FNS_EP03_Master_FINAL USE THIS
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[00:00:02] Erin Potts: In the tension of those first few days after the demonstrations, we had come back to our hostel, and one of the Tibetans that worked there pulled me aside and said in Tibetan that an American had been looking for me, and to be careful, that this American worked with the Chinese. We weren't really sure what that was about.

[00:00:26] Erin Potts: And a couple hours later, this guy comes back to the hotel and we're there. He actually came to our hotel room to have a conversation with us. He introduced himself as working for the U.S. government at the Chengdu office. Chengdu is a city in China that is sort of closest to Tibet. He said he had flown from Chengdu into Tibet to check on the well-being of all the Americans that were there.

[00:00:57] Erin Potts: The conversation started, you know, calmly, and he was like, "How are you? Are you okay?" Like, "It's kind of crazy all this stuff going on."

[00:01:07] Erin Potts: And then he started asking, "Well," like, "Did you see any of the protests? What happened?"

[00:01:14] Erin Potts: As the conversation evolved, he started asking more and more specific questions, including things like, "Well, did the gunshots sound like this?"

[00:01:23] Erin Potts: And he would make a gunshot sound. "Or this?" And he'd make it like a different gunshot sound. I started feeling weird about this conversation at that point, but we still told him, "We have American friends staying here, here, and here. Like, you can go check on them and stuff."

[00:01:38] Erin Potts: But as he was leaving, he said, "One more question. Did you take any pictures?"

[00:01:47] Erin Potts: And I am sure he could read on my face exactly what was going on, but we said, "no."

[00:01:55] Erin Potts: And meanwhile, all these canisters of film are literally just above his head in the ceiling of this hotel room. So we were really nervous. We felt like any second now we are getting arrested, and they're gonna find the film.

[00:02:20] Erin Potts: I'm Erin Potts. This is Freedom Needs a Soundtrack, the story behind the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and how an unlikely group of people turned music and hope into action. This series is a Rangzen production, produced by Adonde Media.

[00:02:40] Erin Potts: Episode Three: "Standing Up for Freedom."

[00:02:48] Erin Potts: I did not know when I was in Tibet in 1993 and documenting those protests that Ngawang Sangdrol had been arrested. 

[00:02:58] Ngawang Sangdrol: When they sent me to the Drapchi prison, when I enter the cell, I didn't recognize my friends there because everybody looked so scared. When the guard leave, they hugging me. Everybody's crying.

[00:03:14] Ngawang Sangdrol: In Drapchi, every single day we got tortured mentally, yeah. 

[00:03:20] Erin Potts: So we knew about the group of 14 nuns that were called the Drapchi 14. These nuns sang songs of freedom that were recorded on a little cassette tape and smuggled out of the country, and the world got to hear these imprisoned nuns. 

[00:03:38] Ngawang Sangdrol: In 1993, our friend get a chance to borrow a tape recorder from prisoner.

[00:03:45] Ngawang Sangdrol: We got many helper, and, uh, we got two, uh, recording tapes. And so they secretly bring to our cell. So when we got this chance, right away we make a plan for recording freedom song. We record at midnight, because at night they lock the door, uh, our room door and the gate door, and they go home. So when they sleep, then we get up and record the song.

[00:04:27] Ngawang Sangdrol: We have 14 songs and the meaning of the first song we recorded, we call the "Ghangjong." "Ghangjong" means the snow land. Uh, uh, snow land is, mm, the Tibet, right? So it's our motherland, our soul.

[00:04:51] Ngawang Sangdrol: "Snowland, uh, snowland is my beloved country. My guru is His Holiness the Dalai Lama. If six million Tibetan people being united and sun of the happiness will, uh, shine again behind of the cloud."

[00:05:18] Ngawang Sangdrol: So each night we secretly recording midnight. And then when we go to the work, we buried the cassette wrapped in plastic underground so, mm, they couldn't find it. We all nervous and scared, and we know what is the result if they find out. But, mm, we also ready to sacrifice. So two of our, um, friends, the political prisoner nuns, for work they have to go out with a prisoner guard.

