(Yul Brynner faces off with the Fat Boys)

Here’s a mix for Chairman Mao’s radio show at Spine. (Listen and download here.) I just handed over the records, with a faint idea of the immediate future. Mao did the mixing, from Boggy Creek to Burgess Meredith. (Nice cameo in Burnt Offerings, Burgess.)

I wanted to call it “Bat Doing Pull-Ups,” based on a nightly aberration staged by the curtain drifting above my air conditioner. I’d been tucking the center under the rod, which made the “wings” droop. Each night gives the curtain full benefit of the bat. But one can’t go around saying Hey, here’s the mix I didn’t mix called Bat Doing Pull-Ups, dedicated to the air conditioner. My curtain is a supersonic nocturnalist. The Kriegsmarines trained on electro-shock pull-up bars. Etc.

Then Trevor, Mao’s 2-year-old, saved the day. He laughed at me and directed us to a Dr. Seuss thing called “Too Many Daves.” (He’d met another Dave earlier that day.) “Looks like you’ve got one horse too many.” Trevor is named after one of the Ultramagnetic MC’s, who sometimes referred to himself as TR-808, after the Japanese bottom-maker.

Not in the mix but on my mind: New vocoder intel from De La Soul, a tribute to DST playing the synthesizer at Bronx River. “The gusto is going home with me!” Mad actionable.

TRACK LISTING

Legend of Boggy Creek (Promo 45)
From the summer of boggy pants.

Camp swim test horror. After blowing our jeans into inner tubes, we had to claw through brown water down to the bottom and surface with a handful of squish. Alge Crumpler.

I cannot validate the claims made on this record (250 sightings!), but my heart, as the saying goes, beats like Sasquatch feets* for The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by PV Glob.

*Biggie had a vocoder moment on “Real Niggaz (Mister Cee’s Best of Biggie)”, when he rhymes over Above the Law’s “Black Superman.”

Clave Rocks—Amoretto
Latin Rascal edits at the wrong speed = morning sludge to the train through the humidity.

Mixed by Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers who also did this vocoder song.

Talking and Scratching (For the People)—The Computer People Communicators (CPC)
From 1983, on St. Louis’ ElectricLand Records, a Division of Poo Poo Man Records, with special thanks to the Paper Bag Co.

Reality (Music Version)—Disco 3
This is the Fat Boys before they were the Fat Boys, being John Carpenter when he was John Carpenter.

Bonus: A perk of divorce summer was my dad taking me to see The Thing and Escape From New York. (Had to sneak back in to hear the EFNY theme again.) (Though “Over the Wall” is Carpenter’s Krautrock travel jam.) Now every sled dog I pass on the street comes with a Morricone lurk and hopes of genetic mutation.

James Mason Bonus: “Reality” was produced by James Mason, the Roy Ayers keyboard player who also did the Wuf Ticket vocoder 12 “The Key” with Francois K. (Not Lolita James Mason who spanked Peter Sellers in Moet pong.) Mason also did “I Want Your Love,” which may be the best soul song of ’96, wearing 1978’s pants. (Actually if you listen to it, 1978’s pants are already on the floor.)

Boyz-N-Effect—Boyz Going Off
That phaser ascent is from my favorite Cheryl Lynne song “Encore.” They also trapped Parliament’s ghost inside an Emulator. (“If you hear any noise it’s just me and the boys.”) Pretty sure that goulash gut rumble is Melle Mel’s “don’t stop” part from “I Feel For You.” A bass digestif.  It goes hopping mad around minute 7, but we had to move on.

Street Freeks—Jimmy Lewis and LA Street Band
One of the leftovers that didn’t make the book mix, which doesn’t relieve the guilt of not including “Tonight” by Kleeer.

Beauty of Machines—Sylk-130
Loose Ends sighting! Just a scuttle and a hiss, but they’re in here.

Scratch Version B—Indeep

Donna—Art of Noise

Don’t Stop the Rock breakdown—Freestyle
This is from Centipede’s set at the San Francisco book release. Freestyle were from Miami, where Ice Cube once managed to cram a giant hydraulic skull into a mosque.

