[CLOCK TICKING]
JON WERTHEIM: Californians got on board for a $33 billion
high-speed train that was supposed to connect
LA to San Francisco by 2020.
Instead, they have this--
an unfinished line connecting, wait
for it, Bakersfield and Merced.
Why have 20 other countries managed to build high-speed
rail, while America hasn't?
We've heard people saying what happened
in the past is the past.
Failure is not an option.
Failure is always an option.
[LAUGHS]
[CLOCK TICKING]
Hersh!
It's Mama.
ANDERSON COOPER: Tonight, the story of a mother
who would not give up on her son after he was taken hostage
by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
I was always saying, I love you.
Stay strong.
Survive.
I love you.
Stay strong.
Survive.
I love you.
You stay strong.
Survive.
Was it a command to you as well?
Yes.
[CLOCK TICKING]
BILL WHITAKER: If you're a rock fan,
you already know Stewart Copeland, acclaimed drummer
for The Police.
What you may not know is who or what he's making music with now.
[MONKEY CHATTERING]
That's a kookaburra.
BILL WHITAKER: Hundreds of animals turned into something
wild.
You put an instrument with them,
and those animals become Pavarotti.
[CLOCK TICKING]
I'm Bill Whitaker.
I'm Jon Wertheim.
I'm Anderson Cooper.
I'm Lesley Stahl.
Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.
[CLOCK TICKING]
It's hard to exaggerate the role
of the train in the American story
or the romance of train travel, those iron horses galloping down
rods of steel.
Why, then, has high-speed rail-- so common in other countries--
not tracked in the US?
As we first reported in April, an ambitious state-run project
connecting LA and San Francisco has lurched, derailed, cost
billions, and may never happen.
One private company is betting that it could succeed
where the public sector is not, but that, too,
has had its bumps.
As US high-speed rail remains a mirage, a ghost train,
it's become a stand-in for a broader question--
can America get its act together and still build big things?
The very model of modern engineering,
it hums across the fruited plains at a top speed
of 200 miles an hour.
It's revolutionized travel.
It's a source of national pride--
in Morocco.
[CHIMES]
Here in the US, high-speed rail looks like this,
hardly passenger-ready.
America's hopes for its first high-speed rail
were kindled in 2008, when California voters approved
a ballot measure for a train connecting
Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours.
The estimated price tag, $33 billion.
Completion date, 2020.
It would cut pollution, revitalize local economies,
clear gridlock.
Status update-- today, the state's high-speed rail
authority is preparing to lay its first tracks at roughly
the same cost, only, slight course correction here,
instead of LA to San Francisco, it will run one third of that
distance, connecting, wait for it,
the metropolis of Bakersfield and Merced, population 99,000.
Oh, and when will it open?
2033.
Maybe.
VINCE FONG: I think that the California High-Speed Rail
nightmare is the quintessential example of government waste
and mismanagement.
You say this needs to stop.
Needs to stop.
JON WERTHEIM: Congressman Vince Fong,
a Republican from Bakersfield, sits on the House Transportation
Committee.
He says that when California voters first
approved high-speed rail, the promise and price
tag were more marketing campaign than realistic projection.
We're now in 2026.
There are no trains.
There's no track laid.
It's a complete bait and switch.
If I vote for a mansion in Malibu by next year and someone
says, actually, you know what, in five years,
we're going to have a dog house in Modesto,
how do things go so off the rails?
The business plan that was put out in 2008
was very theoretical.
This is what we think is going to happen.
And it became very clear that they didn't
have the specifics worked out.
This project--
JON WERTHEIM: On that point, management doesn't disagree.
Toks Omishakin is California's secretary of transportation,
and Anthony Williams, a rail authority board member.
Both are relatively new to the job, left to answer
for their predecessors.
There were mistakes made.
Some of the criticism on this project, I think, are very fair.
What happened?
I don't think the voters fully understood,
and neither did we in the public sector,
what it was going to take to actually get
this project delivered.
JON WERTHEIM: To get the necessary political buy-in
from the whole state, the plan called for the train
to run inland, threatening the farmland of the Central Valley.
