Star Trek, the Last Voyage

In 1976, just at the end of their first season, the cast did an extended Star Trek skit which few people will remember. It’s remarkable in multiple ways. First, of course, it features John Belushi as Captain Kirk, with Chevy Chase as Spock and Dan Aykroyd playing McCoy. Given that, we know we’ve got great talent on the stage.

 

The first thing that’s so striking is the combination of their age and weight. Both Aykroyd and Belushi were relatively svelte in contrast to the way they both overindulged over the ensuing seasons. And the audience is appreciative but hardly wild about their entrances on set. It’s just the first season, after all.

Then comes the skit itself, clocking in at 12 minutes in length – wonderfully over-written! And evocative of a different era when long dialog and single camera shots were the norm. This whole thing would’ve been a tight 5:30 had it run even ten years ago.

What we get, though, is a very apparent set of building blocks that become the bones of those SNL years. Belushi has somehow rallied himself into clear enough consciousness to do a bang-up job impersonating William Shatner, complete with the intensity, over-enunciation and attitude, blowing through a hugely wordy script in a single, fluid take with nary a flub.

Chevy is truly funny as Spock and Aykroyd struts his deadpan attitude with doctoral style. And it’s wonderful watching them work together, with our advance knowledge of their future careers arcs. Chase will leave for big screen shenanigans. Akyroyd will partner with Belushi for the Blues Brothers and the HOUSE of Blues and Belushi will, sadly and shockingly, go out in a drug overdose his cohorts must have feared, at the peak of his short career.

As to the skit, no story spoilers here. Just an appreciation of some of the earliest iterations of the extraordinary SNL juggernaut. Enjoy!

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War of the Worlds

No, not red vs blue, think bigger! In 1898 HG Wells, one of the founding fathers of the Sci-Fi genre “gifted” us with some incredibly imaginative thinking about an alien invasion, bringing a whole new (ahem) alien concept into sharp focus and leaving us howling at whatever planet suited our fancy.

It took the genius of Orson Wells to turn that story into a radio drama in 1939, when his troop of players, the Mercury Theater, performed a live version of it on the air. This time, it was far more realistic. Using cutting edge tech – radio broadcast – and cutting edge techniques – sound effects, live orchestra, inspired performances – he simulated an invasion of Earth by wicked, up-to-no-good Martian invaders, whose advanced weaponry promptly flattened our puny defenses, dispatching with great swaths of humanity, as on-scene reporters, bystanders and military brass helplessly intoned the bad news in real time. 

One of the coolest concepts that gave the show a more believable bent was to use a small live orchestra, whose job was to play insipid dance music, simulating a normal evening radio broadcast, only to be repeatedly interrupted with breathless reports uttering “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this special bulletin” or even more convincing: “We now return to our program of evening music…” at which point the (really awful) dance music midst would be cut back into.

The effect was electrifying, so much so that it caused actual panic in the streets, with people spilling out of their homes, armed with guns and pitchforks. Heady stuff.

Now comes the latest iteration of the show (which was redone as  2005 Spielberg feature with Tom Cruise), a War of the Worlds OPERA (!) staged by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, based on the Mercury Theater broadcast, based on the book. The company has gone so far as to schedule not only the premier performance at Disney Hall in downtown LA, but a simulcast at three additional yet-to-be-announced outdoor public spaces, where a live actor will take to a makeshift stage and perform along with the live show. This will be done via loudspeakers mounted on poles built to hold the original 50-year old air raid sirens that were installed back in the days of the Red Scare. Quaint!

Just bought tickets (including the $14 per ticket convenience charge) and can’t wait to go next week. Stay tuned for broadcast interruptions.

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Where was the future in the year 1700?

From all the info I can gather, science fiction got its more or less official start in the early 1800’s with the appearance of one Dr. Frankenstein. Written by Mary Shelly in 1811, it basically crowned her the Mother of Science Fiction. Try smoking that one, guys…

But prior to that, we have a distinct lack of evidence of anything quite so fanciful and a big part of the reason is, in my mind at least, for lack of things electric. Oh, there were drawings from Galileo – fantastical ones – and a great TV series based on his life as well. But story telling? Not so much. You need to have some basic understanding of possibility in order to dream in scifi and without having any clear concept of propulsion, for instance, how are you gonna get there?

