FNS_EP04_Master_Transcript
[00:00:00] ​
[00:00:02] Erin Potts: When we did the first Tibetan Freedom Concert, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. You know, we had failed before. We thought we needed partners in the activism space to help us, but it turned out that our vision for what the activism of those concerts should be was really specific, and it didn't fit with any of these partners that we kept trying to have.
[00:00:29] Erin Potts: For instance, they would want the concert to include Nobel Peace Prize winners, and that the Nobel Peace Prize winners would be, like, the real focus of it.
[00:00:38] Erin Potts: And I was like, "No, young people need to be the focus."
[00:00:44] Erin Potts: As activists, we were always told, you know, "Young people need to be involved because you're the future, and you're gonna be leaders someday."
[00:00:50] Erin Potts: And I was like, "Fuck that. We're leaders now."
[00:00:54] Erin Potts: Like, why are we getting relegated to this, like, side thing? And so we just realized, okay, this isn't working. This is not the right partnership. This is v- not the right moment.
[00:01:06] Erin Potts: You know, it was really frustrating, and we, we had three failed attempts, but we had dozens of iterations in our own brains of what it could look like that just never got past paper and pen phase.
[00:01:21] Erin Potts: But each time we failed, we learned something new, and each time we failed, more people came to support us. And at some point in the fall of '95, we had a conversation, and we were like,
[00:01:40] Erin Potts: "What if we did this on our own? What if we don't need a partner? What if we can make this happen with Students for a Free Tibet and the local Tibet support groups?"
[00:01:50] Erin Potts: And as soon as we did that, things started happening. The Beastie Boys’ management and others who had seen us at Lollapalooza and seen us on the Beastie Boys tour and had read about what we were doing started coming and saying, "I'll help."
[00:02:09] Erin Potts: We found a promoter in San Francisco, which is where I lived, uh, and why that first concert was in San Francisco.
[00:02:17] Erin Potts: Adam was on a tour in Australia with a bunch of other bands and started asking some of them, "Would you perform a concert for Tibet?"
[00:02:28] Erin Potts: So with bands saying yes and a promoter, it started moving at a much quicker pace. And it just, it kept rolling and rolling and picking up speed and momentum and becoming more and more nerve-wracking, honestly.
[00:02:46] Erin Potts: Um, there was a moment I remember where I was like, "Oh, wait a minute. This is happening."
[00:03:04] Erin Potts: I'm Erin Potts. This is Freedom Needs a Soundtrack, a Rangzen production. This series was produced by Adonde Media and distributed in partnership with KALW Public Media in San Francisco. Episode Four: The First Concert.
[00:03:28] Erin Potts: Our office in San Francisco was really tiny. It's very close to Fisherman's Wharf. As soon as we started bringing more and more people in to do the big concerts, it was just too small. I mean, we did not have enough desks for everybody, so some people would have to sit on the floor. There was no walls. It was just one big open room.
[00:03:48] Erin Potts: There's a distinct smell of coffee and bagels and, uh, this Indian pizza we used to always get. And this was pre-internet. Everybody's on the phone all the time, and it's a cacophony of phone calls and fax machine buzzing and our little boombox that we loved so much and just was always playing music, and there's meetings happening in the corner.
[00:04:13] Erin Potts: I don't think anybody was over the age of 30 in that office. All of us were just out of college. None of us had ever produced a concert before, much less a concert of the scale that we were talking about. It was scary and fun and exciting. I mean, we were on adrenaline just trying to hold on at times to the momentum that was pushing us forward.
[00:04:43] Erin Potts: We announced the concert at an international Tibet support conference that happened in Washington, D.C. on March 10th.
[00:04:55] Erin Potts: This was 1996, so it was just a couple months before the concert was to happen. Adam was the one to make the announcement. "We're going to have a concert in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park June 15th and 16th for Tibet." I, I mean, I was so stressed out. I actually remember very little of his words about it, but I remember the reaction of the room, which was excitement tinged with a little hesitation that this has been tried before and not wanting to get their hopes up.
[00:05:30] Erin Potts: For me, it was like, "Oh, shit, we said it out loud." Like, we just announced it, and now we gotta make sure it happens in the biggest possible way. Oh my god, my, my biggest fear was it wasn't gonna work. First of all, every day that it got closer and closer, something would fall apart, and it would be like, "Oh, shit, this isn't gonna happen."
