He’s the Loudest Man, Just for the Yell of It

In retrospect, the trip to Sacramento was a waste of time and money.

Stan Lemkuil could have been interviewed simply by sticking his head out of the kitchen window and talking to Los Angeles.

Lemkuil is the World’s Loudest Man.

How loud is loud? Lemkuil tops out at 117 decibels, measured at a distance of 8 feet, 2 inches, and has his Guinness certificate to prove it. By comparison, to anyone but a teen-ager 110 decibels is considered the human ear’s “pain threshold.”

No Doubt About It

There is a louder person , a prepubescent English girl who’s registered 120 decibels. Females are by nature louder than males. (Was there ever any doubt?) As the Guinness people put it: “Males bellow; females screech.” There’s a difference. Be that as it may, Stan Lemkuil is LOUD. How loud is loud?

Half an hour into the interview on the modest little Lemkuil homestead in Sacramento, Lemkuil casually let loose his version of a fire siren. He does things like that.

The tape recorder--a modest little Panasonic--packed it in then and there. Played back, the tape to that point sounds like an avalanche precipitated by a flock of starving sparrows. Subsequent to the “siren,” the Panasonic literally vibrates in the hand, hisses some, tweets and finally says, “To heck with it.”

What was said and observed that first half-hour is lost to posterity. A pity, too, because Lemkuil’s visitor was just beginning to get the hang of the man. Sort of. Actually, capturing the Lemkuil essence is like trying to catch a Santa Ana in a sieve.

He is a man of many parts--most of them jumbling up his living room, though many spill over into the bedroom and kitchen and out into the front yard.

In the front yard are remnants of what was once a collection of 40 cars, including a full series of Edsels. A neighbor complained. Only seven or eight cars remain--it’s hard to tell where one stops and another picks up. The ’59 Ford called Super Toad seems to segue into a green-and-white Edsel with the nose of an F-86 Sabre Jet and rear windows fashioned from old TV screens.

Lemkuil’s living room is illumined by a light fashioned from a dud bomb, a wastebasket, cake pan, ice bucket, fan, bug light, odds and ends. Mostly odds. It flashes red and blue and coughs up a sound like sporadic artillery fire on the other side of the Marne.

Further light is shed by an upside-down plexiglass coffee table nailed to the ceiling, hard by a propeller hanging from the nose of a Studebaker adorned with a French horn festooned with Christmas tinsel. There are “clouds,” skis and an ejection seat up there too.

What is illumined is virtually impossible to describe with any degree of precision--like Lemkuil himself.

One tries. Lemkuil is a collector, an artist, a ventriloquist, a sculptor, a comedian, a mechanic, a fire marshal, a cartoonist . . .

He can be very loud when he chooses to. He can speak in 100 voices, in as many accents, in an “infinity” of sounds. Elsewhere, the word unique is hackneyed; here it is exiguous.

“It’s got to be hard to do a story on someone who does sounds,” Lemkuil says into a back-up tape recorder. “Writing just ‘pop, click and boing’ won’t quite cut it, do you think?”

No.

How does one adequately describe a voice that haphazardly, whimsically speeds up to the point where an audio tape sounds like a congeries of disputatious canaries opening a new branch?

Or an angry mosquito so real one searches for a place to slap?

Or Harry James’ trumpet playing “The Flight of the Bumble Bee”?

Or the Gettysburg Address recited backwards?

Or a sneezing dinosaur?

One thing at a time.

Peering around from behind a living-room robot with a hair-dryer head and L’eggs eggs for eyes, Lemkuil focuses his attention for a short spell on loudness.

He is a bit put out at the arbitrary nature of the Guinness Book of World Records, suspecting a bias in favor of the British.

Lemkuil was listed once, in 1982, at 117 decibels, along with schoolgirl Joanne Brown, then schoolgirl Susan Birmingham, both of whom hit 120.

Then, unaccountably, he was replaced by a British sergeant who did “only” 114 decibels.

Now no male is listed at all.

(Contacted in New York, David Boehm, Guinness’ American editor, set a world record of his own--for fudging. If Guinness lists the world’s tallest man and woman, Boehm was asked, why not the world’s loudest woman and man. There was no adequate explanation.)

