Ann Liguori: You had a nice childhood. A very solid childhood, and that’s very important.

Wilt Chamberlain: Yeah, you know the only thing that was not so nice was that I was this height at 14 years of age.

Ann Liguori: Seven foot?

Wilt Chamberlain: Yeah, and can you imagine going through America at that time, a man of color, a little boy, 14 years old, that height? You know, I was looked upon as a freak. Today, when you see someone close to my size or whatever, people think: “sports,” “basketball,” “zoom dollar signs.”  And they don’t think “circus freak” or what have you.

[Music]

Wilt Chamberlain: The toughest thing for me was growing up and being stared at and being looked at and being talked about in that particular way. Other than that it was a good childhood.

Ann Liguori: Did it give you a complex? I mean, did it make you feel insecure: Wow, I’m so tall?

Wilt Chamberlain: You know, well, not insecure, but, you know, I kind of wanted to hide a little bit. I did not want to bring that notice to me. If I was on like the bus or we had the El, you understand, I would always sit down. I was taught to stand up and give my seat to ladies or women, and I never did. I was always just going to sit there. Because if I stood up, my head would be like almost touching the ceiling and everybody would look, so I was really quite conscious about that.

[Music]

Wilt Chamberlain: I was played the villain so much because I was bigger and stronger than most, and they cast me as the villain everywhere I went.  And villains are kind of hard to really know on a personal level when you see them as mean, unsensitive-type people.  And also when you have this great size, sensitivity once again is not given to you. They talk about all these things that you can do and whatever, but never do they say are you gentle, really sensitive about things.  And we are.  You know, a big dog tends to be much more at ease with kids and gentle with them than a little one that’s always yelping, yelping, yelping, you know? So I don’t know where they get that because you’re big you have to have this gruffness about you.

Ann Liguori: You do mention the sensitivity issue in the book about sex and how rewarding it felt for you that the woman would find you very sensual and sensitive, that it was a shock to some people that you could be that way.

Wilt Chamberlain: Well, let’s talk about that a second. You know, I say that you want to be treated just like everybody else in that respect, but on the other hand: viva la difference.

[Music]

Wilt Chamberlain: I think my attraction, if there was attraction that women had for me, was the fact that I was different. Of course when you’re famous, you have a little more money than some people and you’re involved in something like professional sports: that’s an attraction. But I think a lot of ladies found me so attractive because I was different. And I acted on that in a way.

[Music]

Wilt Chamberlain: I think that Wilt Chamberlain, as age has come upon him, is even much more secure. Even though I can do less, I feel much more secure about it.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: We probably will.

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: Probably. I don’t have a car, but it will probably be something like that.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: But if you had one, then somebody could drive it. She could drive it.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Your baby could drive it. I’m sure it wouldn’t be any problem. I could arrange it.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: No problem.

 Mike “Mike D” Diamond: No problem, Jamaica.

[Music: Beastie Boys “Paul Revere”]

“Now here’s a little story I got to tell

About three bad brothers you know so well.

It started way back in history

with Ad-Rock, MCA and me Mike D.”]

Adam “MCA” Yauch: We got in last night. We took the bus right after the show.

Rocci Fisch: Where were you last night?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: We nearly got arrested.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Yeah. Virginia.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: Listen to this: we’re on the stage playing and we happen to say—can I curse on this or is this like uh—

Rocci Fisch: I’m going to edit it.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: So I said “mother fucker” a couple of times or he said “mother fucker” or something like that. And, ah, some cops went up to Madonna’s manager and said that the second we came off the stage that they were going to arrest us and put us in jail and it was that simple and there were no two ways about it.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond:  Like it was really scary ’cause as soon as we came off the stage they grabbed us and said, “Yo, boys. You’re going to prison.”

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: I tried to run away because I didn’t know what was going on and this guy, this cop, like he didn’t hit me that hard, but he like you know hit me in the back of the legs with his club. I mean if we had known in the first place we wouldn’t have done it. But this guy had to go and hit us.

 Adam “MCA” Yauch: I never knew that it was illegal to use profanity before this.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: You know, there’s a way we talk and it includes profanity. We never figured we’d be arrested for it.

[Music: “Paul Revere” continues]

Rocci Fisch: What’s it like opening for Madonna?

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Usually there’s about basically almost a riot breaking out after every show because either the crowd wants to kill us or we have to run from the girls because they mob us.

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: Every single night is definitely really hard work. Harder work than I ever really imagined. We go out there and we just have to win this audience over. They don’t want to see rap music. They don’t want to see the Beastie Boys. They don’t care what we’re doing. They want one thing and one thing only: that’s to see Madonna come on stage. But then we go out there, we work hard, we win them over, and then they get real happy. It’s really kind of cool.

[Music: Beastie Boys]

Rocci Fisch: Are you guys the only white rappers?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: It looks that way right now and I’m real surprised at it. Although kids always come up to me after the show and tell me they rap also. But we’re the only ones on vinyl, I imagine.

