Katherine Wessling's interview with Joe for Speak magazine

by Katherine Wessling for the Winter 2000 issue

Those who have heard Joe Frank are passionate about his dark, wry, probing radio shows. He's won major awards; filmmakers have come calling and he has chat rooms full of ardent fans. Yet, after twenty years, the innovative radio performer remains surprisingly unknown.

For years Frank's shows were atmospheric montages of drama, monologues and discussions, but his work has recently taken a new direction. In his latest series, Karma, Frank mixes his own self-examination (often centering around his turbulent relationship with an actress he calls Kate), with that of longtime collaborators like actor Larry Block and audio clips from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's inspirational tapes.

Frank's early life could easily be mistaken for one of his surreal shows. He was born in Strasbourg, in 1939, to parents who were fleeing the Nazis. The family settled in New York, where his father became a shoe manufacturer. As a boy Frank suffered from clubfeet and had to endure casts and braces. When he was five, and about to undergo surgery, his father died. In his early twenties, while recovering from testicular cancer, Frank read The Sound and the Fury and was inspired to write. He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, became a high school teacher, and finally, in his thirties, began to work in radio.

After a stint at WBAI, Frank went to NPR and won several NEA grants and broadcasting awards. He also caught the attention of Ruth Seymour, general manager of Santa Monica’s public radio station KCRW, who offered Frank a weekly show.

Since his move to Southern California in 1986, Frank has adapted versions of his radio shows for television and theater, and done voice-over work for VH-1 and the Sci-Fi Channel. In the meantime, filmmakers Michael Mann, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin and David Fincher have either optioned his stories or bought them outright. But radio is still the medium in which Frank thinks he can best “entertain, amuse, provoke thought and move people, all at the same time.”

What led to your start in radio?

When I was young, I used to listen to Jean Shepherd at night. I lived in a pretty unhappy home - there was a lot of tension, a lot of misery, a lot of repressed rage. I remember that it was rather difficult for me to go to sleep at night, and I came across him on WOR. He was a storyteller who would talk in a very engaging, friendly, approachable way that embraced you. You really felt that you were friends, that he was a member of your family. I would usually fall asleep to his programs.

Later on, when I was teaching at Dalton, a private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I started to listen to radio. Steve Post had a free-form radio show - he would extemporize and improvise and it was magic to me. There was a guy late at night whose name was Bob Fass and he would take you on these weird aural trips. He had women roller-skaters come in and he set up microphones and recorded them and then mixed that with music and some other background sounds. It was intriguing to me.

When I was teaching at Dalton I got burned out and did not want to be a teacher for the rest of my life. One of the things I noticed about teachers is that they don't grow up sufficiently. If you're in an environment where you're around teenagers all the time and not living out in the real world, there is a way in which your growth can be stunted. I couldn't be fully realized as a human being.

What were you teaching?

I was teaching English. One of the wonderful things about Dalton was that I was able to create whatever course I wanted. One course I taught was called ‘Existentialism in Literature’ and we'd read Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Sartre's No Exit, Camus' The Stranger and other thought-provoking, philosophically stimulating literature.

I was very uneducated, by the way. I graduated high school about sixth from the bottom of my of five hundred people. I constantly failed subjects, had to go to summer school to repeat them, and was told by my vocational counselor that I was not college material. So I was far behind in my education because I hadn't done any learning until I was about seventeen or eighteen years old.

I decided that one way of catching up was to create courses in subjects that I was not yet familiar with and then learn them over the summer. So as a teacher I was very often one step ahead of my students, trying to grow as I was growing them. One of the things I learned was that I was good on my feet - I was amusing, entertaining and could hold their attention. I found that - and this is still true - I could be much more comfortable in front of twenty-five people than I could ever be sitting with somebody in a restaurant. So then I began to think, “Well, maybe I can get into this radio business.” And I started at WBAI as a volunteer.

How old were you at that time?

I was in my mid-thirties.

And then you went to NPR from WBAI?

