The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  You could certainly make an argument for some marijuana-laced fingerprints being on the Golden Record. Indeed, its very existence is down to Carl’s passion for sending music into space, which must, at least in part, have been powered by some marijuana-fuelled enthusiasm. The fact that they wrote about an alien race being able to one day decode Ann’s thoughts from those firecracker EEGs is pretty down-the-rabbit-hole stuff. And it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to conclude that some of the music choices were helped over the line by that same enthusiasm. But of course, you could say exactly that about a lot of 20th-century music and about a lot of 20th-century records.

  Another point I’d like to make is a simple one: think about how bad this record could have been. I mean, there are any number of potential horrible outcomes that were avoided. Have you heard some of the popular chart hits from the 1970s? Don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, but I don’t want the aliens knowing that. Worse still, what if it had been a really insipid Best Classical Album in the World Ever!-type compilation? Good music, sure, but how boring. The whole thing could have been absolutely strangled by committee, or could have become sponsored and commercialised, turned into little more than a record-label advertisement or back-catalogue sampler. As it is, we ended up with this multifaceted cultural artefact. A mixtape where a 2,500-year-old Chinese refrain plays alongside Japanese flute, where Peruvian panpipes vie with Navajo chants, an Indian raga and a Cavatina pluck at our heartstrings, where Mexican mariachis duke it out with a 1920s Chicago seven-piece, where the sounds of youthful euphoria rise from the Ituri Rainforest and the strings of Chuck Berry’s guitar, all the while rubbing shoulders with Bach, Beethoven, Holborne, Mozart and Stravinsky.

  ‘A lesser person – you see this all the time – would have instinctively gone to appointing a NASA committee in which the majority of the votes would have been NASA staffers,’ says Tim. ‘And I’ve served on some of those committees and they do get certain things done, but they would have been disastrous for something like this. So I think Carl’s genius was to keep it within a small group where we could really do creative work, and not have to try to fit everything into some 11-dimensional social matrix that might or might not have offended anyone … NASA was scared to death of any kind of criticism coming from any member of particularly the House or Senate. I mean, just to the point you would describe them as clinically paranoid on that subject. So they would have endlessly been tiptoeing around, saying, “what would so-and-so think?” and “shouldn’t we be doing this?” And we did hear some yappings like that in the distance, but I think we really got a good record because of the way we did it. It was a bottom-up matter of inspiration and intellect on the part of everyone involved. I don’t mean that you couldn’t have selected a dozen other people similarly who would have done just as well or better. But I do think it was brilliant not to get into some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. It is very hard to get creative work out of that … as any architect will tell you.’

  I spoke to as many of the record team as I could when researching this book,8 and it felt like there were areas of tension over ownership of the record – who was responsible for what. Talking to Ann, Frank, Jon and Tim, it felt at times like talking to proud parents, each with strong views about their child. And, as any parent knows, the person you can sometimes find most irritating in all the world when discussing your offspring is the other parent. Views differ on how things came about, on who was responsible for certain things at certain times. People remember things very differently.

  ‘No, actually, she was with me when she lost her first tooth. Remember? It was while we were roasting marshmallows.’

  ‘No, that was her second tooth.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘Wasn’t.’

  ‘Was.’

  So there’s some Rashomon effect at play here. At the same time, though, there’s plenty of mutual respect, with an acknowledgement from all parties that everyone involved worked hard, did their best and contributed positively to a project that came out well. Let’s just say that they don’t often get together and go bowling. Which is a pity. I’d really like it if they occasionally got together and went bowling.

  ***

  One of the great frustrations for the record committee was that earthlings never got to hear this music for aliens. Today you can very quickly find audio files in varying degrees of quality online, through the JPL Voyager mission archive or NASA’s own Soundcloud channel. But that’s only been possible relatively recently. For years, the possibility of an Earth-released Voyager record languished in development hell. For decades the only way you could hear the music on the record was by reading Murmurs of Earth and tracking down your own copy of the original songs – assuming they existed on vinyl, which many did not.

  It was never given a proper commercial release, despite Carl’s best efforts. There were a number of factors: rights issues, confusion,9 intransigence, lack of effort. Jon remembers being accosted by one high-school music teacher who said: ‘I demand to see a copy. It is my right as an earthling!’ There was eventually a CD-Rom version, which came with a reissued edition of Murmurs of Earth in 1992 (made by Warner New Media, with guidance from Frank and Jon), but that wasn’t really satisfactory.

  David Pescovitz, a former student of Tim Ferris, was batting around ideas with his friend and record store owner Tim Daly. They were searching for something they could work on together, when they discovered their shared fascination with the Golden Record. So David approached Tim Ferris, asking if he would endorse a first proper reissue of the Golden Record in time for the Voyagers 40th birthday. Tim gave the project his blessing, but under two conditions: it had to be the entire record, and they had to source it from the original masters. He wasn’t going to get behind anything half-arsed.

