User:Rash

I am Richard Looney. For reasons I won't go into here, "Rash" has been my nickname since High School. I started the Joe Frank FAQ on Usenet in the very early days of the internet, based on notes I'd been taking since the late 1980s, when I lived in LA and Joe was on KCRW every week.

I first heard Joe Frank on Halloween, 1979, when I still lived in my hometown of Washington DC. There were two public radio stations serving the area then, and I knew All Things Considered was repeated on the one, 90 minutes after the other. On this date they played something remarkable, at the end of the news: The Night Watchman, from Lies. It was so weird, well-done and thought-provoking, I readied my cassette deck an hour later, and recorded it during the repeat. Unfortunately I wasn't in time to catch the preceding, explanatory comments, so I had no idea about what I'd captured; but it was a favorite in my audio collection.

Ten years later I had moved to Southern California, still getting used to the public radio out there. KCRW was playing in the other room, late one afternoon in October, when I was stunned to realize I was hearing a familiar voice! It was the premiere of At The Border, and I was amazed to learn the Night Watchman had a radio show, with new material, every week! So naturally I started recording his shows, logging details as they were broadcast. At the time, KCRW sold audio cassettes of his shows, and I mailed to them for details. The listing they sent me, which labeled each show as either a Drama or Monologue, was the basis and origin of the FAQ.

I'm no longer clear on the development details but eventually, Henry Lowengard hosted my FAQ on WFMU's website, where [[1]] still lives today (but hasn't been updated since '04, sorry). Early on, many forgotten contributors helped identify the music Joe used, which I added to each program's details, along with the credits given at the end of each show. About the time Joe went commercial and started up [[2]], since so many new shows were just rehashes of previous material, I lost interest and moved on. I did meet Joe twice, however - at his performance at 72 Market Street (where a friend was a waiter, so I had an "in") and later, at his book-signing for The Queen of Puerto Rico, at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, in 1993.

So many thanks to the newer generation of Frank-o-philes updating this Wiki!