[00:05:54] Erin Potts: Like, something big, like a band would back out, but then another band would come in, or the sound truck was too expensive, and we didn't have the money for it, so we had to cancel the sound truck. You know, like, all these things that felt like huge decisions. As we got closer and closer to it really happening, and as it became more and more real for everybody, that hope started building and building and building.
[00:06:26] Erin Potts: This thing is gonna happen, and it's gonna be big. Like, it's not just a little club show for Tibet. It's gonna be 50,000 people every day for two days in a public park in San Francisco.
[00:06:49] Serena Altschul, MTV News: This weekend, it's a concert. 
[00:06:51] Kurt Loder, MTV News: This Saturday and Sunday, live from San Francisco, it's The Tibetan Freedom Concert, a two-day all-star show that today alone will feature the Beastie Boys, who organized it with the Milarepa Fund. 
[00:06:59] Kurt Loder, MTV News: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Björk, Tribe Called Quest, and more.
[00:07:03] Rebecca Rankin, Much Music: The price of your ticket goes directly to a good cause.
[00:07:06] Erin Potts: A music magazine out of the UK called it, like, “The best gig ever,” because we had the lineup for that moment. Some of the greatest bands of our time. 
[00:07:16] Kurt Loder, MTV News: Featured top form performances by Smashing Pumpkins, De La Soul, and Foo Fighters, and Biz Markie... and the- 
[00:07:20] Erin Potts: Beck and Sonic Youth and Pavement, Björk.
[00:07:25] Björk: I've been a bit obsessed about the Tibet thing since I was a teenager.
[00:07:29] Erin Potts: Sean Lennon and his mom, Yoko Ono. 
[00:07:32] Yoko Ono: Uh, this is a global village, as you know, and everything that happens in this village affect us directly.
[00:07:38] Erin Potts: Chaksampa. Oh my God, Rage Against the Machine. 
[00:07:42] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: The reason why Rage Against the Machine had the Beastie Boys back was because we had a mutually supportive relationship with regards to the issues that we were into.
[00:07:53] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: My name is Tom Morello. I'm a musician and activist. I'm a founding member of Rage Against the Machine. Adam's spirituality and the issue of Tibetan freedom was really, you know, near and dear to him, and he fully wielded the cultural capital of that band to bring the attention of the West. I probably didn't know that much about the issue of Tibet before, you know, Adam brought it up, but what I did know was that they were our brothers in arms on the right side of history, and that when we asked them to play a show, they said yes.
[00:08:26] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: And when they asked us to play a show, we said yes. 
[00:08:29] Erin Potts: That was Yauch. It was him asking everybody, all of his friends, these legends of music and of music and activism.
[00:08:44] Erin Potts: There were Tibetan musicians that performed. The Tibetans supporting our work was essential. We had 500 volunteers, mostly Tibetans or Tibet supporters. Like, it couldn't happen without that. There's no free Tibet without Tibetans. There's no Tibetan Freedom Concert without Tibetans. It just couldn't work.
[00:09:07] Deyden Tethong: I am Deyden Tethong, and I was about 20 years old in 1996 when I first heard about the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I was born in India to my Tibetan father and my Canadian mother. My father was of the generation that straddled a free Tibet and then a reality in exile. My family was very politically active and, you know, we were filling up small rooms of people to try to appeal the case for Tibet and our struggle for freedom.
[00:09:43] Erin Potts: The Tibet movement had existed for decades, so there were dozens of organizations and advocacy networks already doing really essential work long before Milarepa was ever created, and long before those concerts existed. So, you know, we were entering an ecosystem that was already live, it was already working, and our contribution was this cultural strategy that kind of tried to, um, build upon the work that the Tibetans were already doing.
[00:10:13] Deyden Tethong: I was finishing my last year of university just outside of Toronto, and there was rumblings within my group of friends, um, that there was this massive concert being planned in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and it became a guessing game of how are these coming together? Wait, who's organizing it? We knew that it was Adam from the Beastie Boys, this group called The Milarepa Fund, and this partnership with Erin Potts.
