Irwin Chusid interviews Joe for WFMU

Irwin Chusid interviews Joe Frank for WFMU, 1991 January

IC: This is Irwin Chusid, aka Ol' Pal Irwin, at WFMU in East Orange. And I'm speaking with Joe Frank, the monologist, the focal point of Work In Progress, which airs nationwide on National Public Radio. Correct me if I'm wrong about any of this information, since I'm faking it.

JF: (dryly) So far you're doing brilliantly.

IC: Ok. The program is produced at KCRW in Santa Monica located at Santa Monica College and is carried locally here on WFMU and I believe WNYC…

JF: That's correct.

IC: …station over in New York City also carries it.

IC: What gives you the confidence to think that people would want to hear you speak to them over the radio for an hour even one night a week? There's got to be a certain amount of inner courage, something that breaks down inhibition that you probably have, a natural inhibition, that allows you to think that people want to listen to you?

JF: I never thought about whether people want to… The question you're asking is one that never occurred to me, and one that I've never wrestled with. I just felt that… I guess I felt intuitively and instinctively and just naturally that what I would say on the air would be amusing, entertaining, compelling. And I don't mean to sound immodest but I felt that what I was doing on the air I guess was so unique and in a sense challenging and different from the normal fare of what people listen to on the radio that there would be an audience for it. And I think I felt that through the humor and through the stories and the quality of the thought particularly when I was… My feelings about my programs vary; I don't think they're all wonderful and there's some I'm proud of and there are others I find embarrassing to listen to. But overall I think that… I never doubted it.

IC: Before you were on radio were you a natural storyteller?

JF: Well I was a… Well, that's a good question because that leads me to what confidence I had on radio. I was a teacher in a private school on the upper East Side in Manhattan called the Dalton School and I was a very good classroom teacher. I was extremely entertaining to the students and I was very popular and…

IC: You were teaching literature?

JF: …teaching literature, yeah. And with a lot of philosophy, philosophy in the sense that questions about “why are we alive”, and questioning values and trying to make the course really address the kinds of concerns young people would have about their lives at present and what to look for in the future. And I wanted to be an entertainer and I did that 8 or 9 years and I think — in fact I know — that that sort of set me up as a monologist and I found through working with teaching classes what kids, young people, would respond to and what worked and what didn't work and I found that just by virtue of being human people are really interested in certain universal questions which are the kinds of questions that I address in my programs for the most part.

IC: Do you listen to radio? Were you listening to radio at the time a lot and did you feel that radio was the direction you wanted to head in when you sort of felt you were burned out on teaching?

JF: Yeah, because… I was listening to WBAI at the time, which is the station that I first started at in New York. And I was very impressed by certain people who had programs there: Larry Josephson, Steve Post, Bob Fass, each in his own way doing something extraordinary and really compelling. And then something was added to that which was: there was a time after teaching, sort of an interval, before I went into radio, when I was producing concerts up in New England and I spent a lot of time driving in my car at night, driving from one campus to another. I was producing concerts at a theater in Northampton, Massachusetts called The Academy Of Music which was in what they call the Five College area where Smith, Mount Holyoke, U.Mass, Amherst and Hampshire College are located. And I was sort of a one-man production team. Not only did I sign the acts up for the theater and rent the theater but I also went out on my own and put posters up at all the colleges and went to the newspaper and placed ads… And because I spent a lot of time in my car I listened to a lot of radio — it was the only access I had to hearing other people and I found that particularly driving late at night that it seemed to me that radio was really a potentially enormously powerful, intimate, compelling medium and I just began to think of myself… I thought how wonderful it would be… The magic of talking into a microphone and knowing that your voice is coming out of speakers and radios and automobiles and in people's homes and people carrying their transistor radios… I mean your voice can come out of God knows, in any situation, any place, and you don't know there was kind of a magic about it. And not being seen also was very compelling as an idea. So that's kind of how it… just the idea of being this voice in the night — this unseen voice telling highly interesting personal, strange compelling stories, would be powerful.

IC: You're also old enough to remember the world before television, when radio really was the primary form of mass media. Do you have recollections of Fred Allen or radio drama during the 40s and 50s that were probably the seminal influences?

