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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Joe Frank conjures up the nightmares that "This American Life" and "A Prairie Home Companion" have when they go home at night.
Mar 7, 2000 | The perfect Joe Frank experience is driving down an unfamiliar highway alone at night. You turn on your radio and are greeted by a lush, resonant voice that lulls you into a seemingly simple tale of love: a man at an airport saying goodbye to his wife over the phone, which abruptly turns into a vision of betrayal, alienation and death -- often from obscure disease -- all brought about by some profound personal failing, which is redeemed at the last moment by a nearly transcendent moment of joy.
In the 10 minutes between his first "I love you as much as day we were married" to the end of the story, the man is confronted by an elderly woman having a seizure, his wife's infidelity, a near-fatal collision with an ambulance, a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer and his profound loathing for his own son.
Then Frank will shift the scene and you'll find yourself listening in on a private conversation caught midstream between lovers or strangers, parents and children, patient and shrink, pastor and supplicant. It has no obvious connection to the preceding story, but is so disarmingly intimate -- and, at times, so patently absurd -- that you are left wondering if you can believe what you're hearing. Frank coaxes along a confessional flow of sexual encounters or childhood humiliations that serve as unlikely springboards for the most profound questions of human existence: the need for love, the longing for family or the nature of suffering.
Although commonly categorized as radio drama, Frank's work bears very little resemblance to the stagy artifice of plays performed over air. It is instead a dense collage of scripted monologue and staged improvs that are edited down from hours of raw material to 60 minutes of seemingly spontaneous storytelling. Loops of background music as diverse as James Brown and Steve Reich carry you from one scene to the next, bridging the gaps between Frank's associative leaps.
Even Frank's monologues, which seem to come from a completely unified perspective, result from lengthy recorded telephone conversations with a core group of collaborators who have been with him since his earliest days of radio. These are transcribed, edited and then rerecorded by Frank, who races from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., to the studios of KCRW, his home station, early in the morning, without softening his deep seductive voice with extraneous conversation.
As the titles of his public-radio series -- "Work-in-Progress," "Somewhere Out There," "In the Dark" and "The Other Side" -- attest, Frank wanders deeply into the unconscious, producing Dionysian stories with a fairy-tale intensity whose effect is often funny, disturbing and deeply memorable. You could say that "Joe Frank: The Other Side" presents the nightmares that sunnier, more accessible shows like "This American Life" or "Prairie Home Companion" have when they go to sleep at night.
Ira Glass, the producer of "This American Life," got his first paid job in radio working on Frank's program "Summer Notes" in the early 1980s. "I still have vivid memories of Joe Frank programs that I listened to when I was a teenager and first learning about radio," he says. "I can repeat section for section a program I haven't heard for 18 years. It gets into you and stays with you."
Even today, when Glass travels to promote his own nationally syndicated show, he has a recurring Frank experience. "A listener will start to tell me excitedly about this amazing show they've heard," he says. "There is a car accident and the guy in the accident makes friend with the guy who saves him. I haven't even heard the show but I know it's Joe Frank."
Frank himself describes his show as being about "these private things that go on with people and they think nobody's going to talk about. Where your mind goes and maybe it shouldn't go." His current program, "The Other Side," relies much more heavily on what he describes as "realism," meaning a series of more or less true stories that his friends tell about their lives, rather than on his own monologues. The shows come together by a weekly process he describes as "just pure havoc and chaos." He says, "I have no idea week to week what's going to happen."
Larry Block, an actor whose life has frequently provided Frank with material, says, "It's gotten to the point with Frank where every phone call is potentially a show. He'll say, 'Hold on for a second.' He knew that I knew that he was going to turn on the recorder, and thrived on it. He would make a show out of you and me talking right now. He wants to suck out of me every bit of experience in my life."
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When I meet Frank in person, I feel a little like Dorothy pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz to find that he is not the omniscient being she had imagined him to be. Frank, 61, is a tall boyish mixture of self-assured and mildly embarrassed. His home, an inviting two-story house behind a walled garden on one of Santa Monica's more elegant streets, is nothing like the dark and cluttered domicile where I would have housed his on-air persona. The living room is spotlessly austere and his dining-room cabinet is filled with hard-bound Bibles, Butler's "Lives of the Saints," histories of the world's religion and novels by Kafka, Dos Passos and Faulkner rather than dishes. His office looks like the room where the living is done.