Rocci Fisch: Someone said today that maybe you’re “rappers for the suburbs.” How do you feel about somebody describing you that way?

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: Well whoever said that is an ignorant moron, because we’re certainly not rap music for the suburbs. Because if he ever listened to our records and knows anything about rap music. That we are soul, hardcore, b-boy music, and we do not play sucker music. Like a Chaka Kahn “I Feel for You” is suburb rap music. They think that anything with someone, you know, saying something in a rhyme is rap music.

[Music: Chaka Khan “I Feel for You”]

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: But that’s certainly not us at all.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: I’d just like to say, like, these people just don’t realize that when we’re in New York City we’ll go to the worst neighborhood in Queens, play to an entirely black audience with someone like Kurtis Blow for a thousand people. This is not a suburban audience. This is like the hardest core urban audience. The thing that really bothers like white critics won’t like us, because they have this whole preconceived notion of what rap music is: you gotta go out there and be angry and sing about the ghetto. And that’s the only reason for rap music to exist. You know?

[Music]

Rocci Fisch: How did you get your group name, Beastie Boys?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: It’s from the good old days. We were a hardcore band.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Yeah, we were like—I was like what, 14?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: Yeah.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: I was like, 14, 15? That’s when we made our first record. We were all going to high school at the time and that’s how we met.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: At time it was the stupidest name that I could possibly think of. And if you could think of a stupider name I’d probably be pretty impressed now. So lay it on me: can you think of a stupider name than the Beastie Boys?

Rocci Fisch: Not really

Adam “MCA” Yauch: So then that answers your question right there.

[Music: Beastie Boys “Hold It Now, Hit It”]

Rocci Fisch: What’s def?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: What do you mean?

Rocci Fisch: What do you mean def?

Adam “MCA” Yauch: Def is uh, you know, we are def. I’d say that’s a good answer. We are def.

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: Def in New York is what—is something that’s really good, like us. You know what I mean? Def, like def jam.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Kind of like if you put on a James Brown record and you just know that’s def.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: Jam is something that you put on toast.

Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz: We’re very into breakfast.

Mike “Mike D” Diamond: Yeah, we’re into breakfast a lot.

Adam “MCA” Yauch: It’s like, we like hot butter on our breakfast toast and we also like def jam on it.

Jim Morrison: You’re not hungry? How about you: are you hungry? Oh, it’s lunchtime. Did you have breakfast this morning?

Howard Smith: Yeah.

Jim Morrison: You did. What’d you have?

Howard Smith: Oh, little things like chocolate cake and tea here.

Jim Morrison: Is that all you had?

Howard Smith: That’s all I want.

Jim Morrison: You should eat more, Howard.

Howard Smith: You put on a lot of weight. Are you eating a lot?

Jim Morrison: Well, um… You know that’s something that really bothers me. What’s wrong with being fat? That’s what I want to know. Why is there such…

Howard Smith: I didn’t say there’s anything wrong with it.

Jim Morrison: Why is it so onerous to be fat? Um… I don’t see anything wrong with fat. You know? I mean, I remember when I used to weigh 185 pounds. I’m the same height. I was the same height that I am now and I weighed 185 pounds and I was going to college. And I had this food ticket at the cafeteria. And the cafeteria food is mainly all based on starch. You know it’s cheap food, right? And so I don’t know what it was, but in order… I don’t know, I just felt like I was… If you missed your meal you just, you know… I just figured: “Well I was getting screwed, right?” If I missed a meal I blew it. So I’d get up at 6:30 every morning just to make breakfast, right? Eggs and grits and sausages and toast and milk. Then I’d go do a few classes. And I’d make it in there for lunch.

Jim Morrison: Mashed potatoes. Every now and then they’d put a little piece of meat in something, you know? Then I’d go to a few more classes. And then I’d go to dinner and it was more mashed potatoes.

Jim Morrison: And so about three months later I was 185 pounds. And you know what? I felt so great. I felt like a tank, you know. I felt like a large mammal. A big beast. When I’d move through the corridors or across the lawn, I just feel like I could knock anybody out of my way, you know. I was solid, man. It’s terrible to be thin and wispy, because, you know, you could get knocked over by a strong wind or something. Fat is beautiful.

Howard Smith: How much do you weigh now?

Jim Morrison: I don’t know to tell you the truth. I’d guess somewhere in the neighborhood of about 150.

Howard Smith: Really?

Jim Morrison: You want to compare biceps? (Laughs) You want a dead arm wrestling match, Howard? Are you ready? Are you in shape?

Howard Smith: All right. Yeah.

Jim Morrison: We’ll wait until the interview’s over.

