The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Talking to me in 2017, Tim called the press conference ‘a joke’. The motel, which has since been torn down, was double-booked. The record’s official launch was held in a large room separated from the oompah sounds of a full-blown Polish wedding3 by nothing but an accordion-style folding barrier. Thanks to this sound pollution, no tape of the Q and A has survived.

  In The Farthest you see fleetingly some photos from the press conference. Jon is seated next to Frank, who is dressed in a yellow shirt, a pen sticking out of his breast pocket. Carl is in an open-necked white shirt tucked into fawn trousers. Ann is wearing a dark blue shirt and dark jacket, seated between Carl and Tim. Tim is wearing a dark blue shirt, cool-ass glasses and is drinking a coke. Frankly the team look a little tired and gloomy, but you can’t assume too much from a couple of stills.

  I asked Tim if he remembered feeling nervous.

  ‘No no no. I always felt that everybody was going to like the record. I thought that the only issue was with NASA – and I understood NASA’s concerns. I thought they were making a mistake by trying to basically hide the fact that the record was even on the spacecraft. But I was perfectly happy to be presenting, you know, to be answering questions to the press. I thought the public was going to like the project. I’ve always felt that the record would be popular if it were ever given a chance. I’ve always welcomed public interest in the project … I was just disappointed that NASA had done such a poor job. We said a lot at that conference and there are no recordings of any of it because the audio people couldn’t work in that environment – with a wedding reception taking place on the other side of the accordion divider. And whether that was suppressed hostility on NASA’s part or just an honest mistake, I don’t know. But of course if they’d scheduled a proper press conference in the first place then there wouldn’t have been issues. But that’s it, you know? With Carl pushing the envelope into areas outside NASA’s orbit, naturally you get some push-back when you do that.’

  ***

  After the press conference, Tim and Ann drove to Miami, and Carl, Linda and Nick drove to the airport to fly to Cape Cod.

  Ann had confided in Lynda; Carl in Lester Grinspoon. Together they decided that Carl should tell Linda at the Grinspoon’s place in Cape Cod so the Grinspoons would be on hand to provide moral support as friends of the couple. On 22 August, two days after the Voyager 2 launch and 82 days after the ‘for keeps’ phone call, Carl told Linda he wanted a divorce and that he wanted to marry Ann.

  Ann says: ‘We had made this vow that at one o’clock we would turn to our significant other and tell them what had happened and that we were in love and that we were leaving. We both of us did it at one o’clock, unfaltering, never looked back, never faltered. And that was it.’

  According to Poundstone’s book, Linda was shocked, angry, distraught. She’d wanted a second child with Carl. Arguments and discussions went on into the night. Eventually they drew up a list of their personal items and possessions on a yellow legal pad and began to divide things up then and there.

  Tim, again according to Poundstone, took it fairly calmly. He had already experienced heartbreak and knew the ropes. And amid all of this upheaval there was Nick. The only child aboard Voyager. A sweet little six-year-old who had said ‘hello’ to the universe for all of us kids just a few weeks before. He too is reported to have taken the news in his stride.

  Just around this time, Sagan’s own parents had moved into a retirement condo in Florida. Carl met with his father, Samuel, telling him that he was leaving his wife for another woman. Samuel said, without looking round, that he hoped the woman was Ann.

  Linda and Carl’s divorce would run for some time, with days in court and coverage in the press. Friends and allies helped out on both sides. Frank visited their house in Ithaca, witnessing Linda and Carl splitting up their possessions. In the immediate aftermath, Linda didn’t want Ann and Carl being seen around Ithaca together. So while they didn’t immediately move in together,4 they did travel and in December 1977 they visited London.

  In December Carl was invited to the White House to brief President Carter and the first family – essentially to give them a kind of celebrity astronomy lesson over dinner. Carl did that, and then the next day he and Ann flew to London to prepare for the Christmas Lectures.

