How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  SCARE QUOTA

  I first met Rammellzee when I was in town for the New Music Seminar in 1993. I was with Randolph Heard, a former copy editor for Hustler, then working for a Larry Flynt hip-hop magazine called Rap Pages. En route to Rammellzee’s Battle Station, we stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and Randolph talked about the giant chicken statue in Flynt’s basement. And then something about Ultramagnetic MC’s first visit to the Rap Pages office, all of them dressed for summer, save for Kool Keith, who had arctic mirrors welded to his bald head—the rest of him furred up, as if he’d just mugged a dogsled.

  When the elevators opened into the office, the Four Horsemen just stood there.

  The Yeti hunter said, “Enter the spaceship.”

  I loved that story so much I accidentally tossed my wallet in the KFC trash with the nugget tray. It kind of turned into a thing, with my arm half-eaten by the Thank You flap, and the guy behind the register, mildly entertained, as if watching some grisly zoo accident. The Garbage Gods were watching.

  OF FRIENDS AT THE INSTITUTE

  I used to proofread product inserts for a pharmaceutical company out in Zebulon, NC, allegedly near Terminator X’s ostrich farm. One day I received a handwritten fax and a question: “Can science achieve a unified theory of complex systems, permanently skeptical of friends at the institute?”

  This was followed by four pages of rhymes about “self-replicating lightning” and “truly complex amoebic bond traders, appearing at the border.” There was no cover sheet, but according to the name at the top of the page, it had been sent by the Emperor General, aka Sir Menelik, aka Chewbacca Uncircumcised, a rapper from Brooklyn who made a few appearances with Kool Keith on Dr. Octagon. (Keith once called me collect from a pay phone near LAX, on Valentine’s Day. It was after 3:00 a.m., North Carolina time. I accepted the charges.)

  I once brought Menelik to the Battle Station to meet Rammel, thinking, well, you know.

  MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO LEAVE

  This is the book of how things worked around the Battle Station.

  You talk into electric fans, eat bad mushrooms (duds) and put on a 47-pound Jules Verne helmet.

  You realize it’s best to not try on the masks.

  You’re told that this guy is an equation and are reminded of a Peanuts character named 5.

  You remember the time you got carsick in back of your mother’s Buick wagon, and how the electronic tailgate got lockjaw.

  You learn about the Mettroposttersizer, a planet smasher that triggers “the Wizard’s Game of Pool,” leaving the solar system in a molten state. Also known as “a good reason to drink beer.” Sometimes referred to as: “Might be a good time to leave.”

  Not so fast. Have a beer.

  You consider things like Word is born is term is time is period is punctuation is ending, and hope your editor saves you from yourself.

  You are given a plaster dimetrodon and are told it is part of the letter A.

  You have no idea what’s going on, but just go with it, with the understanding that it may not bring you back in one piece, if ever, but if you worry about such things, then you’re probably in the wrong place.

  You then leave the Battle Station and make sure the city is still there and that the sky hasn’t gone crooked and is still happy to see you.

  ON THE WORD BEER

  March of 2009, I sustained a severe neck injury while trying to finish the Rammellzee chapter—and the book—on my 40th birthday. A terrible idea. Trying to invent a chapter title wasn’t much easier. Rammell suggested “Death of a Monk.” I went with something less terminal: “Eat a Planet and Go On to the Next One.”

  He shook his head. “And now we both raise our eyebrows together.”

  I reminded him that those were his words, his math. His teeth.

  And with that Rammellzee said, “Time for beer!” and rolled back and executed a crooked reverse somersault from the edge of his bed, aimed in the vague direction of the kitchen, his surf footie akimbo, and Rammellzee himself, hitting the floor, with grace, right on the word beer.

  Phone conversation between myself and Rammellzee, October 19, 2007. He is the first voice.

  “You like oysters, boss?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got a spot over here for you. We can watch the boats sink.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll let you hold the bomb.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you know anyone at the Smithsonian Institute?”

  “Working on that one.”

  “You need to talk to someone in the Department of Space.”

  “Okay.”

  “The Andromeda Galaxy is going to be here in five million years. It will consume this galaxy.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “This means something to me.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s sending a master blaster radio cloud ahead of itself.”