[00:05:53] Ngawang Sangdrol: So we send these tapes successfully. Of course, we were very nervous, so when they come back safely, oof, we're so happy!

[00:06:04] Ngawang Sangdrol: Our plan is that, you know, send to the outside, let people know we're not giving up. We standing up for freedom.

[00:06:15] Ngawang Sangdrol: So we still are physically suffering, but our mind is still standing, not give up. We thought if, mm, we send outside the prison, we thinking it's possible maybe get to the India. You know, we have people in India.

[00:06:34] Ngawang Sangdrol: That's we thinking, maybe it get to the India, you know? But we never thought in, around the world!

[00:06:44] Erin Potts: I don't think anybody really covered it to the extent that one would think it should be covered in the news. But yeah, we had heard their voices on these recordings. There was something different about hearing women singing freedom songs and knowing that they were in prison, and knowing that it caused them to be in prison for much, much longer.

[00:07:10] Ngawang Sangdrol: At the end, they find out. They suddenly opened the door and they took the recorder and the tape. They interrogate everyone. They can recognize our voice. So immediately we say, "Yeah, I did, I did." Everybody said that. The court people come inside the prison and, um, yeah, they make a court there, and then increase the sentence.

[00:07:38] Ngawang Sangdrol: So me, Ngawang Sangdrol, uh, to, uh, six years.

[00:07:46] Erin Potts: The nuns are so central to the resistance inside Tibet. The nuns are not gonna stop protesting. The monks are not gonna stop. The Chinese government knows they're the ones that are not giving up. They have to crush that connection to traditional Tibetan re- religion and resistance if they're gonna keep their hold on Tibet.

[00:08:17] Erin Potts: Soon after the protest in Tibet, Sam and I, we started doing two things. We were trying to figure out how to get this film out of the country, and then we were also writing down everything we had seen in letters and sending it to anybody that we knew in the U.S. We wrote letters to my mom. We wrote letters to friends.

[00:08:41] Erin Potts: One of the letters that we wrote was to Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, 'cause he was supposed to come with us on this trip,

[00:08:47] Erin Potts: and we thought, "Well, maybe he could do something with this crazy experience that we've just had."

[00:08:55] Erin Potts: So we sent off all these letters, and then we started quietly telling people that we had film and did they know any route out?

[00:09:05] Erin Potts: A Western tourist on a luxury tour, I think they might have been staying at the Holiday Inn even, um, agreed to carry it to Hong Kong. I left Tibet and I arrived in Hong Kong and found out that my pictures had gotten there. We had people from human rights organizations pick it up, get it processed, and get it to the Western press.

[00:09:36] Erin Potts: And while I was still in Tibet not knowing it, those pictures went out and were in newspapers all around the world. It worked out, but man, we were really scared. I was still overwhelmed by the whole experience, but I remember feeling like, holy fucking shit, these pictures that I took of the risk that these Tibetans had taken, that they had gotten out to the world and that the world knew what had just happened and what these Tibetans had tried to do.

[00:10:17] Erin Potts: I just remember a sense of relief.

[00:10:26] Erin Potts: When I got back from Nepal and was at my parents' house and sort of recovering from the trip and from that experience, my parents kept getting calls from somebody named Adam from L.A., and I thought it was another Adam and didn't wanna return the calls. I just didn't, didn't have the energy at that point.

[00:10:46] Erin Potts: And finally, my dad answered the phone, and it was Adam again, and my dad just was like, "Listen, she'll call you if she wants to. Stop calling here." At that point, I was like, "Okay, I should probably call whoever this person is back." And as soon as I got on the phone, I realized it was Adam Yauch, who had gotten our letter and was like, "Are you safe?

[00:11:08] Erin Potts: Are you okay?" And wanted to hear everything, you know, about the experience. I think that there was something in the fact that Sam and I were so focused on Tibet. I was doing things about what I had just seen and experienced, and I think that gave Adam a window into like, "Oh, I can do something too." And you know, what he could do was pretty massive. It was about a month after I got back from Tibet, and he had called my house that I went down to L.A.