JF: I don't know that they were really seminal influences. I mean I never thought about radio when I was listening to it as a child, I never thought “gee, I'd like to do that.” Although I do remember really enjoying some of the programs. Well, there was Allen's Alley, and the Fred Allen show, which I remember finding particularly appealing, and The Bob Hope Show. There is somebody else who very much impressed me, Jean Shepherd, who was on in New York late at night when I was in high school I guess, or younger, I think. I listened to him and found that experience extraordinary because I had problems with insomnia and I couldn't sleep and here was this man who would just talk to you in an extremely engaging way who would make you feel less lonely and less anxious and I think the power of the medium of radio is first — particularly the personal power of it I felt at that time.

IC: And the fact that it was really one man at a microphone in a studio somewhere addressing an audience that he couldn't see and yet in many ways articulating their thoughts.

JF: That's right …and moving them, and entertaining them. That certainly set sort of a, some kind of standard or certainly the germ of an idea in my mind which I later developed.

IC: Now when you first started in radio, when you first felt the impulse to go into the medium, aside from what you were hearing on ‘BAI at the time, did you not like what you heard elsewhere on the dial and did you sort of feel like “I can do better than this” — was there some sort of motivation to prove that you could perhaps do something with the medium, explore its potential a little better than the way it was being explored on most radio stations?

JF: There must have been some idea like that but I don't remember thinking actively about that, although I do remember thinking that I thought radio was — nothing interesting was happening on it at all, and 'BAI opened the door to me of what… because I only started listening to ‘BAI relatively late. That was the first time I realized how creative radio could be and how the medium could be exploited and explored. I probably didn't even imagine the possibilities of it until Jean Shepherd and 'BAI.

IC: And at the same time now only was he doing radio, monologues, but he was starting to get into television; also a writer: short stories, novels, screenplays, and you're also in a sense following the same direction of trying to maybe broaden your base or just explore other media, having started in radio and then branching off into stage shows… Have you done any actual writing, I mean strictly for print?

JF: I'm working on a book right now — I have a contact with William Morrow to produce a book for them. It's a little ironic that you should mention this because just as you and I may agree that the best work that he ever did was on the radio — that that was the most powerful stuff that he did and that's when he influenced and changed and moved people more than he probably has since. But I'm wrestling with that question about “what is it that I really do well — what is it that I really should be doing.” Are these other forays into other mediums like television or film or writing a book, are they really what I should be doing. And the only reason… I mean I think that if I were paid a considerable amount of money to do radio I would just do radio and I wouldn't even think about any of these other… Although maybe artistically after a while you've done everything that you can do in a medium and then you start repeating yourself and then you decide “well, maybe it's better to go on and explore new terrain.” But at the moment I'm really sort of wrestling with that question.

IC: That's funny, one of the questions I was going to ask you was how many times in your life you find yourself doing something that you've been doing too long and you know you need a change and you know need an escape. That theme occasionally crops up in Work In Progress — of people feeling that they've been in the same place for too long and they need to move on and yet they don't, not right away. And a year drags on and two years drag on and you're looking back and thinking “I should have stopped doing this two years ago.” Have you — do you reach that impasse in your life every so often?

JF: Well, the thing about the radio programs… There are two answers to this. The first is that unlike any other radio show on the air that I know of, this show is really different — one from the other show that is, it is not strictly formatted. You called me a monologist but there are programs when I'm not even in the program where there are actors performing. There is “Rent A Family” which is a three hour radio drama and others of that kind; there are shows where I have panel discussions where I have really offbeat, strange, not really legitimate panel discussions. The shows are sometimes serious and reflective and about real life and sometimes they're completely fantastic and bizarre and just fanciful. So when you turn on Work In Progress you don't necessarily know what in the world you're going to get that particular week. And in that respect, because I was doing different things, exploring different ways of approaching this medium, I didn't get into a rut as quickly as I might have. I mean for example I did one program that I'm proud of where I went out into downtown Los Angeles with a tape recorder and talked to people who were living on the streets, and what the program ultimately became was just voices of people, homeless people, people in trouble, and I wasn't in it and I just added a music mix and you just heard these voices out of nowhere without any… not being explained, no interviewer, just the voices of the people on the street.