Howard Smith: (Laughs)

Larry King: I’d been in radio two weeks.  I was 23 years old. And I did everything because I did sports, I did news, I did disc jockey. And one day—they knew I was a glutton, because “Larry will do it”—and the station manager calls and says, “The all-night guy is sick. Would you like to fill in tonight?” “Sure! No problem.” Now I’m in the station all alone. It was a small station. I’ll never forget this: I’m playing these records, and the phone rings and I pick it up and say, “WAHR” and this lady’s voice—I can still hear her voice—she goes, “I want you.” [Laughter] I go, “What did you say?” “I said I want you.” And I said to myself: there’s a couple of extra pluses to being in this business. So I said—the immediate thing, I swear to god—“I get off at six!”  She says, “Naw, that won’t do. I’ve got to go to work. You gotta come now.” I said, “But I’m on the air.” She says, “I’m only 12 blocks from the station. Here’s my address. If you can make it, please. I really want you.” Hangs up.  I got her address. I’m the only one in station. So here’s what the audience heard: “Ah folks, I’m only sitting in tonight, so I’ve got a real treat for you. You’re going to hear the entire Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall album uninterrupted.  I had 33 minutes, which is all the time I needed. To this day that’s still true.

[Music: Harry Belafonte “Jamaica Farewell”]

Larry King: So I put the record on. I get in the car, I swear to god. I rushed to her house 11 blocks away. I pull into her house. The light is on. The Volkswagen was in the driveway. She said the door would be open. The door was open. She was sitting— She wore a white negligee. I never saw her face clear. The little lamp was on.

[Music: “Jamaica Farewell” continues]

Larry King: The radio was on. Belafonte’s singing. She opens up her arms. I run into her arms. I put my arms— My cheek goes against her cheek, and on the radio Belafonte is singing “Jamaica Farewell.” “Down the way where the nights—”

[Music: “Jamaica Farewell” continues: “Down the way where the nights—where the nights—where the nights—”]

Larry King: “Where the nights—where the nights—” The record gets stuck. I push her back. I jump in the car. I drive to the station. And this is Jewish masochism: I keep the radio on. “Where the nights—where the nights—where the nights— where the nights—” and I was petrified. I come back. All the phones are ringing. I’m apologizing to people. And the last call I never forgot. An old Jewish guy. “WAHR” and I hear this guy go, “Where the nights—where the nights.  I’m going crazy. I’m going crazy.” I said, “Sir, I apologize. Why didn’t you change the station?” He says, “I’m an invalid. They set the station for me on top of the bureau and I can’t reach it.”

[Music: “Jamaica Farewell” continues to end]

//End//

David Gerlach: This is Blank on Blank. Where lost interviews come to life. Distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org. I’m David Gerlach.

Joe Fassler: I’m Joe Fassler and I’m a writer for TheAtlantic.com.

David Gerlach: Back in early 2012, Joe spoke with Brian Selznick. He’s the author and illustrator of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” It’s a book that was turned into “Hugo,” an Academy Award-nominated film by Martin Scorsese.
[Music: “The Movies” from the “Hugo” soundtrack]

Joe Fassler: I’ve always had a really soft spot for kids’ books, and one of my favorite writers to sort of emerge on that scene in the past few years has been Brian Selznick. And I loved these books, “Hugo” and “Wonderstruck.” Just the books that read like a novel but are as illustrated as the best books for kids. And I had wanted to ask him about the experience of being enchanted by something because it seemed so important to his books. And I never imagined that he would have such a specific vignette to tell about the moment he realized how important it is to be wonderstruck by the world.

[Music: “The Movies” continues]

Brian Selznick: After college, I travelled around Europe and it was one of those trips where I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got back. I was sort of aimless and there was sort of a subtext of having a mission to try to figure out what God meant to me at the time. I mean, it wasn’t really a spiritual quest, but in the back of my mind I was like: I need an answer. I want to know what makes sense to me. And I found a postcard in a gift shop in Sweden that answered all my questions. It was a quote from Albert Einstein, which I have since discovered is a slight misquote. But it’s so good. The misquote is actually better than the quote, I think. It’s a little long. It starts off: “The most beautiful and the most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. My profound belief in the presence of a superior reasoning power that reveals itself in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God.”

[Music: Motion Trio “Stars”]

Brian Selznick: So I bought the postcard and memorized it, sent it off to a friend. And I never, never thought about God again after that.

[Music: “Stars” continues]

Brian Selznick: It’s this need for curiosity and for the experience of wonder that keeps us alive, that keeps us going, that keeps us engaged in the world. A sense of wonder is not something reserved for childhood.

Joe Fassler: What were some of the things that left you sort of wonderstruck as a child?

Brian Selznick: There’s a book called “The Borrowers” by Mary Norton.

Joe Fassler: Is that the little people?

Brian Selznick: Yup. The little people who live under the floorboards of a kid’s house. I basically thought it was a true story and so I would make little furniture for the little people who lived under the floorboards of my house. And that idea that, you know, there could be these unseen beings, these, you know, somewhat magical little figures living in my house among my things, was a deeply important idea to me when I was a kid.

