Radiolab - Mixtapes to the Moon

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

They promised to change you. They ended up changing all of us. On July 20, 1969 humanity watched as Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. It was the dazzling culmination of a decade of teamwork, a collective global experience unlike anything before or since, a singular moment in which every human being was invited to feel part of something larger than themself. There was however, one man who was left out.   This week on Radiolab we explore what it means to be together and - of course - the cassette tapes that changed it. Special thanks to WBUR and the team at City Space for having us and recording this event, all the other folks and venues that hosted us on tour, Sarah Rose Leonard and Lance Gardner at KQED for developing this show with us and Alex Overington for musically bringing it to life. EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Simon AdlerProduced by - Simon AdlerOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Alex OveringtonFact-checking by - Emily Kriegerand Edited by  - Soren WheelerEPISODE CITATIONS:Videos - Check out Zack Taylor’s beautiful documentary CASSETTE: A Documentary Mixtape (https://vimeo.com/127216590)Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, X (Twitter) and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Oh wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You are listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From?

WNYC. See? Yup. This is Radiolab, I'm Latif Nasser. And I'm Lulu Miller. And Simon Adler is here again with another mixtape story. What is happening? Final one, I promise, I promise.

I don't believe, for sure don't believe you. Well, they might come up in a story, but it won't be about it, how about that? But I'm gonna just say that this is the story that started it all for me. And we should say, for listeners who don't know, Simon, a few years back, pitched us this whole series about the mixtape. We were initially a little hesitant to do a whole series about a mixtape.

Because it sounded like a hipster... Vantasia. Yeah. But it was very good. It was very good. And then it finished. But it didn't finish for you. No. It will never be finished for me. But for you all, there is one more, this multimedia live show filled with completely new stories that we called mixtapes to the moon. And, uh, that is what we're going to play today.

And this was, when you say that, like this was what brought you in? This was the story that started it for you? Absolutely. Yeah. Because it starts off with this zany notion that a cassette tape could change your life and then goes on to show how it changed the lives of all of us. I say that line and I get one of two responses. One is this, all of you laughing, to which I say, wait how you feel at the end?

All right, so here we go, live from WBUR's city space. And so, tonight we've got a show for you. We are going to go from a mall to the dark side of the moon, rewinding into the not-so-distant past, looking for how the hell we all came to feel so alone. But first, as one does with the story, let's start at the beginning with this guy. I'm Shad Helmstetter, and I'm glad to be with you. Okay, well, you mind if I just jump in with some questions for you?

Please do. Okay, Chad here grew up in Minnesota, today he lives in Florida, and I called him up to discuss a life-changing shopping trip he took back in 1981. I was in a store in Scottsdale, Arizona. And you know, he's walking up and down the aisles, checking out what's new. And I saw Sony's first blue and silver Walkman.

It was the Sony TPS L2. And Chad had never seen anything like this. In fact, he'd never worn headphones in public before. But you know, it was sitting out for folks to try and so a little sheepishly he picked the thing up. I put the earphones in, pressed play, and it was absolutely breathtaking and inspiring. It was, it was... I thought it was magic. And Shad, he was not alone. Tuning out and tuning in. About 750,000 people nationwide are doing just that.

I can turn it up loud enough so I can drown out the sounds. It just puts you in your own world all by yourself. I mean where the Walkman went, these transcendent, these surreal experiences seem to follow. I remember vividly that walking or roller skating or dancing there was this kind of disconnect from my normal everyday experience." That is Juliette Christensen. She is a historian of design at the University of London. And she says it was so disorienting for her, at least because whereas before her entire life sort of felt like a documentary with her eyes acting as the camera's lens, once she put those headphones on and pressed play, the camera almost seemed to

like float out of her eyes, turn around and point back at her. Suddenly I'm in this film, right? And I'm the star. The protagonist. I'm singing in the rain. Gene Kelly tap dancing through the streets. Or perhaps, you know, an action hero running from the bad guys, or a teenager in love for the first time all over again. the first time all over again. But anyhow, back in that Kmart. I recognized then that Sony would sell millions of them and others.