Conversation: Stick-Up Kid (Instr) B-Boys

“Two Teenage Girls, Grisly News”—EMS Vocoder demo
Running low on weird vocoder ammo here. It was either this Heavenly Creatures thing or a dismal stock Market reading. The Grisly Girls was my favorite TV show growing up.

Slow Beat—Escape From New York (“Snake? I Thought You Were Dead” Version)
Twisted Wires (Instr)
Brain—D.I.X.O. (Monk Edit)
Rockets—Future Woman (nasty “sexy rocket” Zeus Box solo)
Casco—Cybernetic Love (Instr)
Lawton Law—Time Is Now (Dub)

This is sort of the lost Italo disco chapter from the book, save for Lawton Law, who’s from Jersey. (Good job, Chairman, making it all work.)

In case you’re wondering about weird-ass “D.I.X.O.”:

Vocoder Chorus:
Don’t call me that, I’m not insane,
Electric heart, electric brain.
Please understand this program breaks,
Just like you I feel the pain.

The chorus occurs after the girl said “the machine’s going crazy” (which we edited out—nobody’s going crazy here) and apparently hurt its feelings.

This is a great moment:
1.)    The vocoder denies that it’s a few giant ants short of a picnic.
2.)    The vocoder feels your pain.
3.)    The vocoder catches feelings.

Feelings!

(Thanks Veronica Vasicka for the lyrics)

Intermedium Nepalese—Zeus B Held
From the Zeus B Held album Europium. If the album cover is to be believed, Zeus, painted in silver, stole that florescent halo tube from my mom’s kitchen.

Sweet Song Of Summer—Bee Gees
First heard this while driving through the mountains alone in October.* As you can probably imagine, the darkness was really feeling that “I-can-feel-you-in-evil-darkness” part.  But how threatening can the darkness be if it’s down with the Bee Gees?  Where’s Mean Mister Mustard?

As my mom once said, “Summer holds too long.”

*It’s always October around these parts.

August 4th, 2026—Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury
“Smoke, and then silence.”

Just For You—Ingram
But wait. We did nothing to this. Amazingly “as is.”

Here’s a Jack Tatum obit I did for Hua over at The Atlantic.

You may not be able to tell, but that Dolphin is leaping through a ring of fire.

They are not doing aerobics.

But we should talk about #89, Nat Moore.

In the early 1980s, Nat and fellow Dolphin All-Pro Larry Little co-owned Superstar Rollerteque, a skate rink in North Miami near Liberty City.  Luke Campbell and vocoder enthusiast Pretty Tony Butler had their first DJ gigs at Rollerteque.

Pretty Tony played “Rock Lobster.” Luke played “Tour de France” at the wrong speed.

Superstar Rollerteque is now mini-storage, a place where folks can compartmentalize their sustained decay and unwanted Bass.

The sign at the car rental next door reads: “No Jive, You Drive!”

Last Friday I played records at the Printer’s Ball in Chicago, along with Dante Carfagna, co-inventor of a speaking device called “Wrong Name Death Scream.”

Dante is responsible for the impulse-buy Venus Flytraps, once available at Woolworth’s of Greater Miami. The flytraps appear in the vocoder book, somewhere between the cackling fly that landed on your sandwich (a narrow escape), and a giant inflatable can of Budweiser. Excellent footage of the flytrapper (and its gooey lunch) appear in The Hellstrom Chronicle.

Occasionally , Dante will send me books like Man With A Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound or The Case of the Midwife Toad. Or an orange hologram button of Eddie Murphy’s brother’s rap group, K-9 Posse.

(The Midwife Toad, 1971)

Many of the songs that helped Tesser my ass through the gruel of book writing came from Mr. Carfagna: Pure Essence “Wake Up,” John Kaye (The Sparrow) “Isn’t It Strange,” Makers “Don’t Challenge Me,”* “Snake Beats,” The Majestics “Key To Love,” “You Can Drive My Spaceship,” Chico The Leo’s I Love My Momma Hotline, an expensive group called Timeless Legends, Andrew Wartts, and a sub-freak bass song that provided evidence that German U-Boatmen had stolen ashore during World War II to catch Val Lewton movies in Lauderdale. (It’s in the book mix, between Kraftwerk and Jam Pony Express.)

