*Track 18
Don’t Know When but a Day is Gonna Come - 10th January 2019
It appeared some of those reclusive occupants of interplanetary (“most extraordinary,”) craft might finally, four decades later, have decided to return Karen Carpenter’s calls.
Canadian astronomers had reported picking up a series of, “fast radio bursts,” in an unusual repeating, predictable pattern. Somewhat ambiguously for scientists they had declared a belief these were originating from, “somewhere unknown and extragalactic.” Electrical signals from deep space were apparently nothing new. Much like tuning a radio dial, back in an analogue age, picking up snatches of song within a sea of static, it had always been possible to find the odd burst as long as you happened to point your telescope in the right direction.
The difference this time though, the reason this story had made today’s news, was that astronomers had never previously (in Canada or anywhere else) managed to record signals that operated according to a set distribution and schedule. This newly discovered cycle of activity was being repeated every sixteen days, with, “a flurry of identical signals every hour or so for four days,” followed by, “twelve days of silence,” (which sounded a bit like a Christmas carol mashup). Stuart couldn’t help reflecting how this description made the potential messengers sound like the alien equivalents of oil rig workers, following a rigid ‘four days on, twelve days off’ work pattern.
The expert interviewed had been woolly regarding the origin of these radio bursts, his, “best supposition,” (surely a scientific smokescreen for a guess?) being that they had arrived from, “a massive spiral galaxy about five hundred million light years away,” which may at least explain why it had taken our aliens so long to get back to Karen!
The astronomer had then been even vaguer on what might be causing the signals, suggesting there may be, “an innocent explanation, like a star falling into a black hole,” (which hadn’t sounded that innocent to Stuart), but not entirely ruling out that they could be the result of, “alien civilisations sending us messages.”
It had been that final quote, casually thrown into the story, that had brought The Carpenters to mind. Stuart had always enjoyed the bizarre lyrical content of ‘Calling Occupants …’, a song which seemed to stand out like an atonal pimple on the duo’s otherwise flawless complexion of easy listening. There were few songs that made the ‘70s charts, beyond those fuelled by LSD, daring enough to propose our minds may be capable of transmitting abnormal thought energy.
A song so utterly, extra-terrestrially outlandish, yet performed by down to earth Carpenters, Stuart conjectured, must be enough to make Muse eat their hearts out. Yet having played it afterwards, on Spotify, to help substantiate his case, he had uncovered one simple, if previously unknown, reason why the song had always felt so anomalous. Karen and Richard’s ‘Calling Occupants …’ had never been an original, instead it was a cover of a song written and released by Klaatu a year earlier in 1976.
Klaatu had then rung a long silenced teenage bell in Stuart’s mind. Unable to dredge up a good explanation for this he resorted to Wikipedia, only to discover, in a neat juxtaposition with today’s astronomers, that they were a Canadian band who (unsurprisingly, given the subject of their famous song) had named themselves after the alien lead character from the 1951 sci-fi classic ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’.
This film was a none too subtle allegory for Cold War tensions, with Klaatu visiting Earth to deliver a warning, fearful of the way, “humanity has developed rockets and atomic power.” This alien emissary then makes Earth a sinister, nuanced offer on behalf of an interplanetary organisation, to, “join us to live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” As the plot unfolds ‘50s humanity pretty much flunk this test, although it would be hard to argue, Stuart thought, if Klaatu were to pay a return visit today that he would register much progress over the seventy intervening years.
Further down Klaatu’s Wikipedia entry Stuart had then spotted a section headed ‘Controversy’, and it was there that he had finally uncovered why a band he was fairly convinced he had never listened to still seemed to have recorded an entry on an almost forgotten index card, within a misplaced Rolodex file, discarded in a dusty, rarely visited ‘70s corner of his consciousness.
In September 1976 Klaatu had released their debut album ‘3:47 EST’ to minimal critical acclaim, and even less commercial success. A record doomed to slip quietly into oblivion. Yet a few months later Steve Smith, a writer on a provincial newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island, had posted a series of stories about this otherwise forgotten album, pointing out how its original release had featured no photos or biographical information, nor any individual musician credits, with all its tracks simply credited to Klaatu. Based on little more than this, it would seem, Smith jumped straight to an outrageous conclusion that ‘3:47 EST’ had been secretly recorded by a reunited Beatles before being released under a pseudonym.
