BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Joe Frank died Monday. He was 79. And he was a radio giant. He conducted interviews, read stories, wrote dramas, and none of it was like anything done before because it was so raw and, frankly, nuts. To many of us, it was shocking and sad. He wasn't a huge star but his light has been reflected in the great work of people you do know.

Mark Oppenheimer is the host of the podcast Unorthodox. He spent the past year interviewing Joe and those he influenced for an article in Slate called, “Joe Frank Signs Off."

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  So when I first has the idea to write about Joe Frank, for a while he didn't get back to me. Then he sent me some emails basically saying, no, go away. Then there was an email that said, try me in a couple of months when I'm feeling better. Then, at one point, he had this idea that we would collaborate on an article that was partly fictional --

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

-- but that I would put my name to it as a journalist and then maybe I would get found out, and wouldn't it be interesting if the world unraveled what he and I had collaborated to make? [LAUGHS]

[BROOKE LAUGHING]

And I said, Joe, that's not what I do. I write true stuff. It gets fact checked and, if I do that, I’ve basically destroyed my career. You know, I'm not an experimental radio artist. [LAUGHS] I’m a journalist. And then eventually he said, okay, come on out and we can talk.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Tell me about him, Tell me, first of all, about what his life was like.

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  Joe Frank had one of the most difficult lives of anyone who didn't live through a genocide whom I've ever interviewed. He was sickly his entire life. He was born with club feet. He had testicular cancer at a young age. He had a different cancer about every other decade for all of his 80 years. His mother hated him. His father died young. He was just in enormous physical and psychological pain. He was a child of privilege. He grew up quite wealthy on Central Park in New York City, the child of parents who had fled the Nazis.

He hadn’t trained to be a radio person. He had gone to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and wanted to be a fiction writer. And then for a while he was a high school teacher at The Dalton School in New York City. Then he promoted concerts up in western Massachusetts and he would drive up and down I-91 and listen to the radio on his way to the shows he was promoting in the Springfield area. And that's when he began to think that maybe he had a future in radio because he found that those voices keeping him company late at night on the highway in the cold were so soothing to him and gave him a kind of community and company that held his melancholy at bay. And so, he began to volunteer at WBAI, which was, radio-wise, really the place to be. It was doing very interesting work, hit or miss work, some of it was terrible.

[BROOKE CHUCKLES]

But he went there and just studied and learned to cut audio, learned to edit and listened.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So what did you experience the first time you heard him?

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  I have to say that if I had encountered Joe Frank on my own without knowing how much he had meant to some of these really great cultural figures, like Ira glass or Alexander Payne, the film director, I probably would have listened for a few minutes and then turned the radio off. I probably would have said, this isn’t my cup of tea. He’s difficult. He resists -- you. He doesn’t come to you. He tells stories that don't make sense unless you listen for the whole 25 or 45 minutes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And even then. [LAUGHS]

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  And even then. [LAUGHS] He often operates at the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, so that if you're not paying attention you snap to after your mind wanders and you're not sure if you're listening to a story about his life that really happened or if he's reading the evening news. If you can't pay really close attention, then he's not for you.

He is for late-night listening in the car by yourself, and it's not an accident that his career really flourished once he left the New York-Washington axis and moved to Los Angeles because that is a city where a lot of lonely people are in cars by themselves late at night.

[CLIPS]:

JOE FRANK:  This is Joe Frank. I'm here at the Bellflower Hotel in the rooms of Bertram Fields, a preeminent performer in the art of mime. Have you ever thought about what else you might have done in your life had you chosen another career path?

ACTOR ARTHUR MILLER PLAYING MIME:  I suppose if I had not become a mime, I think I would have considered going into registered nursing. I was always interested in bodily fluids and people's reaction to different medication and I --

 [AUDIO UP & UNDER]

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  You’ve just been rejected from your 12th audition of the week, you have a couple of drinks at the bar. You get in the car to head back to the Valley to your little efficiency apartment, and it’s 11 p.m. and you turn on the radio and you’re looking for some company, for some solace, and you give it your undivided attention. That's where Joe Frank hits people.

JOE FRANK:  -- any sense of, of what you’re going to be doing at Carnegie Hall. Could you give us perhaps a taste of, of the performance this Thursday evening?

ARTHUR MILLER AS MIME:  Well, we’re doing a broad range of material at the concert but perhaps you might like this one. This is from the Dercru days. It’s always been a big favorite. It’s called “Nothing Happened.”

[PAUSE/SIREN SOUNDING]

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  The Joe Frank that I enjoy is, is really the funny and the very silly Joe Frank, the absurdist Joe Frank. And he did a piece called “Prayer” --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  -- which aired in different versions in 1994 and 1995. So the whole hour is about religion and the different ways people relate to religion. Frank was a very committed atheist. He had very conflicted feelings about his own Jewish background but he was, like many atheists, obsessed with religion. And one of the pieces in the hour-long episode called “Prayer” is a performance by THE late poet and performance artist from Baltimore named David Franks, with an S on the end. And Franks had this stock character who was this radio evangelist, this faith healer --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  -- who would heal people over the radio. And what Joe Frank did was he had David Franks come on as this preacher and take phone calls from stroke victims, from people with disabilities or palsies, and he would lead them in these incantations. He would say, now, repeat after me, and then he would have them pray to, you know, the great otter god.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

And he would, he would, he would say, you know, okay, repeat after me, “Let me be like a mouse, inside a mouse trap.”