[Music: “Stephane Visite Appart” by Jean-Michel Bernard from “The Science of Sleep” soundtrack]

Brian Selznick: Actually, in high school people used to start telling me I should illustrate children’s books. And I think it just was my ignorance that made me not interested. I didn’t know about children’s book as an art form. I didn’t think about what the genre could do, and so I just ignored it. But after college I kind of came to my senses and got a job at a children’s bookstore. And that’s when I really started learning about the history of children’s books and realized that in fact this is a serious art form that has a great audience. Kids are the best audience you could ask for.

[Music: “The Movies” from the “Hugo” soundtrack]

Brian Selznick: I also had the pleasure of meeting Maurice Sendak, who had always been a big hero of mine. And so he and I became friends and he had asked me to send him a box of my books, because he didn’t really know my work. And so he looked at it and he basically said, “You’re very talented. I see that you can draw, but you haven’t reached your potential yet. There’s more in you.” And basically that’s what we all need: is someone who can look at us and say, “There’s more there than you even think.”

Joe Fassler: So that gave you license to be brave?

Selznick: At first I had no idea what it meant. You know, I had made a lot of books and they had done pretty well. But somehow it resonated. It made sense. And yeah, when you have someone like Maurice Sendak say to you that you have more potential than what you’re reaching, you don’t ignore that.

[Music: “The Movies” continues]

Joe Fassler: Okay, thanks so much Brian. Have a great day.

Brian Selznick: Okay, bye.

Joe Fassler: Bye.

David Gerlach: Many thanks to Joe Fassler for bringing us this interview. Read his profile of Brian Selznick at TheAtlantic.com and find more of Joe’s fact and fiction work at JoeFassler.tumblr.com. Support for Blank on Blank comes from Tiny Letter—email for people with something to say. It’s a simple way to send an email newsletter from the people behind MailChimp. TinyLetter.com. Amy Drozdowska produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists listening: we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[Music: Zaz “Coeur Volant” from the “Hugo” soundtrack]

Later that week, with a suitcase-sized tape recorder in a back seat, Aisner and his best friend Pat were driving from the northern suburbs of Chicago to the South Side of Chicago, where Ali’s fan club was headquartered. It was two years after Ali had trashed talked his way into a victory over Sonny Liston; a year before he would refuse to go Vietnam. At the time, many black Muslims, led by Malcolm X, were advocating for “total separation” of the races. And so, for a scrawny white boy from the suburbs, heading to the heart of Chicago’s gritty South Side was no small thing.
“We parked as close as we could to the building,” Aisner, now 63, laughs. “White Jewish boys from the suburbs did not go to the south side of Chicago.”

The Muhammad Ali fan club was housed in a small brick building on X street, a gold foil sign announcing itself out front. Next door was “Muhammad Speaks,” the black Muslim newspaper. From inside the club, Aisner and his friend watched out the front window as Ali screetched up in a red Cadillac convertible, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and jumped over the car door.
For the next 20 minutes, Ali talked boxing, footwork, why he wanted to fight — and launched into an epic, unprompted riff about traveling to Mars and fighting for the intergalactic boxing title. All went smoothly — until Aisner realized he’d forgot to turn on the tape recorder.

“I was mortified,” he says. “I said, ‘Champ, do you think you could do that again?’”

The champ obliged.

The interview aired a few weeks later, and Aisner went on to produce a radio show and a documentary in the decades since. But he’s never quite forgotten that first interview with his childhood icon. For 25 years, he kept the original reel-to-reel recording until he digitized it. But it sat. No one else ever heard it.

Then Aisner heard about Blank on Blank. And brought his interview of a lifetime back to life.

David Gerlach: Do you remember Andre Agassi’s mullet? It was amazing. Long. Flowing. Easily one of my favorite mullets of all time. But you know, I had never actually heard Agassi talk about The Mullet, actually say the word “mullet.” That’s until James Sullivan sent us the interview he did with Agassi by phone back in 2011. It was for a short Q&A that ran in the Boston Globe. Here’s Agassi.

Andre Agassi: What better way to mask who you really are than wearing a mullet, right?

David Gerlach: One of my favorite quotes to stumble across. And that is how we begin this episode of Blank on Blank.

[Sound clip of Agassi’s Canon ad: “What is the image of a rebel?]

David Gerlach: Agassi went through a very public transformation during his tennis career: from young bad boy to a much more mellow pro. And in this raw recording, we get a glimpse into just how it happened, how he says he became his true self. Agassi was on the fast track to a tennis career from an early age, and now parents ask him about getting their kids into sports. Here’s Agassi’s response.

Andre Agassi: What my advice would be: Make sure you define success in a healthy manner because every decision after that will be a result of that first decision. And if you define it wrong, if you define it with how much money you’re going to make, how good you’re going to be, you will make a lot of bad decisions. What I would love to see people do is to expose their children to all sorts of experiences. That’s ultimately, I think, what creates the peace a mind in a child’s heart: when they’re able to explore their passions. And a parent that predetermines what that passion is going to be is probably off to the wrong start.

