The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Now, quite rightly, you’re not interested in my opinion of all this. Who cares what I think about music? I have terrible taste. I’m known for being a little too partial to novelty music and throwaway pop, and was once, at the very last minute, stripped of the honour of DJ’ing at a university event when the organising committee overheard my boasted intention to begin my set with the 1988 novelty record ‘John Kettley is a Weatherman’ by A Tribe of Toffs. With all that in mind, I have a couple of things to say.

  Firstly, considering that an image of a nuclear explosion was left off the picture sequence for fear of appearing like a threat, I find it surprising that the sacrificial dance segment of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring made it aboard – and, by all accounts, made it quite easily. I say this with respect to the composer, to all the composer’s fans, and to Murry Sidlin who suggested it. I understand the arguments for its inclusion, and I can see that it does have an interesting, complex and very striking structure. But it sounds to me like a species looking for trouble. It’s about the most intimidating piece of music I’ve ever heard.

  Now the Cavatina, on the other hand, is captivating. It’s utterly, spellbindingly, stupendously beautiful. It’s a piece of music that keeps promising to give you a note your whole body craves, only to give you another you didn’t know you needed. It is the ‘I Am the Resurrection’ of the Voyager Golden Record, a triumphant slab of awesome that makes you yearn for something you can’t taste or see, like a half-remembered, sunny summer-afternoon orange juice poured by your mum. It makes you remember things you’ve left behind, people you’ve hurt, and people you’ve loved, and people who you still love and yet are forever ageing before you and are so changed from the simple, easy people you first knew. It gives form to your past – a figure who approaches quietly, taps you on the shoulder and gives you a look you can’t interpret. It makes you want to find anyone you’ve ever said a cross word to, and not say sorry, or say anything, but just urge them to sit down with you and listen to this.

  With the emotional fallout that was on the horizon for the team, it is perhaps an appropriate piece of music to end a record that would last a billion years – forever imprinted in its final bars, the simple, daily difficulty of being human, of being without a muse, of being alone, drifting towards a last fork in the road. Beethoven never witnessed a performance of the piece in its final form, as it was first premiered after his death in 1827. And as Tim writes in Murmurs, it comes from the mind of a man who longed for marriage and family, but was refused because, according to Magdalene Willmann at least, he was ‘ugly and half crazy’. The man, dubbed ‘Immortal Beloved’ by his fanboys, who wrote a famous letter declaring love for another human being – a letter he never sent. Ferris writes about the mood of the Cavatina, and how Beethoven’s companion of his later years, Charles Holtz, said the composer could be moved to tears just by thinking about it. And how Beethoven wrote the word ‘sehnsucht’ in the margin of his work, meaning longing or pining.

  Some years before the events of Voyager, Ann heard the Cavatina for the first time. She was so moved, she wondered then how she could ever repay the gift of this piece of music. Voyager, it seemed to her, had given her exactly that chance. Talking about it four decades on, she says: ‘In the Bible it’s 40 years that the Israelites were in the desert. And now it’s been 40 years that Voyager has been moving, at 40,000 miles an hour for every hour of those years. And yet that is the tiniest fraction. It’s a nanosecond of a nano-fraction of the time ahead. And so I was imagining, how can we make a statement at the end of this record? The idea of endless night. The final statement, the coda, the final moment of the record, I wanted to be that sadness and solitary feeling. At the same time there’s this little thing of hope in the Cavatina, that is to me so triumphant in what makes it so powerful. It’s an acknowledgement of the struggle of life and how lonely and how difficult it can be. And yet the joy at the heart of it.’

