

  On a park bench in Harlem, Tito and I talk pods. “Biters in the City” was the first 12 inch that refused to leave my mom’s turntable, as if the spindle just couldn’t let it go. When I finally managed to wobble the record away, it would always try to eat the spindle itself, stuck in the grips of torn vinyl from the exit wound. A friend helpfully described this effect as the record trying to barf out the universe. Nervous about damaging mom’s turntable or the record, I’d leave it be. Just let the thing keep on, this black hit of space.

  Tito goes with it. Behind us, four girls in fuzzy bomber jackets form a circle around a bare stone fountain and fire up a chorus to keep warm. Tito recognizes someone approaching. I want to see Sutherland, pointing, vacuuming. Instead it’s a guy who says he knows Just-Ice.

  The word pod still sounded pretty mysterious back in the Walkman era. “ ‘F-4000’ was a club banger,” says Tito. “Back then it wasn’t as saturated, so everybody got their airplay and everybody could get they shit heard. DJs would cut ‘God of the pod.’ And we in the club.” He smiles. “And they play it and fuck with our names. Tito. God-god-god of the pod-pod.” Behind us, the girls in fuzzy jackets fight the wind for a harmony.

  TORQUE OF THE TAPE

  The edits on “It’s Your Rock” were done by a young KTU DJ named Aldo Marin, who would later start the Electro-Freestyle label Cutting Records. Albert Cabrera of the Latin Rascals once warned about the dangers of disappearing inside the edit, mummified in two-inch recording tape—so deep inside the track that one had to literally cut their way out.

  WHATEVER YOU SAY

  You can’t talk because we’ve extracted all your teeth and given you a complete vocal cord resection.

  — John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds

  I am listening to “F-4000” while standing next to a shipwreck diving helmet. The swatter in my hand is mint green and shaped like a tulip. The helmet was welded together by the Morse Diving Company back in 1923. It’s painted gold, weighs forty-seven pounds and seems to be missing its Kraken. A fly has buzzed itself in through the third-floor window and into a loft apartment near the Holland Tunnel in downtown Tribeca. Overseeing the damage is Rammellzee, a vocoder extremist in kung fu slippers and waterproof pants. At 6′ 3″, Rammel prefers looming to standing. His head is squeezed inside a black do-rag with an acrylic mudflap down the nape.

  To my knowledge, Rammellzee is the only one out there who has corrected ocean pipe fissures in the Gulf of Mexico and rapped on “Beat Bop,” a 12-inch single recorded with K-Rob and gallery graffiti icon Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983. Rammel has led as many lives as he has voices. Rapper, diver, sinister masked man, dentist, jeweler, letter defender, quantum engineer, painter. Toy encoder, toy assassin. “Professional heretic.” Self-admitted bullshitter. Allegedly pushed Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair. His childhood distrust of the Catholic Church tops a list of aversions that includes mayonnaise and the word whatever.

  “He’s a genius,” says director Jim Jarmusch, who cast Rammel in his 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise. “The kind of guy you could talk to for twenty minutes and your whole life could change, if you could only understand him.”

  Rammel likes “F-4000” so much that he’s convinced his name is in the song. Apparently it’s up to me to make sure it’s there. We’re making our second pass and he’s got me checking lyrics on the back sleeve. His name is nowhere to be found, so I try to fudge a match. Anchorman with the master plan? This will not be easy. Every vocoder track I play him is taken as a WWF challenge. “Pack Jam” fires him up. “He wasn’t an engineer!” Rammel says of Jonzun. “He wasn’t with the military! But he could play!”

  Untitled by Bo Tompkins, watercolor, circa 1987. This D&D lab accident of a face is what a vocoder looks like after being sucked into the Fantasy Three’s vacuum cleaner. (illustration credit 9.18)

  You may have seen Rammellzee at the end of the film Wild Style, rapping like broken-nose revenge, waving a flintlock dueling pistol over his head. But he is best known for “Beat Bop,” a track that is ten minutes long, though truthfully, we’ll never hear the end of it. The 12 inch now goes for hundreds of dollars, or thousands, if you want to splurge for the original Basquiat cover art. Despite its legend, Basquiat thought the record was a failure. “Jean was involved with the recording process,” says Al Diaz, a graffiti writer who played wood blocks, bells and timbales on the track. “It wasn’t like he was just doing lines and writing checks.”

  “Beat Bop” is an eventful walk home from school, intended to be a conversation between two people (a pimp and a kid) but sounding like an argument among six (Rammel). One going home, the other, out of his mind. “K-Rob was kind of on this good-boy trip,” continues Diaz. “Saying, ‘Your mind can’t function,’ ‘Waiting at home for Mr. Right,’ and then Rammel’s going on about cocaine. It was some sinister shit. The session was fairly controlled. There was a lot of cocaine, but we were focused.”

  Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee entering Disneyland in 1982, photographed by Stephen Torton (© ADAGP, Paris). Their flight to Los Angeles was shared with Eddie Van Halen. According to Torton, who worked closely with Jean-Michel and Zee, Rammellzee was a kind of muse to Jean-Michel, a constant source of material. “Our own T.S. Eliot.” (illustration credit 9.19)

  Al Diaz thinks that this “Beat Bop” session may have driven K-Rob to choose Christ as his savior, possibly because he ran into the Gangster Duck, the Evolution Griller and “The #1 Stain on the Train.” Characters, right down to the letter. All this reverb and interruption is confusing. When you hear K-Rob say, “Say what? Say what?” he means it. Understandably, K-Rob does not make it home for dinner that night.

  That’s what ten minutes and ten seconds of “Beat Bop” will do to you. It makes you late for things. It made rap late to its own funeral. It’s one of those vocoder songs that doesn’t use a vocoder, or need one. K-Rob and Rammel are so in the room that you keep turning around to make sure they aren’t.

  I purchased “Beat Bop” during a family Christmas excursion to New York in 1984. When I got home, I let those disembodied voices inhabit the living room: the unplayed piano, the plaque on our coffee table saying “Nixon Put His Feet Here,” the clay skunk I made in second grade. I had questions. What is 720Z? Who was making with the freak freak?

  My friend Nate somehow learned all the words to “Beat Bop.” This was quite a feat for a seventh-grader short on breath, considering the song’s length and how most of the words aren’t even words. The more we listened to it, the more we understood that we had no idea what was going on. Thirteen years old, looking at the label. What’s a Rammellzee?

  “F-4000” is still at full-throttle in Rammel’s apartment
. Still decoding, trying to make a name from adhesive air. It must be when Fearless Four’s DLB says, “soon you’ll see that DLB’s.” Two L’s, two E’s. This must be the place. A Z is an S on vibrate, anyway. Shake hands with a cicada joy buzzer. A friend would later say, “You think you heard them saying his name because he’s saying they’re saying his name?”

  Rammel calls “F-4000” “non-negotiable war music,” which means one more pass for the peas. “That’s it!” He looks back over his shoulder. “They didn’t print it right on the back of the record! God of the pod of this brand of peas. That’s only certain people in Afro-Futurism and that would be that brand of peas. Start with George and Bootsy. James Brown.”

  What about Sun Ra? “Sun Ra is definitely in one of them pods! I don’t know if he’s in my pod. That’s where I tip my hat. I’ve got a lot of spaceships.” He lumbers off to the kitchen for a beer. I notice the Tasmanian Devil (sarcophilus harrisii) pointing at me from the back of his T-shirt: “You’re Next!”

  I defer to the fly, still woozing around the apartment. It lands on the Verne helmet, wipes its goggles and considers its chances. “See, he likes that vocoder shit,” says Rammel, nodding to the insect. “It’s just a sound. There’s no place to go. We need to stop using water in the shower. We should use sonics to vibrate the bugs off our bodies instead of giving them more food to war—to cause cellular dysfunction. Fearless Four! Now that’s pure war music. It’s introducing a crew, ready to kill. You better know why they’re coming for you.” I salute him with the tulip.

  “F-4000” has stopped for the last time. The room is quiet.

  “Please kill the fly, boss.”

  A talking and singing machine will be numbered among the conquests of science.

  — Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 1839

  Good Fred Ellis, inventor of Good Fred Oil, at La Rutan Barbershop, 2009. Good Fred helped mentor the early LA electro hip-hop scene, providing Egyptian Lover and Uncle Jamm’s Army with an office to run their label, Egyptian Empire, and distribution company, West Coast Wax. (Courtesy Brian Cross) (illustration credit 10.1)

  OPEN YOUR BOOKS TO PAGE FREAK

  Heavenly tech! Heavenly tech! Compton! Compton!

  — Homer Dudley vocoder chant, Bell Labs, 1936

  Richard Pryor pulls up to the La Rutan barbershop in a new convertible Rolls-Royce and asks, “How the hell does this thing work?” La Rutan’s owner, Good Fred Ellis, laughs himself into the front seat for a test drive. It’s 1975. The Rolls is custard, Pryor’s hair is Natural and the sky is generous.

  Along with Al Green, Leon Isaac Kennedy and Charlie Pride, Pryor was among the regular clientele at La Rutan—French for “natural” backward —which for the past forty-six years has been cornering 54th and Western in South Central Los Angeles. Good Fred started out shaving Mohawks in Detroit in the Fifties before moving to California, where he’d later become Godfather of the Activator Curl. In the early Eighties, Fred’s son Darryl and a young DJ named Rodger Clayton helped bottle Fred’s homemade Jheri-curl emulsion of glycerin, water and alcohol, which was stored in 300-gallon drums in the back of La Rutan. Samples of Good Fred Oil were then test-marketed at parties held by Clayton’s crew of DJs, originally known as Unique Dreams before changing their name to Uncle Jamm’s Army (with George Clinton’s blessing). Uncle Jamm’s main attraction, Egyptian Lover, would throw sample vials of Good Fred “Hansom Dude” pomade wave accentuator into the crowd while cutting up Zapp records. Folks stood a fighting chance of getting dinged in the head while the vial trajectory was being so eloquently described by Zapp’s Mini Moog, an activator bungee jump. Repeat often as necessary.

  JUST PLAIN BACKWARDS

  In eighth grade, we’d impress ourselves by quoting the backwards Sir Mix-a-Lot line, Keerfatsujehs. We listened to Capt. Rapp’s “Bad Times” (another classic from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ pre-Janet phase) at the wrong speed, unaware that a 12 inch could be a 45. This went on for years until my mom pointed out the correct speed on the label.

  The Good Fred formula would ultimately be deconstructed by the chemists at Johnson & Johnson and mass-produced for millions of Michael Jackson dollars. Though discouraged, Fred Ellis was told by a marketing professor at UCLA to keep building his pyramid and customers would come looking for him when he reached the top. Egyptian Lover (a.k.a. Greg Broussard), LA’s most wanted DJ, would find himself in a similar circumstance—specifically, in a Superman suit, apexed on a pyramid stack of fifty Cerwin-Vegas, humping the speakers and violating the sacred order of the eyeball’s parking space. This may seem excessive, but somebody must’ve been doing something right if George Clinton, Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman are showing up at your parties.

  Egyptian Lover in the chair at La Rutan Barbershop, top right, Los Angeles, 2009. La Rutan’s clientele included Richard Pryor, Leon Isaac Kennedy and Bobby Womack. (Courtesy Brian Cross) (illustration credit 10.2)

  Good Fred would advise Egypt and Clayton, encouraging them to start their own label, Egyptian Empire Records (and distribution company West Coast Wax), as well as provide an office, across the street from La Rutan. The first record, Breaking and Entering, was released in 1983 as a soundtrack for a documentary that included Samoan kids spinning on their heads and a drum-machine tutorial by Egyptian Lover himself. The EP also featured Ice-T, who would later collaborate with Morris Day refugees Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for an electro masterpiece called “Cold Wind Madness.” Only twenty-five copies of Breaking and Entering were pressed; one remains with Egypt, and the rest are now presumably in Teutonic custody.