It looks like it may have taken the industrial revolution to get the wheels turning, from laying powerful railroad systems around the world, to great migrations into the cities, factories, efficiency, suffering and overcrowding – the kinds of concepts that might have been quite different in the 1700’s, when the world was still tilted towards agrarian. 

What did your average peasant think about space travel, robotics, reanimation and ray guns? I think religion must have had a huge impact on the way we ALL thought about things in the 1600’s. Religion was the answer for questions unanswered, the purview of the wisest and most powerful figures and a convenient way of explaining unexplainable phenomena.

And strict interpretation and god-fearing belief was undoubtedly the most acceptable, politically correct and life-affirming path to take. You want to take a stroll down that corridor to the suite of rooms we keep for trouble-makers downstairs, do ya? I didn’t think so. Any more questions, my son?

Given the baseline of info we own, it’s easy to teleport into the next galaxy for a 10-year old. Were kids thinking about star-hoping in the middle ages? I’d love to be able to ask ‘em.

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The Future of the Future

How lame is our current culture going to look to someone exploring it a hundred years from now? You could start by considering life in 1917, as American was embroiled in World War 1. There’s a scary thought. Will someone be writing “You could start by considering life in 2017 as America was embroiled in WW3.” Yikes…

Let’s figure on that not being our history and how about another bite of that nice fresh-baked brownie you got at the dispensary?

OK: 1917. Candlestick phones, Model T’s, women’s suffrage, bowler hats and new-fangled typewriters. Quaint, but relatable. Which is to say in the hundred years between now and then, we progressed faster than a speeding freakin’ bullet, going from 17 mph to 17K mph and developing technology absolutely and unimaginably magical. How much of what we are today could a smart reader like yourself have figured on back then? Commuter jets? Gay marriage? Pop Tarts? VR? Chuckie Cheese? Rock ‘n’ Roll??

So the Q that keeps rattlin’ around in my head is if that much happened in the trailing 100, what can we expect in the Next? And let’s consider Moore’s law and apply it to the future of everything. Which is to say we’re evolving SO much faster than we ever have, the amount of general information in the world has gone from doubling every thousand years to every hundred, every 50, every ten, five and yes, one or two, now. Doubling.

And at that rate, we, each and every one of us, brainiacs all, are gonna be equally gob-smacked with what happens in the Next hundred, because we can only guess at where they’ll take us. Or our kids, at least. Who’ll likely live well into their hundreds and vaguely remember gramma n gramps giving ‘em bitcoin to go out and buy some toy levitation shoes.

Quaint.

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We’re All Voice-Over Stars

I’ve been involved in the VO world for decades and have watched it change dramatically, then become commercially disrupted and change again, then socially and change again.

In the entirely different world of the 1960’s and 70’s voice-over artists were a neat little boutique extension of the entertainment business, who worked mostly out of three cites: New York (by far the largest market), Chicago and LA. 

To be a VO talent was to be represented by a union talent agency and be a card-carrying SAG and AFTRA member. Your agent brought you into their offices several times per week to record demos of radio and TV commercial copy, then the tape operator edited several auditions together onto a reel-to-reel tape and messengered it over to the advertising agency for review and hopefully, a booking.

There were stars in the voice-over world, quite different from any other types. They were only known to the agencies and each other and enjoyed both the faceless anonymity of being regular people in the outside world, but also made gobs of money with ongoing campaigns that could pay residuals as high as a quarter million per year, per campaign. Which, if you were really hot, could be one of a dozen you’d nabbed and could go on for years. I recently met the woman who played Charley Tuna’s girlfriend for Starkist Tuna, back in the 70’s. That gig netted a house and a college education for her kids.