Shad, still standing in the electronics section, still in a bit of a daze, started imagining the implications of this device. No, that's correct. but I wasn't thinking about it in terms of music, which is how everyone else was probably thinking about it at that time. I was thinking about it in terms of the tool to rewire the brain. I mean, what if we could change how we think

by listening to cassette tapes to be more confident, for instance. And when I held that Sony Walkman in my hand, I remember thinking, now anyone can do it. Okay, so he got himself a microphone and a recorder, and we are going to take a listen to what Shad Helmstetter made. What I need everyone to do now is take these headphones that you've got The big thing Simon here in the studio. So before the show we'd actually Given wireless headphones to everyone in the audience and at this point we asked them to put them on So everybody got their headphones on put them on

Now you podcast listener, I'm guessing you're listening to this on headphones But if you're not and can I recommend doing so because what Shad was going for, well, it hinged on what you are about to hear, feeling like it was made just for you. Here it is. You are incredible. That's right, you. You have a lot going for you. You always did. And now it's time to let yourself live out the incredible potential that you were born with.

You've had it all the time. You were born to be an exceptional human being. And each day you give yourself the winning words of self-talk that say, I like myself. I'm glad to be me. I like myself. I am glad to be me. I like myself. I'm glad to be me. Anyone feeling more confident?

Maybe a little cringey? I kinda like it. But even if you hate it, you have to admit that Shad was onto something. I worked for the company back in the records days and it was going nowhere. It kinda had to shut down parts of the business and keep it surviving. That is Vic Conant. For years he had been trying to sell messages like Shad's on vinyl records with no success.

But suddenly, you know, with the arrival of the Walkman and now this exact same material on cassette tape, The business took off. All of a sudden, we were selling millions, millions of these cassettes. Like a record exec, Vic went out and signed folks like Shad and published their material. And you know, well, at the beginning of the boom, he says, most of their products were like Shad's. Very affirming.

Very motivational. You can be and have all that you want in life. As time went on, customers began demanding more and more specific products, like how to improve their memory. I'd like to personally welcome everyone to the Mega Memory Program. Or how to be better at business. Welcome to How to Deliver Unpopular Messages, an instructional tape from American Management Association.

And eventually things got very, very weird. Again if you would take these headphones, put them right up, everyone put their headphones on and again, podcast listeners, headphones will help you, but for very different reasons than before. for the information and secure that they had. But the movie was sketchy. Did Nost have a plot line? All they knew that he could understand was that they worked hard as he tried to begin.

He was stuck. was stuck. I mean, I think it's fair to ask what the hell is going on there. Like it's sort of these two dueling fairy tales. One in the left, one in the right, where if you try to listen to one, you sort of lose the other. Okay, I'm going to tell you the trick, how the trick is done right now. I'm going to expose the contents of this idea, by the way the first time it happened. It was an accident Ladies and gentlemen Lloyd Glauberman and has he told me if you want to hear the hypnotic message?

He's communicating what you have to do is listen to what is being said between The two stories so for example if the story in the right ear says... The word feel... In the left ear, what followed was... The word better. Okay. So the listener, at that moment in time, the only thing that's actually available for that split two seconds is feel better.

Now, what Lloyd made there, it literally could not have existed without a Walkman and headphones to deliver it. And I mean, Shad's creation, it definitely would not have been successful. I mean, can you imagine sitting in your living room on speakers, your wife next door? And so to me, at least, it was starting to seem that this whole

self-help movement, it all came down to this little blue box. However… I could pick that apart as a critical theorist of media by saying, well… Please do, pick it apart, yeah. Okay. Again, that's Juliet Christensen, and she says that is not the whole story here. There's something else as well, which is that the kind of period of success of self-help, right, the 1980s, when it really kind of came to prominence, was a particular social and political climate.