  David and Tim Daly formed Ozma Records (named in honour of Frank’s famous experiment). They spent almost two years clearing all the rights, trying to track down the stories of some of the indigenous music, correcting errors and filling the numerous gaps. Having recruited Lawrence Azerrad, they mocked up their design for a proposed triple-LP set of golden-hued vinyl, featuring all the music and sounds, plus a companion book with all of the record’s photos and other ephemera, and launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2016.

  The crowdfunding effort went live on a Tuesday. By Thursday they had already surpassed the $198,000 funding target, after seven days had topped $650,000 with more than 5,000 backers, and by the end raised nearly $1.4 million.

  During the course of the project they tracked down original musicians, sending letters and paying royalties, they donned white gloves to hold the original lacquers at JPL archives, they followed Lomax paper trails at the Library of Congress, they met with Frank to take new scans of old diagrams. They were painstaking and obsessive and treated the record and everyone involved with it, or recorded on it, with an infectious reverence. Speaking about it in late 2017, David said one of the things he and Tim Daly were most proud of was their corrected tracklist. Then in January 2018, at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden, all this work was rewarded with the ‘best boxed or limited-edition package’ award.

  The Ozma reissue records, just as Tim Ferris had hoped, were based on the original CBS studio masters. After the lacquers had been cut by Vlado back in 1977, CBS Records (now Sony) had deposited the original master tapes in a climate-controlled underground warehouse where they sat, untouched, for 40 years (the 1992 reissue was based on a domestic reel-to-reel copy). Then Tim and the Ozma team gathered at Sony’s Battery Mastering Studios in New York City. An engineer named Vic Anesini – who had just baked the old reels to temporarily prevent the iron oxide from shedding off the backing – pressed play. David called the sound ‘breathtaking’. Tim called it a relief: ‘A great relief because we didn’t know whether the tape was going to survive – with analogue tape any problems loom really large. If you lose half a second of analogue tap
e you’ve got a problem. None of those problems emerged. The engineer initially was starting and stopping the tape and logging each track. I pretty quickly asked him to stop doing that because I just wasn’t even sure I trusted the backing not to snap. But it sounded terrific.’

  There was another interesting little coda from the Ozma story. During the publicity push, a man named Ron Barry approached David. He said he had experience in video encoding, and asked David if he would send him the audio readout of the Voyager photographs so he could try decoding them using only the instructions on the case. David sent him a digital file of the audio, taken from the original master tapes. What happened next can be seen on YouTube, in a mysterious, multi-framed video where the rasping white noise of the picture sequence soundtracks the ghostly appearance of each image in turn, shown in real time as they appear simultaneously via the right and left channel.

  ‘I was very interested,’ says Tim, ‘because … we had tested this technology early going into the record. Then there had been a test on the outside, of the data coming out. And I never felt that the images had been decoded properly. I felt they were encoded properly, but I didn’t think the decode test was correct. To my eye we should have had about 30 decibels better signal than we were seeing. But this guy came back, and they looked great. It was fantastic. It was indeed the readout that was in error back then, not the record itself. The photos on the record look amazing.’10

  ***

  So, what happened next? Tim met the future Carolyn Zecca Ferris in 1979. They were married in 1985. She had two children from a previous marriage, Francesa and Alex, and together they have a son named Patrick. They live in North Beach, San Francisco, and Rocky Hill Farm where they built an observatory in 1993. Tim has authored 12 books, from The Red Limit (1977) and Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988), which won the American Institute of Physics Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer, to The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997). He’s made documentaries The Creation of the Universe in 1985 and Life Beyond Earth in 1999 (which ended with the dedication ‘For Carl Sagan’), and more recently has written, produced and narrated Seeing in the Dark in 2007. The latter closes with the sound of Mark Knopfler playing ‘Dark Was the Night’ on a 1932 National steel guitar.

  Tim would go on to teach at Brooklyn College, the University of Southern California, California Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley (where David Pescovitz was one of his students). He also nearly went to space as a finalist in the 1986 NASA Journalist in Space programme, which was suspended after the Challenger crash.

  Speaking to Jon in 2017, he described how he still sometimes feels like he’s back in the room at Cornell’s Space Sciences Building, searching for the perfect image: ‘I could not find a good picture of a campfire. People sitting around the campfire playing music, cooking marshmallows, talking, laughing … couldn’t find one. Then of course a week after launch I found the perfect one. For years afterwards, right up until recently, I’d be looking through a book or something and I’d see a picture and think: “Boy, that would have been perfect. Where were you when I needed you?”’

  Jon continued collaborating with Carl for the next 20 years, illustrating books, working on the Cosmos series, designing the original sailing-ship logo for the Planetary Society that Carl founded in 1980, and working on the film version of Contact. He’s settled in Hawaii with his wife and two children. He’s had an asteroid named after him and created ‘Galaxy Garden’ (the Milky Way mapped in plants and flowers, at Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary in Kona, Hawaii). He created numerous artworks for NASA, he co-designed the ‘MarsDials’ artefacts – sundials placed on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers inscribed with the words ‘Two worlds, One sun’ – and created time-capsule-like messages for future Mars explorers in the ‘Visions of Mars’ CD-ROM/DVDs placed aboard Phoenix, which landed on Mars in 2008.

