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Salon Magazine - 2000
"Public Radio's Bad Dream" contd
Joe Frank conjures up the nightmares that "This American Life" and "A Prairie Home Companion" have when they go home at night.
By Susan Emerling
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When I ask Frank about Eleanor from "Rent-a-Family," or the woman in "Soulmate" who leaves an hour's worth of increasingly hostile messages on a lover's answering machine, he smiles and asks, "Is this the misogynist question?" He contends these are the only two women like this in his entire oeuvre, and cites other examples of female characters who are deeply caring and desirable. Most of these, of course, vanish like an apparition moments after they appear, leaving the male character to run through a fast-forward mental scenario of perfect union, reproduction and betrayal.
"The idea of speaking into a microphone and having your voice come out of the speakers of radios all over people's apartments and cars was somehow magical to me," Frank says. "You're hidden, and by virtue of being hidden, there's a power in that."
His first shows, in 1977, were late-night live free-form radio at New York's WBAI, part of the Pacifica network. Frank would talk, play music and direct actors in improv pieces based on stories he found in the tabloids. What would it be like to know your plane was going down in the Pacific? How would you raise a two-headed baby? The idea was to ambush his listeners with a show that sounded as real as possible despite the absurdity of the material.
Arthur Miller, a musician and songwriter whose recurring epithet is "not the playwright," has been one of Frank's most consistent collaborators since the early days. "Joe would come in with all these things he wanted to do. He'd be somewhere between anxious and hysterical," Miller remembers. "There'd be hand-written stuff, typewritten stuff, transcriptions of other people's stuff, things written on the backs of envelopes, in a three-ring binder. He'd say, 'I have scenes with a man and woman, a list of weaponry I want to read, a list of antibiotics I want to read and the music from these three records.' I would help him organize the elements, like acts in a vaudeville show."
In a memorable early collaboration, Frank invited Miller on the air to play a famous mime. After discussing his career, an upcoming date at Carnegie Hall and the pleasures of working with the great Marcel Marceau, Frank asked his guest to perform one of his most famous routines. He let the air go dead for an incredibly long radio minute. When he came back, Frank told the mime that he was wonderful and the phones lit up with callers.
After a few years of developing an audience for absurdist late-night humor, Frank was inexplicably hired by National Public Radio as a host for the weekend "All Things Considered." Frank loved the imprimatur of a famous radio program, and was pleased to be paid for the first time in his radio career. But he admits he was "in way over my head" and that the five-minute essays he produced at the end of the hour were inappropriate for the journalistic format. "The kinds of questions I was interested in ["All Things Considered"] didn't answer," he says. "Why are we here? What is the nature of God? If nature is bred with tooth and claw, is human compassion just an anomaly?"