By the 1980’s, voice-over got a suddenly glitzier with the advent of major TV and screen stars landing million-dollar contracts to become the voice of big and luxury brands. It gave the brand a sheen to be associated with a premier voice and it gave the VO business a deep and fearful shudder to see a significant portion of its rank and file actors being shunted aside for in the name of glamor.

By 2000, digital recording made it possible to record from casually constructed home recording setups, then submit via the internet to your agency, which would assemble a digital link to send off to the client, now anywhere on earth.

And by 2010, entirely digital agencies had established such an internet stronghold, that many traditional agencies dried up, replaced by direct-to-client business models via digital handshake, repeated thousands of times per day.

Today, with something like 500 hours of video getting posted online per minute, voiceover is anyone making a smartphone video and talking over the picture. It’s turned the cultural tonality of voice recording into a much more casual overall style and created dozens of sub-genres, ubiquitous on a web that seems second only to the infinitely expanding universe out there in space.

Where outer-worlders are undoubtedly listening.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind, post-screening follow-up

What an experience to see it present day. Had a pre-screening dinner in the towering LA Live section of downtown LA with 50 new friends, all brought together by Paul Hynek, son of the man who worked closely with Steve Spielberg to bring the original movie to light 40 years ago and who defined what the three phases of close encountership are: 1) sighting, 2) physical evidence and 3) contact.

Then into the cavernous theater for the 4K digital director's cut, which did not disappoint. Spielberg has always had a gift for capturing the American cultural zeitgeist of the moment on the screen, lingering over families and especially kids. While scenes were much longer then than now (who has time to watch people talk at dinner?) one of the reminders that we get when we watch something decades old is how it preserves the former age of people we know now as old or ancient.

Richard Dreyfuss as a virtual kid, with the reckless energy to match, not to mention that this was Spielberg’s, what, third feature film? How insane is that on the genius scale? And how in hell did anyone get along without hiding their phone under the dinner table for continuing updates on whatever? Eh, whatever.

What really resonated was the final third of the film, as Dreyfuss hones in on the secret governmental operation on the mountain plateau in Wyoming, where an enormous temporary landing strip has been assembled by a devoted corps of engineers and scientists, preparing for the greatest moment in modern Earth history. Which happens and does not disappoint.

The aliens throw a half dozen gorgeous little scout ships around just to bedazzle, which apparently signal the mother ship all's well, clearing the space for the landing of this giant vessel that handles gravity like it was a raindrop, then disgorges a group of air force crews it had scooped up 30 years prior, ostensibly for benign probing (everybody seems dazed but in perfect health) before beckoning a replacement crop of volunteers to join the friendly naked-looking aliens motioning them to walk up the gangway. Which, you may remember, includes a blinking, grinning, mind-blown Richard Dreyfuss, who has been summarily written off as certifiable by his clueless earthbound family, anyway, so what's to lose? This is what he was born for.  

It was a religious experience for me in 1977. And while time changes everything, it still left me buoyed and otherwise uplifted the other night. That scene, that visitation. Have we already experienced it? Are we simply descendants of a race that touched down a million years ago and dropped off the building block DNA to get us started? And if not, why not? And why haven't they made themselves more known if they have the tech to get here?

We'll never know. Until we know.

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Keepin' Up With the Jetsons

What's it gonna be like to run with the fast crowd in the year 2400? Will we still be waiting at rope lines to get into the coolest zero-grav clubs? Dropping big bucks on magnums of GoThereJuice and sporting the latest pomp-doos?

I wrote this song to give myself a little tour of what money could buy 383 years out. Or whatever money's called by then. Maybe retinal scans will be so retro you'll just need to think’n’pay... Jet packs, vacation planets, fetching androids, textured ultra-beats, flying cars! Oh, it's ALL comin' baby. 

The twist in the song is about being able to AFFORD it. You think you can join in on a piddling salary? Honey, if you have to ask... So my avatar in this one is bound and determined to be a playa, even though he has no business being there. His FOMO runs so deep, he's about run through his second mortgage hangin' in, and those beautiful people he's running with? Every now and then one whispers to another: Wait, WHO'S this guy again?