The Ball

The interactive Vocoder Guest Log was set up next to the turntables. People could talk through the EMS-2000 and listen to their robot brains under headphones.

These two little kids with glasses were regular customers. They walked out with all the secrets of the future.

(Photo by Meg Handler)

The sound system at the Printer’s Ball had that MiniMall parking lot Bass. As if copies of Oxford American came with complimentary tube amps and a quad gut-check. This created a more tactile interactive feature: one could sit on the monitor next to the turntables and feel the hot bottom-breath on their legs. It was like bass conditioning  (BC). (The fossils are the future and I promise we’ll get there.) Elsewhere, the low-end seemed to be pooling and eddying in the far corner of the room, where the walls went florescent green and the air caught feelings.

I learned that Trus’Me and Section 25 have bass, but Crime Mob on Friends of Distinction has boom.

DJ Battlecat has boom (and a synthetic cowbell imported from West Palm) but you wouldn’t be able to tell since someone took a claw hammer to my copy.

Polish sausages from Jim’s in the back of a Subaru also, not surprisingly, have bass.

A man with headphones welded to his skull did a thoughtful softshoe from outer space. The headphones came off for “Hydraulic Pump.” He wasn’t homeless, just passing through, “someone who had to have all his shit with him at all times.”

Thanks to the Hughes Brothers and Fred Sasaki at Poetry magazine.

*Not trying to be all secret squirrel about shit, but YouTube doesn’t have all the answers. (And I was lazy.) “Don’t Challenge Me” will be included on Carfagna’s upcoming comp Open Spaces.

This is Vincent Calloway, Midnight Star’s vocoder Freakazoid, kicking air right in the face. Vincent was recently inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame at age 50.

The inscription reads: “To David: I know the book is gonna be kickin.”

Roundhouse kicks over mic stands were pretty standard during Midnight Star live shows. During soundcheck, Vincent would do the WOPR while reciting lines from War Games through the vocoder.

Freakazoid live, view it here.

This is Carmen Rosa, an airborne Cholita wrestler from Bolivia. Please come meet her at the screening of Betty Park’s amazing documentary Mamachas del Ring, which is showing this week as part of HBO’s New York International Latino Film Festival. (Carmen will also be tweeting her first trip to New York @mamachasdelring.)

The opening take-down scene is worth the price of admission alone.

(Courtesy of Chris Lasalle* and Dave Funkenklein)



This team photo was taken at the New Music Seminar in July of either 1989 or ’90.

The white guy in the middle, Dave Funkenklein**, once swore to me that he would deliver advance cassettes of the second Organized Konfusion album to the NMS, despite Disney’s filibustering, not to mention all the chemo. (And he did.) Funkenklein could not be stopped. He once drove to Tijuana with a malignant tumor in his spine to see Rodney O and Joe Cooley.

The guy indicating he’s number one, wearing the Cut Master DC polo, is Cut Master DC.

He appears in the vocoder book scratching records with basketballs.

The guy holding the D-Moet sign, is not D-Moet but King Sun. The last time I saw King Sun, he was in a similar position while being hauled off by a security octopus after a brawl that may have implicated Coolio, at an overbooked NMS event that included a surprise (surprise!) appearance by KRS-ONE, Mad Lion, the UMC’s, all the UMC’s buddies from Staten Island, and the Wu-Tang Clan, in their entirety.

The guy to the left of the D-Moet sign in the white Kangol is D-Moet, who used to be down with Excalibur.

The red topsider just behind King Sun’s left elbow houses the foot of Grandmaster Caz.

The guy to the right of Caz is Steady B, possibly wearing the same Fila windbreaker he rocked on the cover of What’s My Name?, and sadly now serving a life sentence in Houtzdale, PA.

The guy dead center, normally in a Ninja mask, is UTFO’S DJ Mix Master Ice.

The guy in the Gucci & Tenille hat, upon which his gold teeth once appeared, by themselves, is Just-Ice.

