Freedom Needs a Soundtrack
Episode 01: The Power of Music
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[00:00:00] Serena Altschul, MTV News: This weekend, it's a concert. 
[00:00:03] Kurt Loder, MTV News: This Saturday and Sunday, live from San Francisco, it's- Lots of acts are here for the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a two-day all-star show that today alone will feature the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Björk, A Tribe Called Quest, and more. 
[00:00:15] Rebecca Rankin, Much Music: The price of your ticket goes directly to a good cause.
[00:00:25] Erin Potts: It was the mid-1990s, before social media, before livestreams, before most people had heard the word Tibet.
[00:00:33] Serena Altschul, MTV News: Meet Erin Potts, 24-year-old director and co-founder of the Milarepa Fund. 
[00:00:38] John Norris, MTV News: And, of course, Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, instrumental in helping put this concert together. I understand- 
[00:00:42] Erin Potts: A lot of people ask me, like, "How did the idea of a concert come up?"
[00:00:46] Erin Potts: And I'm like, "I was an activist. He was a musician." It wasn't really even a conversation. It was just, "Yeah, we're gonna do this." 
[00:00:55] Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys: The main reason that we're doing the concert is to raise awareness about Tibet, to let people find out about the Chinese occupation. 
[00:01:02] Serena Altschul, MTV News: 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.
[00:01:15] Erin Potts: Oh, my God, my biggest fear was it wasn't gonna work. I mean, it had never been done before. I can't remember the exact order of how all the yeses started happening, but I remember the feeling of it, and it felt like being strapped to the front of a Mack truck going 150 miles an hour down a highway. 
[00:01:37] Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers: Hello, this is Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
[00:01:40] Thom Yorke, Radiohead: This is Thom from Radiohead, and we're proud to have been asked to perform at the Tibetan Freedom Concert.
[00:01:44] Björk: I think music, like, can save any situation.
[00:01:47] Kurt Loder, MTV News: More than 100,000 fans, making it the biggest U.S. benefit show since Live Aid in 1985. It was followed- 
[00:01:52] Erin Potts: Some of the greatest bands of our time... 
[00:01:55] Kurt Loder, MTV News: ...performances by Smashing Pumpkins, De La Soul...
[00:01:56] Erin Potts: ...of that moment... 
[00:01:57] Kurt Loder, MTV News: manson, Biz Markie, and a thunderous turn by Rage Against the Machine. 
[00:02:01] Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine: Everybody who cared at all about music during that era knew about Tibet because of those concerts.
[00:02:09] Biz Markie (live): Free Tibet! Free Tibet! Say free Tibet!
[00:02:14] Erin Potts: We had 500 volunteers, mostly Tibetans or Tibet supporters. 
[00:02:19] Deyden Tethong: As a Tibetan in the West, what I saw was somebody who was our generation and bringing together a culture and a moment in a way that we could see ourselves in it.
[00:02:33] Erin Potts: We were trying to create a microcosm of a free Tibet. 
[00:02:38] Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters (Live): Today we've changed our name. We are no longer the Foo Fighters. Today we are the Freedom Fighters. 
[00:02:48] Q-Tip (Live): Say free Tibet!
[00:02:50] Unnamed Audience Member #1: There's a lot of young people here that only came here for the music, but it's the message that they're hearing over and over and over again, and maybe it'll get them to think about what's going on in the world. 
[00:02:59] Erin Potts: This was a message concert, not a benefit concert. We were there to get people involved in the Tibet movement.
[00:03:05] Unnamed Audience Member #2: I didn't know anything. I'm gonna be, I was really naive coming in here. I didn't know a thing. But now, they've really just opened me up. Like, 'cause I think if anyone knew what was going on, there's just no way they wouldn't do something about it.
[00:03:16] Erin Potts: I always knew that the most important day of our work was the day after the concerts.
[00:03:21] Kurt Loder, MTV News: ...by a nonviolent protest outside the Chinese consulate in San Francisco by some 300 people, among them Perry Farrell and Chili Peppers' bassist Flea. 
