MUSIC was with the Moonmen, too. Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad had missed music on his first spaceflight, aboard Gemini 11, so on the way to the Moon, he took a portable cassette player so he and his crew could bounce around to Joao Gilberto’s hit The Girl from Ipanema and Sugar Sugar by The Archies. He also took a tape of country and western songs, which his co-pilot Alan Bean just about managed to tolerate, but when Brian Eno came to provide the music for an Oscar-nominated film called For All Mankind, he was intrigued to find that many of Conrad’s colleagues had taken country and western on the trip as well.
‘I thought that said something interesting about how they saw themselves,’ he twinkled ‘which was as frontiersmen.’
Most of Eno’s score is collected on the Apollo album and more than any other piece, An Ending (Ascent) captures the sense of wonder I continue to feel when I think of the dreamy two years spent making Moondust. Written to accompany the emotive reuniting of the Lunar and Command modules, it also reflects the tone in Eno’s voice when he recalled the night of the first landing, saying:
‘It was a full moon that night and we looked out the window and saw it and thought “My God, this is really happening.” It was a magical moment. It just seemed incredible at the time.’
Classical music featured on the lunar trips too. Bizarrely, several astronauts took the soundtrack from Stanley Kubrick’s newly-released 2001: a Space Odyssey, exposing the weird dynamic between sci-fi and real-sci that drove Apollo from the very beginning, and Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna will shiver the spine of anyone who’s seen that film. By the time I’d finished my research, I could barely stand to hear Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – the theme from 2001, which has become a kind of shorthand for space – but Lux Aeterna is another thing entirely. Space is wondrous, but it’s scary as well: one false move and it’ll turn you inside out.
More intriguing still was Neil Armstrong’s choice of Dvorak’s New World Symphony and something his crewmate Michael Collins had referred to as ‘strange, electronic-sounding music,’ which the First Man identified by email as the theremin work of Dr Samuel Hoffman – specifically an album called Music Out of the Moon, which the First Man taped from his own collection. The theremin was an early form of synthesizer, which a player controlled by moving his or her hands through two electrostatic fields to produce the kind of unearthly quaver you hear on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations or Portishead’s Humming. Yet the sound is still most often associated with sci-fi B-movies from the 1950s, notably Forbidden Planet and Robert Wise’s magnificent The Day the Earth Stood Still, making its selection by Armstrong quirky to say the least.
Truth be told, it was always the quirks and contradictions that most fascinated me about Apollo. The whole enterprise had been set in train by John F Kennedy in 1961, after a disastrous start to his presidency called for a show of vision. NASA had neither plans, desire, nor means to go to the Moon at that stage (its head, Robert Gilruth, claimed to have woken up screaming the night after the plans were announced), but with the US lagging behind the Soviet Union in science, technology and space, JFK instructed his advisors to find a contest that America could win. Had ballroom dancing been suggested, who’s to say he wouldn’t have gone for it? Viewed this way, the Moon conquest was the most immaculate folly ever contrived, born of vanity and opportunism as much as rapture.
As such, it was also a perfect expression of its time. It’s easy to forget that the call to peace and love was a response to violence, brutality and unrest on a grand scale, and The Last Poets, often claimed to be the first rap group, grew out of this mid-late-Sixties foment. Deeply obscure at the time, they were rediscovered during the hip-hop explosion of the 1980s, and their Mean Machine sounds as mind-blowing today as when it first appeared. Soberingly, it also sounds as relevant – a trait shared with Jimi Hendrix’s freeform excoriation of The Star Spangled Banner, which was most famously performed at Woodstock, just three weeks after Armstrong’s landing. The guitarist cleverly denied any political intent behind the piece, but his Stratocaster tells another story, of people screaming and bombs falling and bullets tearing flesh. He knew of whence his instrument spoke, too, because like most black men of his generation, Hendrix had done time in the army: had a training injury not bought an honourable discharge, he might well have ended up in Vietnam himself.
JUST as Rock and Roll rose with the Space Age, it seems no coincidence to me that the ‘Sixties’ disintegrated in spirit at about the same time as the lunar programme, at the end of 1972, as the last two men stepped off the Moon. Even as a political naif, you could hear the change on the radio, in the sardonic strains of Steely Dan – named after a dildo in a William Burroughs novel – and the rise of hedonistic Glam Rock. David Bowie describes how he felt at the time thus:
‘For me and several of my friends, the Seventies were the start of the Twenty-First Century. It was Kubrick’s doing, on the whole, with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange…there was a distinct feeling that nothing was true anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it seemed…everything was up for grabs.’