Please help me identify the others.



*I first met Chris Lasalle when the Source Tour came to The Zoo in Raleigh, NC with Lord Finesse, Organized Konfusion, Roxanne Shante, Biz, and The Almighty RSO. Before taking the stage, the RSO dispatched a crew of girls to case the building. They wore Boston Bruin jackets and spandex shorts and communicated with the RSO limo by walkie-talkie. The evening concluded with gunplay in the parking lot. Apparently, one of Biz’s records caught a bullet and saved the life of Source tour manager Jennifer Perry, who was ducking under the passenger seat. A full recount appeared in The Source’s 50th Anniversary Issue with Flash, Bambaataa and Herc on the cover.



**Here’s a brief excerpt from “Burn Rubber on Plastic Bubbles,” a tribute to Funkenklein that appeared in Jeff Chang’s anthology Total Kaos, as well as Wax Poetics. (Funkenklein once ran his wheelchair down an office hallway paved with bubble-wrap to simulate a drive-by.)

In 1993, a delegation of 18 Samoan rappers went to Disneyland. Averaging 300 pounds a pop, they called themselves Boo-Yaa Tribe. Admission was on the house. At “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Boo-Yaa shattered the standing record for maritime tonnage in an Animatronic buccaneer fantasy. Even more astonishing was that Disney staff had the cannon balls to kick them out (“Please do not agitate the skeletons”), despite the protests of their guardian, who happened to be in a wheelchair. Apparently, Disneyland did not share Boo-Yaa’s enthusiasm for testing the properties of volume and displacement. After all, it’s a small world.

I learned of this rap barnacle when reading “Gangsta Limpin,” a column written by late hip-hop writer/impresario Dave Funkenklein Klein, who as it turned out, had arranged Boo-Yaa’s day on the plank. Klein headed a Disney-owned rap label Hollywood BASIC Recordings and was interested in adding Boo-Yaa to a roster which included a Maxwell Melvins and a group serving life sentences in a New Jersey State prison, Zimbabwe Legit, DJ Shadow, and Organized Konfusion, two guys from Queens who rapped about cytoplasmic disintegration. This may have been counter-intuitive for Disney, but certainly no less hardcore than singing dwarfs, dancing brooms, and a night on Bald Mountain with Chernabog.

Through Funkenklein, I learned that Coolio used to be a fireman, that Bozo the Clown’s manager was named “Morty” and that JVC Force dug Detective Stan “Wojo” Wojciehowicz. Funkenklein downwormed tequila on transatlantic flights with Ultramagnetic and took Erick Sermon to Sea World. In one of his Gangsta Limpin columns, you’d read LA riot commentary, medical reports, inbred music-biz jokes, concerns for Robocop 3, and an offer to swap glossies of Ice T’s wife (Darleen) in exchange for a Wattstax video.

(Photo by Keetja Allard. Originally published in Relax, 2002)



Phone conversation with myself and Rammellzee (first voice), from October, 19th, 2007:

“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 5 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.”



Time enough.



Thanks Hua for digging this up from your inbox.

Thanks Dr. Quatermass and Five Milli for the original on-screen face melt.
(See: Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces)

(Image: Urb magazine, 1993—my first feature.)



Q: Are you going to see the new Transformers movie?

A: I don’t need to see it. I am it. Why do I need to see me?







Good Idea

I met with Stephen Torton the day after Rammellzee passed. An artist himself, Torton worked closely with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee while also documenting their first trips to Italy and Los Angeles in the early 1980s. (The LA mission would be commemorated in Basquiat’s “Hollywood Africans.”)

He told me a story about how Rammel once approached the MTA and City Hall with a proposal. If they let him camouflage the entire subway system, graffiti writers would be so confused and discouraged that they would just give up.

The MTA said, Nice try, but we’d rather dip the trains in acid.



Disneyland

Torton’s 1984 photo of Rammel and Jean-Michel Basquiat entering Disneyland, at dusk, appears in the vocoder book. Wearing a tweedy overcoat, Rammel is glancing over his shoulder, clearly up to something. Basquiat’s tie appears to be yearning towards some unseen electromagnetic force. Not surprisingly, nobody else is near them. They are in their own Walleyworld. Maybe Wall-E World—Rammel being an apocalyptic garbage-recycling robot himself. By the time we get to the scene, it will be too late.