Yet the rail authority hadn't answered basic questions,
like precisely where it could lay down its tracks,
what's known as right of way.
3,000 parcels had to be negotiated just for the segments
that we're working on today.
In the Central Valley.
It seems to me one farmer doesn't want high-speed rail
going through his field, and you've got a guy that can gum up
the works for a long time.
Yeah, that's what happens sometimes in these processes.
JON WERTHEIM: More snarl--
California's exacting environmental regulations,
which triggered all manner of reviews, lawsuits, and delays.
As anyone who's renovated a home knows, delay adds to price.
So do the high US labor and construction costs, at least
compared to many other countries.
And while the federal government contributed modestly
under the Obama and Biden administrations,
the burden fell largely on the state.
When construction started, was the financing
there to complete this rail?
It wasn't.
Let's be real.
We had a lot to learn, and we had a lot of growth to do.
And it's arguable whether we should
have been clearer about that.
JON WERTHEIM: By 2019, costs ballooning
and the timeline years off schedule,
bipartisan political pressure mounted.
Newly elected Governor Gavin Newsom
said this in his first state of the state.
Right now, there simply isn't a path
to get from Sacramento to San Diego,
let alone from San Francisco to LA.
JON WERTHEIM: Under Newsom, who didn't respond to repeated
interview requests, California decided
to focus on that initial Central Valley segment,
a route few clamored for and fewer are likely to ride,
though the ultimate goal remains connecting Northern and Southern
California.
When you have a project like this
and when the budget no longer permits you to finish it the way
you want it to, you start cutting off your arms and legs.
JON WERTHEIM: Lou Thompson helped found Amtrak in the 1970s
and, until 2024, sat on California's High-Speed Rail
peer-review group.
We've heard people say time to cut bait.
We've heard people saying what happened
in the past is the past.
Failure is not an option.
Failure is always an option.
[LAUGHS]
Is that what's going to happen here?
No, I don't think so.
But I think what will happen in the short range
is that they will cut back and do the best they can
with the money they have available.
JON WERTHEIM: Here outside Fresno,
in California's Central Valley, one
of the few signs of concrete progress, literally,
structures like this.
Locals here jokingly refer to it as their own Stonehenge.
Ideally, these bridges and viaducts
will one day be used to support California High-Speed Rail,
but for now, these are curiosities in a field,
monuments to promises that haven't been met, and plans
that haven't been executed.
Ironic because American rail was once the world's envy.
In the 1800s, the US government oversaw the birth
of the transcontinental railroad,
stitching the country together as it expanded westward.
NARRATOR: We turn to the future.
JON WERTHEIM: In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration
decided that the transportation vanguard was off the tracks,
creating-- and, critically, continuously funding--
the interstate highway system--
NARRATOR: --and the family cars in tip-top shape.
JON WERTHEIM: --fueling the world's proudest car culture.
Meanwhile, Japan's famous bullet train opened in 1964,
and today more than 20 countries have high-speed rail, generally
defined as cruising at 150 miles an hour or more.
Yes, Germany, and France and China, but also
Turkey, Indonesia.
Egypt has broken ground.
The obvious question there is, how can it
be that we can't get it done and they can get it done?
We know we can do this.
It's an economic engine.
JON WERTHEIM: Mike Reininger is managing director of Brightline
West, a private company that believes it can achieve what
California hasn't.
Oh, wow.
Next stop, Zurich.
It's like a European train system.
This train, which opened in 2018 and runs
between Miami and Orlando, hits top speeds
of around 125 miles an hour.
Not quite high-speed, but close.
It's akin to a beta test for Brightline's next project--
a bullet train connecting LA and Las
Vegas in just over two hours, a trip that
can take five hours by car.
Brightline West will be true high-speed rail,
first time in the country.
And we'll operate at speeds of about 200 miles an hour maximum.
JON WERTHEIM: Out West, Brightline
is solving the right-of-way issue
by running on the median of the I-15 highway.
Construction has already begun on some
of the station structures.
The plan is to start service in 2029.
What are you telling people to get them out of their cars
or getting them to avoid the airport?
It's more enjoyable.
It's safer.
It's reliable.
This really is all about changing people's behavior.