[Music: Air – “J’ai Dormi Sous”]

Andre Agassi: I have always had a desire to impact people. It’s been misdirected for a healthy chunk of my life. Early on I impacted people at the academy in a negative way growing up. But nevertheless, it was important to me to somehow impose my experiences on others. As I learned how to channel that in a more positive direction, I found a great deal of reward.

[Music: “J’ai Dormi Sous” continues]

Andre Agassi: Stop worrying about where you are and start making sure that your experience is more of what you want it to be. That is how I approached my tennis and that’s one of the reasons why I played so long. Because I did focus on tomorrow being better than today. I regret a lot of things. At the same time I wouldn’t change one thing. So it’s an interesting way to look at it. I’m regretful for everybody that I made to feel less than they deserve at any stage along the way including the sport of tennis. But overall it was a journey that I obviously had to go through, and it’s a journey that I continue to go through. Every day you grow to understand yourself better, you push yourself to be better.

[Music: Myslovitz – “Theme from the Road Movie”]

Andre Agassi: You know, I’ve lived pretty transparently. For better or for worse, it’s been transparent. There were times I was confused. And I think the world was clear when they saw it. There were times I was angry. There were times I was scared. There were times I was confident. No matter how I felt, I couldn’t hide it. You know, I’ve said in the past, my eyes have betrayed me most of my life. I think that honesty is what connects you to people. That’s the connection; it’s living that transparency. I spent a lot of time—thousands and thousands of hours—trying to make sense of my contradictions, solve the calculus of my psyche. And I netted out realizing that quite often what I thought was truth wasn’t. Like when you tell someone “I do” and you find yourself divorced two years later, ten years later, did you lie when you said “I’ll love you until death do us part; I’ll be with you until death do us part”? Or did you actually believe it? Or is it possible you want to believe something so much you’ll try the rest of your life to make it true? I found myself doing that quite often through my career, but it was always a visceral reaction.

[Music: “Theme from the Road Movie” continues]

David Gerlach: So I was taking a listen to some vintage clips of Agassi on YouTube from his days training in Florida. And I came across this. Take a listen.

Andre Agassi: As far as life goes, even more importantly, every day challenge ourselves to be better than the person we were yesterday.

David Gerlach: I guess the true Agassi was there all along…right behind the mullet. Thanks to James Sullivan for bringing us this interview. He has a new book out. It’s called “Island Cup: Two Teams, Twelve Miles of Ocean, and Fifty Years of Football Rivalry.” It’s about high school football between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It’s a great book. Check it out. Many thanks as well to Amy Drozdowska for producing this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, non-fiction authors and interviewers of all stripes out there, we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach:  This is Blank on Blank, and thank you for joining us as we build this archive of lost American interviews.  I’m David Gerlach.  Today we’re talking about what it means to win. Does it mean working hard and just doing your best? Or is it something else? Is it seeing someone else lose? That’s the question raised by Alex Bogusky. He’s an advertising guru and an unlikely prophet.

Danielle Sacks: Alex Bogusky is pretty much considered sort of the Steve Jobs of advertising.

David Gerlach: That’s Danielle Sacks. She’s a senior writer at Fast Company magazine.

Danielle Sacks: He quickly became known as sort of the bad boy of advertising. Creating ridiculous stunts most famously for brands like Burger King.

[Clip: Burger King commercial]

Danielle Sacks: He did everything from creating Chicken Fries to a cologne that smelled like meat.

David Gerlach: So Danielle interviewed Bogusky for an article she wrote a few years ago. He was 46 and had just left his perch atop the ad world at his firm Crispin, Porter and Bogusky. Danielle went out to his new headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. What he had dubbed “The Fearless Cottage” to find out why he gave it all up to find himself.

Danielle Sacks: I’m at the cottage, and who walks in but of course Alex’s monk. I said “Alex, how’d you get a monk?” And he said, “Actually I hired the monk for Crispin, and now he’s sort of my own monk as well.

David Gerlach: So the stage is set: Danielle sits in during Alex Bogusky’s journey of self-reflection. Greg the Monk by his side, and the topic turns to what his father taught him about winning. This is Blank on Blank.

Alex Bogusky: I was crazy competitive for most of my life. I think I’ve been in this process of becoming less competitive. If I get some, you don’t. And, my dad’s thing to me, with sports is, it’s not enough to win. Somebody else has got to lose. That’s where you get the “Mmf” out of life. That’s part of the joy of winning, the infliction of loss.

[Music:  Hior Chronik - “The Sea”]

Alex Bogusky: But I’ve been shedding the notion of competition. Because it doesn’t make you happy. You can’t win enough to win.

[Music continues]

Alex Bogusky: My friends don’t believe it. They’re like “Oh my God, dude. You’re the most competitive person I know.” They’ll joke with me. But if I need that constant thing, that’s not sustainable. So I’ve been messing around with this less competitive version of myself, somewhat fearful at the beginning of whether there can be excellence without competition.