[CLIP]:  

DAVID FRANKS:  Inside a mouse trap.

MALE CALLER:  Inside a mouse trap.

FRANKS:  Feed me

CALLER:  Feed me

FRANKS:  Bread

CALLER:  Bread

FRANKS:  Wine

CALLER:  Wine

FRANKS:  Hamsters

CALLER:  Hamsters

FRANKS:  Rats

CALLER:  Rats

FRANKS:  Bullfrogs

CALLER:  Bulldogs

FRANKS:  African Eurasian tiger-pussycats

CALLER:  African Eurasian tiger-pussycats

FRANKS:  And love me, O Father…

[SOUND UP & UNDER]

MARK OPPENHEIMER:  This was incredibly cruel and I do believe that the callers were real people. Joe Frank would do live shows. Pieces were recorded but pieces could also be live. He also did a pledge drive once where he said, if we don't meet our targets we’re gonna shoot this dog here in the studio.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS] They, they didn’t meet the target and they pretended to shoot the dog.

Frank could be very cruel but what you have to remember is that he had suffered at least as much as the people who were calling in. I mean, this was his own pain that he was working through.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

This is someone who, you know, had nightmares because of the enema he’d been given in the hospital when he had an undescended testicle operated on, and then he had testicular cancer. And, you know, his cousin donated a kidney to him and then billed him for the kidney. This was someone who’d been through enormous pain in his life.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You can find Mark Oppenheimer’s story, “Joe Frank Signs Off” in Slate.

When Frank died, I assumed I’d find someone he influenced just down the hall. Yep, Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad. I played him some tape.

[CLIP/MUSIC UP & UNDER]:

JOE FRANK:  When you hug people goodbye after a social event, perhaps a dinner party or a gallery opening, there was always that moment when they squeeze you more forcefully than before, a polite way of letting you know they were about to withdraw. Usually, the one who disengages first is the one who cares less.

[BROOKE LAUGHING]

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.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

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 --

[BROOKE LAUGHING]

-- injuring her back, which led to her hospitalization. But I had no choice. It was a matter of self-preservation.

[BOTH LAUGH]

JAD ABUMRAD:  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. [LAUGHS]

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

Like, they’re just these little fragments of dark experience, which are beautifully realized, very vivid, kind of funny but kind of also troubling. Like, and they’re, they’re always many things at once, you know?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] How do you think he influenced you, ‘cause you were always a great producer, always technically adept. You had tons of musical composition training, you understood the rhythmic possibilities of radio, all of which are heard continually in the programs that you produce. So what did he do that you don’t think you could have done without him?

JAD ABUMRAD:  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. These --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  We’re going back how far?

JAD ABUMRAD:  We’re going back to the Stone Age, so say like January, February, 2002 --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JAD ABUMRAD:  -- 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; everybody 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?

And so, I would -- every Sunday night, I’d have to put out three hours, and it was an anthology show at that point and it was literally take the best documentaries from the BBC, the CBC in 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 to 11, I’d be playing my show, and I was board opping at the time -

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JAD ABUMRAD:  -- 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? [LAUGHS]

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

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? I, 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 surreal-ity and a disorienting-ness to his stuff that I was just really fascinated by, and I was like, oh, I want to, want to do that.

There’s something transgressive in everything that he does, and I like to think we try to sort of embody that spirit a little bit in that we’re making things that aren't always safe. They kind of want to mess you up a tiny bit or they want to trouble you in all the right ways. When I was a little radio baby, I feel like that was something, like, oh, you know, I can do --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JAD ABUMRAD:  -- I didn’t think I could do that [ ? ].

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

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

[CLIP/MUSIC UP & UNDER]:

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’d ordered a Bombay martini straight up, olives on the side.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

A prostitute sat down next to me. She was young, willowy, had a faraway look in her eyes. Her name was Meredith. We talked about our careers, the importance of networking, setting goals, focus.

[ABUMRAD AND BROOKE LAUGHING]

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.

[LAUGHTER]

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.

[ABUMRAD AND BROOKE LAUGHING]

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 ABUMRAD:  Oh, my God! [LAUGHS]

[BROOKE LAUGHING]

Oh, that’s good. That’s really good.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS]

JAD ABUMRAD:  Wow.

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

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

And it’s not --

JAD ABUMRAD:  It’s true. I mean, there’s no FCC violations there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] And it’s simply -- gross!

JAD ABUMRAD:  Yes. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And yet, you tell me that there is a person on the planet to whom [LAUGHS] that hasn’t happened.