  “When?”

  “That one will be here in 10,000 years.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know it’s a little far off, but you might want to take a look at it.”

  “And finish my book before it happens?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Okay.”

  ROBOT REDBOARD

  Electro Barry became a Nottingham folk hero in 1989, when some kids tried to snatch his boom box. “I was walking out of the grocery store after purchasing some chocolate roll-style cakes. I was confronted by five young men who tried to relieve me of my stereophonic equipment. I decided not to let them have it.”

  Barry then swung the radio around, using it to flag down help, and accidentally struck a passing car. Behind the wheel was a driver’s ed student, her first time out. One can imagine her surprise when a double-decker JVC—say, blasting the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam”—came smashing through the window like a Transformer fist. The driving instructor then got out and punched Barry in the head for his trouble. The radio was in pieces.

  (A more cinematic version of the story has the radio getting stuck in the car window with the hand of Electro Barry still attached, dragged him along for several blocks while the Jonzun Crew tape ejected and unspooled into the driver’s face.)

  Barry placed the JVC fragments in a garbage bag (which normally served as the radio’s raincoat) and went home and reassembled it. For consequent outings, the revived box would be handcuffed to Barry’s wrist, with the spare key stashed in the battery compartment as a final security measure.

  This was all I knew before meeting Barry Sheppard. The last, and perhaps most memorable stop on my winter book tour was this 44-year-old admin for the Nottingham magistrate who lives with his mother, photographs clouds, and claims the most extensive collection of vocoder tapes in galaxies both known and imagined.

  “Electro Barry was a way of making me more human and family-friendly,” he later explains. “Audiotron is my true street name. I collect and own vocoder music and perform robotics—that’s why I am Audiotron. Calling me Electro Barry would be like calling Egyptian Lover, ‘the Lovely Egyptian.’ ”

  My liaison to Audiotron was the P Brothers—Ivory and Paul S—two hip-hop producer/DJs who serve as the Bronx annex of Nottingham, guarding the old-school ways in Northern England and, in their words, “dealing with a lot of science.” (True urban legend: Ivory’s fridge door plays the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” when you open it.) Said Ivory, over email, before my visit: “Before seeing Electro Barry, you need to wear headphones playing ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ loudly, so you feel just like the blind girl in Manhunter.”

  After a few pints at a pub that “smelled like the inside of a fat wooden leg,” the P Bros stopped the car a block short of Barry’s house. They played me an old BBC radio interview with Just-Ice, a rapper from the Bronx who necessitated steel-reinforced doors at record labels. “I used to work construction and take my frustrations out on rocks and buildings,” said Just. “But I love animals.” When we reached Audiotron’s house, he answered the
door with the kindly gnomish squint of one who hasn’t seen much daylight. He was three bites into a two-story heart attack on white bread. (Six franks on the bottom, two beef patties on top.) When we got to his room upstairs, the sandwich was placed on top of a vocoder—the EMS 2000 used by the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica—which sat on a bed flush to the wall.

  In addition to vocoder music, Audiotron collects glowing fiberglass traffic cones (called “bollards”), vintage English alarm security boxes, skulls (“I like natural history”), synthetic toadstools and medieval arrows (or “arrows that are stylish but can still hurt people”).

  “This may appear a bit strange to you,” he grins. “But I like color.”

  I ask about the human teeth on display, positioned between the rabbit skull and the orangutan skull, next to the wall of hand-drawn vocoder cassettes. “Those are my brother’s teeth,” he says. “He had extensive surgery and sold me some of his teeth for three and a quarter quid.”

  The shelf above the bed holds scrapbooks, with spines marked accordingly: Clouds, Fireworks, Buses, Landscapes, 1980s Pylons. On the wall below the scrapbooks is a giant check made out to Barry Sheppard from the County of Nottinghamshire. “It was a charity walk I designed. It took me 150 miles around my county and took five and a half days to complete. I raised £637 for the British heart foundation and an extra £108 for Polish orphans.”

  He then pulls out a copy of my book for me to sign. “I have a confession,” he says, switching on a row of bollards. “A friend downloaded the mix you did for the book and gave me a copy. I hope that is okay.”