  I asked Jon how he reflects on the mixtape. For him, although he thinks they did a great job, he can’t stop but think of it from the alien perspective: ‘This is music that is important to us,’ he says. ‘We don’t know if you’re going to like it, but we like it. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. If it had been entirely up to me, I would have leaned much more towards … things that you would do that you wouldn’t necessarily need to do for a human audience unless you were teaching music appreciation or something. But that for an extraterrestrial audience it would be more like a class in Earth music. Maybe having the same tune played in different styles on different instruments, for example …

  ‘Whereas, as it is, it’s more a sampler of Earth’s music. Which is fine and I hope that some of the pieces at least will be understandable. I think that all the music, even if it is very culturally referenced to something particularly human, will still have built into it the elements of tempo and harmony and counterpoint that will be of interest. And I think that the nature of musical instruments will also be possible for them to understand – especially the acoustic instruments. I think those sounds – drums and flutes and vibrating strings and the human voice – especially given the information we supplied about our biology and what animals are like, I think they’ll understand that some of these sounds are made by the bodies of animals.

  ‘Where I part company with Carl is that he felt that … some songs, some of the pieces expressed a kind of cosmic loneliness. I mean, nobody knows anything about extraterrestrials. But for what it’s worth, I’m sceptical that cosmic loneliness is as easy to convey as prime numbers.’

  The last thing I’d say about the records’ music is this: if the Voyager records had turned out differently – say, if Frank’s massive noggin hadn’t been available, and if that in turn had meant that for some reason all the images and greetings had taken up most of the runtime – and by June 1977 there was room for just one piece of music, I would have voted for the Cavatina. If one piece must represent Earth, and if it can’t be ‘Misalliance’ by Flanders and Swann or ‘Soulshake’ by Peggy Scott and Jo Jo Benson, let it be the Cavatina. It’s really, really good.

  Notes

  1 Jimmy had been a studio assistant at the famous Record Plant in NY. When he showed up to work on Easter Sunday, his bosses were so impressed they let him work with Lennon.

  2 In the final mix of the sound essay, the kiss is followed by ‘Mother and child’ – specifically the very first cries of a newborn infant, and then a six-month-old baby being soothed by its mother. This audio was provided by Dr Margaret Bullowa at MIT and her then-assistant Lise Menn, who is now a linguist and professor at the University of Colorado.

  3 The photograph in question came from a book called The Classic Nude by George Hester. It shows a pregnant woman holding hands with a man. They are both naked.

  4 ‘On behalf of my countrymen I am sending a message of friendship and greetings to our friends in space …’

  5 His excerpt, translated, reads: ‘We seek to live in peace with the people of the whole world, of the whole universe…’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Final Cut

  ‘So let me see if I get this straight. You made this piece of shit and it’s going to go whirling around the Earth, and for some reason I’ve gotta clear this motherfucker?’

  Anonymous

  Vladimir Meller was born in Czechoslovakia. He graduated from a high school in Košice, went on to study electrical engineering in Prague, learning violin on the side. Then, in 1968, Russia invaded.

  ‘I was studying in Prague. I was in my third year. I went back to school and Russians were occupying pretty much every building, every police station, every newspaper building. I mean, it was just all over town.’

  Vlado went back to his dorm to find most of his friends gone. He asked where everybody was: ‘I hear, one guy’s in England, one’s in Rome. And I was like: “How in the hell did they get there?” Because you can’t travel in communist countries. You just can’t. You can’t get a passport.’

  The gossip
was that the border was open between Slovakia and Austria. The Russians were watching the West German border – they didn’t want people crossing over to West Germany – but Slovakia to Austria was clear. Vlado returned home and told his parents that he wanted out, that he wanted to escape. At first they thought him crazy, but he described the ghost school he’d returned to, and eventually they relented.

  ‘So my father took me to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and that’s only 30 kilometres across from Vienna. At night you can see the lights in Vienna. That’s where the border was open. We got to the train station and there were thousands – I mean, thousands – of people who were running. Families, young kids … And they were all trying to get on the train to Vienna. So my father put me on the train. I mean, you only have to cross the Danube River – that’s the border. And you have Slovak guards on one side and the Austrian guards on the other side. And when the train stops at the border because you have to show your passports, nobody – I mean, nobody – on that train had a passport. Nobody. We were running from invasion – where do you get a passport? Who’s got time to get a passport?’

