How to Wreck a Nice Beach / Paperback Edition (SOLD OUT)

HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH
THE VOCODER FROM WORLD WAR II TO HIP-HOP

DAVE TOMPKINS
Stop Smiling Books, Chicago
Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn
Paperback Edition

**FULL COLOR + 16 PAGES OF NEW CONTENT**

The history of the vocoder: How the Pentagon’s speech scrambling weapon transformed into the robot voice of pop music 

How to Wreck a Nice Beach includes interviews with:
Afrika Bambaataa, Ray Bradbury, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton, Laurie Anderson, T-Pain, Teddy Riley, DJ Quik, ELO, Rammellzee, Arthur Baker, Michael Jonzun, Midnight Star, Lester Troutman of Zapp, Holger Czukay of Can, Donnie Wahlberg, Egyptian Lover, Fab Five Freddy, Forrest J. Ackerman, Man Parrish, Cybotron and Wendy Carlos, composer of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.


Selected by The Village Voice as one of the 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Chosen by Amazon as the ENTERTAINMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 

“It's 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: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. ... [Tompkin's] biggest and most perilous adventure in How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the plunge deep into the throbbing radioactive heart of his own prose—a hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy Collins.”
— New York Magazine