PLUG WONDER WHY

(Editor’s Note: This post is from Dave Tompkins one of the most bugged, brilliant guys I know, plus the nicest dude you’ll ever meet in the music biz. He didn’t have a conventional post (as if the words “conventional” and “Dave Tompkins” ever really went together) but it’s nice to stir stuff up now and then. –O.W.)

Plug Wonder Why

Everybody and their grandmother’s three-legged robot hamster (1) have been sending me these links—thanks, I’m trying to get unapprehended by the Vocoder commissar. In words of dude who wrote Sennheiser Coder manual in ’78 (included in Herbie Hancock press kit), “get your creatures together.”

Though they are often confused for one another, the same way the burping bog bank in Dark Crystal could be mistaken for a legitimate Florida real estate prospect, the same way Katherine Hepburn’s Golden Toadcoder could be Larry Graham…

This

Is not the same as

That

.The idea to use THIS was inspired by a mail-order book club flub and if I tell you any more I’ll have to give you a “vocal resection” –like they did Rock Hudson in Seconds (there’s a Graham Central Station joke in there, just past the fat-faced credits. Does that mean your voice will have to be reseated—in the sinusoidal bleeds? “Those bleeds?”—Cannonball Run—long ogle Jack Elam’s eyeballs! Heil (2), hail the size of Peter Lorre’s eyeballs! What if Peter Lorre played piano like Stevie in “Hands Of Orlac?”  What if Stevie rocked Orlac’s robot gloves? What if Orlac’s robot gloves could do something, like, stop them goobers from casting Will Smith in I Am Legend? )

THAT was from the same episode where Cookie Monster steals a train and drives it through the set of Beat The Clock. (Not the episode where Cookie Monster eats a time machine).

To quote my main Toad, Toad: “We can open the box, Frog.”

To bite Simone Signoret in Army of Shadows: “We need new crystals. The wavelengths have changed.”

To the bridge: “Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghghhrrrmrmrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!” (Vocoder inventor Homer Dudley, freaking the monk, Harvard, 1936)

To my mom:  “You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.” (Homer Simpson)

To what end: “Dave, that program is on, the one with the universe about the planets crashing into each other and plants living underground and methane gas and fossil bass and all that stuff you wanted for your book right?” (Mom)

To properly toast Hua Hsu’s birthday, play your copy of Grandmixer Delancey St’s “Megamix 2 (Why is it Fresh?)” and check out how he brings Sulu to the stage. (nice squeaky spit shield wipedown)

That shit is so why.

(1) My mom had a 3 legged hamster. His foot got caught in the mesh, rotted and fell off.  At night it’d get out the cage and she could hear it clumping around. As if hamsters clump!

(2) Heil is a company that makes Talk Boxes

—

Dave Tompkins