[00:10:46] Serena Altschul, MTV News: Meet Erin Potts, 24-year-old director and co-founder of The Milarepa Fund. 
[00:10:50] John Norris, MTV News: Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, instrumental in helping put this concert together. I understand how- 
[00:10:55] Deyden Tethong: I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Um, you know, this was the '90s where certain artists and actors who were trying to find, I guess, their own religion were falling into Buddhism and starting to follow the Dalai Lama, and being attracted to that sort of sense of wisdom and Dharma practice.
[00:11:18] Deyden Tethong: It took a minute to figure out how I felt about it, but once we got more exposure to Adam and how he was invested in the cause, and how he came to the Tibet issue, it felt very genuine and authentic and respectful. 
[00:11:38] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): The main reason that we're doing the concert is to raise awareness about Tibet, to let people find out about the Chinese occupation.
[00:11:46] Deyden Tethong: As we got closer to the time of the concert, there are volunteers that are needed at the concert. They would like Tibetans to come and help connect the dots for concertgoers, work on the actions that were going to be featured at the concert, um, in terms of petitions or postcards. So we planned to attend and flew with a group of friends and family and landed in San Francisco International Airport.
[00:12:22] Erin Potts (archive): Welcome to the Tibetan Freedom Concert. I'd first like to introduce everybody. 
[00:12:27] Deyden Tethong: Um, there was a press conference that was held, and it had the organizers, the Milarepa Fund, including Adam Yauch and Erin. I remember coming in, and it was getting started. I had not a clue what the organizers looked like. I was sort of expecting producers of the show to be our parents' generation, and then as the participants were filing in, and it was Björk, it was one of the guys from De La Soul, and I remember seeing Erin, and at that point we hadn't met.
[00:13:12] Deyden Tethong: She had her hair in a ponytail, and I remember looking at Erin and being like, "Ah, that's her." That, and they're young. I'm trying to say it in a way that's not gonna be babying, but she just looked so young. She looked like us. And then... 
[00:13:34] Interpreter for Palden Gyatso: My name is Palden Gyatso. 
[00:13:36] Deyden Tethong: Palden Gyatso arrives, who was the Tibetan monk who was imprisoned and had escaped with his torture devices.
[00:13:43] Interpreter for Palden Gyatso: There was a rising of tens of thousands of Tibetans in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I was imprisoned for 33 years in Tibet.
[00:13:54] Interpreter for Palden Gyatso: There were sores that we would come, come on our limbs by being suspended from the ceiling, and then they would have fires lit underneath them, and then from 1987 on, there was also electrical torture inflicted upon the, the Tibetans in the, in these prisons. We'll show you some of these cattle prods that were used on him and all of the female prisoners.
[00:14:15] Deyden Tethong: That was a big moment, to see him surrounded by media and press, hearing him tell his story of his imprisonment and torture and then escape. 
[00:14:29] Interpreter for Palden Gyatso: These are the cattle prods. These were smuggled out of Tibet. These are the actual instruments that were used in his prison. These would be plugged in, so they were completely electrified.
[00:14:37] Interpreter for Palden Gyatso: There's a button here that would be pushed, and then sparks would be emitted from this, from this end here. 
[00:14:43] Deyden Tethong: I just remember looking around that room and saying, "Gosh, all these people are paying attention," because we had thousands of stories like this, but until you can see it and until people pay attention, you just don't feel heard.
[00:15:08] Deyden Tethong: In those days, very little was coming out from Tibet. It was a lot of Tibetans in exile getting the information, the Tibetan government in exile getting what they could, and sharing these stories and testimonies, and those stories were always, you know, dismissed by the Chinese government. To see Erin up there talking about Tibet in a way that felt right, what I saw was somebody who was our generation bringing together a culture and a moment in a way that we could see ourselves in it.
[00:15:52] Deyden Tethong: It was a moment of relief and understanding that this was gonna be good. The day of the concert, I remember getting up really early to report for our volunteer check-in, um, in Golden Gate Park. That Saturday morning, June in 1996, it was cold. There was fog. There was wind. 
[00:16:18] Erin Potts: We were trying to create a microcosm of a free Tibet with our concert, with everything we did.
[00:16:25] Erin Potts: We had miles of Tibetan prayer flags strung everywhere on the concert grounds. 