You don't think this car culture is intractable?
It's so hardened and it's so much
a part of the American psyche, it just can't be cracked?
I don't think so at all.
JON WERTHEIM: Cultural questions aside, Brightline's Florida
trains run at street level through crowded neighborhoods,
and according to numbers compiled by the Miami
Heraldand local public radio, more than 200 people
have been hit and killed by trains in the near decade
since operations began.
Brightline says that running rail in the desert
out West, where track crossings won't be at street level,
will be a safer proposition.
Then there are the finances.
The stratospheric costs of building and running a rail line
vastly outstrip revenues.
Analysts have downgraded Brightline's debt to junk,
raising questions about private rail as a business.
To what extent, big picture, do you
worry about the future financial viability of Brightline?
The business has built slower than we originally
expected it to build.
We thought we would be carrying more passengers today
than we are.
The business is, in fact, growing month
over month, year over year.
That's a great thing.
That solidifies, in our mind, the viability of the business.
JON WERTHEIM: Brightline's west coast project
has already received some federal funding
and is hoping for a $6 billion loan from the Trump
administration.
If you look around the world, for the most part,
the infrastructure systems are funded by the public sector.
You do see a role for government here?
Absolutely.
We welcome it.
JON WERTHEIM: Back in California,
the rail authority insists state funds
can cover the cost of the Central Valley leg.
As for the rest--
Just to be clear, as we speak right now,
are the funds there to complete LA to San Francisco?
The entire amount of money we need, not there today.
But do we believe we can get those funds to get
the project done?
Absolutely.
How much do you estimate is going to cost to connect
high-speed rail San Francisco to LA?
Today, we estimate, with the right optimization,
just over $125 billion.
I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that.
JON WERTHEIM: That's more funding
than Amtrak has received in its history
and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion.
That's a big gap to fill.
It is a big gap to fill, but again, we
have an understanding of how to get there and to fill that gap.
JON WERTHEIM: A gap the authority
hopes to fill with a new plan to cut costs, lure
private investment, and connect to bigger cities much sooner.
But there's another challenge to building anything today--
the swirling winds of a political climate
in which one party pushes and the other reflexively pulls.
Remember Gavin Newsom's pessimism?
In recent months, he's championed the project.
This is not just a transportation project.
This is about reimagining the future of this region.
JON WERTHEIM: Meanwhile, in 2025, President Trump
canceled $4 billion in federal grants for the train,
swiping at a political nemesis in the process.
Did you ever hear of Gavin New-scum?
That train is the worst cost overrun I've ever seen.
JON WERTHEIM: In a statement to 60 Minutes,
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the administration is
in favor of high-speed rail, but this project has, quote,
"wasted billions in taxpayer dollars yet delivered nothing."
Can this be done without help from the federal government?
This initial segment, we believe so.
The ultimate 494 miles of building this out
without the federal government's help will be challenging.
There's no doubt about that.
Is this a nonstarter, to build a project like this,
without federal funding?
Well, not only can't it be done, it shouldn't be done.
Because a lot of the benefits of the project,
the reason why you build a project,
is public-- pollution reduction, congestion reduction,
improved safety, comfort, reliability.
All of those things are public benefits.
JON WERTHEIM: There are other ideas for US high-speed rail,
say Dallas to Houston, but nothing else in the building
stage, leaving that uneasy, overarching question.
Morocco has high-speed rail, and Serbia and China
and Japan and Western Europe.
Why don't we?
What's your simple answer?
Well, the simple answer is they've decided they want to do
it and pay for it, and we haven't.
You think we will in our lifetimes?
I don't know.
I'm dubious.
Absent a national political will to work with the states
to create some of these systems, I
think it's going to be im-- and of course my lifetime,
almost certainly not.
But maybe yours.
I don't know.
[CLOCK TICKING]
Since Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel
nearly three years ago when the war in Gaza began,
far too many mothers, Palestinian and Israeli,
have lost children.
This is one mother's story.
Her name is Rachel Goldberg-Polin.
She's an American-Israeli who moved to Jerusalem
18 years ago with her husband, Jon, and their three children.
