The Vinyl Frontier
Page 26
There are lots of myths about the record. According to Tim at least, the whole Beatles ‘Here Comes The Sun’ story has become something of a myth. And there are others. You often hear that ‘Satisfaction’18 is on there, and I’ve heard people discuss the project as if it was actually a loudspeaker on the side of Voyager, blaring out music like the stereo of Elon Musk’s orbiting roadster.
The Voyager record is certainly a strange story. What I like about it is the way the record seems to have a life of its own. How, despite all our best efforts, it captured something of our imperfections. I like that there’s love on there and that, like real love, it’s messy. I like that it has some rough edges. I like that the wasp is flying upside down. I like the unscripted Cornell greetings. I like that NASA insisted Jon alter the outline haircut of the man standing beside a pregnant woman so he looked less like a surfer. I like that there’s a digitised printout of the names of a load of American politicians on there. I even like that there’s a Nazi on there. Indeed, the further away it travels, the more I like it. And I love that these records are hitchhiking aboard these two amazing probes, machines that sprinkled our lives with wonder.
There are mistakes. And you could argue the whole thing, at times and in places, has a last-minute, rushed atmosphere. It has pages that seem almost literally torn out of coffee-table books to represent humanity. It has a picture of three people pouring food and water into their faces to show how we eat and drink. It has weird, mysterious numbers all over some diagrams of human anatomy because Linda’s paint flaked off. It has whale song mixed with nonsensical (to an alien audience) greetings. It has an ‘h’ wearing a backwards cap.
All of these criticisms one could send after the Voyagers, but they won’t care. They will carry on regardless, drifting forever in the big nowhere, with their golden discs time-stamped ‘1977’. The year of punk,19 the year of VHS, the year Grateful Dead kicked arse, the year Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan fell in love, the year before Frank and Amahl got married, the year of Apple II, the year of Star Wars: A New Hope, the centenary of Thomas Edison’s phonograph invention, and the year Peter Carl Goldmark died, developer of the modern LP. And finally the year this disparate team of artists, writers, engineers and scientists put together a monument for humankind – something that will in all likelihood survive longer than Earth itself – and sent it off into space under the noses of some bureaucrats.
Finally, I’d like to end by encouraging all of you to do what I did when researching this book. I had several playlists going. I had the Voyager record as a playlist, which I listened to over and over as I walked my dog along the Sussex Downs. Then, to immerse myself in the mindset of the Voyager team, I decided to make my own. I gave myself 90 minutes to play with and, just as I had for Beth back in the early 1990s, I tried to create the ultimate mixtape. This was the best of the best. My very, very favourite and bestest music of all time. The music I’d want to preserve, the songs I’d run back into a burning Earth to save if the Sun went nova.
On my first go, I set some ground rules. I limited my pool to music created prior to the launch of these space probes, music that could, in theory at least, have been open to the Voyager team – basically anything released before the summer of 1977. So the Carpenters’ version of ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ was out as it wasn’t released until early September 1977 – just missing the boat – whereas the original version by Klaatu, which first appeared in 1976, was absolutely fine. Then I removed any rules and imagined myself in charge of a record due to leave our planet in a few months’ time. The result?
Let’s picture an alien being. It has headphones on. It is sitting next to a golden record. Not the NASA Golden Record, but the JSCOTT Golden Record. The alien has a slightly faraway look on its long thin face. It has evidently been sitting there for some time. Suddenly, you can hear a kind of rasping sound coming from the headphones. You notice the stylus is skipping along the run-out groove. A second alien, who’s been staring down at a console nearby, looks up at her colleague. The first alien lifts the tone arm, carefully placing it gently back on the armrest. Then he removes the headphones and rubs his pointy ears. He turns to the second alien and says: ‘They only had three chords.’
It was hopeless. It was my favourite music, but it was such a narrow view. It was like trying to explain colour by only showing red, or like describing Earth by only showing England’s rolling fields. Beautiful, sure, but what about mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, fjords, deserts, cityscapes, moors, tropical islands, Arctic tundra, savannas, jungles?
Most people reading this will, I hope, be in awe of what the Voyager record team created. They will wonder at Frank’s incredible brain. They will be won over by Carl’s undoubted magnetism. They will be impressed by Tim’s unflappable cool, Ann’s infectious wonder, Jon’s obsessive dedication, Linda’s artistic skill, and the hard work of all the people who left their impressions on the record – Wendy, Val, Amahl, Shirley, Eck, George, all those ethnomusicologists, the CBS engineers, the guys at Colorado Video, the thinkers from SETI and the Order of the Dolphin. But for those of you who think you could do better, I encourage you to give it a try. Here’s your brief:
Make a record that represents humanity on a good day.
You can do it in 90 minutes of music.
You can do it in a 12-minute sound essay.
You can do it in 120 images and diagrams of your choice.
You can record greetings in as many languages as you like. And you can put it all on a metal record, inside a metal box.
