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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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Most Frank fans are not famous. One of these, a man named Jerry, listened to Frank's dark tales while locked in his New York apartment. After Jerry's death, his brother sent Frank 15 years of tape-recorded telephone conversations -- Jerry arguing with his father, flirting with an ex-girlfriend and reminiscing with his brother, who tries to cajole a cousin out of money for the electric bill. Frank edited the tapes into a trilogy of programs called "Jerry's World," a eulogy of life imitating art and art, in turn, imitating life.
"I don't try to offend anybody, but I do," Frank reflects. "The station gets complaints about me being in the 11 a.m. time slot on Sunday. I like it. There's a large audience. It may seem strange, but I consider my programs religious. It's all about faith, God, meaninglessness."
Frank's version of religion is dominated by anger and questioning rather than acceptance and love. In a program called "Holy Land," he tells Biblical stories -- Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden, or the Immaculate Conception from Joseph's point of view -- that end up sounding like bad modern marriages. Eve doesn't want to be "just some nature girl" and tells Adam, "Frankly, I resent that God made you first." Joseph says he always knew that Mary "was kind of a social-climber." He's used to watching her work the room at parties, but he "had no idea that she would actually get involved with God." Joseph feels betrayed by a God who would force him to live in infamy as the world's most famous cuckold.
Frank's return to radio is his own mixed blessing. "I've built a body of work on the radio and this is the art form that I understand so I like the idea of just keeping on building," he says. "But it's exhausting and sometimes I feel that my life is rendered empty by the fact that I have to work so hard to create it. It creates a lot of pressure and unhappiness because I feel that I'm not enjoying my life enough. I can't do the things that I want to do because I don't have the time to do them. But then if I do a good program, a program that I'm proud of, it's really complete. Because you can always look back. You can always put that program on and listen to it and it's there. And if you'd gone to the country, you can't put that day in the country on anytime you want. That's not there. This is something that's solid and real and lasting. Even a relationship isn't necessarily that."
For an artist obsessed with mortality and the meaning of life, Frank has chosen the most ephemeral of media. It is fortunate for him that the Web came along, providing a sense of longevity to radio. But as important as his show's digital afterlife may be, nothing compares to the live broadcast, while the audience has temporarily suspended their lives to listen together. Frank tells me he used to sit in his car with a former girlfriend, parked overlooking the ocean, listening to the program as it aired. He sat there imagining his audience in their own cars and living rooms, somewhere out there, in the dark, on the other side of the radio, listening to his life's work-in-progress.