No Shouting Match

Lemkuil, however, refuses to get into a shouting match with Guinness, which is just as well for Guinness. “If it were a government agency or something official, I could follow it up,” he says, “but Guinness can do anything they want to. In America, we tend to think of the book as God. In Britain, they know Guinness is just a beer company.

“I set my record in ’79 at the Siren Championships in the Old Town of Sacramento: two government witnesses, all the documents. And I have the certificate from Guinness. It’s been a while, but I’ll take on any man, any time. No matter what I do I can beat 114 any time. I could do it snoring . . . “

It was in the Old Town, in fact, that Lemkuil’s “siren” was put to its most beneficial use. Lemkuil, who often sits in with the bands at the Old Town’s jazz festival (without benefit of mouthpiece, or even instrument), was sitting in a friend’s car when an alarm was set off at a local bank. “A patrolman commandeered the car and I did the siren. We really cleared the streets of cars, too! Turned out to be a false alarm.”

As for females being inherently louder, Lemkuil has no argument.

“Females have a smaller and therefore a tighter larynx,” he explains. “This makes for high frequency. The higher the frequency, the louder you are.

“A low frequency just penetrates. I can get a sound going in my head. I feel it in my skull, and often enough I can get your skull vibrating too.”

(Lemkuil does a sound, like Godzilla humming, that makes a guest’s eyeballs pop and seems to clog the nasal passages. Vainly but reflexively, the guest looks around for a stewardess with a peppermint . . . )

“Any prepubescent kid is louder than an adult,” he continues, a bit of news that will come as no surprise to any hollow-eyed parent. “It’s an evolutionary thing. Before adolescents of any species can take care of themselves, they have to have some way to keep the parents around if they’re in distress or danger or need food. The more strident the pitch, the more likely that parents at a distance will respond.” In other words, Survival of the Loudest.

Out in the front yards, swinging and swaying in the world’s weirdest suspended porch chair, Lemkuil, ever restless, breaks into a calliope that Barnum would have killed for.

Suddenly, behind the calliope, an ominous drip has developed--bloop, bleep, plop.

A nameless dread deep within a haunted house chuckles maniacally, then drools--in French. Seemingly in the distance, a predator bird zeroes in on a frightened frog.

“Often enough,” Lemkuil says, “people don’t want to hear what the real sound is. They have preconceptions. “I’m a voice-over specialist (with scores of credits) and I know what they want, so I supply it.

“A production studio comes to you needing a sound. They don’t want to go 300,000 miles somewhere to tape it live if you can do it better. Besides, space creatures are hard to come by.

“Even closer, the producer often doesn’t want the real thing. A radio station was looking for sea gull sounds and tried recording them. Well, they’re basically nasty-sounding birds if you really listen.

“Anyway, they admitted their station was middle-of-the-road, so I did them a middle-of-the-road sea gull. A nice, soothing sound, what somebody in Iowa would expect a gull to sound like.

“It’s kind of like Rich Little doing John Wayne. Now, when people see an old Wayne movie they’re disappointed. What they want is Rich Little doing John Wayne.”

Clearing His Throat

Lemkuil does Gabby Hayes fast, then slow, then does a Transylvanian just to clear his throat.

“Take this sound,” he says, doing a bird call that seems to make the sun itself cock its ear. “What do you think that is?”

A guest suggests a Tarzan movie. “Exactly,” says Lemkuil, “but curiously, it’s pure kookaburra, the Australian national bird. The Tarzan movies were supposed to be set in South America, but you’ve got East Indian characters, African elephants--I can do ‘em all. Including . . . “

This time the sun stops in its tracks as the Ape Man himself metaphorically swings out of the trees, yodeling his fool head off. “Nobody else can do that,” says Lemkuil, understandably smug. “They recorded it with overlapping soprano, alto and bass singers plus some sound effects. I can do it alone.” He can.

Jollies at the Zoo

Lemkuil, of course, who’s “35 plus tax,” still gets his jollies at the zoo. “I get the peacocks going, the lions, the bears,” he says. “They’re answering me from everywhere. An animal in captivity does not make a wild animal sound, so when they hear one, they’re going, “Hey! I gotta get outa here!”

