Egyptian Lover circa 1984, “They used to get seriously freaky.” (illustration credit 10.5)
Though LA seemed to be all fast times at 123 bpm, one of Egypt’s best move would turn out to be slow, backwards and only heard if you were at the party freaking in the mud:
Wreckin’ Cru, “Surgery” featuring Dr. Dre and Cli-n-tel (1984, Kru-Cut Records). “Surgery” inspired kids to do the Freak in hospital scrubs. Don’t let The Chronic fool you, Dre used to love that vocoder. (“Horny Computer”!) Dre also produced “Killer Day-tons,” the first song about carjacking, and the underrated Sleeze Boyz (“Dance Til You Drop”). The Kru-Cut logo looks like a starfish doing a double bicep pose on Venice Beach. LA electro’s resident illustrator, Darryl Davis, took it to the jockstrap with “DJ-N-Effect”: Cat People, Teen Wolf and now, I Was a Teenage Beefcat at a Pep Rally in Compton. Is that Nastassja Kinski in the front row?
I played “Planet Rock” backwards from end to beginning and my arm was sore. They’d never heard anything like that. This was 1983. It was like hearing “Planet Rock” for the first time. At the end it goes, “party people,” but the words were going, “imsump imshumpyump.” It was like speaking another language to the beat. I play “Planet Rock” backwards with one hand and get girls’ phone numbers with the other. That was a good one.
While Good Fred’s Accentuator would flourish with Ice Cube and khaki in the Comptonian future, the vocoder and the Uncle Jamm parties couldn’t survive as venues grew increasingly nervous about gang insurance. Egypt remembers the shift. “The gangs would have one fight and say, ‘I’ll see you at the next Uncle Jamm’s Army party,’ and then have another fight at the next one. It got so they’d say, ‘If they’re coming, we ain’t coming.’ Ninety percent of the gangsters came to have fun. It was the ten percent who couldn’t get a girl. They were the ones starting problems. There were so many women there—women outnumbered us five to one. This was at the Sports Arena. Everyone was selling dope and making money back then. Gangsters with money—no problems. But play Michael Jackson—that will make you fight. The Rolling 60s Crips would shoot up every-fucking-body. Slow songs and ballads make the gangsters fight. No room for Michael Jackson. Sorry, Mike.”
INSTANT ROBOTNESS
By 1982, when the vocoder was putting Los Angeles on freak notice, Kai Krause was ready to sell his Sennheiser to Neil Young. The freelance vocoder consultant drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway with his VSM-201 in his trunk, headed for Young’s ranch in Half Moon Bay. Selling his machine to Young for $13,500 would be a final act of vocoder good will for Kai, who had spent much of the past five years peddling Martian voices and explosions to Hollywood. Yet instructing Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Frank Zappa on how to use the vocoder had its perks. “Almost anyone would want to hear and see it,” Kai says, emailing from a castle overlooking the Rhein. “We sold one to a hospital in San Diego. They used it for linguistics.”
Kai first met Dr. Fritz Sennheiser in 1977, at the Audio Engineering Society in LA. “Figure out if there’s anything Hollywood can do with that thing,” said the doctor, leaving Kai with a 45-pound vocoder the size of a microwave.
The Sennheiser unit was billed as “the first Entertainment Vocoder,” now that it was declassified. Kai ended up writing vocoder manuals for Sennheiser’s American clients, enticing them with promises of “instant robotness” while telling them to get their creatures in order: “The vocoder could make Mr. Rogers sound like Stevie Wonder or an unbelievable sore throat.” Yet his demo tests went much further. The sound of football stadiums and castle winds roaring through twenty channels, in German, were almost too Grayskull for my outgoing phone message.
In the manual accompanying Herbie Hancock’s 1978 album Sunlight, Kai definitely saw the future, calling the vocoder the “ultimate phone answering machine.” “There were many odd encounters with the Sennheiser machine,” says Kai. “Clients adored it, amazed how it could work, and we grinned quietly.” There were Dracula screams for the ABC Movie of the Week (“Kind of like Tarzan’s yell”), Icelandic Christmas choirs (“Figures they would take the holidays seriously up there, it gets dark a lot”) and collaborations with Keith Emerson (“Watched lots of Benny Hill”). Yet stocking effects for Tron and The Black Hole would leave a “strange Disneyesque aftertaste.” “For Disney, this meant explosions, machine sounds, spacy blurbs of all kinds, lots of low rumbles, rocket stages, and a sheer endless set of mechanical sound effects. They used me more like a live animal: Let him make his beeps and burps, we just hold a mic to it and call it something later.”