[00:03:28] Erin Potts: We weren't there to raise money. We were there to raise action. 
[00:03:32] Unnamed Police Officer: If you want to stay here, you will be arrested. You all understand that? We advise you all individually, and you can make your decision as we approach.
[00:03:40] Unnamed Police Officer: Right?
[00:03:51] Erin Potts: I'm Erin Potts, and I was a music fan, someone who was told at a concert once that I could make a difference. I didn't know that that would lead me to co-found the Tibetan Freedom Concerts with Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and we didn't know if those concerts would work, if anyone would come, if anything could change.
[00:04:09] Erin Potts: What happened surprised all of us. Honestly, it still kind of surprises me. This is the story of those concerts, how they came to be, what happened during and after, and why freedom needs a soundtrack.
[00:04:40] Erin Potts: Freedom Needs a Soundtrack is a Rangzen production, produced by Adonde Media.
[00:04:48] Erin Potts: Episode One: The Power of Music.
[00:05:01] Erin Potts: My dad had a record player and a small collection of records, and I just, I always remember music. I have vivid memories of, like, flipping the records and putting the needle on the, on the vinyl. My parents had a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, and I remember they were always interesting. Something was always, like, a little irreverent or outside of the normal, I guess.
[00:05:27] Erin Potts: And at around 12 years old, I remember I gave a new friend of mine a subscription to Rolling Stone for her birthday that year. Kelly Patricia Callahan, uh, who became my best friend. As her name implies, she's Irish, and she loved the Irish band U2.
[00:05:50] Erin Potts: As our friendship grew, I also came to love U2. But U2 back then was, like, it- they- they're not the band they are today. They were a punk band, they were edgy, and they were singing about peace in Ireland and the end of apartheid and things that I just didn't know about yet. And I was too young to see them in concert, according to my parents, so the first three times I saw them perform were on these bootlegged video tapes that we had gotten.
[00:06:23] Erin Potts: The first one was, um, U2 at Red Rocks. The concert at Red Rocks had happened in 1983, I think, and it was about a year after that that I watched it on this passed-around bootlegged video tape. And when they sang "Sunday Bloody Sunday," Bono is waving this white flag. It's like a surrender flag, but it's not a surrender flag.
[00:06:49] Erin Potts: It's something else, like a peace flag or something. And he has the crowd chanting, "No more. No more. No war. No more." And it just blew my mind in such a great way.
[00:07:10] Announcer, Live Aid Promo: On July 13th, a billion people all over the planet will tune into a music event that will never be repeated, the Live Aid concert. Dire Straits, Bryan Adams, Elton John, 70,000 other performers.
[00:07:20] Erin Potts: About a year later, U2 played at Live Aid. Live Aid was about raising money to stop the famine in Africa. 
[00:07:31] Unnamed News Anchor #1: It'll be nearly a year before Ethiopians can expect proper rains again.
[00:07:35] Unnamed News Anchor #1: By that time, thousands of people, perhaps even millions of people may have died. 
[00:07:41] Erin Potts: At that time, we were watching the news, and it was just devastating videos of children dying in front of our eyes of starvation. 
[00:07:52] Unnamed News Anchor, BBC News: Final preparations are being made for what they're calling the greatest show on earth: Live Aid for Africa.
[00:07:57] Unnamed News Anchor, BBC News: Tomorrow's 16-hour transatlantic program looks set to reach a television audience of more than a billion people around the world. 
[00:08:04] Erin Potts: They say that 40% of humanity watched that concert on television. I remember seeing Wembley Stadium, seeing the audience, and I had never seen a crowd that big before, and they were there to try and do good in the world.
[00:08:22] Erin Potts: So again, I was hooked. And then the third time I got to see them was, um, the Amnesty International concerts. 
[00:08:31] Bono, U2 (Live): We've got 18 very special guests with us tonight.
[00:08:35] Erin Potts: It was 1986.
[00:08:36] Bono, U2 (Live): 18 prisoners of conscience released because of Amnesty International. 
