[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple days ago, Joe Frank passed away. One of the greats in our business. Huge inspiration for me, but a guy whose work you may not know. He was one of the originals. Nobody told stories like Joe Frank. Nobody told stories like Joe Frank. No one. He—he is still—anyhow, you know what I'm gonna do? I want to take this podcast to play for you a little bit of his work, because it's so good. It's so good! And also play for you a few conversations I've had recently about Joe Frank and the impact of that work, starting with a conversation I had with Brooke Gladstone from On the Media. She recently interviewed me about the impact that Joe had on Radiolab, which is significant. So let's start there. This is an excerpt of a conversation that I had with Brooke Gladstone that they used for On the Media, and I believe it starts with a clip.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I—let me play a clip, or maybe a couple of them and get your reaction.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: When you hug people goodbye after a social event, perhaps a dinner party or a gallery opening, there is always that moment when they squeeze you more forcefully than before, a polite way of letting you know they're about to withdraw. Usually, the one who disengages first is the one who cares less. When this used to happen to me, I felt rejected and humiliated. I'd come home with a lonely, sick feeling. And that's why in order to assume the power position and gain the psychological advantage, I now hug people very briefly, perhaps one or two seconds before freeing myself. Sometimes, if I detect any resistance, I'll push the person away. In one instance, I caused a woman to fall backwards over a chair, injuring her back, which led to her hospitalization. But I had no choice. It was a matter of self preservation.]

JAD: [laughs] Oh, man! That is classic Joe Frank. It's really good writing, you know? He writes these, like, scenarios. They're like demented talk of the towns, in a way. Like, they're just these little fragments of dark experience which are beautifully realized, very vivid, kind of funny but kind of also troubling.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [laughs] How do you think he influenced you? Because you were always a great producer, always technically adept. You had tons of musical composition training, you understood the rhythmic possibilities of radio. What did he do that you don't think you could have done without him?

JAD: A lot of different things. This was way at the beginning for me, when Radiolab was just a three-hour thing on the AM station.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're going back how far?

JAD: We're going back to the stone age. So January, February, 2002?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Somewhere around there. Really at the beginning. And everybody here who knows the beginning of Radiolab knows that I didn't deserve that show. It was just too soon, and I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have a style. I had this—I had the, like, unfortunate thing that we all had back in 2002, is that I just wanted to be Ira Glass. Everyone wanted to be Ira Glass, right? And I was still trying to figure out, like, okay, so who am I? What do I want my stuff to sound like?

JAD: And so I would—every Sunday night, I'd have to put up three hours. And it was an anthology show at that point, and it was literally take the best documentaries from the BBC, the CBC from Canada, the ABC in Australia, Radio Netherlands, all this stuff, and package them into three continuous hours. And I would sort of narrate in and out of different segments. And so from 8:00 to 11:00, I'd be playing my show. And I was board hopping at the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Which means I wasn't just making the thing, but I had to sit at the board, hit play on the CD, and then between hour one and hour two, and hour two and hour three, I'd have to say the weather, right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [laughs]

JAD: So I was doing the whole thing. And after me, Joe Frank would come on. And he was part of my shift. And every time I'd just be like, "What the f is this stuff?" Like I would just be sitting there listening to him and, just like, amazed and, like, mentally taking notes, being like, "Oh, this guy has a feel and a—" there's a surreality and a disorientingness to his stuff that I was just really fascinated by. And I was like, "Oh, I want to—I want to do that."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Can we play that one that we said that we can't play?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: There was a time when I danced on a street corner dressed as a chicken. My job was to draw attention to a furniture store down the block. One evening when my shift was over, still wearing my chicken outfit, I walked into a bar across the street. I ordered a Bombay martini, straight up, olives on the side. A prostitute sat down next to me. She was young, willowy, had a far away look in her eyes. Her name was Meredith. We talked about our careers, the importance of networking, setting goals, focus.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: Then I excused myself, walked into the men's room, entered a stall, and sat down on the toilet and had a bowel movement that broke in two, and half of it was still hanging out of me, so I had to wipe myself 50 times, repeatedly checking to see if there was more left on the toilet paper. And written on the wall were the words, "Know that someone is suffering anonymously and unknown, and that by the time you read this, I'll be dead."]