Uncle Jamm’s Army at La Rutan, including Egyptian Lover (center) and Rodger Clayton (Uncle Jamm, second from left, bottom row). (illustration credit 10.7)
The Sennheiser VSM-201 Vocoder clientele included DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Frank Zappa, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Devo, and Disney. While each unit cost $18,500, Kai Krause would charge $52 an hour for vocoder consulting. (illustration credit 10.8)
Dr. Fritz Sennheiser. In 1977, Sennheiser charged Kai Krause with introducing his VSM-201 to Hollywood. “Using mere oscillators to talk through is a trivial application of the technology,” says Kai. The Sennheiser vocoder was used by Kenny Loggins, Neil Young, Star Trek and Cheech & Chong for a deleted alien abduction scene from Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie. (illustration credit 10.9)
Kai felt the machine was meant for better things than, say, an alien-virgin abduction scene in Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie. “The entire process was highly chaotic, lots of screams and tin-foil hats. When they took me to dinner later, one of them mumbled that the whole scene had only one intent: Audition a few dozen actresses. Glad the vocoder could help.”
Though the droids were often the Sennheiser’s bread and butter, Kai quickly tired of it, preferring the sound of “three saxes with a frog in a blender falling down the stairs with a nun, backwards. Never mind the robots. Using mere oscillators to talk through became the most trivial of all possibilities in that sense. All that robotness was quickly explored to its edges.” To cope with the tedium, Kai would lock himself in a room and trap weird noises inside his head. No clocks, no windows. He explains:
One of the richest veins in sonic surprises for me was to hook up the Sennheiser with two radio channels, one on each input, and just turn the dials. It was like a window with hundreds of variations flying by. I would use drums to play “through” an orchestral recording, or use water drops over Gregorian chants. Extremely interesting results came from feeding two radio channels into it at once. Not a blending, nor a true morphing—but an odd cross-correlation. The pitch from song A being re-EQ’ed by the spectrum of song B.… and often you could still hear both. A Bach fugue being modulated by the Beatles’ “Michelle” was absolutely eerie … you could still hear the words, faintly intelligible, but without the pitch of the song. It’s a shame Sennheiser labled the inputs as “Speech” and “Replacement Sound,” already expecting robot voices.
In 1982, the year Tron hit theaters, Kai was contacted by Neil Young’s production coordinator Joel Bernstein and hauled his entire synth rig up into the mountains. “[Neil] was kind and polite, but also a bit spaced, hard to get him to concentrate on any detail. It wasn’t possible to get him or anyone else there to listen to the how- to and why of the whole set-up. In the end, I had to give up and let go. He did explain that he was a huge Kraftwerk fan and wanted to re-create that sound desperately. About a year later, I heard Trans and suddenly knew where it all had gone.”
YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA
Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), Japan’s self-described, ironic “Techno Pop” superstars, made electro from M-80 popcorn exploding on cookie sheets. Adopted by the Tokyo school system, YMO became the soundtrack for gym exercises, lunchroom ambience and after-school eraser clapping. As video age pioneers, YMO vocodered the Tokyo Tower into space and glazed their faces with Bio-Clear, a spray-on instant mask used while touring for their 1978 album Behind the Mask.
I’M A LOT LIKE YOU
A severe motor disorder, a father’s guilt, a commercial flop, a landmark lawsuit, cut-out bin hell, throwback redemption. Neil Young’s relationship with the vocoder was complicated. More than just a guy with a Kraftwerk jones, Young recorded 1983’s Trans for his son Ben, a quadriplegic born with cerebral palsy. As a device which in itself struggled to communicate, the Sennheiser became a tool of empathy. “It’s communication but it’s not getting through,” said Young to his biographer, Jimmy McDonough. “And that’s what my son is. I was looking for a way to change my voice. To sing through a voice that no one could recognize and it wouldn’t be judged as me. [It’s] my search for a way for a severely handicapped non-oral person to find some sort of interface for communication.” Neither Geffen Records nor the fans got the message, resulting in Young being sued by his own label for not being himself, a contradiction in itself, or a crime—abetted by the vocoder and punishable by $3.3 million in damages. Young filed a countersuit for $21 million (worth 1,555 Sennheisers) and settled out of court. His VSM-201, however, was never heard from again.