There had been such a suppressed desire, amongst grieving Beatles fans, for this story to be true that the journalist’s largely unfounded speculation quickly became a global phenomenon, hungrily fed upon by the world’s radio stations and print media.
There seems one obvious flaw in Steve’s hypothesis though. Klaatu, even on the oft quoted ‘proof’ of a track titled ‘Sub-Rosa Subway’, simply didn’t sound anything like the Beatles (even on a ‘less-than-fab-four’ off day). Understandably though, Klaatu kept their heads down as the story spread exponentially, allowing the rumours to persist, achieving a couple of hit singles and an extended album deal in the process.
This must be the story Stuart had, partially at least, remembered, and faultily filed away mentally. He now felt obligated to re-listen to ‘Sub-Rosa Subway’.
“OK,” he conceded, “the vocals do sound a bit McCartney,” and the song’s liberal use of strings and brass could have helped feed the rumour, but the missing factor (the elephant not in the studio) was surely the song’s lack of quality control. It must have been obvious if the Beatles had plotted to release anything, years after splitting, they would have ensured it was better than this sub-standard ‘sing-along-a-Ringo’ drivel.
It probably took longer to get a good conspiracy theory off the ground (and for it to go viral!) in 1976, Stuart supposed, but in that pre-web age it would likely have proven even harder to get such a story debunked (however unlikely) once it had taken root.
This made an appropriate thought for the day; with speculation on the differences between the pre- and post- internet ages, and their consequences, neatly mirroring a subject Stuart had spent time exploring over the last month, prompted by Charlie’s unsolicited corroboration of his own theory that the ‘Challenge’ clues may have been set in more innocent times, making them (in intent) harder to research and solve.
With a while left before their diminished team was due to gather (with Ed unfortunately lost to an unavoidable work commitment) Stuart decided he could use this opportunity to look back over his recent research notes, which, in a nod to the Stones/Farlowe classic, he had titled ‘Out of Time’.
Given his odd sense of priorities there was one further task Stuart felt compelled to complete first though. While reading about ‘The Earth Stood Still’ earlier, a new, never previously contemplated, musical list had occurred to him, which he wanted to get recorded before his selections faded from memory (and slipped into another Klaatu-like inaccessible file). These five songs, Stuart congratulated himself, would make a great ‘last’ playlist for sound-tracking any impending apocalypse:
5) ‘The End’ by The Doors – Written (less portentously) about a relationship, Jim Morrison’s meaning had since been hijacked by its brilliant use in ‘Apocalypse Now’, but its lyrical theme, an end to elaborate plans, worked equally well in either scenario.
4) ‘Don’t Know When but a Day is Gonna Come’ by Bright Eyes – Cataclysmic songs work best when they build to a crescendo, and this (after Conor’s forewarning of a day without a moon or a sun) features a nigh on perfect one.
3) ‘Seven Minutes to Midnight’ by Wah Heat – The atomic scientists’ predictive Doomsday Clock had shortened during 1980’s Cold War stand-off, and Wylie’s insistent chorus duly sounded like it could theme the final countdown.
2) ‘Eve of Destruction’ by Barry McGuire – The harmonica sections add a Dylan feel to this song’s chilling verses, with their references to the ‘button’ getting pushed, but then along comes a chorus you could happily ride to oblivion!
1) ‘Five Years’ by David Bowie – Another song with a sublime culmination. Bowie gets the bad news in early, with news reports of an earth that is dying, before slowly building his tune to an Armageddon of its own.
(Footnotes: McGuire did little else of consequence, before or after this masterpiece, and however worried we became in 1980, when the Doomsday Clock countdown was reduced to seven minutes, we should perhaps be even more scared that today it has dropped to just two!)
With Anne out walking Oscar, and Joe having made it clear last night (not relishing the early start) he would be staying in bed, “recharging my brain cells,” until it was time to logon to the ‘Challenge’, Stuart realised that a perfect slot remained to review his notes (on the lessons learned from combining his ‘musicality’ and ‘timeliness’ theories) while listening to some music from his newly collated cataclysmic collection.