[00:16:30] Deyden Tethong: Two stages side by side. 
[00:16:32] Erin Potts: We had two stages, in part because we didn't want a headliner, and so we called them the red stage and the blue stage. 
[00:16:39] Deyden Tethong: The stage had a massive Tibetan flag, which I have never seen one that big in my life.
[00:16:47] Erin Potts: So it's yellow with snow lions holding a bunch of jewels in the middle of it, and these sort of rays that go out. It's a very visually stunning flag. 
[00:17:02] Deyden Tethong: There was great care that was given to build these reconstructions of some of the Tibetan parts of our place and our culture. They're called stupas. 
[00:17:14] Erin Potts: A consecrated Tibetan stupa, a monastery tent where monks and nuns were creating traditional Tibetan art and doing prayers where the, the concertgoers could observe what they were doing and participate.
[00:17:29] Erin Potts: We wanted anybody with two eyes and two ears who came to this concert and didn't know anything about Tibet, was only coming for the music, for them to absorb so much information about Tibet just by how it felt to be on those grounds. 
[00:17:42] Deyden Tethong: We had arrived obviously quite early, so the concertgoers hadn't arrived yet.
[00:17:47] Deyden Tethong: Um, production was still getting set up, and there were a lot of us Tibetans that were coming in our traditional Tibetan dress. You're straddling two worlds. You know, you have your one culture in the East, and you have your Western, but you're in a dominant North American culture, so you're following all of these popular cultural influences as you do as a child and a teenager, and then to suddenly have those two worlds collide...
[00:18:18] Deyden Tethong: We had grown up as a very small minority of Tibetans in North America, and, um, at a time when we would say it was hard to fill a room for Tibet, and now we had a sold-out concert of 50,000 people per day. It was life-changing.
[00:18:47] Kurt Loder, MTV News: Lots of acts are here for the Tibetan Freedom Concerts... 
[00:18:49] Erin Potts: I was so busy during the concerts that I actually don't remember much of the performances, but there are moments that I remember. 
[00:18:58] Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters (Live): Today we've changed our name. We are no longer the Foo Fighters. Today we are the Freedom Fighters. 
[00:19:05] Erin Potts: I remember the Foo Fighters saying they were no longer the Foo Fighters, that today they were going to be the Freedom Fighters. I remember Biz Markie.
[00:19:17] Biz Markie (Live): Say free Tibet!
[00:19:19] Erin Potts: And having half the crowd say free and the other half say Tibet.
[00:19:23] Biz Markie (Live): Say free Tibet!
[00:19:26] Erin Potts: One of the performances that stands out the most in my entire life is when Tribe Called Quest played. And I was standing next to our head of production, taking it all in, looking out at the crowd, and then I saw, way back in the distance, I saw one of our perimeter fences get overrun with kids who were breaking through.
[00:19:50] Erin Potts: And I looked at him and I was like, "Uh, should we do something about that?"
[00:19:54] Erin Potts: And he was like, "Ah, no." Like, kind of just shook his head like, "No, there's nothing we can do."
[00:20:00] Erin Potts: I remember the mayor of San Francisco showing up at our concert. Now remember, we were in a public park in San Francisco. The city had to give us permission to be there, and the mayor's name at that time was Willie Brown, and he shows up right when Rage Against the Machine is singing, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."
[00:20:21] Erin Potts: And he wants to go on stage, and it's like this insane anti-authority song with the crowd just going wild. And I'm like, "Of course he comes right at this moment." 
[00:20:37] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: When it comes to great political music, it first and foremost has to be great music. Many people come to the show just to enjoy the music, but there's some certain percentage that are going to be, it's going to stick with them and it's gonna last beyond the concert, and that is because of the music that, uh, allows those doors to be open to the ideas.
[00:20:58] Erin Potts: One of the speakers was Palden Gyatso, who was a Tibetan monk. He spent 30 years in prison for demonstrating against the Chinese and for Tibetan independence. When he was released, he somehow bribed a Chinese officer at the prison to give him the cattle prod and the torture devices that had been used against him, and he smuggled those out as he escaped from Tibet.
[00:21:28] Erin Potts: And he talked about that on the stage in front of 50,000 people. 