This has to be one of my top Disneyland break-ins, along with that time Funkenklein did Pirates of the Caribbean with Boo-Ya Tribe in a wheelchair.

(An earlier part of this day, photographed on Santa Monica Blvd, can be seen here.)



Baby Grim

Earlier this year, Torton showed me two short films he did with Rammel. The first was a 1982 performance/Ikonoklast Panzerism screed at the Squat Theater near the Bowery. (Live at the Squat marks the first time I’d ever seen Fab Five Freddy’s eyeballs). The other short, titled Baby Grim, was shot in ‘84 and has never been shown. We find Rammellzee amok in the town of Martina Franca in Italy, where he’d been commissioned to cut an armed letter sculpture from granite. He is wearing two—maybe three—pairs of slit-lensed lizard glasses on his forehead. His pants are tucked into his boots. Schoolchildren point and laugh at this alien, slouching across steep cobblestones in ear muffs. But they do it from a safe distance.

In another scene, Rammel looms over knee-high medieval churches, spritzing plaster models with color. (He’d already bombed a sawed-off Renault.) In the background, you hear “Planet Rock” and “F-4000,” to the hiss of aerosol compression. The gallery owner is upset. Rammellzee had snapped off all the crosses.



Rodeo Big Duck

I bought “Beat Bop” while on a family Christmas trip in 1983. I was 14. Having lost my parents to Macy’s, I escaped to a nearby record store (which may have been Rock & Soul) and blew my Christmas shopping money on 12 inches. A guy who kind of resembled the manager of the First Avenue club in Purple Rain (“What’s this one-song shit!“) recommended five records: “Fresh” by Fresh 3 MC’s, “Rock the House” by the B-Boys, “Death Mix” by Afrika Bambaataa, “Bad Times” by Capt Rapp (produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), and “Beat Bop,” which was credited to Rammellzee Vs. K-Rob.

I’d never heard of a song being by something vs. someone. The conflicted verses. Many questions. Who was making with the freak-freak? Rodeo big duck? What’s a Rammellzee? Why is his pinky nail so long? Who’s driving this German tank?

In eighth grade, my asthmatic friend would recite all the jabberwocky of “Beat Bop,” occasionally hitting his inhaler while quacking around in his green Sergio Tacchini flip-flops.



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 Rappages. 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 Rappages 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.

The rest of the day’s events are accounted for in the book. Men from Zurich challenged Rammel to a transversal alphabet drag race using letters on zip wires.

I remember the fumes.

I remember meeting Rip Cord Rex, a character with nitrous tube eyebrows and a spare tape deck that cushioned ejected from his brain. (Alyssa Milano’s hair clip had been borrowed for the teeth.) Rammellzee once showed me a Polaroid of Rip Cord Rex wielding a leaf-blower under a strobe light. He was wearing a kimono. I was then told that Rip Cord Rex liked to steal engines. (This recalled a Sesame Street episode in which Cookie Monster and his jiggling eyeballs drove a stolen steam engine through a game show.) Not surprisingly, Rammel had a miniature toy train with Cookie Monster, the engineer, leaning his blue head out of the window.

That’s 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 that seemed to be missing its Krakken. The helmet was welded together by the Morse Diving Company in 1923. I thought I was going to fall through the floor.

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 hear about dentistry, epoxies, oil rig fissures, deep sea decompression, and rescuing baloney-sandwich idiots from the rip tide.

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 and putting a black eye in the sun. Also known as “a good reason to drink beer.” Sometimes referred to as: “Might be a good time to leave.”

Not so fast.

You listen to a 1984 recording of Rammel and Phase 2 on the vocoder in a basement in Vienna, and notice that Led Zeppelin (“Dazed and Confused”) and Royalcash (“Radioactivity”) have bled through from the other side.

You get sozzled.

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 are told not to be a scallywag, boss, yet find yourself impaled on a phrase, again.