[00:08:41] Erin Potts: And it was much more about these political prisoners that were on stage. Political prisoners are people who've been imprisoned for their beliefs, their nonviolent beliefs, or their nonviolent opposition to a government. And all around the world, thousands of people were in prison. Amnesty had this very simple methodology of writing letters to those governments saying, "We know you have this political prisoner, and we are demanding their freedom."
[00:09:13] Erin Potts: And it worked! Like, letters would free people from prison. And at this concert, there were dozens of freed political prisoners on the stage with these artists. Somewhere in all of that, Bono and a bunch of other people that were performing at the shows said, "Go start a chapter of Amnesty International at your school."
[00:09:39] Erin Potts: And I did it the next day. I signed up, and I started organizing, uh, immediately. Every month, we would get these packages from Amnesty that say, "Here's the case of the political prisoner we're asking you to write letters on behalf of." So it would be all information about who they were, what they did, what they were accused of, usually falsely, and then some sample language for writing the letter and an address to send it to.
[00:10:13] Erin Potts: The idea that you could write letters that take you less than three or four minutes, you could write these letters and put them in the mail and combined with thousands of other people's letters, you could free people who were wrongfully imprisoned... it was mind-blowing. Like, sometimes activism feels so big and, like, massive and, like, you have to have a perfect plan and you have to really know what you're doing, and sometimes you just have to fucking write a letter.
[00:10:42] Erin Potts: You know?
[00:10:50] Erin Potts: About a year after I started organizing my Amnesty chapter at my high school, Amnesty asked us to write letters on behalf of a group of Tibetan nuns. And these were nuns who had been put in prison because of their desire for Tibet to be an independent nation again. And I think the thing that stood out most to me was that they were just teenagers like us.
[00:11:13] Erin Potts: We were getting ready to write the letters, and I remember that my teacher had lived in a Tibetan refugee camp. His name was David Brown. And, you know, he told us about how Tibet had been an independent country, uh, how China had invaded it. 
[00:11:30] Narrator, Tibet: "The Bamboo Curtain Falls" (1992): In Peking, they solemnly declared that Tibet was next to be liberated.
[00:11:35] Erin Potts: In 1950, the new communist government of China said Tibet is now part of China. Not only did they do that, but they also erased the history that it had ever been independent. The Dalai Lama, who is the political and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, fled Tibet in 1959 and thousands of Tibetans followed him.
[00:11:56] Kurt Loder, MTV News: Since his exile from Tibet in 1959, the Dalai Lama has lived in India, where he works for nonviolent change in his homeland. 
[00:12:02] Erin Potts: My teacher, David Brown, he gave context to why these groups of nuns were saying they want an independent Tibet and why that would put them in prison. 
[00:12:13] Narrator #1, SFT Footage Lhasa Uprising (1989): Anyone waving the Tibetan flag is shot.
[00:12:16] Narrator #2, SFT Footage of Lhasa Uprising (1989): The ones courageous enough to demonstrate against the crushing force of Chinese dominance are the monks and the nuns. 
[00:12:23] Erin Potts: The nuns play a really important role in the resistance, as do the monks, for protesting against the Chinese occupation and for demanding a free Tibet. 
[00:12:33] Narrator #1, SFT Footage Lhasa Uprising (1989): Without children depending upon them, and because they are schooled in selflessness, they are the first to sacrifice themselves for the freedom of their people and freedom of thought.
[00:12:45] Ngawang Sangdrol: The monks and nun working for our country more than other, that's because we thinking that is our responsibility. My name is Ngawang Sangdrol, and I'm a former political prisoner in Tibet.
[00:13:02] Erin Potts: Ngawang Sangdrol became a nun at a very early age, as often is the case in Tibetan families and communities. And at the age of 13, she was arrested for protesting against the Chinese occupation and for demanding a free Tibet.
[00:13:21] Ngawang Sangdrol: I grew up in Lhasa, Tibet until 13 years, and then grew up in a prison. I remember, um, we have a, the biggest protest in 1989, and, uh, mm, I joined the several times protest, but at that time, every Tibetan's protesting. So, um, the Chinese, they're fighting, and they got the gun. 