  Barry was too timid to attend Nottingham’s hip-hop club Rock City during its heyday in the early Eighties. He said he wasn’t coordinated enough to pop-lock or spin on his head. “This music was never meant to be kept in a bedroom,” he says, realizing the irony. “But this is my escape. At my job, I’m surrounded by crime and misery all day.”

  He did finally attend Rock City’s 30-year anniversary and brought his vocoder down for the occasion. “The imagination, the science and the mystery of Electro music made it magical. If I could live my youth again, I would live out the early to mid-Eighties just for this reason alone, and then happily fade away.”

  Audiotron was recently interviewed for NG83, a hip-hop documentary on Nottingham. A snippet has been floating around on YouTube, but he has yet to see it. (Barry doesn’t own a computer.) Still, the experience has made him more self-aware, occasionally making jokes at the expense of his legend. I fear that once he is assimilated into the Internet, the spell will be broken. But Barry Sheppard assures me this will never happen. He will always be Audiotron to himself, and Electro Barry to those pointing at him from the outside.

  On the way out the door, I notice a Polaroid of someone, presumably Barry, wearing a red robot costume made of cardboard. “The whole thing was worn like a suit of armor and was fully articulated,” he says. “I literally moved like a robot, due to the stiffness of the cardboard.”

  I glance back at Audiotron’s hot dog sandwich, still sitting on his vocoder.

  “The name of the robot was taken from Robert Redford. I was Robot Redboard.”

  (illustration credit app.3)

  TUBBY RUN THE SKIES

  Homer Dudley’s vocoder skit, “Reports From the Far More Distant Future,” may have been too psychedelic for public consumption, much less his Harvard vocoder demo in 1936. Notably absent would be realities even stranger, such as the vocoder’s appearance with a dancing robot Santa on a Target commercial, or its presence in a key episode of The O.C., when Marissa shot Trey. Still, this document does provide creative insight to the Bell Labs beekeeper, who once went ice-racing in a Saab.

  Dudley would have the vocoder playing the role of itself, along with the voices of St. Peter, a man named Mr. Puree, the president of “Cosmos Laboratories,” and a beer PhD. According to the script, they were trying to harness cosmic rays while researching the hyperbolic function of the elasticity of the ether.

  Said St. Peter: “The problem of the late-coming gate crashers will be solved by decorating them with poison ivy and escorting them individually to specially assigned tables where only hash will be served.”

  The dialogue is also prone to fits of rhyme:

  When Tubby Rogers reached Elysium

  And the “Voices of Science” rang through Paradise

  Angels and seraphs ceased to busy ’em

  They knew that Tubby could run the skies

  One voice (simply credited as “vocoder”), states that each human is a transmitter, referring to the radio station Dudley discovered in his mouth while suffering from colitis in a hospital bed. The vocoder continues to say that folks can tune in anywhere in the universe and “converse and chatter intergalactic.” As an example, they eavesdrop on an MIT beer chant: “Drink it down! Drink it down!” There’s also a rocket train that can take you straight to hell, where a fundraiser is being held for the “Technology Club of Hades.”

  This must have been the machine’s first encounter with the word intergalactic, as well as human emanations in bandwidth.

  The vocoder then closes with the following quatrain, which leads one—perhaps just me—to believe Dudley’s invention had once attempted some party raps.

  I’ve been expurgated in Heaven

  The Three Brass Balls is taboo

  I can’t sing Pie or Women

  So I got a new rhyme for you

  Perhaps a far more distant future will bring us a recording.

  Dialogue excerpts from Homer Dudley’s vocoder skit are courtesy of M.I.T. Archives.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Indestructible Speech is based on interviews with Ralph Miller, Robert Price, Donald Mehl, Sidney Metzger, Mahlon Doyle and William Bennett, Jr., as well as those currently archived in the David Kahn Collection at the NSA. I am grateful to Dorothy “Meg” Madsen for sharing SIGSALY anecdotes from her unpublished book, A World War II Memoir. Information concerning the Sonovox’s role in wartime propaganda was sourced from the Jacob Smith essay “Tearing Speech To Pieces.”

  Ray Bradbury’s memories of the World’s Fair are based on author interviews and Sam Weller’s biography, The Bradbury Chronicles.

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