He chose to run with an old Bright Eyes album, ‘Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground’. The album title alone, he had to concede, was enough to support the ‘overly-wordy’ accusation frequently thrown in Conor Oberst’s direction but surely, Stuart would contend, someone capable of penning such thought provoking lyrics should be allowed to get away with there being a lot of them!
Mysteriously today however, he also found sections of Conor’s words start to reflect (and occasionally even prompt) his own thought processes as he read back over the notes made from his ‘Out of Time’ digging:
‘Method Acting’: recommends, “we need a record of our failures.” It would be harsh to term them failures, Stuart thought, but he had kicked off his analysis by re-recording all the instances where ‘Challenge’ clues (or their solutions) suggested either a music link (from Cabaret Voltaire, via The Chameleons, to The Slits and Blockheads, not forgetting the Limit, Free Trade Hall, and Dominion), or a time shift (from a general internet ‘blindness’, through to the more specific use of out-of-date lunar eclipses).
‘Lover I Don’t Have to Love’: seeks, “some meaning I can memorize,” and Conor couldn’t have proven more perceptive here. Stuart had collected a ton of raw material, yet totally failed to develop a process for turning this into any finished product. Whenever he thought he may have uncovered some meaning, linking two or more disparate clues, this slipped away again once inspected under a microscope of wider review.
‘Bowl of Oranges’: suggests we should, “keep working on the problem we know we’ll never solve.” Stuart had to smile at this, “no need to be so pessimistic Conor,” he said to himself, still convinced that many of the cross-references he had found (each possible song title, partial lyric, or hint at a certain era) may collectively have moved them closer to a final solution. These felt like buds that might not be ready to open yet but could, if persistently watered, eventually bloom.
‘Don’t Know When but a Day is Gonna Come’: claims, “what my father did … it don’t mean shit!” A colloquial denial of Euripedes’ contention (filtered via the Bible and Shakespeare) that, "gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children." This line likely held a degree of poetic license on Conor’s part, but it still prompted Stuart to reflect again today, not for the first time, how thankful he should be for his own paternal inheritance of unbridled optimism (and enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures).
‘Nothing Gets Crossed Out’: proposes, “everything that happens is supposed to be … you can’t change your destiny,” this belief in predetermination being spookily voiced at the exact moment Stuart was trying to convince himself that the ‘Challenge’s musical teasers were part of a Machiavellian masterplan; released to a preset timetable, yet carefully controlled to ensure they never quite gave away enough to elicit a big reveal.
‘From a Balance Beam’: maintains, “it was a small mistake, sometimes that is all it takes.” It was uncanny how this contention matched the only new conviction, the one big conclusion, Stuart had drawn from his latest review. While those ‘musical links’ might be deliberately planted seeds, yet to fully flower, the questions of ‘timeliness’ were more like unconstrained weeds, growing beyond the clue setter’s control. These ‘small mistakes’, with potential to unlock a final solution, were where their focus should lie.
While these seemed an extraordinary set of karmic coincidences, which Stuart (as was his way!) was probably reading far too much into, there had definitely been something fundamental within Oberst’s fatalism that he had managed to take comfort from.
Stuart’s research may not have uncovered any firm truths about his half-perceived theories, but neither had it entirely contradicted them. He could still approach today’s latest test with belief intact. Like Conor he may not know when, but he was sure a day would eventually come when these hints (deliberately laid or accidentally discarded), would finally give away something to help unlock the ‘Challenge’s elusive mystery.
Conscious Anne would likely regard such conclusions (particularly if inspired by Bright Eyes’ lyrics!) as bordering on pretentious poppycock, Stuart kept them to himself. Nevertheless, through their reflected benefit he felt a welcome wave of optimism wash over him as they gathered, with Joe having surfaced just in time to dial in Charlie as Stuart set about unlocking ‘Challenge 69’s latest riddle:
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(To be continued, at 9am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 64’ in the meantime? If you think you have an answer, then please reply direct to this email post to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)