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.

I remember Rammellzee growling at me, “When you start thinking too hard, the culture dies.”

Later that afternoon, I stood in a park at the Zulu Nation Anniversary, thinking too hard, watching O.C. do “Time’s Up” in a downpour.







Zee

According to Ralph Miller, a retired phonetic engineer at Bell Labs, the letter z is a noise, not a sound.



Of Friends at the Institute

I used to proofread Product Inserts for a pharmaceutical company out in Zebulon, N.C., 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.

Emperor General was Sir Menelik was Scaramanga was 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 introduced Menelik to Zee, thinking, well, you know.



Eat A Planet

Last year, 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. He’d said it after telling a story about how he once vibrated his diaphragm too hard when using the vocoder. It made him upchuck his contents under pressure.

He blamed McDonald’s, the planet, and of course, the word whatever.

“Garbage up! Garbage out!”

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.

So long, Rammellzee.

I will miss our annual Halloween phone calls.

“I have to go back underwater. We’re turning buildings into spaceships and we’re not telling you.”

“I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice.”
—Randolph Carter

This varsity Miami Bass jacket came from Robert Mooney, a gift for finishing my book. One for my trouble. As you can see, it comes with a spaceship attached to its sleeve.

(I should finish vocoder books more often!)

My mom—who is not acquainted with the finely stitched intricacies of Bass messaging in Miami—said the Skyywalker Records logo looked like Minnie Mouse’s behind.

(Maybe it was the shoes.)

I said, “No, that’s not Minnie Mouse’s behind. That is a dancing Bass cloud wearing red slacks.”

Then we had a laugh about “clouds of butt.” And my grandmother’s red slacks. And the idea of a mouse getting mugged by a cloud. And how the cloud ran off in the mouse’s Bass pants. And how “That’s the mouse’s Bass pants” would replace the cat’s PJs. And how the cat would just give up.

This provided a good distraction, as my mother just had surgery on her rotator cuff, a.k.a. supraspinatus. This translates to “fish banana” in artificial brains struggling with speech recognition.

The double y’s in Skyywalker’s name were on purpose, so George Lucas wouldn’t sue the red cloud pants off Luther Campbell.

In the words of Jeff Spicoli, “Where’d you get that jacket?

Mr. Mooney organized the vocoder party in Raleigh, N.C., which was DJed by Kurtis Blow’s guitar player Davy DMX*, also the producer of  “F-4000.” Professor Griff showed up and slid through the Soul Train gauntlet.

The appearance of Griff inspired a friend to drive home and retrieve his copy of “Bass Mechanic” so we could hear it at the club. And we did, and we freaked, and our faces quaked.

I was reminded of a story MC A.D.E. once told me about doing “Bass Mechanic” on Pele’s ex-wife’s TV show before she was nearly kidnapped, and before A.D.E. performed “Bass Mechanic” in a futbol** stadium in Brazil, wearing a trench coat.

(A.D.E. is from Lauderdale, incidentally.)

I did not see Professor Griff dance a ring of fire to “Bass Mechanic.”

But the face quakers kept coming.

The last time I saw Griff was 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon in Chapel-Hill. Public Enemy had dropped by to rip up the Cat’s Cradle for a matinee while en route to a homecoming  appointment at NC Central. Flavor Flav surfed over the crowd to the stage.

The Reading

The Raleigh vocoder reading took place earlier that day at Quail Ridge Books, across from the intersection where once, many years ago, a Just-Ice song shut down my friend’s Jetta at 3:00 in the morning and we had to call Triple A.

At the reading, some kid asked me about Lil B. (The Lil B song about Sword in the Stone is great.) A retired pilot inquired about voices in the black box.

After the reading, a guy introduced himself as Randolph Carter.

The Randolph Carter?

Randolph Carter was last spotted in an H.P. Lovecraft story in 1919, on a mobile phone, in an ichorous swamp in Gainesville, Florida.*** He was speaking with a colleague who’d gone under a tomb and, amid the “miasmal vapors,” discovered something “utterly beyond thought.”