IC: What was that show called?

JF: That was called “The Street”. But, however, I came to a point when I really did feel that I was at an impasse, that I'd tried just about everything that I wanted to try and I'm about to start a new series and I really am wondering what I'm going to do and now this question of “should I be in this medium and should I stay here or move on” is one that I'm really thinking about because I really don't know what I'm going to do exactly. And I have some ideas and I'll share one with you and your audience and that is that I imagine putting up a map of the world or the United States and I would blindfold myself and I'd take a dart and I would throw it into the map and assuming the dart didn't land in water I would have to go and live in that place for a week and then I'd have to fly back and then tell about my experience. And then immediately at the end of that show I would be blindfolded again, throw a dart again into the map, and immediately have to go to the airport and fly to the next location. And I would do this over a period of, I don't know, six weeks or two months, and I thought it might be — I don't know, I don't know what would happen, but I've been thinking about sort of strange ways of doing radio. So it would be my personal travails. The picture that I get is of somebody, a radio show host, or me, being worn down by this situation of having to immediately go off for a week and then travel back and report on events and then immediately have to go back to the airport again — just the whole idea of being worn down and being exhausted and become progressively incoherent and the comedy of it — the comedy of subjecting myself to this kind of life for a period of six weeks is… I find entertaining and I think it might make an entertaining series of programs.

IC: How many stations are airing Work In Progress right now?

JF: I don't really know but it's somewhere between 30 and 40.

IC: Ok, and how many shows have you produced of Work In Progress?

JF: Roughly 80.

IC: Who do you perceive of as your audience? Who listens to Joe Frank? Are they misfits and malcontents? Are they lonely and are they alienated? Are they hipsters? Who is out there? There must be in the back of your mind some sense that “this is the person who I'm trying to reach"?

JF: I deny that.

IC: Ok. Do you have any sense of who's out there?

JF: No, I really don't have any specific picture. And certainly the mail that I get reflects a wide spectrum of listeners. I mean I have people who are professors or academicians at local universities or universities around the country.. I also have a criminal population that listens to me. I just got a letter from an inmate of a prison in San Luis Obispo, a men's prison where there's something like 5000 people, and he said that a number of gangs and people are faithful listeners to my program. I get mail from all sorts of… from kids, college kids — I guess I don't get too much from blue collar… the kinds of people who would not listen to public radio. But I never, from the beginning when I went on the air, I was not thinking “I'm doing this for somebody.” I was almost doing it for… God. (laughs)

IC: In a lot of your programs there's real overtones of horror and disgust. Even in the titles “Road To Hell”, “Nausea”, “Why I Don't Love You Anymore”… Well, you're a real keen observer of people's behavior, especially the details of people's behavior and how it affects you inside, and then revealing that to the audience. Especially things like the lack of common courtesy and decency that you may see around you or the lack of consideration of people around you or even yourself, your own lack of consideration to the people around you. Do you generally find — this is a very personal question — do you find life disagreeable and is the show sort of a… an occasion to be a litany of pet peeves which will come out and is the show in a sense a cleansing, like an exorcism for you?

JF: I like the paradoxical quality of condemning other people and then turning around and condemning yourself for the very same things. Again, you know when you say “do I find life disagreeable”: I found it disagreeable but right now I'm finding it more agreeable. But it's… people respond to rage and since we all feel it on one level or another and we can all identify with anger… Life is for most of us frustrating and most of us have fantasies of avenging ourselves, our enemies, of setting things straight… And you're looking at me as if such ideas never… (laughs)

IC: Oh no, not at all. I'm thinking of one show in particular, “Why I Don't Love You Anymore”, where you talk about first people who befoul public toilets, then people who play music too loud, your neighbors. Was that also the show that had the thing about what you wanted to do to stretch limousines?

JF: That's right, yes.

IC: Okay. The whole show just seems like your own dramatized revenge on the people around you who annoy you — a great way, by the way, to vent your frustration and your anger.

JF: Oh absolutely. And that's another nice thing about radio — you can get out and rail and scream against every offense that you've been subjected to. But then on the other hand it's always good to have a sense of irony and to see your own failures and your own shortcomings and how you've offended others and that makes it more interesting.