JAD: Oh my God! [laughs] Oh, that's good. That's really good. Wow!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There's nothing wrong with playing that clip. Actually, he's not using any bad words.

JAD: It's true. I mean there's no FCC violations there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [laughs] And it's simply gross.

JAD: [laughs] Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet you tell me that there is this person on the planet to whom that hasn't happened.

JAD: [laughs] Joe Frank always had the quality of, like, he's coming from inside your head out and then back in again. He has that kind of quality, where it sounds like he's somehow like the voice in your head, but broadcast back into your head. There's something about that quality which, like, I—that's what I want from the radio, that's what I want from podcasts. I want someone to be speaking from inside me, in a way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you ever talked about Joe Frank to ...

JAD: Oh, yeah. I give this talk 30, 40 times a year, where I have, like, an extended Joe Frank excerpt, I have an image of Joe Frank that I show. Yeah, I talk about Joe Frank all the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The vast majority of our listeners, of the people listening to this, I'm going to have to assume they never heard of Joe Frank. And he was always available on podcast, but he was like this mystery.

JAD: Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: To people who weren't willing to sort of follow the breadcrumbs to him.

JAD: You know, I'll tell you, I mean, when I give this talk that I often give ...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm?

JAD: And I go through the series of people who've influenced me, I'll always ask, "Any Joe Frank fans in the house?" These will be, like, audiences of about 2,000, 2,500 people and, like, one time someone clapped. One time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow!

JAD: I remember it was like there was a clap in the far right and I was like, "Oh my God, a Joe Frank fan!" It always broke my heart a little bit, because no one ever knew his stuff. Like, amongst us, our little sort of posse of radio people, he's a legend. But nobody on the outside ever knew him, you know?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is going to be their chance.

JAD: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: Last night I dreamt I was lost on an elevator. All the floors were the same. Then I realized the elevator was moving horizontally, so I tried another elevator—the express. But it just got me more lost faster. People kept getting on and getting off. They were all wearing green gauze over their heads and were smoking ice cream cones. I said, "Please let me off at 39th Street," and the conductor said, "This is 35th Street. You'll have to walk three blocks and take the escalator." But when I got to the escalator, it was just a phone booth.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: So I made a call. I called my father. I said, "Hello? I'm lost on 39th Street looking for an escalator and I can't find it anywhere." And he said, "I'll be right there." And there he was. And the phone booth started moving forward very slowly with my father and I in it, and I didn't know where it was going or why. And he said, "Don't be afraid. This phone booth will take us home." And I said, "But we have no home." And he said, "We live on the 8th floor, Apartment Y." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Yes."]

JAD: That was a condensed version of a conversationI had with Brooke Gladstone for On the Media. You can find the full conversation at OnTheMedia.org. We'll return with one more Joe Frank recollection in just a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Michael Bruehls from Portland, Oregon. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. We're paying tribute to Joe Frank in this podcast. Joe unfortunately lost a battle with colon cancer just a few days ago. After my conversation with Brooke Gladstone from On the Media, I ended up having, later that same day, another conversation about Joe Frank, this time with Ira Glass from This American Life.

IRA GLASS: Hello.

JAD: Hey. How's it going, man?

IRA GLASS: Hey. It's going okay. It's going okay! I can do better at mind reading. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] There were two entirely different okays just then.

IRA GLASS: For the purposes of this conversation, I'm doing—I'm doing just fine.

JAD: [laughs] All right.

IRA GLASS: Hey, did you know Joe Frank?

JAD: No, I had one interaction with Joe Frank, which was—it was almost perfectly Joe Frank in that I met him once at Third Coast, and he—I asked him something and he looked at me for a long time and then just walked away.

IRA GLASS: [laughs]

JAD: Without speaking. That was my one Joe Frank interaction. So ...

IRA GLASS: Do you remember what you asked him?