That's right. I was at WBAI for a couple of years. We did some very innovative, weird things. One of them was having a mime on the air - there was just dead air for about a minute, and then I interviewed him. I said I was very impressed by what he had done and we talked about it. Another time I had a friend come in as a doctor and we had people calling with their problems - these were legitimate problems - and he told them the most preposterous and bizarre ways of treating their illnesses.

To this day I will never understand why they did this, but NPR was reconfiguring Weekend All Things Considered and they decided that they needed to bring in a new sensibility - somebody who was creative and artistic. So I was mysteriously brought down - I say mysteriously because I had no journalistic back ground and I didn't’t know anything about that kind of thing - and I became the host of Weekend All Things Considered, which was the strangest, most grotesque experience I've ever had.

Why is that?

For one thing, I'd never interviewed people about politics or current events, and the learning curve was enormous. Plus, after a few weeks of doing it, I found it completely uninteresting because the questions that I was interested in and constantly thinking about - these larger questions about life, meaning, suffering, what we're doing here - were not being addressed. I went to my boss and I said, “Look this isn't working, you know it and I know it. I don't want to do this any more, and I want to be given the opportunity to do what I can do.” So they gave me the opportunity to create six one-hour radio dramas. That was the beginning.

Then in 1986 Ruth Seymour came to a radio conference in Washington, DC, and asked me to come to Los Angeles and go on the air weekly. When I was at NPR I was doing one show every month or every two months and I thought, “Wow, this is wonderful. Now I can really develop a relationship with an audience.” It gave me much more opportunity for creative work.

Did you have any questions about moving to LA?

None whatsoever. It was just so clear that I had to go. I wasn't really happy at NPR because I wasn't doing enough programs. Although when I came to LA, I spent the first two years in a motel. So I wasn't fully committed.

I grew up in LA, but live in New York, and I'm always split between the two.

It's a tough thing. I don't like to go to New York because I grew up there and spent so many years there, it breaks my heart.

Why?

Because then I have to leave. And when I come back here it seems very quiet and dreary and flat. The sun is always out and the weather's always the same. It's like living in a fluorescent-lit room. New York is so much more dramatic, it's teeming with people and there's so much energy.

Is radio your only love? I read that you're working on a screenplay and | know that you've done theater adaptations of your work.

Those things are not serious. Radio is really the thing. I'm interested in television a little bit because it's close to what I do in the sense that you have to have a weekly connection with an audience. But radio is the medium that I really understand and feel I know. Whatever mark I've made, I've made in that medium. I suppose if it paid a lot more - public radio is so ridiculous - then I'd be completely committed to it. I am completely committed to it, but it would be nice to make more money.

Would you talk about the collaborative process that you used to put your shows together?

When I first went to WBAI, I was really able to explore a few possibilities. One was monologues - I would just tell what had happened to me during the course of the past week. I met very intelligent, funny people at the radio station - some of them were actors - and somehow managed to put them in front of a mike around a table. We began by having panel discussions. I knew I wanted to have people talking in very serious, thoughtful and rigorous ways, but there should be something that was completely bizarre so that somebody listening would not know what to make of it. Are these people insane? Is this real? Am I hearing this correctly?

For example, I decided that we would do dramatic scenes and say that there was a playwright named Joseph Molka who had died mysteriously but remnants of his play had been found and we were going to present them on the radio. So we created four scenes, with actors, with music, highly produced. Most of them were improvised, and then highly edited. We'd improvise for an hour and a half or longer and cut it down to ten minutes for each scene. Then we went to the panel discussions, with other people commenting on the scenes, and that would also be edited. Then we'd take a couple of phone calls. And it was a complete put on, there was no Joseph Molka. But the seriousness with which the listeners took the play and the panel discussion that followed was remarkable, It was just kind of offbeat, funny, strange radio.

Now your work is a collage of different things.