And so it sounds at EPCOT Center’s Universe of Energy, courtesy of Stan Lemkuil. Casting about for sounds for its audioanimatronic dinosaurs, pterodactyls, tyrannosauri rex, the Disney people quite naturally lit upon Lemkuil, who obliged in spades.

“Due to their thin larynxes, the

great lizards probably just hissed, burbled, moomphed, bubbled and burped,” says Lemkuil, “but they presumably had sounds of fear, rage, hunger . . . “

Lemkuil is off again, making what has to be the most disgusting set of sounds ever to issue from a human mouth.

Back in the living room, Lemkuil does a German doctor specializing in heart operations for ducks.

A Mongolian conducts a dialogue with himself, or herself, as the case may be.

Something growls. Something else beeps in Morse code. A baby wakes up, cries, wails, throws a tantrum, croons itself back to sleep.

“I guess I developed my talent for sounds and voices out of necessity,” Lemkuil says.

When he was 3, a severe case of mumps left him deaf in one ear. “I hear monaurally,” he says. “I don’t know what stereo is. I would guess that sounds of animals or whatever are very complex. They’re probably a lot harder for a stereo-hearing person to imitate, because they’re coming in from two sources and coming out of only one.

“I had to listen harder than anyone else in school. They gave me ‘special treatment’ and for a while, the other kids made fun of me.

“I was a very lonely kid, and I started doing sounds to amuse myself. As it turned out, it made me friends. ‘How’d you do that ?’ they’d ask, or ‘Can you do this ?’

“Naturally, I worked harder and harder on it--like a lot of announcers, who are products of early speech defects.

“I was painfully shy, and when I had to stand up and recite the Gettysburg Address, I did it at practically the speed of light just to get it over with. The kids loved it. I was never shy again.

Something New

“Of course, I had to keep coming up with something new. I’d be Dracula for a month, then Tonto for a month. I kept working at it, and somehow I retained the resiliency of my larynx after adolescence.

“I still work at it, and it’s handy sometimes. Like I’m in a big department store and want to locate my girlfriend. I do a ‘BEEP!’--way beyond most human ranges--and she can hear me a block away, or three stories up . . . “

Lemkuil’s girlfriend of 15 years’ standing does not live with him. There’s no room. There may not even be any walls--in the seeming clutter of vacuum-cleaner parts, ceramic eagles, old radios, diving masks, juke boxes, uniforms, lunch boxes, model planes, tubas, trophies and thermoses, the walls, if there, are only memories.

Lemkuil is an unabashed and indiscriminate collector, tinkerer and sculptor, fitting theater intermission light to a juice pitcher to a film reel to a shotgun handle just for the sheer joy of it, and calling it a “space rifle.”

Nor is there any apparent madness to his method.

He simply lives the way he likes to--keeping his entire month’s expenses down to $250--and if others don’t understand, it’s their loss.

“Rich people have collectors collect stuff for them, artisans to make it, designers to plunk it down,” he says. “This is all mine--my designs, my set-up, my life.

“It comes down to playing with what you have and not worrying about convention.”

Not that Lemkuil, whose talents are Promethean if unfocused, would mind working a little more frequently.

Human Jukebox

He has been employed on dozens of TV shows, as the Human Jukebox at state fairs, on numerous commercials as the voice-over specialist he is. (A recent campaign to promote Reno held auditions recently for actors to do the sounds of a Model-A Ford, Laurel and Hardy, and Carol Channing. Lemkuil auditioned--and got all three jobs.)

Off-the-wall comedy, as done by friend Robin Williams and mentor Jonathan Winters, seems to be phasing out in what Lemkuil perceives to be an increasingly bland, if not downright sterile world.

He admits that if he lived in Hollywood he would be much better positioned to land more jobs. On the other hand, he proudly clings to his reputation as a “G-rated comedian” and wouldn’t have it any other way. Ironically, the state fairs he loves so much “say they can’t handle me. Why? Because I’m from California.”

Caught between a rock and a roll, he’d gladly settle for a steady job “doing voice-overs for animation studios, or whatever comes along.”

Just leave a message on his answering machine. He’ll get back to you. At 117 decibels, he’ll just stick his head out of the kitchen window . . .