According to Carter, the voice at the other end of the line was “deep, hollow, gelatinous, unearthly, inhuman, disembodied,” etc.

As fond as I am of the gelatinous voice, there are concerns that pack jam has no interest in leaving me alone.

*During middle school assembly, Principal Alice Litwinchuk made us write down our nicknames and hand them over to the administration. I stole mine from a guy named after a drum machine. People laughed. What is a Davy DMX? Like the time Violet and Lucy coaxed Charlie Brown into admitting he always wanted to be named “Flash.” (Last panel: Violet and Lucy, on the ground laughing in boldface mean: FLASH??? HA! HA!) So I changed my rap name to a tree doctor/storm trash removal service called Davey Tree. Their rival was another crew of tree removers called Asplundh. We had the better looking trucks, though Asplundh had a nastier tree-eating machine.

**We are now tying into current events.

***Lovecraft once walked out on a screening of Tod Browning’s Dracula in Miami.

Holger Czukay said he was tailed by the Cologne police while test-skating his vocoder perfume song. He looked wired to explode. They may have been suspicious of the Ziploc bag of electronics dangling off hip, essentially a homemade bag of Walkman guts. (Holger also once purchased a vintage IBM dictaphone from an undertaker.)

Holger claims the cops were following him because they thought he might bust his iliac, perhaps not the stallion on wheels fantasized by Big Boi.

When we were laying out the book, I asked Holger for a photo of him rollerskating. It was too small for our purposes, but here’s the proof nonetheless.

Off to the mountains, near Asheville, after hearing Dam Funk drop a new Steve Arrington joint in the Sunday mist. Speaking of Steve Arrington, I saw an exquisite pair of signature Three Times Dope knee pads while in Chicago a month ago. They were a promotional item for the 3 x’s D single “Weak at the Knees” (Feat. Steve Arrington).

These knee pads shame my Alkaholiks beer coaster. They also remind me of the guy who asked for Swen Nater’s kneepads after a Laker exhibition game I attended in Charlotte long ago. Hey Swen! Lemme have one of them kneepads!

But the mountains.

I love “Mountain’s World.” (Great Rap Moment: Listening to Tuff Crew’s Monty G, aka The Mountain, order a sundae at a Friendly’s in Philly, with screaming kid party at next table.)

I love the Mountain label.

I love that part of “Al-Naafisyh” where the words “beach knob” seem to get scrunched through the vocoder’s snoot. Lil Beach Knob is a mini-elevation near Linville Gorge. Good caves and moss beds there! (Where my brother once fell through a cave onto a dead moose.)

Last time I was on Lil Beach Knob, the sassafras smelled like Froot Loops.

But I will be reading in Asheville, not Beach Knob.

Asheville is near Brevard, N.C., where I went to summer camp and was indicted by a kangaroo court for waking up one night in my cabin and declaring, “There’s a spaceman in the trash can!”

This incident would later appear in “Spaceman In the Trash Can,” a story I wrote for the Broken Wrist Project, which was published by James Hughes in 2002.

Then, we figured, why not a vocoder book?

My counselor (named Alex Bell)* had been throwing dirt on me in my sleep. He said I was being bombed with bat-guano. “Those bats are shittin’ on you!” said the whisperer in darkness.  I believed him.

It’s great to be here.

Asheville also happens to be Bob Moog’s old haunt. (Event details here.) Hopefully the reading won’t conflict with Game 7 because THERE WON’T BE NO GAME 7.  (Update: Um there will be a Game 7). (Rondo!)

Anyway, my cousin, who did the German translations for the book, will be moderating and hectoring.

Hopefully his old man will come out. My uncle is a former CIA codebreaker who defected into the Blue Ridge mountains to become a water dowser. Apparently he used to eavesdrop on Soviet tank commanders cussing their mothers.

When I was a kid, my uncle would show up at the house and talk UFOs, J. Allen Hynek, and Siberian Tunguska Incidents (the mysterious tree-frying explosion in 1908 that made the coyotes walk upright and go to church in Against the Day.)

*No relation to the guy who designed a talking machine for his deaf wife.**
**Wasn’t there a song called “Def Wife?”