IC: It seems like you've gone through a lot of travail in your life, especially early on. And perhaps periods of depression, periods of self-doubt, periods when you just felt like perhaps you were in some sort of maelstrom. Is the show therapy in a sense for you, I mean personally, the hell with what the audience may get out of it, for you personally is it therapeutic?

JF: Yeah. Yeah, I'd say it is.

IC: A simple answer. (laughs)

IC: Do you see yourself as a moralizer or a moral force, someone with very strong convictions who wants to persuade the audience perhaps to change their thinking in a certain way or change their behavior in a certain way?

JF: Not exactly. I certainly… I think the lowest form of art is the kind of art that tries to change people or tries to affect their beliefs. That's not what art is about. I think art is about tragedy in a way. Or it's about nonresolvable questions. Not things that can be resolved but things that are part of the human condition. I would hate to do a program where at the end of the program my listeners all rose from their chairs and then went out with signs and started marching in front of a department store because the employees were mistreated… I mean it's not like that. But if there's anything that I want to suggest it's that we all share in a common human condition. The subjects that I explore in these programs are in one way or another even though they may be addressed comically or absurdly they address the same kinds of things that many, many people suffer and experience. The show is really about the human condition through my particular perspective, which is probably somewhat narrow — I'm sure there are things that I don't get into my show. My show is really about problems, but it isn't about solving the problems, it's about the problems. I mean I don't think I have answers. My programs are about questions, not answers.

IC: You mention problems, especially problems with relationships, it often seems. Your programs dramatize that a lot, problems between men and women. And I notice in a few of the articles that have been written about you, they occasionally accuse you or they mention accusations of misogyny. I've heard the same thing levelled against Leonard Cohen and I've never felt that Leonard Cohen was misogynistic and I don't feel that you are either, but I'm just curious how you field those accusations.

JF: Well, I made fun of them in one program, “I'm Not Crazy”. I think there are programs that I've done that could be construed as misogynistic; I've also done programs that are quite different, that are about women, which are very compassionate and identify with the characters in them. I've produced programs in which women had talked about their lives and it's the women who were talking — I didn't give them any… I simply put a woman in front of a microphone who I thought was really intelligent or sensitive or thoughtful and had stories to tell that I thought would move people and gave her the opportunity to do so and then edited the program down. So I think I've done programs that have been very positive or affirmative in terms of women's… what women think about and what women feel and that are very sympathetic, and then I've done other programs that are… I think the misogynistic aspect has to do with seduction, has to do with…

IC: Maybe just the natural intrigue that goes on?

JF: Mmm-hmm. And the war of the sexes in terms of wanting to have and take and the objectifying of the other sex or of women which I think sometimes appears in my programs, the fantasies of what I would… you know, seeing somebody beautiful and what you imagine doing with her or to her, which is something that all men do. And you could call them all misogynistic in a way in the sense that there is some objectification of the other.

IC: Perhaps people who accuse you of that might be confusing the storyteller and the actor with the person…

JF: Mmm-hmm.

IC: …who's merely trying to reflect something they've observed, either about themselves or about the people around them.

JF: Well, there's also another thing which is that women respond to these programs very differently. There are some women who I've gotten phone calls from or received letters from who express their outrage at some show. And then there will be another few letters or phone calls from other people, women, who will say “that was really very powerful and I experienced exactly that or in another analogous situation and that was a very moving program” so even women disagree. And I don't know what that necessarily means, but there's no unanimity of feelings about it.

IC: Your program — one of the primary supporters of it is the National Endowment for the Arts and has been for quite a while. Do you feel any sort of dilemma perhaps yourself in being funded by the government — has it ever bothered you, I guess, or do you feel comfortable with it? Is it something you'd rather change if you had a choice between how your show could be funded, would you prefer it to be funded either by corporations, by listeners, by a private wealthy patron, by yourself, by sponsors, or by the government?

