Fans of WNYC’s “Radiolab” turned out in spades to Unity Temple for a special live storytelling experience this past Saturday led by the radio show’s senior producer Simon Adler.
Adler took 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 told Wednesday Journal ahead of the shows.
Called “Mixtapes to the Moon: How the Cassette Changed the World,” the live show explored the impact of the cassette and its best friend, the Walkman. Between the 5 p.m. show and the 8 p.m. show, hundreds of fans paid $40 a ticket to see Adler at the Frank Lloyd Wright architectural masterpiece.
Hosting the show at Unity Temple made sense to Adler because he said 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.
Attendees were directed to bring a pair of headphones and a listening device, which Adler called “central” to the experience, both collective and individual. Audience members were given a QR code upon entry for a self-guided tour of the church. Once scanned, the QR linked to three different versions of Adler’s narration about Unity Temple, a surprise Adler later revealed during the show.
The show 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.”
This was definitely the case for the group of friends that caught the 5 p.m. show. Mark Tawny left thinking about technology’s isolation side effect, starting with the pocket-sized Walkman, which allowed people to continue listening to audio while out and about. Now, it is hard to find someone on the train or out walking who doesn’t have a pair of — usually wireless — headphones.
Tawny told Wednesday Journal how he had also been thinking a lot lately about how church used to be the center of a community but now congregations are now dwindling. Adler’s show, said Tawny, gave him a new perspective on the potential intersection of technology and church attendance, which made the Unity Temple setting all the more interesting to him.
“It was a fresh take I’d never even thought of,” Tawny said.
That fresh take didn’t come directly from Adler. In the show, he didn’t necessarily tell the audience what to think about, but merely encouraged them to think differently about the humble cassette’s place in the world by offering different context.
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 information, which made recording accessible to the wider public.
He then spent about five months researching and reporting on the cassette. That work became a podcast series for the New York-based NPR member station WNYC, which produces the two-time Peabody Award-winning “Radiolab.” In “Mixtape,” Adler’s five-part podcast series, 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.
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 better remember 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. Adler revealed that Collins’ playlist, unlike those of Aldrin and Armstrong, were lost to time.
That particular 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 music. A large portion of Adler’s show was dedicated to the rise of the self-help tape and other lesser-known societal contributions of the cassette.
One area Adler did not explore in his show, as he said he couldn’t figure out a way to include it, was the idea that almost everything out in the world is backed up somewhere on a cassette tape, which is both cheap and durable. So, while it might be considered obsolete, the cassette tape still plays a pretty significant role in society.
“At this point, essentially the entire internet is backed up on a magnetic cassette tape,” said Adler.