  The Christmas Lectures have been held at the Royal Institute in London since they were started in 1825 by Michael Faraday.5 Still broadcast every year, they are a series of lectures on a single subject to a general audience, but aimed at younger people. Carl Sagan was a perfect choice for the Christmas Lectures – a scientist with a sprinkling of celebrity cache, like David Attenborough (who did his in 1973) or Richard Dawkins (who did a particularly good job in 1991). Carl was sandwiched between Nobel Prize-winning chemist George Porter and knot-theory mathematician Christopher Zeeman. He had formally been invited to deliver the lecture on 14 May 1976 by Royal Institute Director Sir George Porter.

  You can go online and watch the videos now. In the first lecture Carl imagines what an alien visitor might deduce from looking at our planet. Then he turns to the outer solar system, to life, to Mars and the prospect of planetary systems beyond our sun. In the first lecture, he mentions the just-completed Golden Record, and plays an excerpt from ‘Depicting the Cranes in Their Nest’ over the address system to a spellbound audience. If you watch very carefully, you sometimes see fleeting glimpses of Ann sitting in the front row, amongst the pleasingly geeky-looking crowd of late-1970s youngsters. Ann, like the rest of them, is watching Carl.

  Tim went back to work. He returned to his writing, taught English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and launched his first book, The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, which won the American Institute of Physics Prize. In a later profile, Tim described his life during this late-1970s period as being that of a ‘happy bachelor’. He would meet the woman he would settle down and have a family with in 1979. Although his relationship with Carl was tarnished, a mutual respect remained. In his acknowledgements for Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a monumental work he wrote between 1976 and 1988, he acknowledges debts of gratitude to both Ann and Carl (among many others). He dedicated one of his own documentaries to Carl Sagan and, when speaking to me in 2017, he still talked about Carl with great warmth.

  ***

  Opinion is divided about how much attention the Golden Records got at the time. We’ve lived with the achievements of the Voyager missions for decades. We’ve watched this great age of discovery unfold before us. But at the time of launch, all those discoveries were still in the future. So it must have seemed like just another NASA probe launch to many writers and readers. Indeed, if you put yourself in the boots of the contemporary press corps, it was just another probe. It must have sounded quite a lot like the Pioneer probes. The fact that these ones had LPs strapped to their sides was the unique feature, at this point in history at least.

  The Sunday edition of the Idaho Times covered the launch on page seven, after a full-page obituary of Groucho Marx on page six. The story mentions a ‘gold-plated recording’ in the intro, reports on some early technical gremlins encountered at launch with one of the gyroscopes and the camera-carrying boom, before ending with a brief rundown of the record’s contents – touching on the human kiss, the Louis Armstrong tune, Beethoven’s Fifth and the sound of an automobile. It also seems to indicate that NASA had provided an actual turntable for the record as well – which they didn’t, of course.

  The St Petersburg Times covered the Voyager 2 launch with a tiny paragraph, just above the corrections, and alongside more coverage of the deaths of Groucho and Elvis. This merely noted that it was taking along with it ‘information about Earth’ in case anyone is out there – although it makes no mention of the record itself.

  The Cornell Chronicle, dated Thursday 25 August 1977, alongside announcements of the forthcoming ‘Freshman Offbeat Olympics’ and new laws reducing penalties for marijuana use, proudly proclaims that Voyager
‘Takes Disc Aloft’, with ‘Sights, Sounds of Ithaca Included’. The accompanying piece brilliantly draws out the local angle – that the record includes the voices of ‘27 Ithacans’, plus photos of the produce counter at the Grand Union Supermarket in the Cayuga Mall and the Cayuga Heights interchange on Route 13.

  Over time, as the Voyagers sped further and further away, the records occupy less room in the limited column inches. The Virgin Islands Daily News, on 6 March 1979, reports on the first photographs beamed back from Jupiter, in what a NASA spokesperson calls ‘one of the most memorable days in planetary exploration’. This report ends with a little Golden Record primer, reminding readers about the discs, telling them that once the Voyagers’ primary missions are done and dusted, they will be carrying their precious ‘phonographs of Earth’ into deep space on the off-chance of an alien encounter.