JAD: I think I might have said something utterly, like, not my place. Because I had just started the show, and I was like, "Hey, if you have any work that you want to like, you know, get on—get on the show, let me know." And he just looked at me like, "You have the gall."

IRA GLASS: [laughs]

JAD: And just walked away. And so that was it.

IRA GLASS: Yeah. Yeah, showed you.

JAD: So what do you remember about him? I'm curious, like, what you saw. Because you worked with him, right?

IRA GLASS: Yeah. Basically when I was—when I was 20, I had my first paid job at NPR, and I was a production assistant to this guy whose job it was to invent new ways to do radio for NPR. And he had a regular show, and he would do different things in different weeks, and—and he brought Joe Frank down from New York. And that was the thing we were doing for a while. And I was Joe's production assistant as my very first paid job at NPR. And I had never heard him on the radio, I mean, he wasn't like, you know, on national radio. So I have, like, a few very specific memories for sure.

JAD: Yeah.

IRA GLASS: And the best way I can explain it is like, I've had the experience a number of times over the years where people try to tell me, like, "Oh, the first time I heard your show was this." And generally the thing they're trying to say to me is like, "I didn't know that the radio could do that."

JAD: Mm-hmm.

IRA GLASS: You know what I mean? Like, I didn't realize that, like, oh, radio could. like, tell a story like that, and it would feel like this. And I myself had that exact experience, and the person who I had it with was Joe Frank.

JAD: Hmm.

IRA GLASS: And—and I remember there was a day early on, and I was standing in the old control room at NPR's original studios, like the original two studios they had. There was Studio One and Studio Two, on the first floor of 2020 M Street. And we were in Studio Two, and I was standing by the reel-to-reel tape machine. You know, the bank of them.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

IRA GLASS: And I remember Joe was telling one of his stories. And I remember feeling like, oh, I've never—I've never heard this before. [laughs] I just remember feeling like this—like this thing, like—and it was just sort of like to feel like totally caught up in a story, and you don't exactly know why you're so caught up with it, and you don't know where it's going. And—and you just want to stay with it. And the sound of his voice, he's such, like, an incredible radio performer. Like, much better than you or me. You know what I mean?

JAD: Totally.

IRA GLASS: Like—like you can do stuff.

JAD: Do you remember what the story was that you were listening to?

IRA GLASS: I don't remember which specific story it was. I do remember, I have gone back, because there was one story in particular called "The Elevator." And in fact I've gone and dug up, that I remember at the time, I thought, like, "This is it. This sums up the whole thing." And literally what it is ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: I'm riding up the elevator of my building.]

IRA GLASS: ... is he gets on an elevator ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: I'm standing there, sharing the small space with a terrific-looking girl.]

IRA GLASS: He totally gets a crush on this woman.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: But I feel shy, uncomfortable. I scratch my head. I sigh. I gaze up at the numbers of the floors lighting up, one after another.]

IRA GLASS: And he starts to imagine their life together, and everything that they will be.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: She seems like the kind of person I'd really like.]

IRA GLASS: And he cannot bring himself to ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: We stand there, silently, not looking at each other.]

IRA GLASS: ... say a word to her. And so he pulls out something from his pocket.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: I reach into my pocket and draw out a scrap of paper, which I unfold. It turns out to be a cash register tape from the A&P, but I scrutinize it as if it's very important before putting it back in my pocket.]

IRA GLASS: [laughs] That's a detail of the story I remember seeming so real. It has, like, a very magnetic forward motion. And it's like four or five minutes long, and the entire thing happens in the elevator. He literally is just describing the floors going up, and all the feelings he has.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: You go through your life looking and looking. Sometimes you see her, the woman you might have loved, who might have loved you, at a bus stop, in a museum, across a smoky room at a party. In the lobby of a theater, on line at the supermarket. In an elevator. When she leaves, in a panic you want to run after her, calling out, "Stop! Stop! It's me, the person you were meant for! Don't you recognize me? Don't I look familiar? I may seem like a stranger, but I'm the person you've been waiting for, the one in your dreams." But you just stand there and watch her leave. This happens to me with a different woman about once each day.]