[00:21:33] Deyden Tethong: I was watching the crowd more than him speaking, and I was nervous. I'm so protective of my culture and our story. I was nervous that this wasn't going to be given the deference that I felt it deserved, just because it's so foreign to a lot of Westerners.
[00:21:57] Deyden Tethong: But when I looked out at the crowd as he was speaking, I remember just feeling such relief and then also gratitude for how respectful and, um, caught up in his testimony and his speech the concertgoers seemed to be, and I think that was probably, you know, one of the more emotional moments from the concert.
[00:22:35] Erin Potts: When the music was done, we all just kind of like gravitated towards our production trailer. Like, I don't think we all knew what to do after the music stopped and everything was over. And we just all kind of gathered there impromptu, and Palden Gyatso, he was there, and he started talking to us, and he said...
[00:23:00] Erin Potts: ...he said that he can die in peace now knowing that this has happened and that it was the greatest day of his life.
[00:23:11] Erin Potts: I actually was looking at some old pictures recently and looking at them with my husband, and I saw a picture of Palden-la. And I just turned to him and I said, "I am so glad he got to see the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and he got to see the crowds and what impact those concerts had."
[00:23:33] Erin Potts: That he went from being tortured for 30 years so severely that all of his teeth were knocked out, and then to go from that to seeing this moment where tens of thousands of people were taking action for Tibet. 
[00:23:53] Kurt Loder, MTV News: A nonviolent protest outside the Chinese consulate in San Francisco by some 300 people, among them Perry Farrell and Chili Peppers bassist, Flea.
[00:24:00] Erin Potts: I always knew that the most important day of our work was the day after the concerts, and what we did with all the energy that had been generated. And so the day after the concerts, we organized a demonstration at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, and we had hundreds of people there. We planned that we would get arrested, that we would block the entrance to the consulate, and when the police came to tell us we had to move, that it was illegal to stay there, that some group of us would not move. And Adam and I were two of a half dozen or a dozen of us that did that.
[00:24:42] Unnamed Police Officer: If you want to stay here, you will be arrested. You all understand that? We’ll advise you all individually, and you can make your decision as we approach, alright? 
[00:24:51] Erin Potts: They drove us to the police station nearby and processed us. Uh, they did not in fact book us or charge us with anything.
[00:25:01] Erin Potts: They detained us and told us not to do it again. 
[00:25:05] Kurt Loder, MTV News: The Tibetan Freedom Concert attracted more than 100,000 fans, making it the biggest U.S. benefit show since Live Aid in 1985. 
[00:25:12] Erin Potts: The first Tibetan Freedom Concerts were the first concert that was cybercast, which was the word that we used for live stream before anybody called it live stream.
[00:25:23] Erin Potts: Students for a Free Tibet, our partner organization, they almost exploded overnight. They had 30 chapters before that first concert. By the end of the summer, when schools were not even in session, they had 350 registered chapters of Students for a Free Tibet. 
[00:25:40] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: Like, everybody who cared at all about music during that era knew about Tibet because of those concerts.
[00:25:48] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: During that time, it made it a first story on the news issue where it would not have been had these concerts not happened. And I think my takeaway from that is that, you know, every act of art is an act of resistance, right? Every time an artist speaks the truth, it's a beacon of light in the gathering of a terrible world.
[00:26:14] Erin Potts: After all of our failures, it was a moment where we proved it could be done. And we weren't done. This was just the beginning.
[00:26:39] Erin Potts: Freedom Needs a Soundtrack is a Rangzen production, produced by Adonde Media and distributed in partnership with KALW Public Media in San Francisco. This series was written and produced by Andrés Caballero. Project management and archival production were led by Mariano Pagella. Fact-checking by Ana Lucía Murillo.
[00:27:00] Erin Potts: Sound design and mastering by Martín Cruz. Martina Castro was the editor and one of the executive producers. The original theme song is by Money Mark. For Rangzen, the series executive producers were Deyden Tethong and myself, Erin Potts. A very special thanks to all who were part of the concerts and to those who helped make this series possible.
[00:27:22] Erin Potts: You can hear the rest of the episodes for free on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This series features voices and audio that we gathered from archival sources. Find links and more information about the concerts at freedomneedsasoundtrack.com.