The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  ***

  It looked like those UN recordings might work out all right too. They were being saved in the editing suite at CBS. While there was political pressure to include everyone who had contributed, there was nothing in the small print about including all of each message. And the heavily pruned-down mix does include some lovely stuff. Bernadette Lefort quotes from Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’; Anders Thunboig of Sweden quotes the 1945 poem ‘Visit to the Observatory’ by Harry Martinson; speaking Persian, Bahram Moghtaderi sent a greeting from the people and government of Iran; there are examples of German, Indonesian, Efik and Flemish; Syed Azmat Hassan of Pakistan speaks in Punjabi directly and disarmingly to some imagined ‘friends’ in space;4 Samuel Ramsey Nicol of Sierra Leone wishes the cosmos good luck; and the US’s own James F. Leonard extended his ‘greetings and friendly wishes to all who may encounter this Voyager and receive this message’. Finally the Australian member, Ralph Harry, recorded his message in Esperanto.5

  Then, in the studio, came Tim’s masterstroke: to mix the cut-back UN greetings with whale song. They had all agreed with Ann – it was a lovely idea to not only include human greetings, but also include some greetings or sounds from a species that shared our planet. So in the mix, behind the rather formal voices of our UN delegates, come the joyful sounds of some whales. We can have no idea what they’re saying, but it is pretty clear they’re having more fun saying it than the UN Outer Space Committee.

  When writing about his reaction on first hearing Kurt Waldheim’s unexpectedly concise message to the cosmos, Carl used words like ‘sensitive’, ‘graceful’, ‘appropriate’. It had to go in as far as he was concerned. But now that a greeting from the head of the UN was a shoo-in, it suddenly seemed not only right but necessary that they should also give the President of the United States the chance to contribute. Uh-oh.

  With the dread of what energy and time-sapping bureaucratic cogs the White House might sling in his path, Carl put in a call to Dr Frank Press, President Carter’s science adviser. He also contacted the top NASA administrator. NASA was pro: anything that brought positive attention on the project from the American government was fine by them.

  There was another wait until, a few days later, they had word. President Carter did want to contribute, but instead of recording a message, there would be an official White House statement that could be photographed and encoded into the fabric of the record along with the rest of the images.

  ‘Carter was told pretty much what the other statements were like and who made them and that Waldheim’s statement was there,’ Frank says. ‘And he decided he would make a statement … but not speak it. And the reason was he thought that his strong Southern American accent would be an embarrassment to the Earth creatures. So he didn’t want his voice on the record … It’s a nice voice, but he’s got a strong accent. He spoke like a farmer and he thought this was going to be an embarrassment to the earthlings.’ Sagan helped President Carter prepare his statement.

  ‘Carl had a big input – and that has not been revealed almost anywhere, so far as I know,’ says Frank. ‘Carter’s statement was a mix of thoughts from Carter, made into nice rhetoric by Carl.’

  The message, officially dated 16 June 1977, is slightly wordier than the UN chief’s. It gives a little introduction to the civilisation that built the Voyagers, summarising America as a community of several hundred million human beings, within a global population of, at the time, four billion. And the meat of the message, like Kurt’s, is really rather good, the highlight being this section: ‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live in yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilisations.’

  The White House, like the UN before it, would eventually put out a press release, telling reporters what the President had done and what he had said, and the overwhelming response was positive.

  Cool. That wasn’t so bad, was it? No indeed. Alas, there was more…

  The Golden Record team were dotting Is and crossing Ts. But now the NASA machine was becoming increasingly hands-on and, according to Carl writing in Murmurs, since securing the President’s message, there was ‘concern’ from NASA officials that the supporting tiers of government should also be represented in the record. As every good American schoolchild knows, Congress and the President share power, so shouldn’t they both be on the record?