[00:13:49] Narrator #2, SFT Footage of Lhasa Uprising (1989): On occasions like these, Chinese civilians join the police by the hundreds in venting their hatred of Tibetans.
[00:13:56] Ngawang Sangdrol: We only shouted peacefully words with a bare hand, but they shooting us. 
[00:14:03] Erin Potts: The thing that drew me in the most, I think, was the nonviolence with which the Tibetan people met such violence. I think it intrigued me in a way because I was like, "Could I do that? If it was me, and if it was my people and my family, could I meet that violence with compassion and with nonviolence?"
[00:14:26] Erin Potts: I think it was around the time that I was writing the letters to try and release the Tibetan nuns, I told my mom randomly that someday I was gonna put on a concert for Tibet, and U2 was going to play at it. And I didn't think about it for the next 10 years. Like, it wasn't a driving force in my life. It was just a random thing that I said that was so what I believed and what I wanted to do, and it was almost like a, an articulation of my mission in life.
[00:15:13] Erin Potts: So in 1989, I was 17 years old. I was completely engrossed in activism and in the idea that we can make change in the world. And up until this part of my life, there were big, big social justice issues that felt impenetrable. And all of a sudden it was like big, massive changes started snapping into place.
[00:15:43] Erin Potts: Like, the Berlin Wall falls down, the Soviet Union crumbles. Nelson Mandela, who had been in prison for 30 years, walks free. 
[00:15:54] Unnamed News Anchor, SABC News: Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa. 
[00:16:00] Erin Potts: Like these things we never thought could ever happen, start happening. And then Tiananmen Square happens.
[00:16:08] Richard Roth, CBS News: It was noontime today in the center of Beijing when a man walked to the middle of the Avenue of Eternal Peace, which as it happened, was already occupied. 
[00:16:16] Erin Potts: I remember turning on the news, and that's when the tanks were rolling in. 
[00:16:20] Richard Roth, CBS News: The man was alone, the tank was not. It wasn't- 
[00:16:22] Erin Potts: I watched as one man with a plastic shopping bag stood in front of a line of tanks, and he just stood in its way.
[00:16:35] Erin Potts: The tank tried to go around it and he moved so it couldn't go, and he just kept doing that. That image of one person being able to stop a line of tanks stuck with me. So when I'm working on these social justice issues in other places that feel just as permanent, like, "Tibet will never be free." I'm like, "No, it can be."
[00:17:02] Erin Potts: "I saw the Berlin Wall fall, and I saw Nelson Mandela walk free, and I saw a single man stop a line of tanks."
[00:17:13] Erin Potts: My senior year of high school, my teacher had lived in a Tibetan refugee camp just three miles over the border of Tibet in Nepal, he taught an anthropology class that I took, and in that class, he wanted us to go on a field trip. He wanted to go and maybe live with the Amish in nearby Pennsylvania to study anthropology and how to be anthropologists.
[00:17:43] Erin Potts: And so he brought that up in the class, uh, one day, and I blurted out, "Take us to the village in Nepal." And everybody laughed. Nepal is very far away from Old Saybrook, Connecticut! So we all just laughed, and class went on, and three weeks later, he came back to the class and he said, "I have the trip to Nepal approved."
[00:18:11] Erin Potts: There were kids on our trip who had never been on an airplane, and then they were getting on a very long airplane and going to a very different culture. We landed in another world. I mean, as different from where we were from as possible. Like, there were cows and motorcycles and rickshaws and trucks and smog and mount- like the most gorgeous mountains I've ever seen.
[00:18:44] Erin Potts: There's a couple of pockets of Tibetan communities in Kathmandu. Boudha is one of them, and it's the one that I lived in the longest. So Boudha was mostly more established Tibetans than the refugee camps. And the refugee camps that I visited, they were stone buildings with tin roofs. And I mean, these were really, really poor communities that didn't have much in the way of resources, um, and were really just trying to receive as many refugees coming over the border as possible.
