Inner Sleeve: Dave Tompkins

Gettovetts – Missionaries Moving (Island 1988)
Design by Rammellzee
Photograph by George Dubose

“What the hell, I give you my word.” The affidavit of Neil Young’s fiddle player Rusty Kershaw, signing off on the inner sleevenotes of On The Beach. Rusty had just explained how he turned into a python and swallowed the carpet and the mics “and such” – in cursive. That alone made On The Beach a good candidate for a favourite record cover. Kershaw must’ve ulp’d for joy when he first saw it, what with that 1957 Cadillac fin poking out the sand like Ape City was around the corner. I know I did. Then I saw the dirty stretch of tube sock photographed on the cover of Mic Bay B’s Washed Up. The only thing lonelier than Neil Young at ebb tide with a can of Coors (“The shoe ain’t happy”) is Mic Bay B’s beached tube sock.

Then there were other sleeves. Bottlenosed dolphins chatting, Germans bowling, Rosicrucians Rosicruciating, Burgess Meredith reading about the last house on Mars, naked folks acting naked, a seahorse playing a Keytar, a pelvic bone in Mickey Mouse ears, the Camp Wisdom Carwash of Euless, Texas, Marvin Whoremonger, a Mob Style album I can only afford on cassette. Which was all fine and bananas. But when faced with too many choices, one defaults to old haunts: the guy wearing a collection of bee-stung Geordi La Forge sunglasses on his forehead (none of which has lenses), that’s Rammellzee – terminal beachcomber, once rescued kids from the riptide in Far Rockaway, Queens. The trainwreck of thorny math rockets above him reads “Gettovetts”. To his right is Shock Dell, “drag stripper with an echo”. To his left is Delta II, “safe cracker”. Above your head is a bubble: what in the glue-sniff pyjamas is going on here?

Released on Island in 1988, the album Missionaries Moving might have sold enough copies to replace the wicker chair that Rammel tore up when designing the cover. This fresco of holes appears to be stadium brights, thanks to the wattage of Big Daddy Kane’s photographer George Dubose.

Back in high school, I showed it to some friends (“Someone’s grandma lost their seat!”) and played them “Lecture”, the album’s eight minute closer. While we decided who was going to steal beer that night, Rammel talked over us about laser shooters in the catacombs. “An instrument was made around the 14th, 15th century. Very mechanised, most people didn’t know it. It was in the catacombs.

It was used as a hypmanotic [sic] vehicle for sound. We know it today to be the laser shooter for the Voice. In those days it was called The Vocoder. Now we call it the Tower of Panzerism. If you can find this in your logic banks, press Code 2 and then do what it says. Education is subliminal… the Children of the Grave went back to the yards. The integers are running out and the train is coming faster.”

It was all in there. Black Sabbath, DONDI, St Leibowitz, Rommel’s tanks, Rommel’s laryngophone – please stop. My friends left the room. “Wait fellas, don’t you wanna hear “Go Down! Now Take Your Balls?”.” “The integer is a nation in itself,” Rammel would later say. “Fear is math.”

“I’m pretty sure nobody heard “Lecture”,” smiled Bill Laswell, a few years ago when I was in his apartment coveting his framed Basquiat Beat Bop sleeve (for Rammellzee Vs K-Rob’s 12"). As Gettovetts’ producer, Laswell had been looking for the perfect loop for the guy who called himself “The #1 Stain On The Train”. Then he found a recording of the Tokyo bullet express – a sure bet. So the podium became a platform and there’s Rammel, arriving, how do you say, too freaking early, holding a purple suitcase full of watches he designed (he attended Fashion Institute of Technology, briefly), none of which could tell time from a hole in a worm – each has an expended 9mm slug burrowing into its face. (“Their crystals hold information from a crushed galaxy,” he’d told me). The beat wheezes into the station and then chugs off and vanishes into a blurring horn, three stops away. An aria wanders the tracks looking for her head, only to find a symphony that’s been out in the sun too long.

That’s “Lecture”. Not quite a first date song, too medieval for the Golden Age of Rap, and certainly in the ‘At Risk’ category for Island Records. Not that a line like “sneeze with me” isn’t catchy as a word virus. And how about that Double Dutch helix: “This twine turns the rope of your mind like DNA codes.”

“Rammel did that in one take without anything written down,” says Laswell. “It’s powerful if you hear it. It’s coming from the other side. I have no idea what he’s saying and I’m quite sure he doesn’t either. But that’s irrelevant. It’s been said. And the monks are in there. That’s important.”

Maybe the order should’ve been steal beer first, then listen to “Lecture”. Maybe my friends would’ve cottoned on to it if they knew Rammellzee was wearing pedestrian traffic mirrors on his pants. He borrowed them from the Holland Tunnel crosswalk near his old loft, next to Grabler Pipe Fitters. Or Garbled Pipe Fitters, since words have a mind of their, well, you know. We’re all in the business of voice box resection over here and transposition is but a slip of the razor under tongue. What’s the word, I give you hell. The only thing coherent is the epoxy that held this moment together. And that too would lose its grip.