In Pursuit of Silence (20 page)

“I’ve been doing this for twenty-five, twenty-six years,” Big Red went on. “I was living in Maryland and I drove by the local radio shop one Saturday and they had some demo vehicles out there. And I just thought, as loud as they were, how pretty the installation looked, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve had seven cars since then and every vehicle I’ve had has something in it.” He pointed at his girlfriend. “The Chevy she drives every day, you
wouldn’t know it had anything in it. It’s all hidden. Then you turn it on—it’s got something in it.”

“Oh yeah,” Big Red’s Lady said.

“But like I said, we are people in our mid-forties. We have people we compete with who are in their mid-fifties that do this.”

“Oh, there’s a huge range of people,” Big Red’s Lady nodded. “There are eighteen-year-olds to Papa’s—what’s Papa? Fifty-four, fifty-five? And we’ve seen people in their sixties.”

“All different kinds of backgrounds. We’ve got retired naval officers are in the sport.”

“There’s Lawyer Boy,” Big Red’s Lady added.

“We’ve got lawyers involved in the sport. I’m a roofing business involved in the sport. We’ve got county employees—the civil service involved in the sport. We’ve got the guy who works at Publix in a nine-to-five job saving his money.”

“We’re not getting the kind of good exposure we need to reverse these laws,” MP3 Pimp said.

Big Red’s Lady nodded. “Because the exposure the people do see is to do with the drug dealers. They don’t see that it’s John and his wife out on a Saturday afternoon with the windows rolled down and their stereo turned up, and they just happened to drive by a cop.”

Big Red flicked himself forward. “Or Drop Bottom who works sixty hours a week so he can keep his vehicle up and keep it running.”

Whatever else, I was loving the
Midsummer Night’s Dream
quality of the nicknames. I asked the table at large how early most participants got into the sport—silently wondering, as I did so, when the term “sport” had become applicable to men seated
behind the wheel of a stationary vehicle adjusting the dial on a car stereo.

“They’re usually kids that are right out of high school,” Big Red’s Lady began. “But no—actually—there’s Mighty Tyke. He’s four.”

“That’s right.” Big Red nodded. “We have a guy over in Iraq serving his country right now who’s a part of our Team dB Unit, and his son is four or five years old. He has a Power Wheels vehicle that’s got a bass system.” Big Red chuckled. “Mighty Tyke’s Power Wheel’s gone 136—which is louder than what you can hear from twenty-five feet away.”

“136 with a box and a battery,” Big Red’s Lady nodded. “It’s what—a Grave Digger?”

“Yeah—a Grave Digger Power Wheels with a box and a battery. They literally put Mighty Tyke’s Power Wheels on a mike to see how loud it was.”

The conversation about Mighty Tyke hitting 136 decibels in his Grave Digger made for a natural segue to the larger subject of the rising volume of car audio. Big Red explained that when he got truly involved in the sport a few years back, if you were breaking 130 “you were the man,” whereas, the previous night, someone on the forum had put up a video of a guy who hit 181.6.

“Everything keeps getting louder,” Big Red cheerfully marveled. I mumbled something incoherent about the wonder of ever-improving technological capabilities. But all three of my tablemates pointed out that there were specific reasons why the technology of car audio had spiked of late. The most important factor, they averred, was the Internet. Because of the way that parts and know-how ricochet back and forth between members
of forums like FloridaSPL, the speed of technological evolution has dramatically accelerated.

Big Red was not the only enthusiast to remind me repeatedly that the extreme environment of car-audio competition has pushed the horizons of possibility for everyone. Car audio has driven the audio industry as a whole, and car audio geared for stereo competition drives the evolution of car audio.

Explosive Sound and Video sits next to a hair salon, an ice-cream shop, and Tire Kingdom in a parking lot that was already grinding with heat by the time I arrived at ten thirty on Sunday morning. A pair of blue tents had been set up to shade an assortment of high-caliber sound-measuring equipment and laptops. Over the course of the next couple of hours, the participants’ vehicles rumbled into the lot along with spectators who clustered around the champion cars waiting for audio to be demoed and gazing hopefully at the dark-tinted windows to try and glimpse the special “something” each had hidden inside. The men, clutching giant plastic cups or dark bottles, seemed to fall generally into the category of short on neck and bald (save for a sneeze of facial hair) or stringy and towheaded. There were plenty of women as well, but with one or two exceptions, they were all girlfriends, wives, or the catchall “lady of.” Everywhere there were tattoos and T-shirts emblazoned with multiple skull or single crucifix motifs.

By noon, a critical mass of competition vehicles had arrived in the plaza. I wandered around and found MP3 Pimp about to
perform what is known as “hair trick.” Hair trick involves finding a long-haired woman who will lean her head into the window of a car demoing its audio. A young woman with very lengthy red hair was just bending over the passenger side of MP3 Pimp’s vehicle as I approached. He turned on the audio and her orange hair began flying up in the air, like a free-floating wildfire.

“I love it,” she squealed when he turned the car off. “That’s the best feeling in the world!”

“Why?” I asked.

“’Cause your whole head tingles and all your hair’s moving and you can see it all moving!”

“And you can finally justify having so much hair,” a spectator observed.

“I can finally justify having so much hair!” she concurred.

The dB Drag Race qualifications were at last getting under way. For the onlookers, this process consisted primarily of watching a huge bald man with a shredded auburn goatee, in a tank top that read
GORILLA HEAVYWEIGHT
, lumber over to cars and stick a sound meter on a hose through the windows of dozens of them one by one, as if he were hooking them up to an IV in preparation for a transfusion. Once Gorilla Heavyweight had positioned the tube, the window rolled back up from the inside, and at the conclusion of a countdown from the judge, who held his fingers above the decibel-monitoring laptop, the audio behind the dark glass switched on to strike a tone barely audible from outside the car.

