After a long absence, I've finally decided to post something here again, inspired, as
noted in my other long-neglected blog, by the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. I did two separate shows on my radio program dedicated to the topic. In the first I played songs from 1969, the year of the Apollo 11 landing (as well as the Apollo 12 landing and the Apollo 10 flight to the Moon), including songs from Taiwan, Britain and the US, some of them directly connected to the Apollo missions, others not. In my other show I played songs connected with outer space in some way or another. Here I'd like to highlight a few of the songs with a direct or indirect connection with the Apollo missions. Some of them I played on my show, but others I didn't, either because I didn't have room for them or in a few cases because I only discovered them in the week since I recorded the second show.
"
Fly Me to the Moon" (Bart
Howard) as performed by Frank Sinatra (the link is to a live version)
"
Everyone's Gone to the Moon" (Jonathan King) as performed by Jonathan King
These two songs are connected to the Apollo 11 mission in a different way from the ones described below. They weren't inspired by the Apollo missions, as they predate them (indeed one of them predates even Sputnik), and they aren't really about space or space exploration. The Sinatra song was in fact originally titled "In Other Words", which is the phrase repeated in the chorus; "Fly me to the Moon" is the opening line of the song, and only this and the subsequent lines about the stars, Jupiter and Mars have anything to do with space. But Sinatra's version (recorded in 1964; the song itself dates back to 1954) was taken to the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts, and Buzz Aldrin supposedly played it while he and Neil Armstrong were on the Moon, making it the first song to be actually played on the Moon (though there is some dispute about whether this happened, as Aldrin's comments have been inconsistent and, unlike most of the songs played on the way to and from the Moon, the song isn't on any of the audio recorded during the mission - though he could have played during a time when they were out of contact with Earth). As for "Everyone's Gone to the Moon", written and recorded by Jonathan King in 1965, the crew listened to it at some point on the way back to Earth. Aldrin seems to have been the one who brought it, as he was the one who brought contemporary popular music (Michael Collins let the others choose the music, and Neil Armstrong brought some more exotic recordings, such as Harry Revel and Les Baxter's
Music Out of the Moon), but in his autobiography Michael Collins said that though he'd never heard it before it was his favorite of the songs the others brought, as he found it "restful". While my own impressions of Jonathan King as a person are not particularly good, despite his role in giving Genesis its start, this song is pretty decent, though as far as I know it's the only good thing he did.
"
Space Oddity" (David Bowie) as performed by David Bowie
This is an obvious one, not only because it is clearly inspired in part by the Apollo missions as well as the film
2001: A Space Odyssey, but because it was released just a few days before Apollo 11 launched for the Moon. The BBC actually played it during their coverage of the Moon landing, even though, as Bowie himself later commented, the fact that the trip didn't end well for Major Tom made it a somewhat questionable choice. Many decades later, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield had similar qualms about the lyrics when his son urged him to do
a cover of the song on the International Space Station, so he asked his son to rewrite the lyrics to fit his own situation. Apparently Bowie approved. I was able to watch Hadfield perform his version of the song live at the Starmus festival last month; on keyboards was Rick Wakeman, who played Mellotron on the original recording (he also played piano on "Life on Mars?").
"
Armstrong" (John Stewart) as performed by John Stewart
Many years ago, I read about this song in a book - I forget the title, but it was something like 100 Great Songs - but I didn't actually hear it until very recently. In late June, as mentioned above, I attended the Starmus festival, at which Buzz Aldrin, among other prominent astronauts, scientists and musicians, was a speaker. At the festival, they showed the new film Apollo 11, which was put together entirely from original footage from the Apollo era, without any new dialogue or narration, though in some scenes music was added (the director and producer were part of a panel discussion before the film showing along with Neil Armstrong's son Rick). In one scene, Aldrin was playing music on a portable cassette player as the astronauts are travelling toward the Moon. At first the song is heard directly from the original footage, with the expected loss of quality, but suddenly it becomes clear and loud, turning into part of the soundtrack for the subsequent scene.
