Monday October 11, 2004

Close Encounter

While I’m quick to admit that the early days of fall leave me prone to overeating, over-napping, and being overly moved by moments of ridiculous beauty, I thought I’d share a highlight from the Little Gray Book Lecture that took place this weekend in a recording studio at the end of a blind alley in South Philadelphia.

The topic of the lecture was “How to Communicate Without the Use of Wires.” To this end, Paul Tough’s piece — about his father’s obsession with contacting alien life forms — concluded with what was billed in advance as “the creepy radio trick.” The story concerned, in part, the exploits of Albert K. Bender, pioneer of World Contact Day. The first World Contact Day took place on March 15, 1953, when Bender asked his associates in the flying saucer community to attempt to telepathically communicate with nearby aliens by silently reciting a scripted message that began, “Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!” The entire message became the basis of a song that The Carpenters recorded for their 1977 Passage album.

Saturday’s “radio trick” consisted of passing out a dozen transistor radios to the audience, all tuned to a frequency broadcasting LGB musical director Jonathan Coulton as he played an acoustic rendition of the song from the stage. The effect was creepy, but it was also sublime. As soon as I got back to New York, I started researching the song.

Hardcore hipsters and music heads are surely way ahead of me on this, but “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” certainly strikes the casual fan as a strange song for The Carpenters to have recorded. The pair did not write the song, however. That distinction belongs to Klaatu, a Canadian prog outfit that released the song in 1976. The band takes its name, of course, from the alien protagonist of The Day the Earth Stood Still. And if The Carpenters’ recording of the song wasn’t strange enough, note that the human name Klaatu choses for himself in TDTESS is “Carpenter.”

Anyway, The Carpenters’ version — which is in fact amazing, except for the campy intro in which aliens dial in to talk to a radio deejay — sticks very close to the original, which you can download at www.klaatu.org. Other renditions I’ve found include one by the schoolchildren of the The Langley Schools Music Project and one by Babes in Toyland off the tribute album If I Were a Carpenter, although that’s a rock version that basically dispels all of the song’s psychedlic, quasi-religious weirdness. All this to say that, yes, that was in fact one beautifully creepy radio trick.