[Music continues]

Alex Bogusky: So I do a lot of sports and mostly at the time when I started this process I was riding motorcross. You’re racing against your friends and it’s very competitive. I pull away from them by 20 bike lengths, I feel pretty damn good. Ten bike lengths the next time, I feel less good. I mean it’s a crazy ride to be on. Right? I just saw that. That is just a miserable way to think you’re recreating. So I took the idea of other people out of it and I just focused on how excellent I could execute a turn. It was only those things I focused on. When I’d look up, I’d be 20 lengths ahead, and then I’d go, “Oh, that’s awesome!” And I’d have to restart the whole thing. Excellence can be found without competition. I believe. It’s found just thorough that notion of like: “I’m going try to express something really authentic through what I’m doing.”

David Gerlach: That’s adman extraordinaire Alex Bogusky explaining his apparent turn away from being the ultra-competitor. But I did have to ask Danielle if his father’s advice really was no longer driving his life. Had the transformation stuck?

Danielle Sacks: Alex is telling me all these things that are incredibly personal and raw and seemingly candid. But at the end of the day you also have to remember you are a journalist. Is this just his greatest re-branding campaign, yet? He just partnered up with Al Gore and he has this new kind of start-up like incubator for do-gooder start-ups. So he is walking the talk.  But it’s also very interesting and coincidental that this whole transformation all happened to happen right after he got his final multi-million dollar earn out from his ad agency.

[Music continues]

David Gerlach: Thanks to Danielle Sacks for contributing to the archive. Be sure to read her great article on Bogusky at FastCompany.com. This interview was produced by me and Dave McGuire. Thanks to Jeffrey Alan Jones for our sound logo. And to hear more lost interviews, interviews you can’t hear anywhere else, head to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach, keep listening.

Mark Barry: My name is Mark Barry. I’m 33. I’m originally from Limerick in Ireland.

Suhrith Parthasarathy: My name is Suhrith Parthasarathy.

David Gerlach: Suhrith is a journalist. He lives in New York, and he writes for The Classical; it’s a sports website.

Parthasarathy: I wanted to write something about distant fandom and the whole concept of supporting a soccer team from a distance, supporting Manchester United or any European soccer clubs from New York.

Mark Barry: When I was very young—maybe three, four—we used to go over to England in the summer to cousins in Manchester. The first game that I can remember—I think I was five or six at that stage. Once I had seen that team, the fans and experienced the atmosphere. As a young kid, it’s like Disneyland, the singing and the chanting, and the sheer theater of it. I was hooked then. That was it

[Sound clip: Manchester United fans chanting and singing]

Parthasarathy: Mark’s really involved with the Man United fan club in New York. I thought he’d be someone interesting to talk to. He’s really involved in bringing everyone together. So when I met Mark and started interviewing him, I had no idea he had a very different past than some of the fans in New York. Mark had something different going about him, and he had a whole different life experience, and that supporting Man United meant as much as life itself to him.

[Sound clip: “Glory, Glory Man United”]

Mark Barry: My real kind of obsession took over when I was a teenager. When we won the premier league in 1993 I had just turned 14. So that was basically my entire teenage years. Nothing but United United winning winning winning all the way up

[Sound clip: Announcement of United winning]

Mark Barry: Right after school, I took some time off where I was working. And I was going to all the games. I would basically blow my entire week’s wages on the weekend going wherever United was playing.

[Music: Nightmares on Wax – “Passion”]

Mark Barry: Unlike here in America, you have a section specifically set aside for away fans which is segregated by a line of police and stewards on one side and a line of police and stewards on the other side. And typically you get between two and three thousand tickets reserved for away fans. Now also typically, it’s the same people travelling to every single away game. Because you’re with same people all the time, because you’re seeing the same people, you’re having experiences with the same people, a lot of the time you are being attacked by home fans, it becomes a very, very tight knit thing. Now that’s even concentrated more again when it goes down to the quote-unquote The Firm, which is the guys, the lads who are there for the football, but they’re also there for other stuff like you know fighting, trouble. You know, to have a fight with the opposing team’s fans.

Parthasarathy: How did you get involved with that?

Mark Barry: It’s very easy when you’re going away from home every week. It’s inevitable that you’re going to be mixing with these lads. I was the same age as they were. We were into same music, into all the same clothes, you know, the same drugs. It’s what they call casual culture. People are doing coke on train and coke on the buses, smoking weed and whatever. So by the time half one, two o’clock rolls around and you’re in a pub, everyone is steaming. And the atmosphere: You’re in a big group of young lads and everyone’s singing and it’s boisterous. All it takes its one person to go, “Alright, let’s go see where these lads are and see if we can’t get something to happen.”