  There was obviously not the time or space on the record for every member of the US government circa 1977 to say ‘hello’, but NASA wanted somehow to memorialise the existence of senators and representatives, particularly those members of committees who held sway over NASA activities and, as part of that, had a hand in the Voyager project itself. The result of this wish? Four photographs of typed lists of names. Names of members of the senate, names of members of the House of Representatives, and more specifically members of committees and subcommittees involved. So if a bespectacled alien researcher one billion years hence is wondering whether Max Baucus served on the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on HUD-independent agencies, all it need do is pop the Golden Record onto some kind of playing device, set it to revolve at roughly 16rpm, get to the section encoded with pictures, download and decode those images using some kind of hardware that has the ability to transform sound to image, and there you have it. Four pages of names, among which – sandwiched between Bob Traxler and Louis Stokes – it will find the name of Max Baucus, and that will confirm that he did indeed serve on the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on HUD-independent agencies.

  This insistence on including a typed list of politicians came late in the day. The photographs, so carefully and lovingly selected by Frank, Jon and the rest of the image team, had by now been converted into audio format. The tape was ready to go to the record team in New York ahead of final cutting and pressing. Good old Valentin Boriakoff – our lovely sandwich-biter from image #82, who had already helped resolve many a knotty problem and was, by all accounts, a very positive ‘how can we make this work’ kind of guy – was about to save the day again. Val met Carl at the NASA HQ in Washington. Carl handed over the President’s message, and the list of members of Congress. Val went to an ordinary suburban commercial developers and had the sheets turned into 35mm slides. The White House was planning to release news of President Carter’s message to the press and they did not want any leaks. So while Val didn’t have a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, he did have to be present for every stage of the developing process so no one could sneak off any copies. Once he had the slides, he flew with them to Denver.

  Again, Frank writes of how the team at Colorado Video would bend over backwards to help. At short notice, they accommodated this last-minute frantic dash to convert the presidential message, and the names of both House and Senate members of space-related committees. What wasn’t recorded in Murmurs was that poor Wyndham was by now on vacation, celebrating his 28th birthday: ‘I received a phone call at home, claiming to be from the White House, apologising for interrupting my time off, but requesting my urgent return to Colorado Video to reassemble the entire set-up and drive back to Honeywell to borrow the recorder again.’

  At the same time another member of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Centre at Cornell, an engineer named Dan Mittler, spent several ‘days of inconvenience’ shuttling between Boulder, Ithaca and NYC as they attempted to get this thing sorted. Once the bonus images were converted, the team asked Mittler to fly with the tape and the Honeywell recorder to CBS New York. As recounted in Murmurs, they couldn’t risk putting the Honeywell in the hold, only for it to get lost in transit – there was no time. The airline had no option for allowing larger pieces of baggage in with the passengers, so they simply booked two seats, one for Dan Mittler and one for ‘Mr Equipment’. And as Mr Equipment could truthfully be described as being under 10 years old, he was able to t
ravel at half fare.

  Judd says: ‘It didn’t mean too much to us at the time, few of us even knew who Carl Sagan was. Yes, ultimately it gave us a sense of pride and accomplishment. However, the pushiness of some of the people involved and little thanks given for a pro bono task, didn’t leave us with an overly warm feeling. If we had known that it all had to be done in something like 12 weeks with almost no budget, we might have been more understanding and appreciative. Certainly dragging Wyndham back for a second go at it was not appreciated.’

  The whole Pioneer vulva debacle still attracts a lot of debate, and yet in lots of ways this part of the Voyager story seems to me much more ridiculous. I don’t mean to pour scorn on the creators of the record, the NASA officials who made it all happen, the structure of US democracy, nor this last-minute scramble to get it done. The road is paved with logical intentions, and each decision, when placed within its context, is understandable. But I just mean: look! Examine the practical upshot of this decision to include those four pages of names. Humankind had this unique chance to send anything – anything – of our world to the cosmos, and yet we chose to fill up part of the records’ finite space (albeit a tiny part) with a printed list of utterly meaningless names – meaningless to an alien audience, at least. It should serve as yet another cautionary reminder of just how bad the Golden Record could have turned out had Carl and the rest of the team not managed to operate without input from outside agency, without letting politics muddy the water too much.