  The Slovak guards, perhaps worried about being overwhelmed or sparking an international incident, waved them across.

  ‘As soon as we got to cross the Danube River the Austrians stopped the train. They were asking for the passports too. Nobody has passports. So they got us off the train and put us on a bus to Vienna and that’s where my journey started.’

  This was the autumn of 1968. Vlado was 21. He made it to Austria, and then by April 1969 he had reached the United States, legally as a refugee. He was given asylum, along with many thousands of Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Romanians all fleeing the situation in Europe. Then just months after arriving, in December 1969, he tucked into a bit of the American Dream, starting a new job in New York.

  ‘It was unbelievable,’ he says. ‘It was a beautiful job, beautiful salary, beautiful benefits. I mean, I was in seventh heaven. You hear about all this stuff … “Jobs in America”, people say. And there I was: 22 years old and I have a job.’

  I know what you’re thinking: who is Vladimir Meller and why are we hearing about him? Well, Vlado is the man who cut the Golden Record.

  ***

  The sequencing and mastering was now complete, the audio tracks all on master tape, but before Vlado could start work, everything had to be cleared. The process of copyright and clearances was also handled on site by Columbia Records. Tim had thought it sounded risky – leaving all the copyright clearances until the last moment like this – but he had been assured long before that it wouldn’t be a problem. So he walked into a meeting with the head of clearances for CBS Columbia and all his assistants. Tim was the only outside representative of the Voyager record project there.

  ‘I started in on my first sentence to describe what we were doing and this guy interrupted me. “So let me see if I get this straight. You made this piece of shit and it’s going to go whirling around the Earth, and for some reason I’ve gotta clear this motherfucker? Why? Why would I do that?” And I said: “Because your CEO told you to do it and he told you to have it done by close of business Friday.” After that we got along fine.’

  They cleared all the tracks in about two working days. Then they took the tapes finished in the editing department to Vlado in the cutting room.

  Today Vlado is an audio-mastering engineer who runs his own business in Charleston, South Carolina. His career credits include metal, rock, hip-hop, jazz, opera, pop and classical. He’s worked with the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, Limp Bizkit, Paul McCartney, Metallica, George Michael, Oasis, Pink Floyd, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shakira, Weezer, Kanye West and Jack White. CBS Records first hired Vlado in December 1969 and he worked for the company until going solo in 2007. In 1977, he was in his thirties and was the top cutter at CBS.

  Vlado told me: ‘They came up to me, introduced themselves and they told me what they want to do, and what the record would be about and that it will go into space … Obviously, as a young dude working, I’m thinking: “These guys are space cadets … who’s going to play this record?” Obviously, I’m in a different position now. I realise it was an unbelievable project. I didn’t realise when I was cutting it that it would be such a big deal 20, 30, 40 years later on.’

  The role of the cutter was to take the two-track master, put it on a tape machine, and start cutting into the vinyl using a cutting lathe. Next thing you know, you have a disc in your hand that you can play back and it plays music the same way as it sounded on the tape.

  ‘I remember it very well,’ says Vlado, ‘because it was almost impossible to cut that record. It was an awfully long record. I mean it’s difficult to cut even 28-, 29-minute records, never mind 35-, 40- to 45-minute records, because the grooves are so packed on the vinyl, so thin that even with your best cutter and best engineer there’s a possibility it could skip. Conventional turntables just can’t track it because when it starts spinning the arm is being pulled to the side … a super-thin groove, you have a chance of skipping.

  ‘So we had to do lots of test cuts. Then play it back on my regular turntable at CBS Records and make sure that it played all the way through. Even though there was lots of spoken word, where the grooves are not modulating very much and you know they’re at low level, but then there was lots of music also. And once the music comes in and there’s lots of classical music … then you start getting modulation and the grooves are spreading apart from each other. And it can eat up the space on your record very quickly.’