[00:11:48] Erin Potts: The Beastie Boys were still recording "Ill Communication," but he was playing me some songs as we drove around L.A. that were him mixing Tibetan sounds and Buddhist prayers with hip hop beats. I remember driving in the car, him playing this music, and I said, "You're like the modern day Milarepa." And he didn't know.

[00:12:17] Erin Potts: He was like, "What? What's that?"

[00:12:19] Erin Potts: And I explained it to him that Milarepa was a poet, a musician, a Tibetan teacher and saint who in the beginning of his life was responsible for a lot of bad things happening in the world. He had done bad things, and he had turned his life around and became this great teacher.

[00:12:42] Erin Potts: But the way he taught was that whoever he was with, the rich or the poor, people from this community or that, he found a way to reach them and to speak in their own language through music.

[00:13:05] Erin Potts: After I came back from Tibet, I had one more year of school left, and I felt so disconnected from college students in America at this point. I figured out that I could do one more semester at school and then get my degree, but not have to go back to school full-time. And instead, I decided I would go to Washington, D.C., and intern at the biggest Tibet support organization at that time, called the International Campaign for Tibet.

[00:13:38] Erin Potts: They really lobbied Congress and the U.S. government to take action on Tibet and human rights. 

[00:13:44] News Anchor, PBS: China will be a powerful presence at next week's meeting of Pacific Rim nations, hosted by President Clinton in Seattle. 

[00:13:51] Erin Potts: China was in the news all the time. 

[00:13:55] President Bill Clinton: Good afternoon. I have just, uh, completed a meeting with President Jiang of China, which I believe was very productive.

[00:14:03] Erin Potts: The United States government was trying to reestablish relationships with the Chinese government. They called it "constructive engagement," that somehow by being engaged on trade, magically human rights would be respected and democracy would come to China, and we all knew that was a farce. 

[00:14:25] President Bill Clinton: I emphasized to President Jiang the need for early concrete progress on aspects of China policy and practice that are of deep concern to the American people: human rights, including Tibet, trade practices, and nonproliferation.

[00:14:41] Erin Potts: It was like this carrot and stick kind of situation where U.S. trade was the carrot, but there was real concern that if China got preferential trade status with the United States, the biggest economy in the world, that it would grow and grow in power, and we would not be able to have human rights or negotiations with the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama, and that China would just once and for all kind of silence Tibetans' desire for independence.

[00:15:18] Erin Potts: It pretty quickly became clear to me that the halls of Congress were not where I wanted to do my work. There was nothing that really grabbed my attention like the work that I was starting to think about with Yauch and with working in culture and art and music. I have seen where culture can make change, where policy or politicians can't or won't.

[00:15:50] Erin Potts: At the end of my internship, I went up to Connecticut to visit family. So this is February of 1994. I stopped in New York City, got off the train, and Adam and I decided we were gonna have dinner. So we walked across town to a Tibetan restaurant and had momos and just sorta caught up about what my experience had been in D.C., and in that conversation, we started dreaming very specifically of what a concert for Tibet could look like.

[00:16:24] Erin Potts: We thought, we'll have a concert in Washington, D.C., on the Mall, and these really political artists, the Beastie Boys, Fugazi, A Tribe Called Quest, like, all these artists. In our minds, it was already, like, iconic. A free concert on the Mall. And it felt like this path just opened in front of me. The Beastie Boys were about to come out with a new album, and on that record, Adam had written two songs about Tibet that sampled Tibetan sounds in it.

[00:17:06] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): Originally, uh, we had sampled some monks on "Ill Communication," and then we were trying to figure out what to do with the royalties. 

[00:17:13] Erin Potts: Adam wanted the royalties for those two songs to go to Tibet. 

[00:17:16] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): And, uh, we thought that we'd like to, to try to give that money back to the culture to help... 

[00:17:22] Erin Potts: the culture. So he called me up, and he said, "Hey, I have royalties from these two songs.

[00:17:27] Erin Potts: Can you help me figure out which Tibetan organization should get them?"