There is one very dramatic change. When I came back to radio this October, I decided that I was tired of all these put-ons, the surrealism, the strange dramatic themes and all that. I had done it to death and I wanted to go deeper and truer. When I started with the series Karma it began to be the truth and nothing but the truth so help me God. There's a guy named Larry Block, who's a wonderful actor and did great work on my radio shows. He now appears as Larry Block, telling about the life of Larry Block the struggling actor, and about other things that are going on. Then I brought in Jack Kornfield, who is this Buddhist teacher. I think it's interesting to mix the sacred with the profane. I saw myself as profane and I saw Kornfield as sacred and I thought it would be interesting to combine the two. A lot of my programs are about counterpoint and juxtaposition. I wanted to combine Kornfield with people who are living completely fucked-up lives, who are confused and bewildered and overwhelmed and just trying to get through it all. They're suffering and lashing out and having joyful moments and crashing into depressions.

I wanted to be so truthful in my program that people - including myself - would squirm. I admitted things on that show - like having had testicular cancer and how that affected me and my self-image and my relationships. I decided that I would do something that I'd never had the courage to do before, which was to reveal myself more fully with the hope that other people would identify with me. And that is exactly what happened.

It does create certain problems, however, because you can't have a relationship. I was involved with somebody in a very volatile and difficult relationship, and I didn't know how the fuck I was going to be able to tell the truth without betraying her.

Was that the Kate relationship?

That's right. I obviously told that story from my perspective, so there is another point of view and another side, but I tried to be as painstakingly honest as I could in relating it.

Do you think that anyone who gets into a relationship with you has to be willing to be exposed?

I don't know. Thank God I'm not confronted by that dilemma at the moment, but it's an interesting paradox. In order to continue to do these radio shows the way I want to do them, I have to have the freedom to tell the truth.

How do you respond when people say it's voyeuristic to use somebody else's life like Kate's in the way you did?

That's a real dilemma and it's something that I've been wrestling with. I try to mask who it is, although I must say I didn't try all that hard in the end. But in my defense - and I don't know how good a defense this is - the public has no idea who she is. The only people who know are those who know us personally and they know practically everything anyway, although they probably learned a few new things from that radio show. And most of the Karma shows were after the fact - well, no, that's not true exactly, she and I went through serial breakups. I've never broken up with anybody as many times as I broke up with her. In fact I've never been in a relationship like it, which was the most bizarre, extreme, wild ride that I've ever been on and never would want to get on that kind of ride again. But a fair number of those programs were done with the idea that our relationship was over, and I think maybe during one or two we had gotten back together again.

When I was going through that with this woman, I had a choice: either go off the radio or write about it, because it was so overwhelming and I was so obsessed about it that I couldn't think of anything else. So it wasn't as if I made a conscious decision: “I think I'll do a show about Kate.” I couldn't have done a show about anything else. I was so enmeshed and engaged and in the middle of it, there was nothing else I wanted to write about, there was nothing else I could think about, there was no other passion in my life, there was no other care. She was everything.

I'm interested in how you try to communicate the truth and what form it takes. What's your perspective on different ways of telling stories?

I've never thought about the art of telling a story. In this Karma series, I just sat down in front of my computer, thought about the shit I was going through, and poured out my heart. I didn't think about questions of aesthetics, I just told it.

I didn't want it just to be me, I wanted to bring in these different elements - Kornfield, Larry Block, Debi Mae West, Kristine McKenna - and other things that come to me. For example, a guy was going to have a heart operation and somebody said, “You've gotta call this guy up.” It became a very weird, kind of fucked-up phone call. And that became that show. At it's best, the show is whatever happened that week.

Why did he agree to be on your show?

He didn't know what he was in for. It was a surprise attack. My take on him was he was a stuffy, prissy, overly confident, in-denial asshole. I didn't like him and the more I listened to him the more annoyed I became because I was thinking about my own illnesses, that I had been close to death twice in my life, and I resented his take on the whole thing. He cast his situation in a certain light that I found aggravating. I was also really tired and Kate was still part of this nightmare I was going through, so I was out of control to some extent. I remember saying to him - this is really provocative - something like, “I don't know why I'm talking to you because obviously you're doing just fine. Look, if things get worse maybe we can have a conversation.” Of course when I said that he got really offended. He said, “I feel sorry for you.” I asked why and although he didn't know me he began to analyze me. At that moment, I thought, “Now this is going to be an interesting conversation.”