IRA GLASS: And I remember when I was 20 hearing that and being like, "This is it. This guy is doing a thing. Like, I want to know—I want to know how you do this."

JAD: Yes, for me the equivalent thing was, have you heard his rent-a-family trilogy?

IRA GLASS: No.

JAD: God, I'd be hard-pressed to summarize the story, but it's essentially—it's a whole world in which families can be rented for occasions.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Well, I saw this ad, and it said, "Rent a family."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: We have certain package programs where an individual can experience, over the course of a 12-month period, a pretty considerable range of-of families.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: Hi.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh, hi! Christa, it's your father from the agency. Come here!]

JAD: And it's all like in this very documentary format, and it's done really well so you actually sometimes, like, aren't totally sure that what you're hearing is a drama. It sounds super real.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We kind of deny that the—the society is—seems to be speeding up before our very eyes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: The whole idea of renting things has to do with people's desire to not have a permanent commitment to them.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I think it's important to recognize the depth of loneliness that must be addressed here.]

JAD: And in the end it, like, doesn't resolve at all. You're just left with, like, 12 different feelings that you don't even know what to do with.

IRA GLASS: I mean, I think in a way, like, that's—that's what he represents. You're, like, thrown in the middle of the action, and it's gritty, and you don't understand. It's kind of dark, and it's not all gonna get resolved. All the answers aren't gonna be given to you, and you're gonna have like, weird feelings that you don't know what to do with. And often it's gonna overreach, and it's not even gonna work, but it was still kinda cool. You know, like, all of that is completely—it's completely '70s film turned into radio.

JAD: So what is it that you think you took with you from Joe Frank and put into This American Life?

IRA GLASS: I mean, there are a couple things. Honestly, the first thing is just he gave me the most important thing, which was desire to do it.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

IRA GLASS: Do you know what I mean?

JAD: Yeah.

IRA GLASS: Like, hearing him made me want to make stories. And then I spent over a decade trying to figure out how to do it with facts and with reporting. The thing that started me with that ambition was him. So that's one thing.

IRA GLASS: A second thing is just the way he would use music, and the way that the music would pull the story forward and create a mood, but also kind of like, push you into the dream of it. The notion that you'd use music as a kind of cinematic scoring, which is not the way, you know, music would be used in old time radio dramas, and certainly not the way music was being used on anything on NPR. And the way he used music is so built into me that a couple of years after This American Life was on the air, Joe was already living out in California, had been for years, and still doing his show. And, like, mutual friends, I mean they're like, "Joe is so angry with you."

JAD: [laughs] Oh no!

IRA GLASS: And I was like, "Why is Joe so angry with me?" You know what I mean? Because he was my—like, why is he so angry? And—and then it turned out that Joe thought that I was listening to his show and stealing the music.

JAD: Oh, yeah!

IRA GLASS: And I got in touch with him and he's just like, "It's so petty." He said, "This is so petty. You could be choosing any music, and you're listening to my show." He's like, "It takes me so long to find decent music, and I edit it so carefully. You know, it's such a part of the identity of the show. And that you would just listen to my show and rip me off. Like, do a little work, brother!"

IRA GLASS: And I was like, "Joe, it's so much worse than that. Like, the fact is, like, I haven't heard your show in years. I haven't heard it. I'm so sorry. And what happened is I just learned to use music from you. And so when Pat Metheny comes out with a new record, I hear the same track you do, and hear the same possibility in it, and I just do the same thing, because, like, it's so built into who I am. So in a way, like, I am totally stealing from you, but I swear, I didn't know it."

JAD: [laughs] Oh, no! Did you ever—did you ever, like, land that in a good place with him?

IRA GLASS: He was fine at the end of it.

JAD: Okay.

IRA GLASS: I think it was just something about the—it was just—it seemed so, like—it seemed so small to him, you know what I mean? Like, "What? You're listening to my show and you're stealing my music? Like what—what's the matter with you?" You know what I mean? It just seemed cheap. Yeah, so there's that.

