Photos below by Gary Land from Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession

A version of the following appears as the introduction to Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession by Joe Mansfield, due out December 3. (A deluxe version is out this Friday, November 29, as part of Record Store Day.) Beat Box features 214 photos of Mansfield's own extensive drum machine collection, as well as historical info and interviews. 

Revenge of the Nerds isn’t the most glamorous way to be remembered if you’re a drum machine. But there you were, a Roland CR-5000, strapped to a Tri-Lam in a yellow rain suit and galoshes. He’s all Devo and fishsticks. You’re but a box with buttons. And he was faking it with cheap sounds that weren’t even yours, faking it next to a choir in white robes making fake handclaps. (Also not yours.) We were witnessing one of the great drum machine hoaxes of all time and didn’t even know it—nor really cared. The sound most remembered from the film was not a CompuRhythm rim shot programmed in a lab in Tokyo. It was a laugh, a hyperventilated bray from a kid named Skolnik. 

When Revenge of the Nerds came out in 1984, Joe Mansfield owned zero drum machines and approximately one Pac-Man watch. An agglomerator of vintage beat boxes living in Boston, he now has 150. I assumed him to be some crazy drum machine hoarder, projecting a friend’s memory/my dream concerning a closet stuffed with abandoned 808s in a North Miami studio. I pictured Mansfield’s kitchen table cluttered with beat boxes. Drum machines on the couch and stacked in the hallway. A pile of dirty drum machines in the sink. Drum machines on the washing machine. A few in the bathroom, by the commode. A wooden bowl containing pieces of sound, captured on chips. Instants of hi-hat and tom, mashed into the carpet. All wishful thinking, you might say, ramming your knee into a Rhythm King in the hallway. There is no 808 cowbell programmed into Joe Mansfield’s front door. As it turns out, he scans as a fairly regular guy who just happens to own enough drum machines to choke a house. He keeps them in temperature-controlled mini storage like any other sane person.

A word on our terms: We like saying drum machine. We like the way it looks, its industrial sensibility. A word stuck in its ways, echoheaded with pre-set notions of a past craze. Don’t mind the Watusi button. There will be modifcations. If you need to get freak exotic, a drum machine can be a drum computer. Rhythm machines are not drum machines, but Leon Theremin’s Rhythmicon, developed in the early 1930s under suboptimal, if not Siberian conditions, has earned the right to be called a drum machine. The 303 is more of an acid squelch machine. An MPC sampler is used to “make beats” but isn’t narrow-minded enough to qualify as a drum machine. 

In 1991, Joe Mansfield used a sampler and drum machine to produce Ed OG’s “I Got to Have It”, a rap classic. In 2001, he co-founded Traffic Entertainment, a label that specializes in reissuing rap classics, some in luxury formats. In the Traffic offices, you’ll find yellow vinyl wallets covered with Ol’ Dirty Bastard faces. Fat Boys pizza boxes and GZA chess sets. A velvet Rolex shrine for a purple cassette containing songs about glaciers, chambers, and ice cream. This paragraph was written with an Ice Cube Lethal Injection promotional hypodermic ballpoint pen. Regurgitate this information into your Alkaholks promotional barf bag. 

At the core of this objectification of hip-hop quietly sits the drum machine. I arrived at Traffic to find 15 of Joe’s clunkers displayed across two examination tables, in all shapes and sizes. I first greeted my old friends, the ones with whom I’d spent most of my adolescence, yet refuse to outgrow. The 808. The DMX. The Linn. 

Roland TR-808

The Roland TR-808 is the only drum machine to have its own Swedish beanbag. It produces the cleanest sound to the dirtiest effect, enjoying its baller status and mythology due to a buddy-system relationship with drop. (Bass is often believed to be some sort of spirit animal of the rear end.) A born failure in Japan, the 808 now receives the most lip service and trunk space (see “blappin’”), gets all the girls (and dudes), comes with its own light show (in house!), and will be starring in its own movie next year. In the meantime, you can order an 808 fridge magnet from Australia.

Oberheim DMX

The DMX has yet to slap my fridge, but I did recently hear it when Kate Hudson did the Roger Rabbit to “Push It” during a shitty in-flight romantic comedy. It’s impossible to imagine that song without the DMX shaker that I always took for a scrub-brush. The DMX has the best handclaps. And Run-DMC. But the Linn has Prince. The Linn is the drum machine that never wanted to sound like a drum machine. Those are real hopefully still live drummers captured in there.

The Casio-VL Tone has the dubious honor of teaching me to play the medieval funeral march from The Shining. (Pure accident—my heart was set on  Rush’s “Witch Hun”.) I attempted this with the Waltz pre-set, thinking it’d go well with “Midnight, the Stars and You”, the Al Blowly crooner heard in the film’s ballroom scene. Caretaker to Casio: You’re not a drum machine’s drum machine, even if we thought the Cha Cha button would emit the woodsy creep whisper from Friday the 13th. The Casio only made the list because Mansfield received one for Christmas in 1980 and reportedly drove his mother crazy.

Though it’s hard to take the Casio seriously, others from Mansfield’s collection would draw suspicion if left alone in public transportation hubs. Mike Banks of Detroit’s Underground Resistance remembers his Roland 909 being dismantled by airport customs in Berlin. The DMX was once seized at JFK for impersonating a federal agent. The Schober Dynabeat could’ve been ordered from the STASI OfficeMax, while the Roland CR-8000 emits more of an analogue ER vibe. Some drum machines look austere in mid-century cabinetry. Others come in hardshell language lab cases, speckled gray. Does the Rhythm Jester remember its previous life as an answering machine?

