Fans of NPR’s “Radiolab” will be thrilled to find out that the show is hosting a live storytelling experience this Saturday at Unity Temple led by the radio show’s senior producer Simon Adler.
Adler will take audience members through the wonders of the cassette tape, a piece of technology that changed the world – and gave rise to a new kind of love letter: the mixtape. And despite its early ubiquity, the cassette, now considered obsolete, is not that well understood, according to Adler.
“One of the reasons I was so drawn to these strange little objects is, to me, they were this turning point, this fulcrum around which society tipped because here, for the first time, in the cassette tape, you had a medium that was small, that was re-recordable, that was mobile,” he explained.
Called “Mixtapes to the Moon: How the Cassette Changed the World,” the live show explores the impact of the cassette and its best friend, the Walkman. Audiences can choose between the 5 p.m. show and the 8 p.m. show Saturday night. Tickets cost $40 and are available for purchase online at WBEZ.org. Bringing a pair of headphones and a listening device is “central” to the experience, which will be both collective and individual, Adler said.
Hosting the show at Unity Temple, the world-famous structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, made sense to Adler as the cassette and the building represent similar shifts in the collective conscious related to modern technology and thought.
“Being in a place that sort of denotes a moment in time, while telling stories about objects that capture a moment in time, that just feels really beautiful and symmetrical,” he said.
The live show was born out of a pitch Adler made about three years ago for a podcast series based around the cassette tape and how it captured audio, making recording accessible for the first time ever to the wider public.
He then spent about five months researching and reporting working on the podcast series for the New York-based NPR member station WNYC, which also produces the two-time Peabody Award-winning “Radiolab.” Adler’s work became the basis of the five-part series “Mixtape,” where, in each episode, the cassette tape serves as both character and source material.
The show at Unity Temple is an extension of the podcast.
“We wanted to be able to play around with some of these ideas of collective experience, individual experience in a way that the podcast just doesn’t fully allow for and so these shows are basically collections of material that originally it didn’t make it into the miniseries, but that we’ve woven together with these certain more theatrical, experiential elements,” Adler said.
Without giving too much away, Adler shared the basis of one the stories that didn’t make it into the podcast but made it into the live show – the story of astronaut Michael Collins. Audiences perhaps know better Collins’ Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, who became the first people ever to walk on the moon’s surface in 1969.
While Aldrin and Armstrong were making that famous walk, Collins was piloting the command module Columbia into lunar orbit. He spent more than 21 hours in complete solitude, circling the moon, with only the company of cassette tapes, which he listened to on his portable cassette player.
“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” Collins wrote in his autobiography.
The music tapes, Collins later revealed, were provided by friends of Armstrong and Aldrin. His favorite song he listened to was 1965’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” by British singer-songwriter Jonathan King.
This story fits in with the perception that cassettes were mostly used for audio purposes, but cassettes have the ability to store information unrelated at all to sound. Adler goes deeper into this lesser-known element of cassettes – and far more – during the show, which was designed to be both fun and thought provoking.
“We’ve created something that, when people walk out of it at the end, they’re going to want to be talking to other people about it,” Adler said. “I think it’s going to make them have some thoughts they’ve never had before.”