After returning to Taiwan, I looked up the song, which was "Mother Country" by John Stewart. When I did so I discovered that he had also written and performed "Armstrong" (his most successful composition was "Daydream Believer", though he himself only recorded it several years after it was a huge hit for the Monkees). He started work on the song even before the landing had taken place, and released it as a single soon after, probably in August or early September (a new recording of the song with some tweaks to the arrangement was released in 1973 on Stewart's album
Cannons in the Rain). The song was controversial at the time of its initial release and was even the target of record burnings because some thought it was criticizing the Moon landing. But while it does have a certain degree of ambivalence, it's actually positive about Armstrong's achievement. It says that while the world still had unspeakable poverty and suffering, war, and growing environmental problems, the moment when Armstrong walked upon the Moon brought people all over the Earth together, if only for a brief moment. Armstrong's Apollo 11 crewmate Michael Collins made a similar observation about how people he met as they toured the world after their return viewed the landing as an achievement by humankind, not just one nation. Stewart's song captures this well, while reminding us that a lot of problems remain. This is most clearly encapsulated in the penultimate verse: "The rivers are getting dirty/The wind is getting bad/War and hate are killing off/The only earth we have/But the world all stopped to watch it/On that July afternoon/To watch a man named Armstrong/Walk upon the moon". It does slip from realism into mythology in the final lines when it draws a parallel between Armstrong and Adam, but even this verse is only weak in comparison with the powerful ones that came before. In any case, the song is one of the best written about the Moon landing, made all the more appropriate by the fact that another songs by its writer/performer was listened to by the Apollo astronauts on the way to the Moon.
"
Armstrong,Aldrin and Collins" (Z. Manners/S. Seely) as performed by The Byrds
This song is more the kind of thing that those who protested John Stewart's "Armstrong" wanted to hear, though both share the sentiment that the achievement made people all over "proud of the human race". But this song is thoroughly positive, at least in the portion that appears at the end of the Byrds' album
Ballad of Easy Rider; their recording fades out after just over a minute. One of the writers, Zeke Manners, was also a country singer and sometime comedian (among other things, he wrote a song called "Take My Wife, Please" for Henny Youngman), but if he himself recorded the song, I couldn't find a copy. It certainly doesn't come close to Stewart's song, but it is at least nice that all three of the astronauts got a mention.
"
Moonhead" (Gilmour/Waters/Mason/Wright) as performed by Pink Floyd
I only first heard of this recording a few days ago, in an article about it from The Atlantic. It was an improvised instrumental jam that the band played to accompany a BBC program on the eve of the Moon landing. The same program also featured the newly released "Space Oddity", by a still relatively unknown David Bowie. While this is one of Pink Floyd's most obscure recordings, it creates the appropriate atmosphere to accompany that historic moment.
"
For Michael Collins, Jeffery and Me" (Ian Anderson) as performed by Jethro Tull
A track from Jethro Tull's 1970 album Benefit that it is sung in part from the perspective of Michael Collins, who remained in orbit around the Moon when Armstrong and Aldrin went to down to the surface. While the thoughts expressed are probably more reflective of Ian Anderson's outlook than that of Collins himself, it's an interesting song with that distinctive Jethro Tull sound.
"
Rocket Man" (Elton John/Bernie Taupin) as performed by Elton John
While Elton John's hit song doesn't expressly refer to the Apollo missions, they surely played a role in inspiring Taupin's lyrics, though the direct inspiration is said to be another song by the same name written by Tom Rapp and performed by Pearls Before Swine, which in turn was inspired by a Ray Bradbury story. Nevertheless, the Apollo missions were still taking place at the time the song was released (Apollo 16 launched the month after the song came out, and Apollo 17, the last mission to the Moon, launched at the end of the same year), and while those were only going to the Moon, not to Mars, the closest living equivalents to the song's Rocket Man were the Apollo astronauts. However, unlike the astronaut in the song, they understood a lot of the science and mostly likely didn't think of their jobs as ordinary nine-to-five ones. Be that as it may, this ranks along with "Space Oddity" as one of the most successful songs about space travel.