Don’t feel you have to limit yourself to pre-1977 music or photographs. Choose whatever you like, from whenever you like. Mine the world as you see fit.
You have six weeks.
Oh, and before you start, let’s just even up the playing field. No computer. No smartphone. No internet. No quick emails. No handy templates. No PDF attachments. No keyword searches. No digital files. No editing software. Go analogue. You’re allowed to write letters and make phone calls. You can visit libraries and bookshops. You can trawl catalogues and directories and indexes. You’re allowed slides and couriers, darkrooms and film. You can use tapes and records and mixing desks and video cameras.
Good luck with that.
This book isn’t about your golden record, or my golden record, it’s about the Golden Record. A heavy metal album by an awesome band, a supergroup of artists and scientists, supported by a host of ordinary yet exceptional people, who together created this wonderful yet genuinely weird monument. And it is weird. In the best sense of the word, it is weird. It’s an odd artefact. A spinning metal plaque with a videoed photograph of a dinner party and the recorded sound of an initiation ceremony. It has the fingerprints of love and enthusiasm all over it, with occasional smudges of darkness. A product of its time. An objet d’art partially shaped by bureaucracy, budget, politics and ambition, but filled to its brim with innovation and beauty. It’s a metal dream of a half-remembered world. A love letter to us and to them.
Notes
1 NASA’s New Horizons probe crossed the orbit of Neptune 25 years to the day after Voyager 2’s encounter. It reached Pluto in July 2015.
2 Just to give you a flavour of Carl’s stature: in 1983 his agent Scott Meredith struck him a new four-book deal with Random House worth $4 million.
3 See Animal Crackers (1930).
4 Ed White was buried with full military honours at West Point.
5 The ‘Waldheim affair’ was broken by investigative journalist Alfred Worm in Austrian weekly news magazine Profil. It centred around Waldheim’s claim that he received a medical discharge after being wounded in the winter of 1942. Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, stated that Waldheim was stationed 5 miles from Thessaloniki when its entire Jewish community was sent to Auschwitz in just a few weeks.
6 Three members of the record team had books out in 1977.
7 Carl’s use was intermittent and moderate, rather than excessive. B
ut it continued throughout his career. And later in life he became a more outspoken public agitator for the legalisation of medical marijuana.
8 I also reached out to Linda Salzman Sagan.
9 In 1977 the team had assumed that Columbia/CBS would eventually release a commercial replica. However, there were endless permission problems since some copyrights were held by direct competitors. Plus, the company’s marketing department felt record stores wouldn’t know where to put it. It was too much of an oddball. Jon writes: ‘We learned the hard way that it was easier to send the record across the galaxy than release it in the marketplace.’
10 You can see the YouTube video here: youtube/ibByF9XPAPg. And read Ron Barry’s description of how he did it here: boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html.
11 It drew the largest audience of any programme in US public television history.
12 Amahl was on the staff of the NAS Committee on Science and Public Policy (COSPUP).
13 Today Nadia is a science journalist with a PhD in genetics from Cornell. Leila is a prima ballerina with State Street Ballet and a double-major graduate from UC Santa Barbara.
14 Named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–54).
15 This includes a facsimile of six-year-old Nick Sagan’s youthful hand, plus Amahl’s message in Arabic. She writes: ‘My father wrote, in his wonderful calligraphic style, the words I recorded, and his penmanship is preserved in the Murmurs of Earth book.’
16 I went twice. The second was even better than the first because they played ‘The Figurehead’ and ‘Fire in Cairo’.
17 It was obvious, from about the second verse, that my housemaster, Mr Sutcliffe, hadn’t realised my intention to perform the entire song, complete and uncut.
18 All the fault of the film Starman.
19 Well, the year after punk really.
Select Bibliography
Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, first published by Random House in 1978, was extremely valuable to me and was a source used throughout the writing of this book. It represents contemporary testimony from the entire Voyager team, written within months of launch. It contains three essays by Carl Sagan (‘For Future Times and Beings’, ‘The Voyager Missions to the Outer Solar System’ and ‘Epilogue’), Frank Drake’s ‘The Foundations of the Voyager Record’, plus essays from Ann Druyan (‘The Sounds of Earth’), Timothy Ferris (‘Voyager’s Music’), Jon Lomberg (‘Pictures of Earth’) and Linda Salzman Sagan (‘A Voyager’s Greetings’). It also includes illustrations, a list of all the music, greetings, sound effects and pictures. Appendices include NASA press releases, the UN greetings, a letter from Robert Brown, Jon Lomberg’s hour-long playlist, and a list of Voyager mission personnel.