You know the type, the sad wanna-be who's just so doggone determined, he'd be cute if it weren't for how hard he was trying to be someone else. Give the dude a nod for tryin', but without the scratch (or whatever slang it'll be then) it ain't gonna happen. With this crowd? You gotta be bad, beautiful or filthy rich -- pick three.

But thanks for playin' our game, and damn, look’it the time. Gotta jet!

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Carl's Gold Record

Hey, it's the anniversary of the Golden Record -- the one that Carl Sagan lovingly assembled and pasted to the side of Voyager 1, sending it off into space for parts unknown.

What do you put on a record meant for curious aliens to grok centuries from now? A little rock  'n' roll, fer sure: Johnny B. Goode. A little Mozart, some Beethoven, Navajo dances, Indian dances (chill: from INDIA), etc, etc.

So, in forty years, Voyager has managed to travel 13 billion miles but likely won't find a listener for another 38,000 years or so. That's the problem with traveling at a mere 18K per hr when your nearest sentient neighbors likely live in another galaxy.

More likely, we'll have figured out how to travel at Warp 9 or Warp 999 by then, and maybe go after the thing, scoop it up and hand deliver it as a sign of good will to the giant warlords of Planet Plaxton, with super powers so far beyond our own, it'll be a nervous bribe to buy another period of relative peace at their hands.

Uncle Carl put a lot of research and thought into that record, replete with an unblushing illustration of two nicely-endowed naked humans, a diamond stylus to play the record and instructions on how to do so. As if the Plaxtonians needed that.

But how cool to attempt to sum up our earthly sonic culture in one collection of recordings, with barely 75 years of content to choose from. Imagine how much richer the experience would be now if we'd included some Miley, Garth and Kendrick. In fact, if we'd wanted everyone to just leave us ALONE, I can think of a trove of recordings that just might do the trick…

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Voices

My career has been a winding road of artistry and entrepreneurship-by-necessity. Fortunately, I've been able to make left-brain choices that closely supported right. Early on, I realized that working from home offered the great advantage of time and convenience and by my junior year in college, I had my first little 2-track tape studio set up in a corner of the bedroom. It was a cool-looking 7" reel-to-reel Sony tape deck with professional-size VU meters whose needles danced to every wave my Shure 565 picked up. Finished in silver and black, I was like a kid with his first bike.

It was a three-head machine, which meant there were three magnetized 1/2" little blocks the tape dragged across, spaced a quarter inch apart. When chosen, the first head erased the previous recording, the second recorded and the third played it back.  This was a big deal, because it meant you could set it to monitor both recording and playback over headphones or speakers. And because the tape was travelling at a fixed 7 1/2" inches per second, the delay from record to playback caused an echo that could then be repeated over and over, until it faded out, replaced by the next sound.

You could sing "Your love is fading" and instantly get FADING, Fading, fading, fading... And brotha, with some mind-altering substance in your brain enhancing that headphone experience, ooooo, time stood still.

I had a flute that sounded like a soaring bird with that echo effect turned on. Vocals could almost be doubled live, which was both thrilling and confusing. It's weird trying to sing something new while the line you sang a second ago still echoes in high fidelity in your ears. Weird and totally cool.

I was playing in a popular local band call the Ramrods at the time and we often drove off in a giant Ford station wagon pulling a trailer full of equipment, going out for a weekend in some distant part of New England. Returning late eve one Sunday, contemplating the classes I was gonna skip in the morning, I arrived to find my front door gone -- replaced with a new one --a bit disorienting -- along with a note from my landlord explaining that my old door had been literally smashed to bits by persons unknown, who had then ransacked and robbed the place.  In their haste, they'd grabbed some loose cash, wrenched a window air conditioner loose, taken a sax in its case and disappeared. I ran straight towards the corner with Sony, which I'd installed in a recessed bookcase so it was flush with the wall. They'd moved right past it, distracted by my more accessible goods – which bounced me back and forth between murderous anger and eye-blinking relief. That memory still evokes the angst of the moment and nostalgia for the simplicity of just laying down a live track in real time and blissfully leaving it at that.    

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