[00:19:20] Erin Potts: We were supposed to do a home stay as part of the program. And my Tibetan family, they were refugees. They were not really at home in Nepal. My mom didn't actually speak Nepali. She only spoke Tibetan. And I think that she was just trying to survive every day. She had five children that she raised in exile as refugees, and her most important thing was that the kids go to school and get an education.
[00:19:52] Erin Potts: She had so much joy. I mean, she would laugh and joke, and she was just the warmest, most welcoming, most happy person I had met.
[00:20:09] Erin Potts: The last day we were in the refugee camp, the entire community had come out, um, to, you know, wish us off. Uh, and a, a Tibetan elder stood up and he made this long speech, and at the end of it, he turned to face the mountains, and on the other side of that mountain is Tibet. Like, that's how close we were. So he turned to the mountains and he said, "Someday I hope that our children and your children will play together in a free Tibet."
[00:20:44] Erin Potts: And that has defined my life in so many ways, that statement that... I mean, he's probably passed at this point, but the possibility of his grandchildren and my children playing together there is real.
[00:21:05] Erin Potts: So when I came back from Nepal, I knew, I knew this is what I wanna do. I want to work for a free Tibet. I wanna do human rights work. And I didn't know how to do that. Um, there's no major that you can take that says, "This is how to become a human rights activist," um, or "how to do Tibet work." And so I spent a lot of time just not sure of how I could be of most use to Tibet and to non-violent activism.
[00:21:47] Ngawang Sangdrol: When I think of my childhood, it's a very happy family. All our neighborhood call our family is the happy family because every night my father played dramyae and my sister and my brother dancing the Tibetan traditional dance. I remember my mother teach me a song. It says that we will be free soon, you know.
[00:22:12] Ngawang Sangdrol: My parents' words and those songs, it give me lots, uh, strength, you know, and courage. Both my parents were very religious and practiced, um, Buddhism very strongly. So, um, when I was little and I, I, I really want to be a nun. So I ask my mother and, um, then I ask my father. I, m- my parents insist me to go to school continually and then later you can do the nun.
[00:22:45] Ngawang Sangdrol: But I, I was, um, really anxi- how you say? Anxious. Anxious. Anxious. So, um, then, um, I become a nun at 12 years old.
[00:22:58] Ngawang Sangdrol: In 1990, when I was 13 years old, at, at that time I shouted, "Independent Tibet, long live Dalai Lama," just these two words, and they arrested me. When they tortured, they, they tortured using many different kind of weapons like, you know, electric rod, and tortured with sticks and beating on my back. And so they using the many different kind of weapons beating us, and then they ask me, "What you shout?"
[00:23:30] Ngawang Sangdrol: And I say, "I shout independent Tibet and long live Dalai Lama." And then he so get mad and hold me and, uh, put the electric, mm, rod in my mouth. I, uh, was kept there, uh, 10 months, and then I was released, and I only spent 15 days with my mother, and then she passed away. Second time, uh, it was 1992, and so I met, mm, w- my friend, and, uh, she said they're gonna, uh, go to the protest.
[00:24:05] Ngawang Sangdrol: The people who arrested us, they're not u- uniform. They have a bunch sitting everywhere. They're spy, but people didn't know. So we shouting, "Free Tibet!" And "Long live His Holiness Dalai Lama!" We walking just maybe a few second, and then all was suddenly jumping some people, not uniform, and, uh, then taken somewhere.
[00:24:27] Ngawang Sangdrol: And, uh, I thought I'm gonna be die because this is second time, and the first time they beat me so badly, mm. Later then Chinese army's coming with the uniform. First take to the, like, a detention center, and then, oh my God, there's army and beating us there, very badly and with foot and with hand and many thing.
[00:24:48] Ngawang Sangdrol: And then they let us stand in the sun, look at the sun, and the whole day, and not giving food. And then at night they lock us inside. At that time I was 15 years old, and, uh, they gave me the three years sentence, and they sent me to the Drapchi Prison.