  Despite working at 16rpm and using a state-of-the-art computer-driven cutting lathe, they were stretching the audio brim, pushing the technology to its limit. If the grooves became too thin it just wouldn’t work. To inscribe the photographic data into the lacquers – remember they were using both sides of the stereo grooves – they plugged ‘Mr Equipment’, the Honeywell recorder, directly into the cutting board to minimise distortion.

  ‘This combination of noises, and bird noises, and whales, and this, and animal noises, and spoken word … You could save some space on the record for music – you could then open up the grooves for the music. So it was very creative how we changed the levels from each depending on what the source was. If it was a spoken word we could lower the level slightly and save space, if it was music we could crank up the levels slightly so the playback was decent … But we cut it, we did it, we played it. We were safe. It played all the way through. It was an unbelievable achievement,’ he says.

  There was one more job. Engineers and cutters signed off vinyl records by etching matrix numbers issued by the record company into the run-out groove – that bit on the surface between the end of the grooves and the circular paper label in the centre. Some were in the habit of leaving messages in the run-outs too, such as legendary Blackburn-born engineer George ‘Porky’ Peckham who from the 1960s frequently signed his records ‘Porky’ or ‘A Porky Prime Cut’. John Lennon, as Tim knew from working with Jimmy Iovine, also had engineers etch messages into those blank spaces, so Ferris thought: why not use the space for something? It was another opportunity, another stretch of canvas. He asked Vlado to add a dedication, one originally written a full month earlier on the back of an envelope during one of the listening sessions. It is, says Vlado, ‘a very delicate process. One bad move and the master would be ruined.’

  The hand-etched inscription reads: ‘To the Makers of Music – All Worlds, All Times.’ The best thing about this inscription though, is not the meaning of the message, but the words themselves, how they appear on the surface of the record. Hold them up to the light, and they look like normal, casual, everyday handwriting, like a ‘back-in-five-minutes’ message scrawled on a piece of paper. It’s the only organic visual element to the records, a fingerprint, a tiny artisan touch, delivered to the universe by Tim Ferris and Vlado Meller from a cutting room in New York, and which, a billion years from now may be the only trace of anything
hand-crafted in the cosmos.

  Reflecting on his work some 40 years later, Vlado sees it all as a stroke of good fortune. ‘It was an unbelievable project. I never worked on a project like that in my life. I worked on lots of rock ’n’ roll, classical, jazz, this and that, but Voyager was something very different. Carl mentioned me in his book, which was very nice of him. But then you have all these articles on the internet and they don’t even mention the cutting at CBS Records. They talk about the records being cut by Colorado JVC – it’s fuckin’ nonsense! They had nothing to do with it!’

  ***

  By this point, what with all the last-minute greetings, presidential messages, overrunning images, relaxed Georgians, and a truly challenging cutting process, the deadline had expired. Luckily it turned out that John Casani, like all good editors, had kept a few spare days hidden away in his schedule.

  Vlado finished cutting at 11p.m. Minutes later, Tim left the CBS building with freshly cut lacquers under his arm. He took a cab directly to the airport, caught the red-eye to Los Angeles and hand-delivered the discs to the James G. Lee Record Processing Center in Gardena, California, the next morning. Here the two sides of the disc became two, single-sided copper mothers (the blank discs provided by the Pyral S.A. of Creteil, France). In the place where a normal record would have its paper label, there was to be a photo-engraving of the Earth viewed from space. On the record it looks like a fairly indistinct swirl of clouds. And finally over this photograph are printed the following words:

  THE SOUNDS OF EARTH

  Side 1

  NASA

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  PLANET EARTH

  These words, coupled with the ‘music makers’ inscription, are the only words on the outside of the record itself. If it is discovered but for some reason never fully decoded, those are the words that will represent our epoch: all, America, Earth, makers, music, NASA, of, planet, side, sounds, states, the, times, to, worlds, united, 1, 2.