Then my friend Larry Block reflected on what was going. Another friend, Kristine, talked about how guilty I felt. On one level I was regretful about what I had done. I thought, “What the fuck is the matter with you? Are you fucking nuts? You are talking to somebody who is about to face heart surgery. You could harm his chances for recovery by unsettling him. What kind of an idiot are you?” But on the artistic, aesthetic level I was thinking, “Wow, that's good radio.”

Having worked with both fiction and facts, do you think one is more important than the other; that one can say more than the other; that one ultimately tells the truth in a better way?

The truth is the truth and if you can tell it really well it is going to be truer than if you do it metaphorically. But on the other hand, when you do something that's surreal or fictional, there's a kind of transcendent quality because you're entering the world of the dream. It can be very magical and moving and mind-expanding. In that sense my past shows opened up a world of possibilities in the listener's imagination that the ones I'm doing now may not.

There's so much humor in what you do. What kinds of humor do you like?

I don't like jokes. I hate jokes. And my friends know that. They never even try to tell them. I just like things that are offbeat, strange, absurdist.

Beckett?

You could say so, although I don't remember laughing at anything that Beckett ever wrote.

Do you like your own work? Do you still feel compelled to do it?

You build up a body of work, build a reputation. Its like I built this whole thing that for now I don't have to dwell over. I don't have any idea how many programs there are but there are a hell of a lot of them. And at this point, what am I going to do, go to medical school? I have no hobbies, no other things that interest me. I don't take pictures, I don't garden, I don't study calligraphy, I don't do anything. Radio is my life.

You've said that you consider your programs religious.

If you look at the Karma series, or even before that, you'll notice that there have been many times where coming out of the music you'll hear a black singer. Those things are not in that music. Those are recorded voices of prisoners in South Carolina in the fifties. Alan Lomax went to prisons and recorded these black prisoners singing songs about love, religion, faith and miraculously we placed those people up against music, this hip-hop, rhythmic music and it's just amazingly moving. I don't know what it does to other people, but it kills me to listen to it. I have cried because those people were in so much pain and so much longing. There is something so spiritual about those men singing. When you put them into a piece of music the combination is mind-blowing. For me, that would be a spiritual, religious moment.

Kornfield is also a religious, spiritual element in the program. And there's also something religious in me and Larry and all of us. There's a longing for some kind of grounding, for some kind of faith and some kind of meaning implied in all the misery that we go through. Sometimes it's even stated overtly., How can you believe in a compassionate loving and caring God when you look out and see what's going on - mayhem and violence and murder and the hierarchy of murder, the food chain and all of that. How could anybody with any compassion have created that? Somebody once said that blasphemy is a prayer in reverse and I think that this program sometimes is like a prayer in reverse and it's also like a prayer. Kornfield is a prayer and the other stuff could be a prayer in reverse.

You've said that suffering can be transcended through art.

When I said that I was speaking of my own experience. Let's say you're going through a terrible breakup with a woman; the breakup is so painful that it's like unrelieved suffering. However, you write about it, and make an entertaining radio show about it,

I remember the revelation that I had when I first came to this. I was in Florida with my mother and stepfather and they were having this horrendous fight down at their end of the apartment and I couldn't bear what I was listening to; it was so ugly and frightening and sad. Then I started writing down what they were saying. The more I wrote down, the more I began to think, “This is interesting.” When I looked at it the next morning I thought, “This is great shit! This is amazing!” The next thing I knew I was almost. looking forward to their fights so that I could write down what was going on. If you looked at it from the right perspective, it was really interesting and disturbing and even amusing. That's what I meant about art transcending life. You can redeem life when you make art out of it. It like converting pain into something beautiful or entertaining. But I don't believe that art transcends life in the sense that my radio programs are going to transcend anybody's life. I'm just using it to save myself.

Joe Frank can be heard Sundays at eleven a.m on KCRW. as well as on various other radio stations, or by visiting www kcrw org