  Then by the 1980s, as Voyager 2 made its triumphant fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune, there are times when the record hardly gets a look-in. If you only have five paragraphs to summarise newly discovered geological features on a Jovian moon, or drifting clouds of debris around Neptune, or brand-new never-before-seen planetary rings, or faint radio signals given off by Uranus, suddenly the Cavatina is way down the pecking order. So during the 1980s science and exploration was the story, and the records – while never completely forgotten – were mere footnotes.

  Jon says: ‘[Frank] said6 that during the mission the press was much more interested in the record than they were in the science, and that annoyed the scientists. That’s just not true. And Frank was not at any of the Voyager encounters that I know of. He’s not a planetary astronomer. So I don’t know where he got that. It might have been a bit later, his own experience. But as somebody who covered the mission for the CBC – and I was at every encounter from the first Jupiter one to the final Neptune one; I was a known member of the press corps, friends with all the other press – in all that time I don’t think anybody ever asked me about the record. There was no sense of “hey, it’s Jon, he worked on the Golden Record.” Nobody cared about the Golden Record. First of all, at the beginning of the mission, nobody knew that the mission was going to be as successful and as remarkable as it was. Nobody knew the solar system would be as incredible as it was. So there wasn’t the sense of historic monumentality of the mission until much later. And the record was a side thing. I don’t recall the record being discussed in any of the press conferences except maybe the very final one – at Neptune. And I don’t remember reporters asking any questions about it. So I think it took a while to gain traction.’

  Pop-culture appearances helped it gain a measure of mythic status. There was Steve Martin on a contemporaneous Saturday Night Live episode, reporting on the first message received from aliens (it reads: ‘Send more Chuck Berry!’). In the first Star Trek film, in 1979, Kirk and Spock discover a menacing alien force calling itself ‘V’ger’.7 In the early 1980s Jon received a treatment for a never-to-be-made film called Stella, in which an alien responds to the record by assuming human form and moving to New York. Then there was the flawed Starman film8 in 1984, in which an alien sent to Earth in response to the record’s invitation crashes near the home of a bereaved widow (Karen Allen), takes the form of her former husband (Jeff Bridges), and first communicates with a deadpan rendition of Kurt Waldheim’s opening remarks. In 2016 there was ‘A Glorious Dawn’, a piece of autotuned spoken word by Sagan that Jack White had pressed into a gold-plated vinyl 7" and played on a ‘space-proof’ turntable suspended by a high-altitude balloon. And more recently the record plays a prominent role in the young-adult novel See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng.

  ‘I think these helped to lift it – give it the lustre that it has now,’ says Jon. ‘There probably hasn’t been a week that has gone by in the last several decades where I haven’t gotten some kind of message … So I hear about it. I know it’s out there and people love it. Stage plays are being written about it, an opera has been written about it, a symphony has been written about it. So it’s kind of made its mark. But from my point of view, the fame and glory associated with it … it’s like one of those jokes about the stupid person’s lottery. It’s a million dollars – it’s a dollar a year for a million years. The fame and glory is, for me anyway, associated with the record, like that. It hasn’t made me payments and it hasn’t made me rich. But I think as long as we remember the space programme we’re going to remember Voyager. And as long as we remember Voyager we’re going to remember the Golden Record.

  ‘I mean, I have no celebrity status, I have no name recognition or brand. I was at JPL a few weeks ago – for a screening of The Farthest – and the woman is giving us a tour of JPL. There in the auditorium is this full-scale model of the Voyager, and there’s the Golden Record on it. I went up to her afterwards and I said: “You know, I helped make that cover. I was the designer of the record.” She said: “Really? What’s your name?” I said: “Jon Lomberg.” She said: “Lambert?” She’d obviously never heard of me.’

  Notes

  1 You can read the rest of the original press release via the JPL website: www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6047.

