Picking the music was an impossible challenge. The team argued, smoked dope and scoured record stores. The Vinyl Frontier explores how the songs and images that headed to space aboard two ’70s probes were selected
In the ’70s, earthlings used the Voyager probes to send a gold-plated ‘mixtape’ into space for alien ears
Spinning though space, 10 billion miles from Earth, NASA’s two Voyager probes are still beaming messages back to the planet they left more than four decades ago. They carry messages from us, too, in the form of two gold-plated records loaded with music, sounds and pictures, designed to describe our world to any intercepting extra terrestrials. If the existence of advanced alien civilization feels unlikely, then the idea of interstellar hipsters whose spaceships come retrofitted with compatible record players is even more of a stretch. But the story of how those golden records were compiled offers a fascinating insight into how humanity sought to present itself to the universe in the late 1970s. Based on extensive interviews with all the surviving members of the Golden Record Team, music journalist Jonathan Scott’s first book bursts with gloriously geeky detail about the songs and images that made the final cut. Scott reminds us that the Voyager discs were not humanity’s first missives into space. NASA first sent up a simple plaque with the Pioneer probe in 1972. It features a simple star map and the outlines of two naked humans. Although the male figure’s genitalia was clearly defined, NASA insisted that the artist — Linda Salzman Sagan — erase the line she had drawn to indicate the female figure’s vulva. Conservative America may have been reaching for the stars, but it still wasn’t ready to acknowledge the contents of pantyhose. Five years later, Linda’s husband, astronomer Carl Sagan, was given the task of overseeing the creation of a 90-minute “interstellar mixtape” to place aboard both Voyager probes. Scott makes no bones about being a Sagan fanboy. He sketches a comic-book-cool portrait of “a magnetic character who loved conversation, a man who could flip between raconteur and attentive listener on a dime, a flirt who loved attention but backed that up with an astounding brain.” The Sagans “clicked” with two key collaborators for the mixtape project at a party Nora Ephron threw in the autumn of 1974. The creator of When Harry Met Sally... had also invited Tim Ferris, “cool as f---” New York bureau chief at Rolling Stone magazine and his writer girlfriend Ann Druyan. The two couples chatted about Trotsky, religion and baseball. Three years later — with the addition of astrophysicist Frank Drake and artist Jon Lomberg — this stellar gang would be wondering how to bring extra terrestrials into the conversation. Sagan’s team had just six weeks to select 90 minutes of music, 12 minutes of other sounds and 120 images. Choosing sounds and pictures proved more challenging than the team had expected. Listening through audio clip libraries, they were traumatized by recordings of explosions from the First World War, and quickly resolved to ditch the dark stuff and err on the side of laughter and whale song. Despite the censorship of the Pioneer plaque, they pushed to include details of human reproduction. Their disc includes a snapshot of human birth, taken in 1946. When Lomberg called the photographer, Wayne Miller, to seek permission, he got Wayne’s son David. It turned out he was speaking to the baby featured in the photograph on his desk, and David’s grandpa had been the obstetrician who delivered him. Picking the music — which eventually included everything from Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria through to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode to the Chinese song Liu Shui (Flowing Streams) — was an impossible challenge. The team argued, smoked dope and scoured record stores. Earnestly committed to featuring more than the Western canon, they called up ornery old ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Sagan said Lomax “brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipes and Peruvians play panpipes.” The discs featured no songs by either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Pop lore has it that NASA hoped to include Here Comes the Sun but the Fab Four turned them down. Allegedly, it was Apple Records that prevented George Harrison’s words from being flung beyond the horizon, when the suits demanded $50,000 per record. Scott shakes his head at the long list of political absurdities. The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was banned from the record because she sang for the Nazis, but by an ironic twist of fate, the first human to speak on the record was actually a former Nazi intelligence officer. UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim may have delivered a beautifully worded welcome to occupants of interplanetary craft, but in the 1980s he was found to have worked for the Third Reich. Meanwhile, then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter preferred to submit a written note to accompany the record, because he felt his southern U.S. accent might be an embarrassment to the planet. Scott’s conversational style makes him the kind of guide who explains how an Indian raga operates before telling us how Sagan’s team chose the one we sent into space. I took his advice and sought out the “spine-tingling” vocals of Surshri Kesarbai Kerkar and find myself cosmically grateful. He also prompted me to refresh my ears with the raw blues of Blind Willie Johnson, whose wordless Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground concludes the musical section of the record. “It’s a 3 a.m. death-comes-aknocking song,” writes Scott, perfect “to accompany two of the most remote, lonesome, human-made objects into the eternal dark.” This is a romantic book, with a genuine romance at its heart. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan fell in love during the project. But they waited until after the launch to tell their partners, Tim and Linda, heading boldly into their new life together without having so much as even kissed. Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996, aged just 62. But Scott has Druyan talking about the night they acknowledged their feelings for each other. Theirs was an age of dreams and optimism. But today Lomberg tells Scott “we’ve lost faith in the future. For all the risk of thermonuclear war in 1977, people were more positive.” More recent Earth spacecraft have left without messages for aliens. I don’t know if this makes us a saner or, as Lomberg says, a “sicker” society. It’s worth remembering that, back in 1995, Sagan said advances in science force “on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.” The messages he sent into space may never reach an alien audience, but we earthlings would do well to remember the message that he left for us.