Her only son, Hersh, was badly wounded and taken
hostage by Hamas on October 7.
Rachel and Jon worked tirelessly to bring Hersh
and the other hostages home.
But on the 328th day of his captivity,
Hersh was executed in a tunnel in Gaza.
When we met her earlier this year,
Rachel Goldberg-Polin told us that now, like so many others,
she's trying to figure out how to live
after her child has died.
To know that your child is being tortured, tormented,
starved, abused, is maimed-- and that's an excruciating form
of suffering.
And then what's so fascinating to me
is that when they came to tell us that Hersh had been executed,
then I realized that those 330 days had been the good part,
because he was alive.
And now I'm in this place, and this is the rest of my life.
How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here?
Have you figured that out yet?
I'm trying to reunderstand what
it means to be in this world.
There are millions of us right now who have buried children.
There's nothing unique about me.
But it creates light for me to try to give words to the pain.
ANDERSON COOPER: What was Hersh like?
Easy.
The universe really knew what it was doing when it said,
Rachel's going to have one So this is the one for her.
I was really blessed.
ANDERSON COOPER: Hersh and his best friend, Aner Shapira,
were at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border
on the morning of October 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked.
They slaughtered 378 people and wounded hundreds more.
What do you remember about the morning of October 7?
[SIGHS] The sirens started, and I went and turned
on my phone.
And it 8:11, two messages had come in from Hersh.
The first one said, I love you, and the second one said,
I'm sorry.
And that was it.
Everything that had ever happened in my life
from the day I was born until that second was over.
ANDERSON COOPER: Hersh sent those texts
from inside this bomb shelter crammed
with more than two dozen people.
That's Hersh against the wall and Aner near the entrance.
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: Hamas came to the doorway
and was throwing in hand grenades.
Aner was picking them up and throwing them out.
[MUFFLED EXPLOSION]
Picking them up and throwing them out.
[MUFFLED EXPLOSION]
ANDERSON COOPER: According to survivors,
Aner threw back at least 10 grenades.
[MUFFLED EXPLOSION]
When he was killed, others took his place.
[MUFFLED EXPLOSION]
In all, 16 people were killed in the shelter.
Hersh survived but was seriously wounded by a grenade.
There were four young men who were not
able to hide under bodies.
They were all wounded, and they were
taken outside and put on a pickup truck
and driven into Gaza.
And that footage we saw for the first time
when we talked with you.
We spoke on October 16 on CNN, you and Jon.
Our son, by all accounts of the witnesses,
had his left arm blown off.
ANDERSON COOPER: When Jon said that,
I realized I'd seen their son being kidnapped.
Four days earlier, at the Nova festival site,
Israeli soldiers showed me this gruesome video recovered
from a terrorist cell phone.
MAN: [SPEAKING ARABIC]
ANDERSON COOPER: That's Hersh with a bone sticking out
of his left forearm, being forced into a pickup truck.
As soon as we got off, I said, I need to call you.
But I still-- to this day, I am sorry that that
is how you found out, that I was the one to tell you
that there's this video.
But we were so thankful, and it
made us know that he was taken alive, that he
walked on his own two feet.
And we also were really grateful that you did it
in such a human way.
In this sideways world, when we had the proof
that he was kidnapped, that was actually good.
Time is running out to save them.
The time is running out to save all of us.
[CHANTING]
ANDERSON COOPER: Rachel became, for many,
the face of the hostage crisis, meeting the pope, world leaders,
and giving hundreds of interviews.
We want to save Hersh's life.
We want to save all of those hostages.
ANDERSON COOPER: Every day, she wore a piece of tape.
On it, she'd written the number of days
since Hersh and the other 250 hostages were taken.
I was always saying, I love you.
Stay strong.
Survive.
I love you.
Stay strong.
Survive.
I love you.
Stay strong.
Survive.
Was it a command to you as well?
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: Yes.
Because there were times when I would just get
seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain.
And I would keel over onto Jon, and I would just
say, how much longer?
How much longer?
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
On the 201st day, Hamas posted this video of Hersh.
And we see the stump of his arm.
It was a propaganda video.
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: Yes.
And that gave us another bolt of adrenaline.