  2 Just around the time NASA was finalising the Golden Records for alien consumption, our planet received an unexplained radio signal. The ‘Wow! signal’ was received on 15 August 1977 by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman spotted an anomaly in the printed readings, circling the area and adding the comment ‘Wow!’ – hence its widely used name. The signal has not been detected since but remains an acknowledged but disputed candidate for alien radio transmission. It seemed to come from the constellation Sagittarius, although many believe it was a natural phenomenon.

  3 He tells the story in The Farthest too, about 20 minutes in.

  4 They first lived together from January 1978 – a home in Slaterville Springs on the outskirts of Ithaca.

  5 Aside from a wartime break between 1939 and 1942.

  6 In The Farthest.

  7 Wyndham Hannaway, the man who converted the Voyager photographs to sound, took a leave of absence from Colorado Video in 1978, working at Robert Abel and Associates on motion control photography of a six-foot model of the Enterprise for the film. It wasn’t until he saw the premier a year later that he discovered that the Enterprise crew was up against the mysterious ‘V’ger’. ‘Astounding,’ he says, ‘but definitely not my script idea.’

  8 In the film Charles Martin Smith plays Mark Shermin, a SETI scientist who put the record together. The film is also responsible for spreading the misconception that the records are broadcasting the song ‘Satisfaction’.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hello, We Must Be Going

  ‘Carl saw our society, our planet, the life on it with the kind of … the perspective of someone from another world. One of my favourite things said about Carl was: “With terrestrials like Carl, who needs extras?” There was a deeper truth there which was that he did have that … cosmic perspective.’

  Ann Druyan

  We had a record player in the sitting room of my home. It was up high, on a wooden shelf, so toddlers like me couldn’t mess with it. Below the Garrard turntable was another shelf with an amplifier (a Leak Stereo 30 Plus), and below that a small cupboard with a modest collection of vinyl.

  The speakers were set into the wall. They had been put there by my grandfather, a DIY audiophile and opera nut who used to live in the house where I grew up. Inside the cupboard, just next to the records, was a line of four dome-shaped, Bakelite switches. These had been installed by my grandfather too and could be used to switch on speakers secretly mounted in various positions around the house. Flick one, and a speaker hidden behind a framed picture of a horse in my parents’ bedroom burst into life. Flick another, and a speaker in the bookshelves of a downstairs room began to hum. This may sound fairly run-of-the-mill to the wireless Bluetooth generation, but back then this was pretty cool.

  I was too young to touch the records. I wasn’t tru
sted to handle them correctly, and anyway I couldn’t have reached the turntable even if I’d wanted to. So if I wanted to listen to Penelope Keith reading fairy tales or Shakin’ Stevens singing ‘This Ole House’, I had to ask for parental help.

  I remember listening to the powerful crackle as whichever parent I’d coerced to my will dropped the needle to the groove. I remember the building excitement as I waited for the smooth clear vinyl to give way to the spikes of rich analogue sound. I’d listen to stories like ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ or ‘The Tinderbox’, often alone, rocking back and forth on my haunches.

  However, I was terrified of another sound. I dreaded it. I never knew when it was coming, but it always did in the end. And when it came, I would run from the room as fast as I could, absolutely terrified.

  Turntables often have some kind of built-in mechanism that kicks in when the playing arm has reached the end of the record, automatically lifting the needle, returning it to the rest position. Not so at our place circa 1980. Ours would just go on, spinning round and round, the tone arm and needle endlessly skipping back, 33⅓ times a minute, against the end of the run-out groove. The powerful amp and the bass-rich wall-mounted speakers meant that, to my young ears, that sound of needles skipping over the run-out was the stuff of nightmares, conjuring up images of heavy-footed monsters. Whoomph … che-t-ke … whoomph … che-t-ke … whoomph … che-t-ke … whoomph … che-t-ke … whoomph … che-t-ke …

  Even today when I listen to records I still feel the same shiver when I’m too slow to lift the tone arm before the record reaches the end. It’s a desolate sound. The sound of something approaching. The sound of an ending.

  ***

  From the day Voyager 1 joined its sister ship in space on 5 September 1977, the records that were attached to the sides began to fade from popular memory as the important business of the missions – the planetary fly-bys – took centre stage.