She says, you know, everything else that was going on in the world at that time, that was important too. And that the world's most influential man at that time was Ronald Reagan. And well, yes, he is remembered for making big government the decade's boogeyman. He also cast the American individual as our nation's hero. If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth. It was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before." He even wrapped his message in

some pretty self-helpy language. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress, except those we ourselves erect. I mean, he seemed to be saying, take care of yourself, be the best version that you can be. It's all about you and you and you.

Nothing is impossible. Man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we're told is fact. And when this political message collided with this personal technology, that is when self-help exploded. Like a chemical reaction, both parts had to be there, and once they were, the resulting blaze was almost impossible to contain. Which, to me at least, makes these tapes so much more than just some woo-woo fad. I mean, seen in this light, they were an early manifestation, a warning perhaps, of where we were headed.

So why was this such a big deal? Why was the Walkman such a big deal? Yeah, yeah. Because you could choose your own music. I mean, it's simple as that. You could choose the sounds that you wanted to listen to. You know, which meant that you, you could also listen to the sounds you wanted to listen to and you, you could choose the sounds that you wanted to listen to.

Which can be kind of joyful, but radically alters your relationship with society. Now to see what she means there, we're all going to take out our headphones one last time. You're going to put them on once more and all I'm going to do is play a brief video clip for you. And what I want you to do... Simon here in the studio once more. And this was actually my favorite part of the show because it was almost like a

like a little magic trick that we pulled on the audience. Everyone once more put their headphones on the lights went down and then we projected this very ordinary looking video clip of a shopping mall from the 1970s. It opens with this indoor water fountain, then pans slowly following these shoppers as they glide up an escalator. The whole thing's only about 60 seconds long. And when it finished, we had everybody take their headphones off and ask them what they felt.

Yeah, right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was your feeling to the whole thing? It just kind of seemed like a normal day in the mall. Normal day in the mall? Okay. Anybody not relate to that? Okay, right here, yeah. I was experiencing it in the moment as avianated from everybody else. You're not hearing them, you're not a part of them, you're observing them from afar.

And quickly, we get these answers that just totally diverged from one another. Bubbly, smooth. It felt like something terrible was going to happen. A plane crash, a bomb going off. Okay. Audience members would start looking at each other confused, at which point I'd come in and reveal that we'd sent different audio to each of their headphones. So unbeknownst to them, some had heard this bubbly little thing.

["Sweet Home Alone"] Others heard just, like, mall ambience. And then some got this. ["Sweet Home Alone"] And these different tracks, well, they totally warped how people experienced that Malsi. Right, I'll give you all a moment with it. You need it. I'll give it to you.

If you want the fuller experience, you can actually go on our YouTube channel. We've uploaded all three videos with all three soundtracks. So yes, each of you is given one of three different audio tracks. And here's the thing. This experience that we all just had, sitting in a room together, collectively seeing but individually experiencing, like that was not possible before this thing. It's totally common and numbing today,

and we don't even think about it when we walk down the street. And yet, 40 years ago, not possible. And this, to me, it seems, is really the world that these tapes portended. It was a world with a new meaning of the word together. A world where not only our sounds could be personal, but our truths and our realities as well. And as I said at the top, I think that this is really what drew me to the cassette tape to begin with.

This sense that seeing together but hearing differently. Well, it was the beginning of maybe the most important fact about today. That while we are all standing in the same world with the same things happening around us, the same facts there to be seen, thanks in large part to the internet, the way we interpret those facts, the way we see the world, can be infinitely different. And that as that's happened, well, the very possibility of collective experience seems to have vanished as well. When we come back, Simon's got the story of one of the most powerful collective experiences we humans have ever had

and the one person who was left out. That's right after a quick break. Lulu Latif back with Simon Adler and his live performance of Mixtapes to the moon. and his live performance of mixtapes to the moon. Why did you deliver moon like it was robotic? Because it was feeling robotic. Here we go, Simon. Take us away. Okay, to close this thing out, I've got one more story for you. You don't have the effect of, I mean, is the juice really worth the squeeze? Yeah.