"
Alan Bean" (Darren Hayman) as performed by Hefner
Like several other songs in this list, this is a new discovery. A song about one of the Apollo astronauts who struck me as one of the most personally likable, and who became a talented painter, putting his art skills to use in conveying what it was like to walk on the Moon. I don't know what Alan Bean himself thought of the song, but I would imagine he liked it (the band apparently did get a chance to speak to him at one point, but I don't know what was said). The video in the link above consists of paintings by Al Bean accompanied by the song. An interesting bit of trivia: Tom Hanks, the actor who played Jim Lovell in the movie Apollo 13, wrote a short story titled "Alan Bean Plus Four" about a group of friends making a trip around the Moon in a spacecraft that the narrator had named
Alan Bean, after the astronaut.
"
Rocket Experience" (Lisa Cannon) as performed by Buzz Aldrin aka Doc Rendezvous
This is something I just came across, an entertaining rap song performed by Buzz Aldrin himself in 2009 not long before the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, when Aldrin was 79. The track was produced by Snoop Dog with help from Quincy Jones (who also produced the recording of "Fly Me to the Moon" Aldrin played on the Moon), Talib Kweli, and Soulja Boy. Of course it includes plenty of lines about Aldrin's moon walking, as well as his promoting future space missions to Mars. The
"Making of" video is also pretty entertaining.
"
Michael Collins" as performed by The Boy Least Likely To
I only first heard this song the other day, but it is a pretty good one. Michael Collins himself would disagree with the characterization that he was lonely, as he's said many times that he wasn't (for that matter, John Young flew alone for a short time on Apollo 10, and the command module pilots on many of the later Apollo missions were alone in orbit considerably longer than Collins), but the worry that he might have to return to Earth alone if things went badly for Armstrong and Aldrin was one he said he had at the time. The song also talks about a sentiment Collins and other astronauts have expressed, how one gets an entirely new perspective on the Earth when you see it from a distance.
"
Contact" (Bangalter/Homem-Christo/Queme/Braithwaite/Mitchell/Porter) as performed by Daft Punk
This track by the well-known French electronic music duo opens with a snippet of dialogue spoken by Gene Cernan, the last person to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 17 mission. While that's it's only direct connection to the Apollo missions, the music itself is worth a listen, even for those who like me don't listen to much electronic music. It makes an interesting contrast to "Moonhead".
"
Tracy's Song" as performed by No More Kings
This evocative song is also closely connected to Gene Cernan and his trip to the Moon on Apollo 17. Tracy was the name of Cernan's daughter, and at one point he traced her initials in the lunar dust. Though as with a number of the other songs written as if from the astronaut's perspective, it may not be a completely accurate reflection of Cernan's own feelings, the basic facts are accurate and the rest, accurate or not, creates a poignant mood. Incidentally, there was also a large rock on the Moon that was examined by Cernan and Harrison Schmidt which later was nicknamed "Tracy's Rock". One of the more commonly seen photos from the Moon, taken by Cernan, shows Schmidt and the lunar rover near the rock. It seems that fellow moonwalker Alan Bean told Cernan he was going to do a painting of it, and Cernan said if he'd known how popular the picture would be he'd have written his daughter's name on it. So Bean painted the scene as if he had done so, which has led some to believe inaccurately that Cernan actually wrote her name there, when it was apparently somewhere else. Also, unlike in the song or in Bean's painting, Cernan wrote her initials, not her full first name, and he apparently didn't think to take a picture of them. But, as he said in later interviews, they'll still be there for people to see when humans finally return to the Moon.
"
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino" (Alex Turner) as performed by Arctic Monkeys
Tranquility Base, of course, was what the Apollo 11 landing site was called. This song is the title track to the Arctic Monkey's 2018 album, and is sung from the perspective of a receptionist at the hotel and casino in question and is a satire on sterile modern life. The band's vocalist, Alex Turner, sounds quite a bit like David Bowie on this song and even more so on the other song from the album that I listened to, "Four Out of Five". The connection with the Moon landing is basically just in the title and the concept of a hotel and casino at Tranquility Base, something which of course should never be allowed to be built in reality - though it may be unavoidable if Moon tourism ever becomes a big thing, as Tranquility Base will certainly be one of the biggest attractions.
