Joe Frank has been in my head since about 1993, though I cannot say exactly when I first heard his programs. I estimate it as 1993 because I found a cassette tape with that date on it containing one of his programs in my storage locker.
I don’t think a day goes by in which a Joe Frank quote or scenario does not pass through my head. If I ever achieve any success in the realm of radio or podcasting there should be no question that he was an important influence. But even if I fail as an audio storyteller I could never deny his enduring presence in my mind.
I had actually just introduced Joe Frank to a long time friend of mine, also named Joe, a broadly cultured individual who I was surprised to find had never heard of him. He listened to Black Hole, which is possibly Joe Frank’s greatest hour, and made the same comments I might make if I were not such a fanboy. It’s very good stuff but it goes a little long on the lunacy and absurdist scenarios. True enough, it is a weakness of Joe Frank, but he had to fill a full hour every Sunday, sans commercials no less, so you do what you gotta do sometimes to reach that goal. This isn’t like conservative talk radio where you can fill three hours of airtime by saying absolutely nothing. I mean he could, of course, and you could say he did precisely that with the endless excerpts of Jack Kornfield’s Dharma lectures. But Joe Frank was always interesting.
I think of him as the Ben Katchor of radio, and I wonder at times if they did not recognize each other as kindred spirits. Katchor, too, can go long on the lunacy, but he almost always cadences on poetry or some wistfully inconclusive allusion.
It was never lost on me but it was only fairly recently that I took stock of how so much of Joe Frank’s material is cultural commentary. I can’t always tell who he is going after, and there are times as well where I cannot even tell what he is talking about. But his output is frequently a veiled critique of some establishment or cultural quirk. That’s the kind of voice I don’t think I have.
I heard the news in the form of an e-mail with nothing but the subject line “Joe Frank Died.” We don’t know what his final recording was, or if it would ever be released, but I think whatever it is should be titled “Joe Frank Died.” I think he would have appreciated that.
There was a period where he did not produce anything for a while, and concern was raised by some who interpreted the last piece he did as some kind of suicide note. I would have to dig around to find that but he eventually made an announcement that he was OK. I never fully realized that he had been chronically ill throughout his life, enduring all kinds of painful surgeries and procedures. It was also lost on me that he was over 70 years old when he married his now-widowed wife. I did not follow her on Facebook so I missed her postings about how sick he had been in recent weeks. I had been thinking, though, that it had been a while since I’d seen anything on Facebook from Joe, who posted frequently. He is the only person on Facebook whose status updates I specifically set to show up at the top of my timeline any time he posted. He could post a little bit past his welcome at times but he was always interesting.
I could not pick a favorite among the Joe Frank canon. Black Hole is one that I cannot forget but which I also have a hard time listening to on account of the subject matter. A short piece about dirt almost made me stop breathing. I don’t remember program names, which makes it hard to find the ones I am thinking of. One story that made my thoughts stop completely was about his parents. They were at a party or a wedding reception from which most people had already left. The music played on and Joe’s mother and father swayed to the rhythm, slow dancing and laughing with each other. Joe described sitting at am empty dinner table, just watching them be together. I don’t remember his exact words but he said something like “It was the most golden memory of my youth.” Joe was 5 years old when his father died, so this would have been among his earliest living memories.
Maybe now the truth can be told about the After Hours scandal, in which Martin Scorsese (or rather one of his writers) simply copied and pasted content from Joe Frank into the script of that movie. Joe sued and the matter was settled out of court but I don’t think the terms were ever made public. Something I did not know about that incident was that Larry Block, a repeat character in Joe’s programs, made an appearance in After Hours. Could that have been entirely coincidental? I would have thought the stealing of Joe’s content would have been discovered after the film was released but Block’s appearance in the film suggests word got out beforehand and that he was cast in a small role as some part of the deal they made.