Effective I mean is the juice really worth the squeeze? Yeah Okay, it's a story that was originally told to me by the guy you heard right there Zack Taylor He is a documentary maker also a fan of cassette tapes I Shot and directed a documentary called cassette a documentary mixtape. How many cassette tapes you think you have? my gosh, I Probably have a couple thousand. Anyhow, story starts summer of 1969

as the crew of Apollo 11 are about to blast off to the moon. And along with all their space gear and all their training, these guys are carrying a thing with them. The TC-50 it looked like a sleek elegant minimalist aluminum brick and what it was really was a Sony Walkman it's a little bit bigger than the Walkman that they would release to the public 10 years later a little bit

heavier functionally the only difference is this little red button on the top, the record function. And this red button, it's actually why these things were allowed on board. Because the gloves that these guys used, even today, I'm sure, like an astronaut's glove is not conducive to like jotting down your thoughts. And I mean, the more I think about it,

the more mission critical this thing is. Mission critical? Yeah, yes, mission critical, because they're going like Star Trek where no man has gone before. Got to record it like no man had done before. And so July 16th, 1969. These three astronauts had about a three days journey to get to the moon, or to get to the

moon's orbit. And as they are flinging through space, folks at NASA, of course, they're listening to everything going on up there. And they could actually hear these guys using their Walkmans, just not as recorded. The intermittent music that we're getting is apparently coming from the spacecraft. The crew has on board portable tape recorders with music on the tapes. Yes, each astronaut had a personalized mixtape with music on it that they brought up there with them. And apparently the music is triggering the box-operated microphones and we're getting intermittent music down from the spacecraft. Now NASA co-signed on all this. The thought was we got to send them up there with tapes to record onto.

Might as well fill them with music first. So Mickey Cap, the record executive would go ask each astronaut, hey, what's your favorite song? Okay. Thank you. Hold my beer. I'll come back with a mixtape for you. And as Zach there tells it, the music these astronauts brought up there with them, well,

it offers a little peek into each of their personalities. So for example, the straight laced mission commander, Neil Armstrong's cassette has this kooky album from the 40s on it. They ever heard of him? I think about 20 years ago. He's probably the god of the moon. It's a little hard to hear there, but Neil Armstrong went to the moon with an album called Music Out of the Moon.

Take a listen. Neil Armstrong, like, that was his jam. And I mean, he played this stuff on board so much that there were times where NASA would have to call up to him and say, hey, Neil. Can you turn that music off please? Thank you. Thank you. Story goes that uh, Buzz the big talking space cowboy

requested a very particular song on his tape. So that the moment they touched down on the lunar surface, he'd be able to reach behind him, pull out his tape player. His TC-50, his proto Walkman, and press play to... Fly me to the moon, let me be among the stars.

Are you serious? That's how, that's the legend, that's the legend, that's how it, that's how the story goes. Years later, he said, maybe that didn't happen. But listen, if a whole building of rocket scientists can believe enough to send these three young men out into space, then I am going to exercise this little faith the size of a mustard seed and believe that Buzz Aldrin reached behind his seat to play Fly Me to the Moon because what an amazing

moment. You! Now this moment and these playlists generally are the sort of strange forgotten possibly partially invented bits of history that cassette heads like me can't get enough of. And I think that's sort of all they would be were it not for the third astronaut on the mission, this guy Michael Collins. Now it turns out Collins' playlist has totally been lost to time. I reached out to NASA, the National Archives, the Smithsonian.

No one has any idea much of what was on this tape, let alone where it is today. Which oddly I think is sort of fitting. Michael Collins is the one guy nobody knows. The third wheel. He's just the guy who like, you know, in history, they couldn't have done it without him? They really needed him? What did they need him for? But Michael Collins was the linchpin in all this stuff.

Michael Collins was the one who made sure that they, first of all, got to the moon, and more importantly, made sure that they got home. So to pick the story back up. July 20th, four days into the mission, around 2 p.m. here in Boston, it was time to actually go down onto the moon. And so Buzz and Neil, they crawled over into the far end of the spacecraft, the lunar landing module that they called the Eagle. They sealed the airlock and they detached. Meaning that the whole time that they were down there on the Moon, Collins, he would be up there all by himself, just waiting.

Michael Collins had the full day where it's just him alone orbiting the moon from about 60 miles above. And not only is he alone, but half the time he's up there, he is in total darkness. He would pass behind the dark side of the moon, meaning no light and no contact. Apollo 11, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good.

Going around the corner, we'll see you on the other side. Over. Roger. This is Apollo Control, we've had lots of signal now. We'll reacquire the spacecraft again on the 13th Revolution in about 45 minutes. All he had was his heartbeat, his thoughts, and the darkness. And while he's sitting up there, he knows that the hardest part is actually yet to come. Because before they can go home, Buzz and Neil obviously, you know, they need to get off of the moon. They need to blast off at just the right time so that Collins can grab them. And as if that wasn't enough.

There was no way to test the engine on the Eagle taking off from the moon. There was no way to test it. It was completely untested. It was an unknown. Yeah, we didn't understand the moon's surface well enough to know how it would go. So what happens if, you know, the engine doesn't have

quite enough gas to get them back to the orbiter? Or what if they overshoot it? And privately, the three astronauts gave themselves about a 50-50 chance of getting off the moon. astronauts gave themselves about a 50-50 chance of getting off the moon. So, Michael Collins is orbiting all by himself wondering if he's going to return to Earth alone or as part of a three-person crew successfully having visited the moon. This is Apollo Control. the moon. to rejoin him for the trip back to Earth. I mean, just picture this for a moment with me. On one side of the moon, facing Earth,

you've got Armstrong, who has just delivered his broadcast back, you know, his famous line. And then on the other side of the moon, in total darkness, totally alone, you've got Mike Collins. So in this moment that literally the entire Earth is experiencing something together, he remains alone,

disconnected and out of touch from all of it. Exactly. So, oh my gosh, this is, this is what I keep going back to. This is where having a Walkman, having this hunk of aluminum with the record button, this is where this suddenly becomes, as I said, mission critical.

Because while Collins is up there, the most solitary man in the history of the universe, to calm his nerves or to get the voices out of his head, he turned to a cassette tape. He pulled out his Walkman and hit that red button. As the story goes, Colin said, my secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone.

Now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter. ["The Last Supper"] Dude, if you're alone, if you're on the dark side of the moon and all you have is a Walkman, how is that cassette not your very best friend? The closest thing you have to another human being, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. I think that cassette is a life raft. The I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a So I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a The I'm going to be a good friend. This episode in the live show was reported, produced, and performed by Simon Adler. Big special thanks to WBUR and the team at Cityspace for having us and recording the

event, as well as to all the other venues and folks that hosted us. Special thanks as well to Sarah Rose Leonard and Lance Gardner at KQED for developing the show with us. And a huge thank you to Alex Overington, who was making all the music you heard live from the stage. Before I let you two sign off real quickly, one little obnoxious fact checky thing. Turns out that there are conflicting accounts of whether Collins recorded those final lines onto a cassette tape.

There are multiple sources that say he did, but there are others who say he wrote it down. So in the interest of transparency, I thought I should just let you know that. Appreciate that. Join us for our next series on the gramophone. And thanks so much for listening. I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Led Zefnasser. Catch you soon.

Hi. Hi, I'm Rhian and I'm from Dunedin, Ireland. And here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Sorine Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dhrinkif is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Ikedi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel,

Maria Paz-Cuteras, Sundar Naan Nisambidan, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Saru Khari, Valentina Powers, Sarah Sambach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our Fat Checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krueger, Natalie Middleton. Hi this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.