  On the first single, “Dial-A-Freak,” Egypt tells callers to open up their books to page freak, over some pulse-dial jitter and musky synths. This was followed, in a hurry, by the vocoder monster “Egypt Egypt,” which in turn was pursued by legions of miniskirt admirers dreaming of long fishnet walks by the Nile, if not Venice Beach, and heavy breathing that defied smog alerts. The radio commercials that Egypt and Uncle Jamm aired on KDAY to promote their parties were as good as if not better than the records themselves, often selling out the Sports Arena in downtown LA, where a significant number of the 10,000 heads in attendance had at some point been activated by Good Fred Ellis.

  The LA Sports Arena would be the site of Run-DMC’s California debut when Rodger Clayton booked them for an Uncle Jamm party in 1983, back when Run had hair. Egypt introduced the teens from Queens to their first palm tree and drove them over to Good Fred’s to get their ears lowered. There, an eighty-nine-year-old regular noted Run’s shelltoe tongues and said, “How come you boys all on TV with no shoelaces in your shoes? You can’t afford no shoestrings?” Outside, girls in “Freak Patrol” T-shirts distributed Uncle Jamm’s flyers. Behind them, on La Rutan’s wall, was a mural of radiant pyramids, pre-mummy pharaohs and a guy rocking Tut’s diadem on his head. That would be Egyptian Lover, who remains a Good Fred customer to this day.

  Victor & the Glove Breakmixer Series: A mix of songs by the late Rich Cason, a prolific LA vocoder producer whose catalog includes “Street Freeks,” “Magic Mike Theme” and “Radioactivity Rapp,” which would be sampled in 2005 for Mac Mall’s “Dredio” (mentioned: Café Escalon, Steve Urkel, Decepticons, Planet of the Apes, glasspack mufflers). (illustration credit 10.3)

  Egyptian Lover’s Freak Machine: the Roland SVC-350 Vocoder, first introduced in 1979, for under a grand. The voice modulates the carrier wave provided by a synthesizer, an evolution from the radio station in Homer Dudley’s mouth. (illustration credit 10.4)

  At Uncle Jamm’s early parties, Egypt and his younger brother would show up in surgical gowns and say they were from Cairo. “We dressed up in doctor suits and did doctor dances. We did fake heart attacks, different gimmicks to get girls. We had the green surgical scrubs, masks and gloves. The girls liked the gloves.”

  The dance back then was “The Freak,” invented by the Carson Freekateers and later stolen by the Lambada. “The Freak dance took Los Angeles to another level,” says Egypt
. “It brought so many people to the dances. Everybody was freaking from beginning to end. Guys humping girls all night long. There were serious freaks going on. It was the only dance we did. All the other dances were obsolete when the Freak came out.” In LA, you’d think the word freak had been invented by the vocoder. Egypt says they turned everything into a freak song, often speeding up classics like Whodini’s “Five Minutes of Funk.” “The vocoder is what the freaks liked to freak to. ‘Scorpio’ changed me. When I played it, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is a Freak song.’ We had Freak contests. A thousand dollars to the best freaks. They used to get seriously freaky. You didn’t even need a partner. It could be one guy laying on the ground, five girls dancing over him. It was a live sex show with clothes on.”

  This did not fly with parents who would sometimes show up to defreak their daughters. “Once this girl’s momma came in wearing hair curlers. I got her name and said on the mic, ‘Your momma’s here.’ Everybody knew who [the girl] was. They put the lights on her. She was freakin’ this dude.” It didn’t help matters that the dance floor was muddy from a leak in the roof, what Rodger Clayton called “a Freak-a-leak.” “She was there freakin’ dude in the mud,” says Egypt. “The flooring had been ripped up. It was so hot and crowded in there, with sweat coming up from the floor. It was a mess. It was wet from all the humans. The walls were sweating. Sweat was dripping from the ceiling. Her momma was hitting her with a belt on the way out!” One night Egypt’s dad showed up. “I was talking real nasty on the mic and I turned around and my dad was standing on the stage. And he said, ‘Talk that shit, boy! Talk that shit!’ I was so embarrassed. I was seventeen. I looked at my brother like, ‘Why’d you bring him here?’ ”