[00:25:18] Erin Potts: By the early '90s, I was already in college. Nobody knew my name. They just called me "Free Tibet" 'cause that's who I was. I was always talking about a free Tibet, whether it was in front of the student hall at a table, or organizing little mini benefit concerts with my friends who were in bands, or in classes that I was taking.
[00:25:43] Erin Potts: I was just trying to bring together things that I loved and was passionate about, and I was trying to, um, not have to leave who I was to be an activist. I was still organizing letter-writing campaigns on behalf of Tibetans, and also doing a lot of other work. I was going to protests in New York City. The first Gulf War was just ending.
[00:26:09] Anne Lindstrom, Channel 2 News: Good evening everyone, I'm Anne Lindstrom in the Channel 2 newsroom with the latest on the Gulf War... 
[00:26:14] Erin Potts: The Rodney King verdict had come out, um, acquitting the four officers who had clearly and brutally beaten Rodney King. 
[00:26:22] Unnamed News Anchor, National Geographic: There are fires burning, there are people being beaten, there is looting. It is a dangerous night in the city of Los Angeles.
[00:26:29] Erin Potts: And in 1992 was when there was a referendum that voted to do away with apartheid. 
[00:26:36] Ellen Erasmus, SABC News: White South Africans are flocking to the polls today in one of the country's most historic referendums. 
[00:26:42] Erin Potts: The media always portrayed my generation as apathetic, and slackers, and said we were tuned out, and we really weren't.
[00:26:51] Erin Potts: We were just not seeing ourselves in their version of what the world should look like. But we were there. We were doing the work, and I think it just sounded and looked really different than what was expected. For me, I was like, "I don't know anyone who's a slacker or tuned out. I see people, like s- doing amazing art, and creating new companies, and trying to change the world."
[00:27:19] Erin Potts: I can't think of a single example of social justice and freedom fighting in the world that has been successful and has not included young people at the center of it. Ngawang Sangdrol, I mean, she was so young. 
[00:27:34] Ngawang Sangdrol: In the Drapchi Prison, we are all young, you know, the around, uh, 18, 20, something like that. 
[00:27:42] Erin Potts: I didn't hear about Ngawang as much as the "Drapchi 14" they were called.
[00:27:47] Ngawang Sangdrol: So everybody's young, so love singing song. And also we have lots beautiful political songs, freedom songs. Usually if the guard is not there, we sing openly, you know, singing. And then two of them get a chance to borrow tape recorder. 
[00:28:04] Erin Potts: Ngawang and a group of Tibetan nuns sang songs of freedom that were recorded on a little cassette tape and smuggled out of the country.
[00:28:16] Erin Potts: And we knew that this work was going on inside the worst, the most notorious prison inside Tibet. There are so many social justice movements where music is such an important part of it. And, you know, music activates the part of the brain that governs optimism. It brings us together, not just for concerts, but, you know, back in the day around the campfires, we always gathered around music.
[00:28:50] Erin Potts: And in the Civil Rights Movement, it was used as a way that the protesters who knew that they were about to get met with violence could stay calm and hold on to non-violence. So the fact that these nuns spontaneously did the same thing and used music and freedom songs as a form of protest really kinda speaks to the universal nature of it.
[00:29:23] Erin Potts: When I was in college, I didn't understand how important music is. I just felt it in my body, in my, in my heart. And I, I also... You know, most activism felt really heavy and uncomfortable to me. I mean, I love a good protest, but that can't be the beginning and end of activism. Like, there had to be something more.
[00:29:46] Erin Potts: And to me, that more was music. Then I found this quote, uh, that was and still is one of my favorites by Emma Goldman that says, "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution." And I knew when I heard that, I knew that is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make a revolution that we can dance to.
[00:30:18] 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.
[00:30:39] 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. The dramyae music you heard in this episode was performed and recorded by Tendor.
[00:31:01] Erin Potts: A special thanks to him for giving us permission to use it. A very special thanks to all who were part of the concerts and to those who helped make this series possible. 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.
[00:31:20] Erin Potts: Find links and more information about the concerts at freedomneedsasoundtrack.com.