Keep going.
This child needs you.
Hersh!
It's Mama.
ANDERSON COOPER: On the 328th day,
Rachel and Jon joined other hostage families,
screaming their loved ones' names into a microphone towards
Gaza.
[INDISTINCT SHOUTING]
ANDERSON COOPER: Rachel didn't know it then,
but that was the day her son was murdered by Hamas.
We ended up finding out they killed him that day.
And so I wonder, did he hear me?
Do you think he did?
I think there are other ways that you
can hear your parents screaming for you,
even if you don't hear them.
ANDERSON COOPER: It was in this underground tunnel
in Rafah on August 31, 2024, Israeli soldiers
found Hersh's body.
He and five other hostages had been executed.
Hersh was shot six times at close range.
When his body was brought back to Israel,
thousands lined the streets and attended his funeral.
Finally, my sweet boy, finally, finally, finally,
finally, you're free.
ANDERSON COOPER: Rachel and Jon continued
to advocate for the remaining hostages,
but they were desperate for details about the last year
of their son's life.
Then, in February 2025, something remarkable happened.
A hostage named Or Levy was released by Hamas,
along with two others.
When Or was reunited with his family and three-year-old son,
he learned his wife, Eynav, was killed on October 7.
He was also told Hersh had been murdered.
OR LEVY: It broke me.
And I told my parents right away,
I want to meet their parents.
ANDERSON COOPER: It turned out Or
had spent three days with Hersh in a tunnel,
and he says something Hersh told him saved his life.
Seeing this guy without an arm, without a hand,
and you know what he did?
He laughed about it.
About his hand?
OR LEVY: Yeah.
And he laughed about everything, and he smiled the entire time.
He wasn't broken?
OR LEVY: No, he wasn't.
Hersh kept repeating this mantra.
"He who has a why can bear any how."
ANDERSON COOPER: "He who has a why can bear any how"
is a mantra Hersh got from this book, Man's Search for Meaning,
a 1946 concentration camp memoir by a survivor, Viktor Frankl,
who'd adapted a similar saying by Friedrich Nietzsche.
OR LEVY: It became our mantra.
ANDERSON COOPER: Everybody there?
Everybody there.
That idea that if you have a why, you can survive--
You can do anything.
ANDERSON COOPER: Soon after he was freed,
Or got Hersh's mantra tattooed on his arm.
OR LEVY: My son, he asked me, what does it say?
He doesn't speak English.
And I just laughed, and I said, your name.
"Your name"?
Because that's your why?
OR LEVY: This is my why.
The only reason why I survived was him.
What was Hersh's why?
I asked Or that, and he said-- he went like this.
You.
It was this shocking, life-affirming CPR
from beyond to have Hersh, through Or, telling us,
what's your why going to be?
Because you can bear this, even this, even losing me.
You could do it.
And so part of what I'm trying so hard to do now
is to figure out, what is my why?
ANDERSON COOPER: Rachel was told something else
by Or that gave her tremendous comfort.
He said, it's important that you
know that he told me that my mother spoke
to the secretary of state in the US.
Hersh had told him that?
Yeah, and I said, he heard on the news I had spoken
to the secretary of state?
And he said, no, he heard you on the news.
And it was like, all of a sudden, thank God.
First of all, that he heard my voice and that he knew.
We are nobodies.
We are absolute nobodies.
I even say the equivalent of John Doe in the Jewish world
is Rachel Goldberg.
But we tried so hard.
And he knew.
ANDERSON COOPER: When we met Rachel in Jerusalem
in February, days before the new war with Iran,
she'd recently finished writing a book called When We See You
Again,which came out in April.
You wrote in the book, "People want hope, resilience, recovery,
strength, survival, healing.
They want thriving and rising from the ashes like the phoenix
from the days of yore.
But the pain is chronic, ever-present, constant, gnawing,
circular, not linear."
That's how it feels?
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: That's how it feels now.
I'm open to it feeling different.
Have you noticed a change?
I think my understanding of grief has changed.
I was dreading and uncomfortable with grief.
And recently I had this whole different thought
of maybe grief is actually just this precious badge of love
that you wear because someone has died
and your love is continuing to grow.
ANDERSON COOPER: When the body of the last hostage
was returned this past January, it
had been 843 days since the October 7 attack.
Rachel and Jon finally took down the pieces of tape
their family had worn and stuck on a wall in their apartment.
That's the day we buried Hersh.
So many lives, so many innocent lives, on both sides, lost.
ANDERSON COOPER: Rachel has kept Hersh's room as he left it.
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: And that's
the tape that we took down.
ANDERSON COOPER: Oh, my gosh.
It's extraordinary to see.
All the pain and everything that is in that ball.
RACHEL GOLDBERG-POLIN: It's these symbols of failure.
What we were fighting for did happen.
We got all of these people home, not as we wanted.
We wanted them home alive, but they had come home.
You said these are all symbols of failure.
Do you think you failed?
Yeah.
You did more than anybody could possibly do.
It's true.
And sometimes 100% is not enough.
[CLOCK TICKING]
If you're a rock and roll fan, you already
know Stewart Copeland.
Drumming legend Copeland, Andy Summers,
and a guy named Sting romped to global stardom as The Police
in the 1970s.
So we were intrigued to learn that Copeland had teamed up
with celebrated naturalist Martyn Stewart
for a pioneering album, sharing the limelight
not with Sting, but with hyenas, owls, and howler monkeys.
It's called Wild Concerto.
As we first reported in April, the album
is based on Martyn Stewart's life work,
an extraordinary collection of audio recordings of the world's
living creatures.
Some are now extinct or endangered,
making Wild Concertoas much a manifesto as a music album.
We had to hear more.
[ORCHESTRA MUSIC]
There's really only one way to start the day at the world's
most famous recording studio.
[ORCHESTRA MUSIC]
Martyn in the flesh, at last.
So great to see you.
We've been so deep into our mission here.
BILL WHITAKER: Martyn Stewart.
Stewart Copeland.
This unlikely pair, the quiet naturalist and the intrepid rock
star--
I hope you have fun with this music.
BILL WHITAKER: --were here at Abbey Road
to turn animal sounds into a concerto,
here in the same studio the Fab Four made famous.
No pressure.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARTYN STEWART: Unbelievable.
The history in here is just--
Imagine McCartney running up and down those stairs.
[BIRDS CALLING ON RECORDING]
This almost makes us Beatles.
BILL WHITAKER: But today, it's the animal kingdom
that gets its shot at stardom.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's superstar time for the wrens, bears, frogs,
and hundreds more--
[MONKEY CHATTERING]
That's the kookaburra.
BILL WHITAKER: --while the humans play backup.
[UPRIGHT BASS PLAYING, PIGEON COOING ON RECORDING]
That's the wonga pigeon.
Even better.
We're good.
Brilliant.
Let's move on.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
BILL WHITAKER: Wild Concerto is a groundbreaking album
based on the unmatched audio archive of Martyn Stewart.
He's crisscrossed the planet for decades,
collecting nearly 100,000 recordings of its wild
inhabitants.
Stewart Copeland wrote the music.
When you sent me your original raw samples--
BILL WHITAKER: All he had to do was wade through 30,000 hours
of field recordings to choose which animals would get the star
treatment.
The screaming piha was a natural.
[SCREAMING PIHA CALLING]
There is the bird in question.
Here is the orchestral version of that bird.
[ORCHESTRA MUSIC PLAYING]
[SCREAMING PIHA CALLING, SCREECHING]
It's just brilliant.
BILL WHITAKER: Copeland told us it
was the raw sounds of the animals themselves
that dictated what instruments he chose.
Take this tune by some Arctic wolves.
First of all, we have the wolves on their own.
[WOLVES BARKING AND WHINING ON RECORDING]
Beautiful, right?
Still makes my hair stand on end.
STEWART COPELAND: OK, let's hear that with the orchestra.
[ANIMAL CHATTER]
It's a trombone with the wolves.
[WOLVES HOWLING]
They're not actual notes.
But you put an instrument with them,
and those animals become Pavarotti.
[ORCHESTRA PLAYING]
BILL WHITAKER: In the recording studio,
the wolves howled into the musicians' headsets.
[ANIMALS CHATTER]
STEWART COPELAND: Yep, we got it.
I'm going to come out there, kiss and hug
every single one of you.
So pucker up, babies.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, everybody.
You rock.
One, two, three!
BILL WHITAKER: Copeland should know.
You may remember his rock star days when he wielded drumsticks
as if they were lethal weapons.
As one third of The Police, Copeland
banged his way to the upper reaches of pop stardom.
(SINGING) Every breath you take
BILL WHITAKER: The Police sold more than 75 million records.
(SINGING) And every vow you break
BILL WHITAKER: Singing along yet?
(SINGING) Roxanne--
BILL WHITAKER: By 1986, the party was over.
The Police were busted.
(SINGING) You don't ever wanna to see me again
BILL WHITAKER: But it didn't take
long before Copeland's propulsive drumming landed
him a new gig and put him on a glide path
to becoming a composer.
How did that happen?
I blame Francis Coppola.
It's his fault?
You blame him?
Yes.
His thing is to find the talent and give them rope.
And he got a drummer from a rock band
and hired me to score his movie.
Because his concept was all about rhythm.
This is Rumble Fish?
This is Rumble Fish.
MAN: Yeah, that's right.
BILL WHITAKER: Copeland told us he knew nothing about film
scores, but he knew rhythm.
So he arranged barking dogs, clacking billiard balls,
and pile drivers in rhythmic loops,
making music for what he called "found sound."
[UPBEAT MUSIC, GLASS SHATTERS]
For horror films, this here is very useful.
BILL WHITAKER: More movies followed.
[KNOCKING, HIGH-PITCHED WHINE]
Then he started writing classical music.
This here, it's an opera that I did with the Deutsche National
Theater in Germany.
BILL WHITAKER: Copeland told us he'd found a new love--
Because the main thing you want
to do as a composer is create parts that are fun to play.
[PERCUSSIVE RHYTHM]
BILL WHITAKER: --as he showed us around his Los Angeles studio
stuffed with instruments.
He says he noodles around on the mall when he's composing.
[DRUM STING]
The drummer, who had never followed a sheet of music,
had become a maestro.
You loved the drums right from the start.
Power
BILL WHITAKER: The power.
What is it about the orchestra you love so much?
It's the beauty.
My daddy raised me to be a jazz musician.
Meanwhile, just quietly, my mother
was playing Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy.
And that hit me emotionally.
Now I've got [VOCALIZING].
In one ear, I got Jimi Hendrix.
In the other ear, I've got Igor Stravinsky.
And so they've always both kind of been there,
interacting in my brain.
We will hear these sounds in Wild Concerto?
Yeah, as well as all these--
[CYMBALS CLANG]
[BIRD SQUAWKING]
And these.
A world away, different music was
pouring into the ears of Martyn Stewart.
He's been eavesdropping on nature
now for more than 60 years.
It started when he was 11.
Armed with a tape recorder, he'd escaped
to the bluebell woods near his home in middle England.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
His first recordings?
This Eurasian blackbird.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
What started as a boyhood lark became a career with a mission.
[BIRD SQUAWKING]
[WIND WHISTLING]
MARTYN STEWART: I always believe the reason I'm on this planet
is to fight for the animals and the environment.
And it's kind of my rent for being here.
I feel empowered to give that message.
And what is that message?
We're losing some of the most precious species on Earth.
I can go back to places that have
been monitored over a period of 20 years,
and the change is significant.
And audio has done that.
Audio is the barometer of the planet.
If you want to know the health of the stream or the river,
the dipper will tell you.
The frog will tell you the health of the marsh.
And the birds will tell you the health of the planet.
BILL WHITAKER: At home in Florida,
Stewart told us he still takes his microphone out every day,
like a doctor with a stethoscope.
MARTYN STEWART: Watch the spiders, Bill.
BILL WHITAKER: He listens to the rhythms of the natural world.
I hear that white noise of the ocean.
[WHOOSHING]
The cicada.
[CICADAS SHRILLING]
BILL WHITAKER: These days, he's deeply worried
about a catastrophic decline in wildlife
populations around the world.
Stewart has the last known recording
of the golden Panamanian frog, here in its digital form.
[FROG CHITTERING]
The northern white rhino is also extinct in the wild.
[RHINO GRUNTING]
Other recordings give no hint of the danger
he overcame to get them.
Here's a howler monkey spoiling for a fight--
[HOWLER MONKEY BARKING]
--and the crocodile that swallowed
one of his microphones.
[CROCODILE GRUNTING]
We have the hyenas here.
BILL WHITAKER: Stewart Copeland told us
his favorite animal was the hyena--
[HYENA BARKING]
--a rare recording from the Skeleton Coast in Namibia.
Well, they have a very wide vocabulary.
They make loving sounds.
They make aggressive sounds.
How does the loving sound sound?
[GRUNTING]
That's Interesting.
In fact, I'll share with you that my wife and I
have adopted the hyena love sounds
as a part of our relationship.
Little kinky, but works.
[HYENAS LAUGHING]
And then they have the laughing hyena.
They actually do.
[LAUGHS]
BILL WHITAKER: No surprise, the hyenas got their own cut
on Wild Concerto.
[ORCHESTRA MUSIC, VOCALIZING]
How did you come up with a composition that enhanced
the sound of the hyenas?
I've asked the Lord above that question many times.
And what did he say?
He said, I don't know.
Just see if you can make a living out of it.
Just be you.
This is just magic.
It's magical.
BILL WHITAKER: Martyn Stewart told us working at Abbey Road
was a revelation.
He's used to being alone in wild spaces at the ends of the Earth,
so we wondered what had made Stewart share his life
work with a rock star.
What made you decide to do that?
I'm living with cancer.
It's hard to talk about that stuff, Bill.
But I got ill.
And my niece Amanda, who works at the BBC, she said,
we have to preserve your archive.
You need people to see what you have.
BILL WHITAKER: Stewart told us his illness is not
the only crisis he's dealing with.
He fears more animals are facing extinction
as the world keeps growing.
Part of his audio archive has become a mausoleum
to past lives.
If we keep stealing from nature,
then the inevitable is going to happen.
We're going to lose a lot more.
What is the inevitable?
Mass extinction.
When you think about what we've lost in my lifetime,
there's no change.
It's not slowing down.
And I don't know how to slow it down.
But if you show people the beauty of something
and get them to fall in love with that,
maybe we can tip something.
[INSECTS CHIRPING]
BILL WHITAKER: He says he hopes Wild Concertowill draw in those
who wouldn't otherwise listen to a screaming piha
or a go-away bird.
Count Copeland among the converted.
OK, what's the walla, walla, walla, walla?
Here we go.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC, ANIMAL CHATTER]
What's that?
Walla, walla, walla.
Which is the marbled frogmouth.
Marbled frogmouth.
I remember that--
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC, ANIMAL CHATTER]
BILL WHITAKER: Copeland told us he
hopes Wild Concertowill immortalize those animal songs--
a human tribute, a heartfelt elegy
to Mother Nature's orchestra.
[VIOLIN PLAYING]
[LIVELY WIND INSTRUMENT MELODY]
[BIRD CALLING]
[CLOCK TICKING]
ANNOUNCER: Take a tour through Stewart Copeland's studio.
Sting gave me this little guitar here.
ANNOUNCER: At 60minutesovertime.com.
[STRUMS GUITAR]
[CLOCK TICKING]
I'm Bill Whitaker.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.
(SINGING) It's a good time
Join us.
Because we think what, Nate?
There's no better way to start your day.
What he said.
I'm Tony Dokoupil.
The CBS Evening Newsis the story
of America one day at a time.
I'm Tony.
While we cover a lot of ground, we also
stick to the basics-- what's real.
Do you ever get scared?
Yeah.
TONY DOKOUPIL: --and what's important.
I'm just asking you why you're here and what your message is.
Success for us is not how much we pack into a show,
but how much you take away from it.
And we'll always end with the good stuff, something
to remind you that there's a lot of life
out there beyond the headlines.
So join me.
This is the CBS Evening News.
[AUDIO LOGO]
[CLOCK TICKING]