Perhaps Chuck Berry’s most curious accolade is the inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” on humanity’s mixtape for extraterrestrials. His signature song was etched onto the Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph embedded with 90 minutes of music (as well as human sounds and images) meant to represent our humble species. Forty years ago, the record was affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, currently almost13 billion miles from our pale blue dot, and sent hurtling through the solar system at nearly 38,000 miles per hour; an identical record also resides on the Voyager II vessel, trailing2.2 billion miles behind.
For this cosmic tour, Berry can thank Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project. Despite protestations from Congress about the project being frivolous, Druyan curated the record ahead of the Voyager launches in the summer of 1977, alongside famed astronomer Carl Sagan, journalist and producer Timothy Ferris, and a small group of other scientists and musicologists. Over the course of about four months, they decided on what was, in the most literal sense, the first “world music” album: a compilation that could theoretically communicate our humanity whole. They braided Berry together with performances of Peruvian panpipes, Indonesian gamelan, Chinese zither, Western classical music (Bach’s “The Well Tempered Clavier,” Beethoven’s “Cavatina” from “String Quartet No. 13”), blues (Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"), and jazz (Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven’s “Melancholy Blues”). The disc also includes sounds of earth, from whale songs to babies crying, as well as photos of our humble planet. The most romantic inclusion: an hour of Druyan’s brainwaves, recorded as she thought about the history of Earth and her burgeoning love for Sagan, whom she would marry after the project and remain with until his death in 1996.
“We knew at the time we were making the Voyager Record that we were engaged in a mythic enterprise,” says Druyan, now 67. “The idea of being able to create this Noah's Ark of human culture and experience and feeling, and then pair that with the ingenious exploratory ambition of the Voyager mission: That was the exquisite embodiment of who Carl Sagan was, that place where our best science and high technology meets the deepest parts of our souls.”
Potential ETs aside, the Golden Record has gone largely unheard over the past four decades; Sagan released aCD-ROM and booklet in 1992 (now out of print), and anunofficial website hosts the record’s music intermittently. (Much like UFOs, it seems to crash often.) Despite being popular enough to beparodied on “SNL,” even Sagan and Druyan were reportednot to own a copy. However, this 40th anniversary year has brought renewed interest in the project: aKickstarter campaign raised over $1.3 million to release the music in a lavish triple-album box set (with gold-colored vinyl, naturally). Sagan’s grandson, the producer Tonio Sagan, has also launched an ambitious remix project comprised entirely of sounds from the records; the first release, “Greetings,” inverts snippets of Morse code, didgeridoo, and rain from the Golden Record into a lovely, trip-hop wash.
In approximately40,000 years, Voyager I will approach the next closest star system, at which point the original Golden Record may get its first listeners; if not, it seems likely to reach someone (or something) eventually, considering the record can survive in outer space forup to a billion years. The Emmy- and Peabody-winning author/producer Druyan is revisiting it, too, viaa biopic on Saganand their love story that she is currently producing. She spoke to Pitchfork about the Golden Record’s legacy, her love of Beethoven and Bob Marley, and turning down the Beatles’ hefty price tag.
Pitchfork: In the 40 years since the Golden Record's release, have you heard it? Do you have a copy?
Ann Druyan: Yes, I have actually the reel-to-reel master of the record, which was given to Carl. I'm scared to say I haven't listened, but I've had it preserved and transferred.
There have been a bunch of different versions. For me, my favorite thing was [the free site]goldenrecord.org; that was truest, in my view, to the spirit of the Voyager Record. We managed to get 27 pieces of music for the record, and we were only able to pay the artists and the copyright holders two cents per copy for the two spacecrafts for universal rights or rather, galactic rights.
There really is no money in music anymore.
Most everyone, including the Beatles, were content with that meager royalty. Except the Beatles’ publishers, Northern Songs Ltd., said no—they wanted something like $50,000 a copy [for “Here Comes the Sun”], which we couldn't charge. That whole project had a budget of $18,000. We all were willing to do it for that, for no money at all, because we were touching such a distant future and such a different place in space, you know? A billion years is essentially four trips around the galaxy, around the Milky Way.
I'd love to hear a bit about the specifics of your creative involvement in the record. Which of your musical suggestions made the final record?
A lot of them. When Carl told us of this contact [with ETs], my first thought was of an experience in the early ’70s in Amsterdam. My good friend Jonathan Cott, who was one of the first editors of Rolling Stone, invited me to a friend's apartment on Herengracht Canal in Amsterdam. He wanted to play for me a rare copy ofthe Vegh Quartet playing Beethoven's “Cavatina” fromthe Late Quartet.