So Ziggy Stardust was the parody of a rock star by a would-be rock star, herald of an age where everything would start to look like parody and satire suddenly seemed pointless – a brilliant conceit. And when rock tried to be good, it ended up looking flabby and self-important, as when well-meaning George Harrison staged the Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Gardens. The former Beatle coaxed Bob Dylan out of sulky retirement and booked a smack-addled Eric Clapton onto every flight out of London for a week before the guitarist then known as ‘God’ managed to catch one, but still ended up presiding over the counter-culture version of Watergate, with all the money blown on expenses and tax.
Nonetheless, I saved up for six months to buy the album when it was released in 1972 and my favourite tune is still Ringo Starr’s world-weary It Don’t Come Easy, which had been gifted him by Harrison (you can hear the original demo version on YouTube now). By then, of course, Jimi, Janis and Jim Morrison were dead, while others like Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac had fried their minds on acid. Within a few years, punks such as The Stranglers (always the scariest of their kind to me, because they sounded so mean but looked so normal) would be mocking the optimism of their predecessors in songs like No More Heroes and Straighten Out. Listen to the lyrics of almost any song from the punk years, though: the counter-culture, like humanity’s brief tilt at the stars, had come to look like a hubristic sham to us all.
Except that nothing about Apollo is so clear-cut. The more I spoke to the Moonwalkers, the more clearly I saw that the most moving part of the experience for them had been seeing the Earth from such a distance; as an opalescent sphere drifting through space, the only colour you could see in any direction. Among the twelve Moonwalkers, there had been epiphanies, breakdowns, awakenings. Jim Irwin claimed to have heard God whispering to him on the surface; Edgar Mitchell felt plugged into the cosmos like a lightbulb and is now a New Age guru in Florida. At a cost of roughly $13 per year per American, the programme was also great theatre, the only shared global memory that doesn’t involve tragedy.
Of all the descriptions of Apollo, Norman Mailer’s ‘surreal adventure’ still seems the most apt to me, and some of the songs are here to mark my own scarcely less surreal passage through it. Hallelujah is the drive from Charlie and Dotty Duke’s home in New Braunfels, Texas, to Austin, with Charlie’s spectacular fall and Faith-inspired rise on my mind (it was the Wainwright version which entranced me then, soon after I’d learned of his grandfather’s place in the Programme), while American Music Club’s Western Sky is the tune I heard in my head as I turned for San Francisco after finishing the book across the bay in Walnut Creek, close to where I grew up, and where the band’s singer, Mark Eitzel, turns out to have been born.
There are times when psychedelic and spiritual ecstasy sound so remarkably like real-life space talk that you start to wonder whether they’re part of the same matrix. Listen to Edgar Mitchell describe his ‘epiphany’, or to other astronauts trying to explain what they saw and felt – examples of which you’ll find in the mix here - and it’s easy to believe. Plug into the ‘sounds’ of space, of radio activity over Neptune or Jupiter’s moons as recorded by NASA probes (again featured here between-tunes), and it’s even easier.
More generally, the Handsome Family, who hail from Albuquerque, New Mexico, represent the happy time I spent interviewing Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, the only career geologist to go to the Moon. They also embrace the Appalachian folk and bluegrass music I found everywhere and learned to love for the first time on my travels, turning country music’s perceived (and at times actual) conservatism on its head with Our Blue Sky, a song which brings to mind the famous ‘Whole Earth’ photo Schmitt and his partner Gene Cernan brought back from his mission aboard Apollo 17. NASA had given up on capturing this image, but in the end managed it by accident on the very last flight, and it’s been the chief symbol of the environmental movement ever since. In a similar way, Moon River conjures the awe we’ve always invested in the Moon: Danny Williams’s sublime version topped the UK singles chart in 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and Kennedy confounded the world by announcing the Apollo project.
Lastly, as friends and I considered Neil Armstrong and Pete Conrad’s eccentric choices of soundtrack, we fell to wondering what tunes we would take given the chance. For my own part, I was astonished at how easily an answer came. Quite apart from its theme, AR Kane’s A Love from Outer Space is one of the most euphoric songs I know, a near-perfect expression of the mood I’d want to take with me to the stars. The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that if anything beats Sugar Sugar in my book (and not much does), this is it.