[00:17:32] Erin Potts: You know, one of the lyrics in one of those songs is Adam saying, "Someday I'm gonna visit on a free Tibet." And I said, "If you're singing songs about a free Tibet, and you have this money that's going to be coming in royalties every six months, let's put those two things together and do some work to help your fans understand why you're singing about a free Tibet."

[00:17:59] Erin Potts: So we started an organization to receive those royalties and do education and awareness and action around Tibet, and we're starting to think about, "Well, what should we call it?"

[00:18:12] Erin Potts: He said to me, "What, what was that name you called me in the car that time?"

[00:18:16] Erin Potts: And I said, "Milarepa." And he said, "Yeah, that's it." 

[00:18:19] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): All right, Milarepa's actually the name of a, an 11th century Tibetan saint, and, uh, he used to teach through his songs and stuff, and so we thought it would be a cool name since most of the work we're doing is through music and having to do with music.

[00:18:33] Erin Potts: And that became the Milarepa Fund. 

[00:18:35] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): So that was the original intention to create our own organization. 

[00:18:39] Serena Altschul, MTV News: And so in May 1994, Adam and Erin established the Milarepa Fund, a non-profit organization working to spread the word about China's campaign to wipe Tibetan Buddhist culture off their map. 

[00:18:52] Erin Potts: Milarepa was a non-profit whose mission statement was to promote compassion and non-violence.

[00:19:00] Erin Potts: We did most of that work through our work around Tibet, but we also gave grants to youth organizations around the United States that were working on non-violence, too.

[00:19:17] Erin Potts: Oftentimes what will happen when bands get ready to do a big record release, they'll do a couple of warm-up shows. So the Beastie Boys did these two secret warm-up shows where they announced the show just hours before it was about to happen. The first concert happened in New York City, and the second concert happened in Washington, D.C., and both of them were benefit concerts for Milarepa Fund.

[00:19:45] Erin Potts: And, of course, Beastie Boys fans were so excited.

[00:19:52] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): Yo, we just wanna thank, 

[00:19:54] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): uh, Slash Six for playing tonight and just playing for Tibet.

[00:19:58] Erin Potts: Not only that, we knew the Beastie Boys were going to be on Lollapalooza, and Adam had somehow convinced the organizers of Lollapalooza that they should bring a group of Tibetan monks to open and close every show with prayers and rituals.

[00:20:16] Erin Potts: We had identified a group of Tibetan monks who would come on Lollapalooza with us. I knew that they didn't know what a rock concert or a rock tour would look like, and so I wanted them to experience a show before they committed to doing this tour with us. So they were in D.C. doing other work. We had them coming to the concert at the old WUST Hall, which is now the 9:30 Club, I think.

[00:20:45] Erin Potts: I mean, these Beastie Boys fans were hungry to see their band. It was just next level. I remember I couldn't even look at the monks 'cause I was like, "There's no way they're gonna do this."

[00:21:00] Erin Potts: We sat out there for maybe two or three songs, and I led them backstage and then out to this outdoor area where we could talk.

[00:21:12] Erin Potts: And I said, "What'd you think?" And the head monk said to me, "If one person learns about Tibet on this tour, it will be worth it." And they agreed to come. I gotta say, that statement really kinda changed how I thought about how I was gonna be talking to people on Lollapalooza. Everybody that I talked to became possibly that one person that found out about Tibet.

[00:21:48] Erin Potts: Unfortunately, just two weeks before we were supposed to go out on Lollapalooza, their main teacher back in India was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and they went back to be with him as he passed and couldn't come on the tour with us.

[00:22:11] Erin Potts: We ended up bringing another group of monks over from India and I kept trying to make sure that they were told that they were going on a rock tour. When they showed up, they had no idea that this is what they were being sent to do. 

[00:22:35] Announcer, Lollapalooza Ad: There's a magical place with band after band playing magical music while you get suntanned.

[00:22:39] Announcer, Lollapalooza Ad: Lollapalooza! Here comes the clueless apparition this summer. Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, The Breeders, George Clinton, L7, plus mucho more... 

[00:22:49] Erin Potts: So we were on Lollapalooza summer of '94, and the first months of the tour were rough. It was culture shock for everybody. 