I remember hearing it and being overcome with a sense of helplessness that I could never repay Beethoven for what Beethoven gave me at that moment. I felt like the “Cavatina” captured a kind of human longing and even human hopefulness in the face of great sadness and great fear. I remember thinking, “What could I ever do for him?” So my very first thought was, “This is my big chance to pay Beethoven back.”
I found out later two things about this. One was that Beethoven had actually thought about this possibility, which really shocked me. He had written in the margin of one of his pieces, “What will they think of my music on the star of Urania?”—I think, thinking of Uranus, which is about the right time William Herschel discovered it. He actually wrote that. He was imagining how his music would be evaluated on other worlds. That was actually goosebump-raising. On the Late Quartet, on the “Cavatina” manuscript, he wrote “sehnsucht,” the German word for longing, and that affected me deeply because that was at the heart of the Voyager record: longing for peace and longing to make contact with the cosmos.
It’s beautiful that it could foster a dialogue, in a way, between you and Beethoven.
That's so true. It was like, “Finally.” You could actually respond across time, even to those long dead, as well as beings of future times and worlds. That was thrilling. I very much wanted Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Louis Armstrong because I felt that was where Africa and Europe really met and profoundly influenced music. I felt Chuck Berry had to be on the record and “Johnny B. Goode,” particularly, because I felt it was like a great American novel. Chuck Berry's genius guitar riff was one reason he was a peerless figure, but he’s as great a poet as he is a virtuoso, musician, and composer. Also there's that phrase in “Johnny B. Goode,” “strumming to the rhythm that the drivers made.” The sound of locomotive driving melody: it made you feel like you were moving at 40,000 miles an hour, the American joy of blasting music and driving your car on an empty highway as fast as you could. At every meeting about the music on Voyager, I would say, “Chuck Berry, ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” and people didn't get it. Even Carl didn't get it at first. I'm very proud of the fact that I wouldn't give up.
In the case of Blind Willie Johnson, the idea was [partially symbolic], that Blind Willie Johnson died from lack of shelter. He died of exposure because he was that poor and uncared for; it was just him and his wife and his ruthless church, this broken-down church. Just to think of him as, obviously, a genius who was so unappreciated that he couldn't even make a living enough to protect himself to come in out of the rain. What a predicament on this planet, and yet here was this piece of music, “Dark Was the Night”—which I loved because it's just a moan. There are no words so it's transcended immediately in any of the limitation of the differences of human languages and the languages maybe used to communicate anywhere else in the cosmos. It was pure, universal feeling, and it was a planet-wide feeling. I was absolutely adamant about that.
I was asked on CNN, many years ago, “If you could add one song, what would it be?” I immediately said it would be Bob Marley's “No Woman, No Cry,” and that that meant so much to me. It just happened that Rita Marley was on treadmill watching CNN and she said, "I want her to speak at Bob's 55th birthday celebration in Kingston, and so she invited me, which was a complete head-snap for me, because I just adore reggae and Bob Marley most of all… I've listened to it 10,000 times and I still find new things in it. That was one of the hoped-for things on the record: that you could listen to it again and still, 40 years later, be discovering something new in it.
Do you ever ponder the location of the record at the moment, where in space it is now?
I do, every night. I think about it all the time. I'm one of the lucky people on Earth who actually has one of the original Golden Covers, and I look at it every night. I try to imagine in my mind, because I know that both Voyager spacecrafts are as real as we are, and they are somewhere moving. I tried to convey that inCosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey[which Druyan executive-produced, directed, and wrote], not only where the Voyager has been but where Voyager is bound for. I imagine tiny little particles of interstellar space and the cosmic rays battering her hull, and yet, still, she bravely moves forward. I can't resist the impulse to anthropomorphize Voyager because she really feels like a child of our lives, of our love for each other. I've visualized countless times imaginary intercepts by the punitive extraterrestrials of my fantasies and what they would make of it and what it would be like, but also just the idea of 40 years, wandering in the night: It has a kind of biblical echo of wandering in the desert for 40 years…
I can honestly say there hasn't been a day since August 20th, 1977, that I haven’t felt a profound sense of humility to be part of this, to have my thoughts and feelings preserved for the closest thing to eternity that we ever get to touch. And then to realize that this, the creative leap that we took from Voyager, happened in the context of the unfolding love that Carl Sagan and I had for each other. It's just too much. Why would I be so lucky?