Chapter 1: The Naked Pioneers
Cocconi, G. & Morrison, P. 1959. Searching for Interstellar Communications. Nature 184: 844–846
Drake, F. 1978. The Foundations of the Voyager Record. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Kraemer, R.S. 2000. Beyond the Moon: A Golden Age of Planetary Exploration 1971–1978. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington
Pyne, S.J. 2010. Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery. Viking Penguin, London
Sagan, C. 1973. A Message to Earth. The Cosmic Connection. Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York
— Salzman Sagan, L. & Drake, F. 1972. A Message From Earth. Science 175: 881–884
— 1973. A Message From Earth. JPL Technical Memorandum 33-584, Vol. I: 193–203
Wolverton, M. 2004. The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes. Joseph Henry Press, Washington
Chapter 2: Needle Hits Groove
Bell, J. 2015. The Interstellar Age: The Story of the NASA Men and Women who Flew the Forty-Year Voyager Mission. Dutton, New York
Cornell Daily Sun archive: cdsun.library.cornell.edu
Davidson, K. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life. John Wiley & Son, New York
Dethloff, H.C. & Schorn, R.A. 2003. Voyager’s Grand Tour: To the Outer Planets and Beyond. Smithsonian Books, Washington
Drake, F. 1976. Original plan for Voyager Golden Record. Appendices. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Drake, N. 2014. 40 Years Ago, Earth Beamed Its First Postcard to the Stars. National Geographic, Phenomena: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/11/28/40-years-ago-earth-beamed-its-first-postcard-to-the-stars/
The Farthest. 2017. Documentary. Director: Emer Reynolds
Poundstone, W. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. Henry Holt, New York
Sagan, C. 1978. For Future Times and Beings. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
— circa 1944–46. The Evolution of Interstellar Space Flight. The Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, Library of Congress
Wawawhack, Rahway High School student newspaper. Vol. VI, No. 5. 1950. The Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, Library of Congress
Chapter 3: Musos v Scientists
Alan Lomax and the Voyager Golden Records, Association for Cultural Equity, www.culturalequity.org/features/Voyager/
Benson, H. Life Among the Stars. SF Gate, 6 September 2007
Davidson, K. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life. John Wiley & Son, New York
Drake, F. 1978. The Foundations of the Voyager Record. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Ferris, T. 1973. Carl Sagan: Life on Other Planets? Rolling Stone, 136
— 1977. The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe. William Morrow, New York
— Biographical details. www.timothyferris.com
Lomberg, J. Unpublished manuscript
Nelson, S. & Polansky, L. 1993. The Music of the Voyager Interstellar Record. Journal of Applied Communication. 21: 358–375
Poundstone, W. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. Henry Holt, New York
Sagan, C. 1973–76. Examples from the ‘Ideas Riding’ file. The Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, Library of Congress
— 1977. Letter to Alan Lomax. The Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, Library of Congress
— 1978. For Future Times and Beings. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
— et al. 1978. Appendices. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Szwed, J. 2010. The Man Who Recorded the World. William Heinemann, London
Chapter 4: Uranium Clock
Bart, C. 1976. Profile: Arden Aids Vikings. Cornell Chronicle Vol. 08, No. 2
Brown, R. 1978. Letter to Carl Sagan. Appendices. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Drake, F. 1978. The Foundations of the Voyager Record. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Druyan, A. 1978. The Sounds of Earth. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Ferris, T. 1978. Voyager’s Music. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Lomberg, J. 1978. Pictures of Earth. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
— Unpublished manuscript
Sagan, C. 1978. For Future Times and Beings. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Chapter 5. Now That’s What I Call Music
Druyan, A. 1978. The Sounds of Earth. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
— 2007. Article. anndruyan.typepad.com/the_observatory/
Harker, B. 2011. Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Heinlein, R.A. 1976. Letter to Carl Sagan, December 1976. Reproduced in Jon Lomberg’s unpublished manuscript
LaFrance, A. 2017.
Solving the Mystery of Whose Laughter Is On the Golden Record. The Atlantic. 20 June 2017
Lomberg, J. 1978. Proposed music for record. Appendices. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
NASA. The Voyager Greetings: soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/golden-record-greetings-to-the
Nelson, S. & Polansky, L. 1993. The Music of the Voyager Interstellar Record. Journal of Applied Communication. 21: 358–375
Ozma Records: ozmarecords.com
Sagan, C. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, New York
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: folkways.si.edu
Chapter 6. The Hydrogen Key
Drake, F. 1978. The Foundations of the Voyager Record. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Lomberg, J. Unpublished manuscript
Chapter 7. Berry v Beatles
Druyan, A. 1978. The Sounds of Earth. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Ferris, T. 1978. Voyager’s Music. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Lomberg, J. 1978. Pictures of Earth. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
Nye, W. 2017. Bill Nye talking about classes with Carl Sagan. Big Think: www.youtube.com/user/bigthink
Sagan, C. 1978. For Future Times and Beings. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York
— 1986. Birthday letter to Chuck Berry. The Seth Macfarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, Library of Congress
Unknown author. 1977. Voyager Takes Disc Aloft. Cornell Chronicle Vol. 9, No. 3
Chapter 8. Flowing Streams and Firecrackers
Davidson, K. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life. John Wiley & Son, New York
Drake, F. 1978. The Foundations of the Voyager Record. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York