  That said, as with every single atom of the Golden Records, the fact that converted images of a few pieces of paper did make it aboard our two celestial chariots is as illustrative to the Voyager record as the missing vulva is to the Pioneer plaque. We can scrub up, put on our best suits and flash our white teeth to the celestial camera, but we can’t completely disguise our foibles, insecurities and idiocies.

  ***

  At CBS it was time to carry out pre-flight checks ahead of final mixing and mastering. They were polishing up the sound essay with kisses and sped-up EEG readings, they were putting UN delegates to whale song, they were mixing the Cornell greetings, they were wrestling with multiple formats – from domestic reels and studio masters to commercial vinyl discs. And at last, by now a little late, the picture sequence arrived. However, there was a snag, and it looked like quite a serious snag: it was too long. Really rather too long.

  Tim says: ‘There were never any raised voices or anything like that. It was a beautiful project and there was really no reason to get angry about it … When the imaging team delivered their data tape and it was twice the length that they were given on the record, and their response when I pointed this out was “well, just take some of the music off” … I remained pleasant.’

  Tim was determined that he was not about to make any cuts in the music to make room for the photographs. No way. So he knocked off for the night: ‘I gave myself overnight to think about what to do … That evening it occurred to me that, since we were going to be mastering in stereo, we could put half the photographic data in one channel and the other half in the other channel, which would bring the project back into compliance without reducing content. Crosstalk was better than -30db, so the solution was technically sound. I told Carl about this solution that night or the next morning.’

  The final Voyager photographs reel-to-reel tape, which would soon be transferred to the lacquer masters and still survives in Sony’s archives, is dated 10 June 1977.

  Meanwhile, the final pieces of the playlist were still falling into place. One of the late runners for the Russian berth was ‘The Young Peddler’ performed by Nicolai Gedda. The suggestion came from Carl’s composer friend Murry. It certainly ticked the Russian box, but they had nagging doubts. For a start the soloist was Swedish, born in Stockholm to a half-Russian father. The song was about someone seducing a young woman too, and it was felt this might not be the best way to represent the USSR. And as the Cold War was still at full tilt in 1977, they had to tiptoe around all things USSR. Carl cabled a Russian colleague, telling him what they were up to and which song was currently in the running as the Russian entry. Time was short and his cable included a deadline for a response.

  Alan Lomax had already flagged up an excellent piece called ‘Chakrulo’, a Georgian chorus, which was in the running and they had a copy. Everyone liked the sound of it, but there was a snag with this too: they had no idea what the Georgian chorus was singing about. What if it was rude? What if it had some political message? It could have been about anything, and they were wary of something that might later come to light and embarrass NASA’s good name once it was too late to change anything.

  They need a Georgian. Lomax tracked down a man named Sandro Baratheli who lived in Queens. By this time it was the morning of the day the lacquers masters were due to be cut. Writing in Murmurs, Tim describes how Sandro came to the studio, listened to the song, lit a cigarette and began telling his desperately clock-watching audience all about the history of folk music in Georgia. At any other time, they probably would have been entranced, but there were engineers waiting. The masters had to be cut and then immediately transported to LA to be made into the final metal discs. Let’s imagine rapid smoking, finger-tapping, furtive glances, clock-checking, beads of sweat appearing on temples, fingers pulling at shirt collars. Eventually, Sandro gave them the low-down: there was no problem with the chorus, in fact the lyrical content was inspirational – it was all about a peasant protesting against a tyrannical landowner. It was in.