IRA GLASS: And what else carries forward from him? I mean—I mean, it's—it's—honestly, there's a thing or two that he does that I have never figured out how to imitate, that in the back of my mind I still feel like I'm gonna steal that. And one of them is this thing that came up last week, I was talking to Parker, one of the, like, the younger producers here. And she was talking about a thing she wanted to do, and kind of moment that she really loves. And she used to be a film professor, and it was like a super cinematic thing she was shooting for. I was like, "You know what? You should really listen to this guy, Joe Frank." And she had never heard of him, and I downloaded—last week I bought and downloaded "The 80-Yard Run." Which, have you heard that one?

JAD: No, that one I've never heard.

IRA GLASS: Oh, my God. It's a super early one. In fact, I think it's just an air check of one of his WBAI broadcasts, before he was national. I think it's an actual live radio show done late at night.

JAD: Wow!

IRA GLASS: And it's just him and a microphone with music, and he's telling this story of what he keeps referring to as ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: As I like to call it, my infamous 80-yard run, is a rather twisted, convoluted tale.]

IRA GLASS: Now before I get to the full story of my 80-yard run ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: I hope that you will bear with me.]

IRA GLASS: There's a few things you need to know first. And the first thing you need to know is about this fight.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: Between Luis Rodriguez and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.]

IRA GLASS: You know, it's like, there's a lot of that. And then he tells you, like, a series of professional fights that happened over the years, and tells them so well.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: He absorbed an awesome, terrible beating, standing propped up, unconscious.]

IRA GLASS: And then there comes a point where he's like—you're, like, six or eight minutes into the thing, and he says, "But before I can tell you that part of the story, you need to know this next thing. And I will tell you that ... "

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Frank: After a brief interlude, during which I will drink some tea.]

IRA GLASS: [laughs] And then, like, the music comes up, and then he just leaves. [laughs] And I was like, "Oh, my God!" And, like, I've spent 30 years trying to figure out how to steal that.

JAD: [laughs] You want to have a tea moment?

IRA GLASS: I don't even know how to do it! I honestly—I honestly—I don't know, man. I mean—I mean, like—like, I'm gonna figure it out, but first I'm gonna go make myself some tea.

JAD: [laughs] That's Ira Glass from This American Life. Thanks to him. Thanks also to Brooke Gladstone from On the Media, and to Sarah Qari and Kelly Prime of the More Perfect crew, who produced this tribute. Also, a very special thanks to Michael Story.

JAD: If you want to hear excerpts of Joe Frank's work, which I would highly recommend, go to JoeFrank.com. His entire archive is there. We'll also link you to it from Radiolab.org. One of the things that you will hear, I think, if you listen—and Ira and I talked about this—is that even though he's a guy who has inspired so many of us to get into the business of telling stories, nobody sounds like him. Still.

IRA GLASS: Because it's completely impossible to imitate. You know, the hundreds of thousands of podcasts that are happening now, there's nobody doing anything as daring and competent at the same time.

JAD: Yeah.

IRA GLASS: Like, literally, like it's so singular you can't really imitate it very well. And I'm personally not one who—who believes it matters, like, if your work lives on past you. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like, fuck the people of the future. You know what I mean? Like these are radio shows. You know, like, they're meant to be enjoyed, like, you know, right now, and then, like, if no one ever listens to them again after we're gone, like, well fuck them anyway. Like, walking around and being alive while we're dead. First of all, fuck all those people, being alive and having sandwiches and meeting for lunch while we're dead and not existing. Like, I hate them already. They can fuck themselves.

IRA GLASS: But it seems—but it seems sad that—that other people like, won't know this weird thing that I know is so special. You know, like, he's so outpacing everybody even now, even now that there's like this army of people making podcasts and trying to invent something that's like, nobody else is doing. He still has—he still has outpaced every single one of them, from the grave.

JAD: That's a perfect place to end.

IRA GLASS: [laughs] Okay. Bye. Bye.

[LISTENER: This is Sunny from South Africa. Radiolab was created Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, Maya Hughes, Jay Garlow, Maria Bartolomeo and Phoebe Wang. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

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