A Commodore 64 Program Hidden on a 35-Year-Old Vinyl Record

The Christian rock band Prodigal released its second studio album, «Electric Eye», in 1984. Although it was well received by genre specialists, Electric Eye is better known for a unique detail: it hides a Commodore 64 program. The key to accessing that secret code is to record the audio stored in the vinyl output groove, transfer a copy to a traditional cassette, and let a datasette interpret the content…

Vinyl secrets weren't new

The idea of hiding strange messages on vinyl records isn't exactly new. The most common were endless stories about satanic statements, but there are more solid examples, such as the recommendation to smoke marijuana on Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust”, “Fire on High” by the Electric Light Orchestra, “Hell Awaits” by Slayer, The Beatles, Judas Priest… the list goes on. Regardless of genre or era, some bands simply decided to have a little fun, playing with their followers' minds.

A program hidden on vinyl

However, there is a special case, and I dare say unique: the hidden message is a Commodore 64 program. The band Prodigal released their album «Electric Eye» in 1984, and on the output groove of side B there is… something odd. During an interview in 2009, band leader Loyd Boldman said it was “a package of code”, and anyone who ran it on a C64 would get graphics, lyrics, and other details about the record. Apparently nobody bothered to document the content on YouTube, and so we come to Robin Harbron, from the channel “8-Bit Show and Tell”:

Getting the data off the record

The curious thing is that a turntable with automatic return cannot enter this special data section, but Robin managed to “disable” that function with a small modification. The capture process is not the most stable in the world, and it likely requires three or four attempts at best. Instead of dumping the signal directly to a cassette, he decided to get a digital copy first, then move it to cassette. He even reminds us that new cassettes have a “leader tape”, and we should advance its position a bit to expose the magnetic medium.

Even so, he also had problems during recording. His conventional audio equipment didn't do a good job, and he found the solution in an old mono recorder belonging to a Mattel Aquarius computer. The Commodore correctly detected the new recording, and the result is… two phrases, one by Albert Einstein and the other by Jesus Christ.

“The perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age” is a well-documented expression of the physicist, while the other phrase is essentially John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

And that's it. The code is quite short, barely a couple of POKE commands, centering options and the phrases themselves, no graphics or song lyrics. The program appears to have been written by someone named “TCB” in 1984, but there are no additional details about his identity. Rick Fields, Prodigal's guitarist, explained that they only saw the program run once, at a computer store in Florida, where they met the young man who wrote the code. I guess after so much effort, the final result is disappointing, however, we now have proof that the program exists, and works well.