  Weeks later, far too late to make any difference to the record, Carl would hear from his Russian correspondent. It turned out that the request for a song to include had been taken seriously and had been passed up the chain to the top bods at the USSR’s Academy of Sciences. The result? ‘Moscow Nights’, penned in 1955, originally as ‘Leningrad Nights’, a very popular and well-loved song. Writing about it in Murmurs, Carl and Tim were relieved they hadn’t waited. While the song is a lovely thing, it’s also a bit too standard, too obvious, rather than interesting or challenging. It’s postcard Russia, tourist-board Russia. It represents Russia in the same way that ‘Now You Has Jazz’ from High Society represents jazz, or ‘Poppa’s Blues’ from Starlight Express represents blues.

  All the music was in place. Now they had to sort out which tracks went where.

  ***

  They sequenced Earth’s cosmic compilation in pretty much one night. It was late in the process, and they sat down and thrashed out an order. Tim thinks this was done at CBS Columbia by Ann, Carl, Linda and himself, right at the end of the sessions, just before the record was to be cleared by CBS.

  ‘My one suggestion,’ he says, ‘that I had learned from other producers, was see if you can create pairs and triplets. Don’t worry about the overall sequence yet. Just what two things go well together, what three things go well together. And then let’s see if we can’t build a sequence out of those units. That’ll move this along faster.’

  And it went pretty well. Most of the sequencing was done then and there in one long meeting. Ann Druyan kept notes.

  NASA’s compilation is a 27-track global tour, with a Western classical bias. It starts brightly with the first of three pieces from J.S. Bach – the Brandenburg Concerto – followed by Indonesian gamelan, percussive ‘Cengunmé’ and joyous ‘Alima Song’, before the sounds of clapsticks and didgeridoo recorded on Milingimbi Island, Australia, 1962. Two late-fifties floor fillers – the distinctive Mexican duel-trumpet of ‘El Cascabel’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ – are followed by a minute-and-a-half of alternating notes in ‘Mariuamangi’, then comes the Japanese shakuhachi piece, Belgian violinist Arthur Grumiaux performing Bach’s second entry, before soprano Edda Moser sings Mozart.

  The mood downshifts with two-and-half-minutes of haunting Georgian chorus, a minute of Peruvian drums, and three minutes of sleepy low-tempo perfection from Louis Armstrong. The Azerbaijani ‘Muğam’ sits ahead of a foundation-shaking slab of Stravinsky, a third and final p
iece from Bach, and the de-de-de-daaaaah of Beethoven’s Fifth.

  Valya Balkanska’s powerful ‘Izlel E Delyu Haydutin’, is followed by the incongruous transition from a 1942 Navajo night chant to the Elizabethan ‘Fairie Round’. Then comes the breathy ‘Cry of the Megapode Bird’, ‘Wedding Song’, ‘Flowing Streams’, before the record is brought to a close with the raga, Blind Willie Johnson and Beethoven’s farewell flourish: the Cavatina.

  Tim says: ‘I always felt that “Dark Was the Night”, which was the first piece I proposed to the record, would be good at the end or near the end. And the transition between that and the Cavatina is quite amazing. There are some great transitions, from my standpoint anyway.’

  Ann says they gave a lot of thought to the last four or five pieces: ‘If you look at David Pescovitz’s reissue, his facsimile of the Voyager record, you will see included in the booklet a picture of my setlist in my own handwriting … I wanted the last pieces to be night music. And, you know, just to have that sense of Voyagers’ very long wandering…’

  It’s true that the record leaves our planet not with a celebratory fanfare, but with a tremendous sense of loss, of romantic longing, from the vocal cords of Kesarbai Kerkar, the wordless moans of Blind Willie Johnson, and the heart of Ludwig van Beethoven. The final piece, the Cavatina, was performed by the Budapest String Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in the spring of 1960. This was towards the end of the Quartet’s career, which from around 1940 right up until 1967 made a series of landmark recordings with Columbia Records, finally calling time on public performances in the late 1960s when its three oldest members, first violinist Josef Roisman, violist Boris Kroyt, and cellist Mischa Schneider were all suffering poor health. By then they had set the standard for chamber ensembles, touring Europe, the Middle East and the US, and had recorded the complete Beethoven cycle for the CBS label.