After watching this for a time (qualifications were to continue
for the next four and a half hours), I glimpsed the man I suddenly knew to be Tommy, the King of Bass, McKinnie. He had just emerged from the garage of Explosive Sound and Video and was walking to a low, gleaming black-and-silver truck sitting under its own special canopy, with the words
HO PROBLEMS
stamped across the front windshield and
KING OF BASS
on both sides.

Even watching Tommy, the King of Bass, move from a distance, one knew oneself to be in the presence of a master of something. A handsome, mildly pumped-up man in his thirties, wearing a black Explosive Sound and Video T-shirt and a matching black baseball cap with the brim reversed, he had that hunter’s poise, that charged balance—of complete alertness and utter relaxation—the self-assured élan of a successful professional athlete who knows his body will perform exactly as it has to when it has to. Only in this case that body is prosthetic, the chassis of a low-slung 1995 Isuzu packed with enough audio equipment to kill by sound alone.

McKinnie has been competing for ten years and purports to be undefeated in all car-audio competitions. He has taken his truck everywhere across the United States and prevailed at the world finals four years in a row, from 2005 to 2008. In 2007, for the first time, the finals were hosted over the Internet, with three locations in the United States (Florida, Indiana, and California) going “face-to-face” live online with France, Greece, and, perplexingly, Norway, to see who had the Earth’s loudest vehicle. Answer: Tommy, the King of Bass. A lot of times, McKinnie told me, “they call the King of Bass ‘the Case’ because I have twenty-four of everything. Twenty-four midis. Twenty-four tweeters.
Twenty-four woofers, and twenty-four amplifiers.” His truck is known as the Loch Ness Monster, “because you always hear stories about it, but you never see it.” Nine-tenths of the year, the Loch Ness Monster remains deep within Tommy, the King of Bass’s, garage. He never drives it or brings it out, unless it’s going up on his trailer to a show. When I looked inside, it was like looking into Ali Baba’s cave—a black vortex gleaming with countless silver cones, odd lustrous disks, gorgon’s hair of wires, and plates of dark metal.

The truck can hit in the 160s constantly for a minute straight. But there is no judging category that technically goes that high, so he runs in the 150 to 159 class, “What we call ‘Balls to the Wall,’” McKinnie said with a nod. “You know, ‘Run what you brung and I hope you brung enough.’” A pretty woman in a bright-white T-shirt and mirrored sunglasses who looked like a somewhat less pampered version of Scarlett Johansson, and who proved to be McKinnie’s girlfriend, appeared with a high black velvet crown studded with a rainbow of rhinestones. She handed it to McKinnie, who placed it casually on the hood of the truck.

“I’d say my entry into the sport began when I was in junior high before I got my first car,” McKinnie remarked. “Guys that considered they were loud in the neighborhood—or considered they were loud in the streets—every time they would drive by, I would run to the door and my parents would think I was crazy. I said, ‘One day that’s going to be me, riding around shaking everybody’s houses and restaurants.’ I just always wanted a loud stereo.” He added that once he had his first car with his first audio system, he drove it loud enough that he was barred from
every restaurant in town on account of shattering their glass—Burger King, McDonald’s, Taco Bell. Even the car wash (“which I’d never actually used, because my truck was always too low”) banned him because he drove by one time and broke its window with the power of his sound.

McKinnie’s story reinforced what I’d heard from MP3 Pimp and Big Red the night before, and what I would hear from a dozen competitors—longtime and first-time alike—over the course of that afternoon. Everyone had craved a loud stereo more than anything in the world basically ever since they could remember wanting anything. Some of them had purchased their first car stereos before they could drive, let alone own a car. The crowd was not especially THUGish. It was, on many levels, diverse—amazingly so, racially—peppered with both more and less aggressive sorts, mostly in their twenties and thirties (with a handful of exceptions either side of the age divide) and making more or less money (though less was certainly the rule).

As Tommy turned away to defend the Loch Ness Monster from a mob of admirers,
Casey Sullivan
, the administrator of FloridaSPL, a genial, gangly guy who looks all of sixteen, and his partner
Buzz Thompson
, who resembles a somewhat shorter, no less voluble, but considerably more coherent version of the Dennis Hopper photographer character in
Apocalypse Now
, introduced themselves, and told me their version of the history that Big Red and MP3 Pimp had begun feeding me the night before.

They explained that car-audio competitions began in the early 1980s with extemporized “boom-offs,” along with more esoteric
contests such as “car-alarm meets”—in which challengers matched up to determine who had the biggest, loudest alarm gadgetry in their vehicles.

Over the next decade, two things happened. First, a new generation of speaker and amplifier technology powerful enough to survive multiple high-volume sessions—and loud enough to excite audiences in ways that sound quality alone never quite mustered—began to appear on the scene. Often the men behind the new subwoofers were home-garage tinkerers who never wrote down their secrets and who made their mark by, as Thompson put it, “getting dirty, spending money, and taking time.” Eventually, if they were lucky, they got recruited by major manufacturers, who helped make a handful of American companies the elite standard of the car-audio scene. Second, sometime in the 1990s, a new strain of powerful subwoofers from China began thumping into the markets. Because they were so strong—and so cheap relative to high-quality equipment—competitions began to torque in the direction of loudness alone. Availability and affordability of extreme subwoofer technology set the stage for the arrival of dB Drag Races.