JF: I've been funded by NEA from almost the very beginning on a fairly regular basis and I wouldn't be where I am today if it hadn't been for the NEA. I would have had to quit because there was no way to make a living and to survive in this medium, for me anyway, without the NEA, so I'm very grateful for the support they've given me. And the only question I have is why should the public pay for my doing what I find creatively satisfying and for my artwork. I mean, why should taxpayers pay for me if my audience is fairly narrow and limited. It is an absurd sort of question but nothing I think about a whole lot. And ideally I suppose it would be nice to have some kind of patron, some very rich individual who would just give you money who would not in any way impose his aesthetic on you. And then you would know that you're not taking money out of anybody's pockets. You're not taking money from the taxpayers, you're taking money from somebody who couldn't care less about what he's spending it for and would also want you to have the freedom that you.. I mean that would be ideal.

IC: A million bucks and a hands-off attitude.

JF: Absolutely.

IC: One last question: you used to work in New York and you've been in LA for a long time and…

JF: Well, not for that long.

IC: For about four years?

JF: That's right.

IC: You were in Washington for a number of years.

JF: That's right.

IC: Do you go back to New York at all?

JF: Very rarely. There's not much for me to go back to there right now. I have dwindling numbers of family… Most of my family has moved out of New York. I have one or two very old, dear old friends from the old days who actually come out here occasionally. And if I went anywhere it probably would be to Washington, where I really did make wonderful friends and really loved my life there. That was from '79 to '86.

IC: Do you go back to New York to produce programs…?

JF: Occasionally… I used to, I'm not doing that anymore. I did that because when I first started in radio I had a certain group of actors and improvisational actors who were wonderfully talented, and still are. And I would go back in order to work with them because they really understood what my programs were about and they understood the sensibility and they really knew how to do what I wanted them to do. And I haven't been able to find people like that here. But now I'm doing monologues so I'm not really… I don't need actors they way I did then. And I also don't want… Again, you don't want your program to stay in the same place. I've used those people, we've done the same kinds of programs enough, and now I want to move on to new territory.

IC: Just briefly, if you could just tell me what you're doing in terms of the film and the stage show.

JF: Well, there was a stage show — that was in April of 1989, for a couple of months. It was at Moca, which uses the… which is a museum/theater [in] downtown LA. And then… but that was it — I haven't done any other shows since then. I have a contract to write a film for Ivan Reitman and another film offer from Warner Brothers if I wanted to do that. I'm writing a book for William Morrow which is… and I just finished doing three films for Playboy Channel [ gap in recording ] called “Hitchhiker”, about seeing a very beautiful woman standing by the side of the road, pulling up, asking her for a ride [sic], and being refused… in a very odd way by her saying “where would I go” and “why should I get in with… I would never get in a car with a stranger.” And then I'm somewhat perturbed and then I drive around and I park at some distance and start watching her wondering “what is she up to” and notice one car observes one car after another after another stop. And she turns everybody down but she stands there at the side of the road with her leg up on a cardboard suitcase dressed very provocatively. And the story develops by my following her to her apartment building and then going into a hotel across the street and renting some binoculars, or buying some binoculars and observing her in her apartment sitting at her computer entering information about the day's events — how many men stopped and what their attitudes were and how they responded. And finally she goes to the window and she takes a plunger… oh, and while I'm watching her from my balcony I look around and I suddenly realize that every window in this hotel and every balcony has a man on it with a video camera, telescope, binoculars, and I'm astonished. And then she goes to the window and she blows up the hotel with all these men who have followed her there to observe her. And that's the story of another one, and there's a third short film. So in those films they all have a kind of erotic content and I'm always the fool and the one who ends up being humiliated and embarrassed and destroyed in some cases.

IC: I'm out of questions. Thank you very much for the conversation. And you are going to continue to produce programs for radio one way or the other…

JF: That's right, yes.

IC: …I trust and I hope, and I'm sure a lot of listeners hope as well. Well, thank you.

JF: Thank you.

— You've been listening to an interview with Joe Frank, of Work In Progress. This interview was recorded at KCRW, Santa Monica, California in January 1991. The interview was conducted and edited by Irwin Chusid of WFMU, East Orange, New Jersey. Special thanks to Jerry Summers of KCRW and to Irene Trudel of WFMU for engineering assistance, and a special thanks as well to Joe Frank.