Dave Tompkins - How to Wreck a Nice Beach

Selected by the Village Voice as one of the 10 Best Books of 2010

Chosen by Amazon as the Entertainment Book of 2010

Dave Tompkins How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the best work of social history Ive read in years. He manages to braid together threads from a hundred directionsespionage, medical research, science fiction, hip-hopso that the story is constantly swooping around unexpected corners. About a third of the way in, it begins to feel like a secret history of our time.

Luc Sante

Its unquestionably brilliant, not only one of the best music books of the year, but also one of the best music books ever written.

Los Angeles Times

How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: Its an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. [Tompkins] biggest and most perilous adventure in How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the plunge deep into the throbbing radioactive heart of his own prosea hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy Collins.

Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

We should be thankful that Tompkins sacrificed a decade to this unique and beautifully wrought book, in tribute to the brief cultural moment when a tool of militarism, secrets and destruction found itself transformed by music-makers into a zap-gun of heroic space-age liberation.

Andrew Male, Mojo

Work[s] the military-entertainment-complex angle with admirable energy, piling up flash-frozen anecdotes of pilots and DJs in voice-critical moments; showing, in its drooling over antique military-signaling equipment, a musicians gear-lust; and striving incessantly to invoke sound: It could sound like an articulate bag of dead leaves. Despite its dense payload of raw fact-bombs, the book remains, like the sound of the vocoder itself, suggestively ghostly.

The Guardian

From the atomic bomb to the band Zapp, from The Gulag Archipelago to Detroits ghettos, Tompkins rewires the connections between war, science, and art to give us a glimpse of evolved man, an analog crooner seductively and jarringly alien.

Oxford American

With verve and humor, Dave Tompkins tells the remarkable story of the vocoder and its secret WWII offspring, which protected the very words of Roosevelt and Churchill as they flashed across the Atlantic. Nobody has ever related this before, and to have a technological tale related this well is a great gift to science and to history.

David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers and Hitlers Spies

How to Wreck a Nice Beach
The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop
The Machine Speaks

2010, 2011 Dave Tompkins

Stop Smiling Media
1371 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.stopsmilingbooks.com
www.mhpbooks.com

Editor: James Hughes

Cover Photograph by Michael Waring
Illustrations by Kevin Christy

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original hardcover edition as follows:

Tompkins, Dave.
How to wreck a nice beach :
the vocoder from World War II to hip-hop :
the machine speaks / Dave Tompkins.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-61219-093-8
1. Electronic musicHistory and criticism. 2. Vocoder. I. Title.
ML1380.T66 2010
621.38224 dc22

v3.1

Great care was taken in the preparation of this book to secure the right to reproduce all of the images used from the photographer, artist or publisher. In a few cases, however, we simply could not locate the right person or company from who to seek permission. In those cases, we have done our best to provide proper attribution to the original artist or photographer (where known) and only used what we believe is necessary to complete this project.

IN MEMORY OF
Bo Toad Lasers Tompkins

THE KORG VC-10 VOCODER came with its own ensemble switch and accent bender. It was used by the author for How to Wreck a Nice Beach, as well as anyone who wanted a leaf blower to sing the chorus.

IN ONE WORD, MILITARISM WAS FUNK.

H.G. WELLS

The SIGSALY Guam Terminal, codename NEPTUNE, with vocoder walls and turntables (left), photographed in 1945. Logistics concerning the atomic bomb missions and plans for the invasion of Japan were discussed over this secret radiotelephone link. (Courtesy National Archives/ NSAz/ Mahlon Doyle)/