[00:22:59] Reporter, MTV News: The organizers of Lollapalooza, a summer music and mind fest, broke all the rules by crossing musical and cultural lines to create the ultimate celebration of individual expression.

[00:23:10] Erin Potts: The audience was like, "What is this?" These Buddhist monks saying a prayer at the beginning of every show? And the monks, you know, they had never seen American kids, and they, I think, were surprised, rightfully so, with, you know, kids in bikinis and topless and dyed hair and piercings and tattoos. Like, they didn't, this, they didn't know any of this kind of American youth culture.

[00:23:43] Erin Potts: And so they were in shock. 

[00:23:46] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys (Archive): The monks were kinda, like, on the side of the stage, like, checking out the musicians and checking out the kids, and everyone was, like, climbing on top of each other in the audience, like, going nuts. And the monks are kinda, like, laughing and just like, "What the hell's going on?" And- 

[00:23:58] Erin Potts: And then, you know, there was other shows where the, the monks got, uh, water bottles thrown at them.

[00:24:06] Erin Potts: Another where I got yelled at by one of the volunteers that we had brought in. It was mostly American Buddhists that we had been able to call in to help me in the booths, and one of them yelled at me, and he said, "How dare you? These kids don't deserve Buddhism."

[00:24:30] Erin Potts: It was a really hard, it was a really hard tour. I laugh now, but I was probably crying every day.

[00:24:38] Erin Potts: I had a booth out front, and it had this big sign that said, "Free Tibet. Help end the Chinese occupation."

[00:24:45] Erin Potts: I remember a kid coming up to me and he said, "Ma'am, how do I get a free Tibet?" And I said, "What?" And he pointed to my sign and he said, "A free Tibet."

[00:24:59] Erin Potts: He thought I was giving something away for free, right? And I explained to him that I was not giving something away for free, that I was trying to help free a country, and he could, too. And then slowly, things started shifting. In another city, instead of being met with water bottles, the monks were met with kids with their hands in prayer.

[00:25:28] Erin Potts: The kids were imitating the dances and the movements that the monks were making on the stage. One night, I remember we were all waiting for the buses to roll out after the show, and the monks were standing outside of our bus, and next to us was The Flaming Lips bus, and it was the whole band, and all of our monks were sipping their evening tea, and I could see that some of The Flaming Lips had bottles, various bottles of alcohol.

[00:25:56] Erin Potts: As I walked up, I was a little worried, like, "What's going on here?" And I realized that they were talking about the meaning of life. And I was like, "Okay, this is why we're here."

[00:26:09] Erin Potts: It was slow and hard, but the change started.

[00:26:19] Erin Potts: Lollapalooza had started adding $1 to every ticket it sold on its tour and donating those to charity throughout the country. As I watched that happen on our tour, I realized this is a really good idea, and we could do this with all sorts of other tours. So the next year when the Beastie Boys were doing their own tour across the United States and Canada, I remember having a very quick conversation where I said, "Hey, do you wanna add a dollar to every ticket on the tour?

[00:26:57] Erin Potts: Have it come to Milarepa, and we can split that money between giving it to local organizations doing non-violence work and youth work and our work for Tibet?"

[00:27:09] Erin Potts: They instantly said "yes" to adding that dollar to every ticket, and a couple months later, we had three-quarters of a million dollars in our bank account from those one dollars adding up.

[00:27:22] Erin Potts: The half that we kept became the money that we used to start the Tibetan Freedom Concerts.

[00:27:42] 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 Lucia Murillo.

[00:28:03] Erin Potts: Sound design and mastering by Martín Cruz. Martina Castro was the editor and one of the executive producers.

[00:28:10] Erin Potts: The original theme song is by Money Mark.

[00:28:13] Erin Potts: For Rangzen, the series executive producers were Deyden Tethong and myself, Erin Potts.

[00:28:19] Erin Potts: A very special thanks to all who were part of the concerts and to those who helped make this series possible.

[00:28:25] 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 Freedom Needs a Soundtrack.com.