Roland CompuRhythm CR-8000

The Maestro Rhythm’n Sound is named Ralph. The Olson X-100 has a button marked for SURFIN. The Wurlitzer Swingin’ Rhythm has one labeled TEEN. After Mansfield pressed it, TEEN shot across the room. When drum machines get old, they start losing buttons. Their memories erode, at least those programmed with memories. Yet Mansfield’s 808 still has the Strafe beat he programmed upon pulling it out of the box in 1985. First things first: Make “Set It Off”.  

The Vox Percussion King could be mistaken for a guitar amp, as if musicians would be more amenable to the idea of a drum machine if it didn’t look like a drum machine. Those front desk buzzers are really foot pedals. What Grandmaster Flash did to the Vox on “Flash to the Beat”—those pig-grunt conniptions—was not part of the original sales floor demonstration. During the finale, the Percussion King seems to run amok, throwing hissy fits of loose change. Many of these devices didn’t actually become drum machines until people started making a fool out of the user’s manual and its square intentions. Play along with your accordion and guitar! A drum machine could be vanquished to a junk shop until discovered to invent an entire genre. Loud but sensitive, they aren’t really social creatures by design, often getting stuck with some late-night hermit, emptying his guts into his gear. 

Vox Percussion King

In 1984, drum machines were often heard but rarely seen. Back then there was no object to place with the sound, other than the records themselves. So we took measures. When T La Rock namedropped the Drumulator in a song, it seemed like the invention of a word-happy brain. A figment of speech. (A friend recently found a Drumulator at flea market: “It was mostly dead but still managed a whispy snare through the buggy, short-circuited sound of abandoned efforts toward grounding.”) On MCA and Burzootie’s stone age Def Jam single “Drum Machine”, Adam Yauch rapped about the DMX and using your own personal memory chips. Confusion ensued. Personal chips? Was Burzootie the drum machine? I called up Radio Shack asking if they had any Burzooties in stock. Then I listened to the song again. Did Yauch really just say that we’re supposed to play drum machines until the world is gone? Sounds like a commitment! 

On Schoolly D’s “PSK (What Does It Mean?)”, the 909 thundered that the world was long out of here, leaving us in reverb and space dust. Schoolly also helpfully drew up a yellow toadstool spacecraft taking off after it, launching into a galaxy of boozy stars and popping brain cells. The ship, the way out, seemed to be melting.    

Roland TR-909

The first 909 I saw wasn’t real, but a drawing, rendered on the cover of the Just-Ice album Back to the Old School. (Best to acknowledge Darryl Davis, a pioneer drum machine illustrator/truck driver from California who did most of Dr. Dre’s early singles in the 1980s.) Just-Ice’s producer, Mantronik, is pictured on the cover carrying a 909. Where is he going with that thing? Nuts? Absolutely. He once told me he had to return one to Sam Ash—still smoking, I’d like to think. Brings to mind what someone (Fresh Gordon?) told me long ago. Somebody was always blowing up the drum machine back then. We didn’t always know what we were doing.   

But we were transported. Back then, the fairly innocuous notion of commuting a drum machine over to your buddy’s seemed like an act of outer space. It never occurred to me that these things ever got out of the house. I remember being floored when Afrika Islam told me he once schlepped an 808 across the Bronx to Bambaataa’s place. In broad daylight. As if people walked around New York lugging drum machines under their arm, like a 12 pack of beer. (Admittedly, I carried Mansfield’s 808 across the Traffic office—not the same effect.) The obvious solution would be the Tensai Rhythm Machine, the first boombox equipped with secret drum programming capabilities and a tape player to prove it all.  

The Just-Ice album cover also featured a boombox (named “Buster”) and a gnome named after the Oberheim DMX. As a kid, I had a thing for the DMX sound. I didn’t know what made it, only that some guy from Queens with my first name used the DMX for his last, and that he was cool with Run-DMC. During a middle school assembly, principal Alice “Boing Boom” Litwinchuk made us write our desired nicknames on a piece of paper and circulated it throughout the bleachers. I chose Davy DMX. Kids laughed. I was reminded of Charlie Brown, after Lucy and Violet tricked him into confiding his secret handle. I always wanted to be named Flash. Next panel: two girls rolling on the ground in dresses and scuffy shoes, jeering under boldfaced balloons. FLASH? HA-HA. Did Joseph Saddler get taunted by a nickel psychiatrist when he rewired himself as Grandmaster Flash and wore a purple leather jacket with lightning bolts? Seeing that Davy DMX was taken, I named myself after the local tree-removal service that pulled up in the front yard with a storm trash-eating compactor. 

The name did not catch, but the DMX sounds did. I heard them through the pillow while tapping out the beat to “Sucker MC’s” on the mattress, putting delay on a winter school morning in 1984. Being half conscious helped put more distance between my face and the beat, an echo programmed by a remote bloodless hand. Not of my own and in no hurry to wake. There was posturepedic boom in the space-coil continuum. 808 springs eternal! Now you can order a Swedish 808 pillow which, in a down stroke of free mind/ass follow marketing genius, can also serve as a cushion. So you can wake up with an 808 interface on your cheek and reprogram yourself to sound like every respectable rap song in the southern United States. Stay dirty, drum machines in the sink. Five cents please.