[LAUGHTER]

JAD ABUMRAD:  And there’s, there’s some connection between the isolation and loneliness of the person having written and then the loneliness you feel in the stall in that moment, yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS]

JAD ABUMRAD:  You hear something like that and it gives you permission. You know, and you didn’t think you could write could you can write something nutty and gross the way that, that he did in the clip we just heard.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  A sense of -- unboundedness.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Yeah, I’ll put it to you this way: That, that idea of, like, being mischievous and transgressive and a little bit dark, and the way he talks, too, that kind of like super-hushed high hiss, there’s like a high hiss in his words. There’s something just about the sound of his voice. And, and there’s a kind of like deep trance-inducing quality to listening to a Joe Frank story. All of those elements, I thought, could I take that and put it into journalism, the telling of true stories, the reporting of true stories? Could that stuff sound like Joe Frank? I remember thinking very consciously, I'd love to be able to be Joe Frank in a different mode.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Well, there is a certain similar resonance, and I think you both make really good use of the proximity effect.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I mean, you -- you’re both --

JAD ABUMRAD:  I’m doing it right now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah, you’re both really leaning into the mic. You know, there is a sort of -- I’m really in your head!

JAD ABUMRAD:  Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  That’s what he does.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Yeah, yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And you do that, too?

JAD ABUMRAD:  I do, yeah. I mean, Joe Frank always had the quality of, like, he's coming from inside your head out and then back in again.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

He has that kind of quality, where it, it sounds like he’s somehow like the voice in your head but broadcast back into your head.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

There’s something about that quality which, like, I -- that’s what I want from the radio. It’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 ABUMRAD:  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 [LAUGHS] all the time.

I -- I’ll tell you what it was. It, it was the experience of being in a studio when you, when you don't know what you're doing, and in those moments when you're staring at this evil mic, like, you have these voices that enter your head. And so, I’d go through the series of voices that were in my head , and it was Scott Simon because [DEEPENS VOICE] Scott has that kind of, like, you know, really -- or that really super intimate way he has, and I was like, oh, I want to be Scott, you know. At the same time, Scott has a certain preciousness. I don't mean in a bad way. And for me, Joe Frank was this, like, antidote.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  but so, what did Joe Frank give you?

JAD ABUMRAD:  That sense of the voice in your head, the dark thoughts that you don't speak out loud, that sense of transgressive, like, I'm going to say something that’s a little bit wrong. All of those things were things I wanted for my show.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah, and there were many times when people wanted to adapt his stuff but it just didn't seem to travel off the radio. One time, someone stole from him.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Really?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  It was the writer of the Martin Scorsese film, this absurdist kind of Virgil-like exploration of New York called After Hours. And he got paid, he says, quite handsomely after the lawsuit.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Wow, I did not know that. That’s crazy. It’s funny, now that we’re talking about it, I'm surprised there was never a Joe Frank moment, a moment where he kind of came -- back. So I don’t know, I wonder how some of the clips are playing. I wonder how it sounds to somebody who's in their ‘20s and just getting into podcasting. It still sounds good to me.

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

It could just be because I’m an old fart, at this point. But I was like, I, I would listen to that. Even when the music’s a little weird, I would totally listen to that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  He was the radio producer’s radio producer. 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 ABUMRAD:  Yeah.

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

JAD ABUMRAD:  You know, I’ll tell you, I mean, when I give this talk that I, that I often give --

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JAD ABUMRAD:  -- and I go through the series of people who’ve influenced me and I always list -- I list Joe Frank in, in a, in a list that goes, it goes, Ira, Scott, Joe. I’ll always ask, any Joe Frank fans in the house? These will be, like, audiences of about 2,000, 2500 people and, like, one time someone clapped, one time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Wow.

JAD ABUMRAD:  I remember, 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, ‘cause 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 ABUMRAD:  Yeah, this is the opportunity to do that. I think people want stuff that’s just not, not usual right now, and he was basically the epitome of that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  It certainly takes you out of the crazy dark world you're in and deposits you in a --

[ABUMRAD LAUGHS]

-- smarter crazy dark world.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

JAD ABUMRAD:  [LAUGHS] Smarter crazy dark world, yeah. [?]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Thank you so much, Jad.

JAD ABUMRAD:  Yeah, thanks for, for grabbing me and doing this.

[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 39 Street, and a 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, 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, Y? And he said, yes.

[MUSIC/MUSIC UP & UNDER]

One day, I’ll visit the Ringling Brothers Winter Home for Retired Animals and watch lions and elephants wearing bathrobes and tattered slippers strolling on the beach. I’ll walk along the shore, climb up on a cliff and think about my life.

BOB GARFIELD:  On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova—Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Jon Hanrahan, Isaac Naple and Monique LaBorde. This was Monique’s last week with the show. She was awesome and we wish her all the best. And our show was edited -- by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week wee Sam Bair and Terence Bernardo.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield.