The official Joe Frank web site
News and Reviews
Archive
LA Weekly - 1997
"Joe Frank is Off the Air" Los Angeles, California (contd)
<--last | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | >next -->
"I think faith and God are dominant in my work. I've always thought of my programs as prayers. They may not seem that way, but to me they're my conversation with whatever you want to call it about the condition that exists here, spiritually and physically.
"I'm asking how it could be this way. I know that people have a tendency to dismiss these shows as wacky. But I'm not crazy. I know what I'm doing with these shows. They are me."
He edited obsessively, constantly searching for the perfect music, the perfect line or segue, sometimes mixing the second half-hour of shows while the first half-hour was playing. He never took vacations, rarely went out. Sound engineers had to force him to stop working and eat.
"He'd work 14, 16 hours without thinking about it. A lot of times what he really needed was someone to babysit him," says Theo Mondle, a former Frank sound engineer who now plays keyboards for Beck. "'Joe, you need to eat.' 'Joe, you need to go home and sleep.' But he never stopped doing the shows. Even when he was recording one, you could see that in his mind he was already developing another show."
Everything, every relationship, every funny story told by a friend, every notion that came into his head while driving, was possible material.
"We'd be talking on the phone, talking about my life or some observation, and then I'd get this feeling," says Lester Nafzger, a regular on Frank's show. "I'd say, 'You're taping this right now, aren't you?' He'd laugh - but, of course, he was."
The shows won him a Peabody award, a Guggenheim grant and other honors, as well as a following that included the rabid - the lobby squatters - and the famous. Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make an HBO series with him. Beck listened and encouraged him to get into live performance. Film directors Michael Mann and Ivan Reitman each have made plans to develop Frank shows. Hollywood stars begged him to use them on his programs, though they were almost always turned down because Frank was convinced they couldn't shoulder the load. So there's a lot he leaves behind and, it turns out, precious little to take with him. a He's not remotely wealthy, having made a measly $30,000 a year for his shows, along with an occasional grant, out of which he's had to pay his troupe. He's not married and has no children and no close family except for an 87-year-old mother who lives in Florida and refuses to move to California because she doesn't want to uproot her cat.
As far as moving on to other creative pursuits, well, he's written one book, a short-story collection called The Queen of Puerto Rico, and hated the experience. Movies, television, recording and live performance all beckon, yet all have their drawbacks. Film and TV offer little control; live performance offers no chance to edit. CDs? Who buys spoken-word CDs, anyway? Deciding to leave radio is not so much a career change for him as it is a divorce, and Frank's face wears the anxious anticipation of someone excited by the prospect of being single but who also remembers the nightmare that is dating. Dating, in his case, in his 50s. "I have a hard time making decisions in my life, figuring out what to do and what not to do," he says from his Santa Monica home. "Buying this house, for example, took a lot out of me. I was looking for a house for five years. I bought this one practically out of a profound sense of guilt. I had this wonderful real estate agent who worked with me for so long I felt I had to do it for her. "The one thing I'm sure about is my work. I've done everything I wanted; what's the point of repeating? I've explored the material that's interesting to me; to go on seems uninteresting and boring. I know exactly what I want and I know exactly what I don't want. And I know, from the very depths of me, that my radio career is over." Minutes later: "You know, this could really be a disaster. I mean, I have no idea what I'm going to do. What do you know about TV?"