While Trans was deemed too sterile, Young countered that you can feel more from someone who doesn’t (or can’t) show pain because it’s roiling inside. Suppression of emotion is an emotion itself, and Young felt it was nobody’s business. Nor should pity bribe an honest day’s two-star review—many weren’t aware of the muse until long after Trans had been discarded. It was unforgivable to Neil fans, who took it personally despite having no idea just how personal it really was. Betrayed by the vocoder. “You gotta realize you can’t understand the words,” said Young. “You can’t understand the words—and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that.” “You either loved it or you ran for your life,” wrote David Fricke in Mojo.
The misinformation surrounding the project had people believing that Neil had actually spoken to his son through the vocoder (this was never confirmed) or that it was just a deliberate prank on pop music’s blind trust in new technology. On the European Trans tour, Young sounded like Miss Piggy while “Transformer Man” was undermined by the interpretive phantom dancing of guitarist Nils Lofgren. (Lofgren would later be required to wear five-pound ankle weights “so he wouldn’t bust the noir vibe with his fuckin’ girly spins,” as one die-hard Neil fan explained.) The tour culminated with Neil Young trying to strangle his bass player.
ELO, Out of the Blue (1977, Columbia). This is what it looks like inside an ELO song. While some say the vocoder could destroy the atmosphere, ELO used it to become the atmosphere itself. ELO ran everything through the vocoder and had the good sense to distinguish between special effects and “very special effects.” (illustration credit 10.10)
BAND PASS FILTERS
The vocoder managed not to offend fans of Queen, Pink Floyd and Blue Oyster Cult and was permitted to mooch off the novelty of synthesizers that became more commercially available in the Seventies. Genesis replaced their Mellotron with it. After riding Isaac Asimov’s sideburns into the future with 1978’s I, Robot, Alan Parsons’ Project used a Poecoder to inhabit the wormy throat of “The Raven” on 1976’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
ELO would run their entire production budget through the machine. Richard “Magic Fingers” Tandy, the group’s vocoder specialist, calls it the “whiz woosh wash.” “The vocoder was our main machine,” he tells me, on the phone from London. “We used it as much as we could. We were mixing things together like sound effects of thunder and voices, drums and strings going through it. We began feeding absolutely everything through it—anything you could think of. Just to see what it sounded like. We used to have a big choir on the string tracks. Then [the machines] started playing themselves and we sat there and watched them. That was fun. Jeff would imagine things and write stories.”
ELO songwriter and arranger Jeff Lynne used album credits to distinguish between special effects and “very special effects,” between butterflies and nausea. On “Yours Truly, 2095” (from the 1981 album Time), Lynne falls for an IBM who turns out to be a telephone wearing a jumpsuit—all set to a vocoder chorus in silver robes.
Tandy goes silent thinking about it. (“I was just expressing astonishment.”) He doesn’t remember where they got their EMS-2000 vocoder or how it fell into the hands of Man Parrish. It cost £2,500 when introduced in 1976. Tandy first saw it in 1977 while recording Out of the Blue in Munich, approximate to Giorgio Moroder’s vocoder activities in disco.
One of ELO’s biggest hits, “Mister Blue Sky,” was a wistful Johnny Head-in-the-Air, a daydreamer naïve to the pleasures of a gray afternoon. “The Whale” was a one-man polyphony submerged in Moog gurgles, some four dreams deep, awakened by a blinding synth and a string section that fried your curtains into frequency bands. The device that dismantled human speech had somehow retained Jeff Lynne’s character, tricking his voice into believing the world was his chorus. Before touring, ELO’s backup singers gave up, realizing the vocoder was essentially doing their job. “So they packed up their coats and left,” says Tandy.