Mark Barry: Well, it was ’04, so I wasn’t a kid. I was 25, 24 or 25. We were playing Leeds. Elland Road was the place to go as a United fan for violence in the most numbers. Everyone is pretty wrecked by the time we even get to Leeds. We get into the game, nothing much. A couple of scuffles outside before, but nothing much happened. We walked around the back of the stadium because a lot of the time the Leeds fans wouldn’t be in the stadium. They’d be hanging around outside, so we went looking for them. We came around the back and the Leeds fans just came down the hill at us. One of them came flying at me. I sidestepped him. Hit him. He went down. And this guy was lot bigger than me. I’m 5’7” on a good day. This guy was huge, maybe 6’2”, 6’3”. And he dropped right by my feet. What do you do in this situation? You make sure the person doesn’t get up. You don’t go: “Are you okay? Can I help you up?” It’s fucking chaos around you, maybe 200 people fighting. So I just started booting him in the head.

[Music: Field Rotation – “Lichtermeer’]

Mark Barry: Now at this stage there were some police with us who saw us coming out and followed us but nowhere near enough to stop what was happening. So in that case typically what they’ll do is they’ll just sit back and they’ll film it. And then they’ll go arrest the protagonists in weeks or months following. Which is what happened to me.

[Music: “Lichtermeer” continues]

David Gerlach: Now, Barry says he was sentenced to a year in prison for causing bodily harm and something like incitement to riot. He ended up serving six months

Mark Barry: Before even the trial it was kind of just hit me: What the fuck are you doing? Because my family is a quote-unquote good family in the sense that I was never in any real trouble growing up. But I got caught up in the violence part of it. After I was caught, and after it happened and the penny dropped, I just kind of thought to myself: This isn’t you. You need to get the hell out of it. I got in a boat and went home to Ireland. Actually, I lied, before I went home—I got out in early May—I actually went to the F.A. cup final [laughs] against the Arsenal in Cardiff.

David Gerlach: Mark still had his passion for Manchester United, but he was ready to start a new life. So he headed to the States where his parents were living and eventually he ended up in New York City. He started working. And then he met a girl in pub, of course, watching his team.

Lissa Gilmore: My name is Lissa. L-I-S-S-A. Not Alyssa [laughs] Gilmore.

David Gerlach: Mark has been with Lissa for five years now. They watch all the games together. She’s a diehard, too. A soccer convert.

Lissa Gilmore: At first it would take up to, I’d say, maybe two days for him to kind of snap out of a loss. Anything I tried to do, whether it was taking him out or cooking for him or doing anything at home for him, nothing would snap him out of it. No matter how much the difference was in scores. It was crazy

Mark Barry: She has chilled me out a lot, I think. I react to defeats much better. I put things in perspective much better. You know, since being here it’s not just Lissa. It’s all the lads. It’s a great group of guys and there’s no animosity. We just have a laugh. It’s all about having fun. It’s about getting together and supporting our team and singing our songs and putting the best image, I guess, of United and United fans out there. It’s all about the camaraderie without the violence bit.

[Music: “Glory, Glory Manchester United”]

David Gerlach: I’d like to thank Suhrith Parthasarathy for bringing us Mark Barry’s story. Read his article on Mark and Man U fans in New York at theclassical.org. Different take on writing about sports. Check it out. Big thanks as well to Amy Drozdowska for producing this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, non-fiction authors and interviewers of all stripes out there: we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line at interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: You’re listening to Blank on Blank. Where lost interviews come to life. Distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org. I’m David Gerlach.

Tony Bennett: My family name is Benedetto. And Bob Hope, he said, “Let’s Americanize your name” and gave me the name Tony Bennett.

David Gerlach: That’s Tony Bennett, born Tony Benedetto, during an interview recorded in his Hollywood office back in 1991. He was speaking with award-winning Hollywood journalist Jeanne Wolf about the release of a 40-year retrospective of his singing career. They talked about a number of things, including his dreams of singing when he was a kid in Brooklyn and his favorite song from his long career.

[Music: Tony Bennett - “I Left My Heart In San Francisco”]

David Gerlach: And they also talked about what you’re about to hear: stars being shy offstage and not so shy in the bedroom. This is Blank on Blank.

Jeanne Wolf: I don’t know any single performer—not some little guy and not the biggest stars I’ve ever met—who don’t have both these streams: this confidence “I can go out, stop 40,000 people and they will listen to me sing,” and “Was I any good tonight?”

Tony Bennett: Because most performers are very shy. I noticed the good performers I’ve met, like Sinatra. You know, it’s funny everybody sees him as “Come on, baby.” He’s actually a very shy man. The shyest man I ever met in my life was the late Fred Astaire. He used to blush over just conversations. You’d say something and he’d blush. Johnny Carson is shy. He’s never good at a party. He’s great on the camera; he’s gregarious. He’s in front of people. As soon as he gets to a party, he just freezes.

