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LA Weekly - 1997
"Joe Frank is Off the Air"
When he first started doing the shows on WBAI in New York, the assembled actors would stare as he stammered through improv sessions, his hands shaking when they weren't shoveling Valium. He was desperate for this to work, convinced he was incapable of doing anything else - understandable, since he couldn't walk or talk as a young child, couldn't learn as a student, couldn't find his place as an adult. As if that wasn't enough pressure, he fancied the shows rising up and out on radio waves to meet his dead father, the father he barely knew and whose image and memory had been removed from his home with all the subtlety that once distinguished Soviet power shifts.
"He had this need to get it right," says Arthur Miller, the actor, not the playwright. "There was this palpable anxiety about him, and that really drove things. But I'd look at this guy, and he's sweating and, you know, nearly convulsing, and I'd think, 'He's nuts. This guy is never going to last.'"
Joe Frank lasted for 20 years, producing the most brilliant, groundbreaking and undefinable radio drama/comedy/art around. His hourlong shows were a hodgepodge of formats: monologues by Frank, faux panel discussions, or vivid scenes and odd stories played by his actors, who weren't always actors and who never seemed to be acting. The results were stunning, irresistible and discomforting - surreal juxtapositions of the bizarre and the ordinary, the autobiographical and the absurd, the hilarious and the horrific. A show such as "A Call in the Night," for example, contains somber recollections of Frank's childhood - himself in a wheelchair, his stepfather portrayed as a clown - followed by a slapstick skit in a Chinese restaurant worthy of Your Show of Shows. Or there's "Pilot," the story of an aviator in an unnamed country beset by unnamed rebels. He recounts the savage beatings he endured at the hands of his mother, while an English companion complains, "You know, the shame of this revolution is what they've done to the tennis court."
In "The Other Side," a man conducts a sadistic experiment to subliminally convince a child that his mother is dead and his father doesn't love him. Later, a supposed panel of experts discusses hostage fashion and chemical weapons that grow hair on the enemy, thereby weighing them down. That's followed by a three-minute Frank monologue about the nature of existence, in which he gravely instructs, "God is closer than the vein in your neck." After that comes another expert discussion, on X-ray vision and the problem it poses for young boys who see through their mothers' clothing.
On every show, Frank worked at a fever pitch, pushed by the belief that because he started his vocation late in life - his mid-30s - the rest of his days were best spent trying to catch up. In the years of doing his program, the last 11 from KCRW in Santa Monica, he worked nearly uninterrupted, stopping only to temporarily flame out from too many ideas and not enough sleep.
But he always came back. Until now. A few weeks ago, Joe Frank, whom Harry Shearer once likened to a fist coming through a speaker, decided he would no longer work in radio. His announced final production for KCRW was a live appearance on August 23 during a pledge drive. The station will begin a weekly retrospective of his work Saturday, August 30, called Joe Frank: A Selection.
"That's it. I'm done," he said quickly during a conversation several weeks ago, the way someone excuses himself from a card game. Then he repeated it and repeated it again the next day and that night, repeating it as though he hadn't really meant it the time before, but now, after thinking about it, he was sure. For two decades, radio hasn't just been enough for Frank, it's been everything. The line that separated his life from his art disappeared long ago.
"I don't consider my life to be successful," he said. "I consider my work to be successful."
The work explored the life, sometimes specific people and events, sometimes nagging questions. What some dismissed as crazy, Frank saw as spiritual. To him, everything led inexorably to the big questions.