This is another recent release that I just discovered the other day, and it relates the true story of Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke taking a tape of country music on his flight to the Moon. It even incorporates the spoken introduction that Merle Haggard recorded on the original tape, presumably provided by Charlie Duke himself. Duke is one of the last four living moonwalkers and, along with the late Al Bean, strikes me as one of the most easy-going and likable of the Apollo astronauts. He also played a big role in Apollo 11, as he was one of the Capcoms (capsule communicators) who were responsible for relaying whatever messages Mission Control had for the astronauts. He was Capcom when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon. As for the song, since I'm not a huge country fan I can't say I like it as well as most of the others on this list, but it's not bad, and it tells the story well.
Other Space Songs:
Of course a list of all the space-related songs out there could go on forever. I played a few on my recent show, like the Byrds' "Mr. Spaceman", Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine", Jimi Hendrix's "Up From the Skies", David Bowie's "Starman", Brian Eno's instrumental "Under Stars", Eric Idle of Monty Python's "Galaxy Song", Blur's "Far Out", Taiwanese rocker Wu Bai's "太空彈", Taiwanese aboriginal band Matzka's "089", Brian May's "New Horizons" and several more. But of course there are far more than can be fit into a two hour show, so there were great songs I had to leave out, including Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun", Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", Bowie's "Life on Mars?", Genesis's "Watcher of the Skies", Stevie Wonder's "Saturn", the Police's "Walking on the Moon" and Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" and "Exogenesis: Symphony", among others. One I just discovered deserves special mention here, as it has a little bit of a relationship to the Apollo missions, though somewhat more indirect than the songs listed above. The song is Rush's "
Countdown", which is about the launch of the first orbital Space Shuttle flight, which took place in 1981 and was watched by the band in person. The track includes recordings of dialogue spoken by mission control and the two astronauts on the Space Shuttle, John Young and Robert Crippen. John Young, of course, was also an Apollo astronaut (and before that a Gemini astronaut) and flew to the Moon twice (one of only three people to do so), walking on it during Apollo 16 along with Charlie Duke. Since the Rush song is about the space shuttle, not Apollo, I didn't include it above, but it's a reminder of what an amazing career John Young had - the first person to fly six space missions (the current record is seven, held by two astronauts, with a number of others tied with Young at six), the longest career of any astronaut, and the only person to have piloted and commanded four different types of spacecraft (Gemini, the Apollo command module, the Apollo lunar module, and the Space Shuttle).
A final special mention goes to a song which has no connection to Apollo but is perhaps my favorite song about space travel. It's one I played on my show and heard live at Starmus, performed by its composer in a new arrangement, backed by an orchestra. I refer to the Queen song "
'39", written by the band's guitarist Brian May, who also sang lead vocals on the studio version from the band's masterpiece
A Night at the Opera (Queen's lead vocalist Freddie Mercury sang backing vocals on the studio version, though he sang lead when they did the song in concert). May studied astrophysics (he later finished his PhD, so he is now an actual astrophysicist), and so while the song might be mistaken for a tale about a sea voyage, a closer listen reveals that the "milky seas" in question are the Milky Way galaxy. What's more, the song is perhaps the only major rock song to hinge on Einstein's theory of relativity, specifically the time dilation that would occur if one were to travel at a speed close to the speed of light (probably not likely to ever happen in reality, but this is a science fiction story). The voyagers leave in the year '39 (the century is deliberately not revealed) and return a hundred years later, having only aged one year. It's very cleverly done, and the catchy melody is a match for the lyrics. It certainly should be ranked among the all time best space related songs, along with obvious ones like "Space Oddity". Brian May's
performance of the song at the recent Starmus is worth checking out too.