Giorgio Moroder, From Here To Eternity (1978, Casablanca Records). Giorgio Moroder was born with a vocoder installed in his name. Moroder also never returned my emails, triggering a recurrent disco nap nightmare where I’m driving an easy chair (or leather couch, something from Monty Python’s furniture races) down I-85 South to Moroder’s “Faster than the Speed Of Love.” Speech is shaped from darkness and filtered through the mustache in the rearview mirror. (Courtesy Gabriele Caroti) (illustration credit 10.11)
It would take Ultraman to make me realize that ELO was more than another UFO on a T-shirt. At the anime exhibit Little Boy, the best of my time was spent on a wall of sketches by Tohl Narita, a Japanese sculptor who kept Ultraman in monsters for most of my childhood. It was an impressive lineup: a heap of Michelin bladderwrack, a blowfish meteor, Godzilla’s cousin with wings, a fire-breathing sweet potato that drank gasoline, and a 20,000-ton walking artichoke.
Their origins—informants of Hiroshima, Dadaism, Buddhism, Greek mythology and various deep-space hairballs—were unknown to American kids who’d get home from school in time to see Ultraman’s name appear in a churn of green swill (the credits alone were the grossest thing on TV) after a day of flossing teeth with train sets, being silly, destructive and completely irresponsible—of being kids, essentially. (In the video for their vocoder hit “Intergalactic,” the Beastie Boys suited up for a kaiju eiga appreciation.) Staring at Little Boy’s Ultraman wall, I heard a vocoder version of the Cantata Wedding March drifting from the plasma screen behind me. Scored by ELO’s “Twilight,” it was a B-29’s view of an atomic fried egg, its blast radius rippling through Tokyo. As part of this animation short for the Japanese science fiction convention Daicon IV, the ELO sense of grandeur suited the vision, in both its epic scale of destruction and hope of regeneration through the unreal: a girl in a crimson Playboy cocktail suit, surfing above the mushroom cloud on a sword.
The most unavoidable Japanese vocoder zeitgeist would be disguised in a Canadian prison opera set in outer space. Nobody understood the hook from Styx’s hit “Mr. Roboto,” the most commercially successful use of the vocoder, yet everyone remembers. As a friend said, “Just being Japanese in third grade and having to listen to fools say that Roboto shit all day” was enough to make her puke.
In 2002, I attended a Styx autograph signing at J&R Music World in downtown Manhattan to check in on Roboto’s legacy. A crab fisherman from Long Island thought the song was just weird and didn’t care much for it, honestly, but was glad they stuck around. His wife sang the chorus and said it was neat and something different. A policeman on duty at J&R said Roboto reminded him too much of “Funky Town,” a song by Lipps, Inc. He then did the chorus of “Funky Town,” (as it appears in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I) while his friend said that Queen could have done a better job. (See “Radio Ga Ga.”) A man from Brooklyn mistook Japanese for Spanish. His friend added that “Mr. Roboto” always made him think o
f a Puerto Rican robot shopkeeper on Sesame Street, chasing little kids out of his bodega with a talking broom.
Herbie Hancock did the unthinkable and used the vocoder to actually improve his voice, thanks to his keyboard skills, one of the most human applications of the device. Songs like “I Thought It Was You” and “Come Running … To Me” are boogie lounge mainstays. (illustration credit 10.12)
WHEN THE STUFF HITS THE FAN
If our produce was any fresher, you’d have to slap us.
— Fresh Market billboard, Greenville, South Carolina
In 1979, Bob Mitchell, resident of Concord, Massachusetts, went on a vocoder witch-hunt. After a Herbie Hancock show in Boston, he wrote in to Musician, demanding a $10.51 refund. The letter was published in the July issue, under the heading “Funk-A-Dunk”: “What’s gotten into Herbie Hancock? Where does he think he’s going with that ridiculous vocoder? That thing isn’t just a waste of time, it’s a complete waste of taste. I didn’t pay $10.51 to hear one forty-minute set with twenty minutes of it devoted to Herbie playing Kid Scientist on the vocoder. I wrote to you hoping that you could talk some sense into him. Obviously no one else is.”
Bob Mitchell wasn’t any more thrilled with Herbie (singing and disco!) than Neil Young’s people were with Trans. “We took a long time to get it,” says Kai Krause, who coached Herbie Hancock on the Sennheiser “It’s more natural-voice-oriented than most. Herbie really can’t sing—he would be the first to say that. Oddly, many ‘more than most’ listeners never really figured out that this was purely electronic, but rather thought he ‘just sings weird.’ ”
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