  When I spoke to him, a Kickstarter campaign he launched had just failed to reach its funding target. Jon had sought to recapture some of the Voyager magic, this time crowdsourcing images from people all over the planet and using them to form the basis of a new digital message to the cosmos that he hoped would be remotely uploaded to the New Horizons spacecraft (which had gone without any kind of message).

  ‘I think we’ve lost faith in the future,’ he says. ‘I think we’re afraid of the future. I think the future has become much more dystopian. I think that, for all the risk of thermonuclear war in 1977, people were more optimistic and positive. We were going to go to this wonderful Star Trek future of global harmony and interstellar exploration. And then the future became Terminator and zombie apocalypse and terrible plague and computers taking over and … I mean, every future is worse than the other. So I think we’re in a very sick culture. And I think we’re in a culture that has a very pessimistic view of itself and of the future. I view the response I’ve been getting to this project as being a symptom of that. Maybe that moment of history and that small group of people were just some unique never-to-be-repeated moment that allowed humanity to do something like that. But I don’t think we’re going to do it again. I see no signs of us doing it again. I mean, we could have done it again and didn’t. They didn’t put something on New Horizons and if they don’t go for the current project I’m pushing, and there’s no real indication that they will … Either you let the fifth spacecraft to leave the solar system go with a message or without it. That’s your binary choice. And so far they’re choosing to leave without it. And what does that say?’

  Jon was such a positive force on the Voyager record, it seems a pity to say goodbye to him on a downer. So instead I’m going to quote a paragraph from the unpublished manuscript he was kind enough to share with me. Let’s leave him in better spirits.

  ‘One of my strongest recollections of the process was how well the team worked together. I think we were all a little intimidated by what we were trying to do, and that tempered the giddiness of the emotions. In a sense humility grounded us, something very necessary when you are reaching higher and farther than anyone has ever done before. People had strong opinions, but nobody was dogmatic about them. There was a sense of great responsibility, jointly borne. Carl was on the phone dealing with NASA; Frank was converting the periods of the planets into binary multiples of the wavelength of hydrogen; I was sifting through piles of National Geographics looking for a farm scene; Eck was shooting slides of photos I had already found; Tim and Ann were in Washington searching out the sound of freight trains; Linda was trying to track down someone who could say ‘hello’ in Swahili; George and Val were on the roof photographing the Sun’s spectrum; Amahl, Wendy, Ros and Shirley were keeping everything organised. Whatever dissensions and dramas later split some of the team members from enjoying amicable relations with one another, while we made the record we worked together superbly. I hope the men and women who craft future interstellar messages are as lucky as I was in their choice of teammates and leaders, with whom I am proud to be cruising through space until the end of time.’

  ***

  After suffering from myelodysplasia for two years, Carl Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. It was the morning of 20 December 1996.

  In 2006 Ann Druyan wrote an article entitled ‘Ten Times Around the Sun Without Carl’. She writes about what her life with Carl was like. She recalls the ‘exquisite June day’ on the Circle Line boat, just days after declaring their love for each other, planning out their future, looking back at him as they disembarked, a dazzling smile across his face as he throws a sweater in the air in exultation. She describes a man who would always stand up and shake the hands of fans who approached them when they were eating in restaurants. She writes about driving around the Ithaca countryside in Carl’s orange Porsche, seven-year-old Nick in the back. She describes Carl playing with their own children, Sasha and Sam, and a Y-shaped twig handed to Carl by toddler Sam, which Carl then carried with him for the rest of his life. The
eulogy, which you can read in full at anndruyan.typepad.com, ends with an acknowledgment of the gulf in distance and time, of ‘ten long trips’ around the sun since she last saw Carl’s smile, but also with the sense of celebration at the life they shared.

  Carl and Ann were married in June 1981 at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Shirley Arden was the matron of honour. Carl wore a pale suit with a dark tie, Ann dressed in traditional white with plenty of frills. As she walked down the aisle to marry Carl, a string quartet played the Cavatina. They lived in California for two years during the production of Cosmos in the late 1970s into the early 1980s, but most of the time their home was Ithaca.

  They were never really apart after that. Sagan was profiled in The People in 1980. At that time he was basking in the afterglow of the records set by Cosmos,11 the spin-off book had entered the New York Times bestseller lists at number one, and they were working on a treatment for the story that would eventually become Contact. Carl was 46, Ann was 31 and they were described here as ‘inseparable’. At one point Carl is quoted saying that before he met Annie, he thought love was hype, designed to sell movie magazines to teenagers.

  Their appreciation for each other was tempered by a near-fatal illness to Carl following appendicitis in March 1983, which led to massive internal haemorrhaging and 10 hours of surgery. In the same year, Carl made multiple television appearances arguing for a freeze in the number of nuclear warheads in America. Biographers talk about the aforementioned ‘Annie effect’, and certainly she not only steered Carl towards public campaigning on issues about which they both felt strongly, but she also helped him build bridges with his children from previous marriages.