[Music: - Tony Bennett: For Once In My Life]

Tony Bennett: I think what happens with performers…It’s almost like an amateur psychologist. A performer has to be thinking of “What do I do when this happens?” and “Should I say this or should I do that?” So you’re thinking all the time, and it creates a kind of an aloneness away from a group. This kind of “Why is this guy in the corner like that? On the stage he is all over the place and in the corner he’s quiet.” But he is really kind of thinking of his next line or his next song or his next performance.

[Music: “For Once In My Life” continues]

Tony Bennett: I like the fact that I paint. I could stay very quiet away from a lot of people. When I’m on stage they’re are a lot of people. When I’m not on stage it’s quiet.

Jeanne Wolf: Well that’s not maybe not liking people but saving up that energy.

Tony Bennett: Absolutely. That’s exactly it. I happen to love people. I really do. I consider my job, an entertainer’s job, a very noble thing. Making people feel good. You take them to a place where they have problems but, all of a sudden, for one hour or so they forget their problems. To see people walk out and say, “I really liked that show; I just enjoyed myself.” I just love being in this occupation.

[Music: Tony Bennett & Frank Sinatra - “Lady is a Tramp”]

Jeanne Wolf: What kinds of stories do people come and tell you about making love to your music or the romance in their life?

Tony Bennett: Whenever they tell me they make love to my music, I tell them to do one for me. (Laughs)

[Music: “Lady is a Tramp” continues]

Jeanne Wolf: That leads to the only natural question after that which is: do you make love to your music?

Tony Bennett: I’m not going to tell. I have a very private life

Jeanne Wolf: That much you can tell. This is important. This is very significant. Whose music do you put on the record player?

Tony Bennett: I’ve been very lucky with Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.

[Music: “Lady is a Tramp” continues]

Tony Bennett: There’s a comedian I know—this is a true story. This comedian, I worked in vaudeville with him years ago. We were all young kids and he said, “I met this girl and she said that I could make it with her if I imitated Nat King Cole.” And he was on top of this girl singing “Mona Lisa”. That’s how he did it. (Laughs)

Jeanne Wolf: (Laughing) Do you think we should vow all these people to secrecy? Do you know what we’re going to do for America?

Tony Bennett: I’m not telling you his name. It’s a true story though. (Laughing continues)

[Music: Tony Bennett - “The Very Thought of You”]

David Gerlach: Now I wanted to play one more clip of this interview before we go. Because if you listen to tony Bennett to set the mood—if you know what I mean—you may want to incorporate one of his pre-performance rituals into your repertoire.

Tony Bennett:  I eat a big plate of pasta before I go on stage. Some people don’t eat before they go on stage. I don’t think that way. As long as you get enough rest and you drink some nice water, a little glass of wine with the meal. As long as you feel all right, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything after that.

[Music: Tony Bennett – “Steppin’ Out”]

David Gerlach: Okay, I just wanted to put that out there. Thanks to Jeanne Wolf for allowing us to dust off this great interview. Jeanne’s covered every aspect of show business for television, radio, and print over the years. Follow all of her work at jeannewolfshollywood.com. Amy Drozdowska produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, non-fiction authors and interviewers of all stripes out there, we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[Music: “Steppin’ Out” continues]

David Gerlach: Sometimes when you’re a print journalist and you’re writing a profile, a feature, you get some really good access to someone. Instead of 20 minutes on the phone, a rushed conversation, you can spend a few hours… even a whole night out with the person you’re interviewing. The conversations become quite casual… and often quite candid.

Christina Ricci: So I’ve never been better than anyone at pool before.

Thomas Beller: Hey. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

Christina Ricci: I’m not. I’ll probably fu&% up.

David Gerlach: That’s writer and author Thomas Beller. He’s playing pool with actress Christina Ricci. The back and forth was recorded on cassette tape. Ricci was barely 18 when they kicked around New York City back in the late 1990s. She was just entering the public eye. She was already game for a good quote. And sometimes a very blunt quote.

Christina Ricci: It is just the most ridiculous thing I could imagine. These people who believe in God actually think that God cares if we say fu%$ ? You know what I mean? It’s sort of silly.

David Gerlach: Christina Ricci has managed to stay in the public eye since this interview. That’s no easy feat. In total over the past two decades she’s been in nearly 50 films. She’s appeared on Broadway. Anyway, it’s really something to listen to Thomas Beller’s interview. You get to be this fly on the wall. It’s a long night out with a seemingly fearless yet vulnerable young actress. And we’ve decided to just bring you bits and pieces of what she had to say. A glimpse at a personality. We begin with Christina Ricci frankly talking about her past struggles with anorexia. The scene: a crowded restaurant. This is Blank on Blank.

Christina Ricci: You should probably know I was really anorexic at the time. I looked like a walking skeleton in a way. I was scary to all the other girls. I was just sort of mad…

Thomas Beller: I didn’t know you had gone through that period of time. What was that all about? You certainly don’t look anorexic now

Christina Ricci: (Laughs ) I don’t know. It was a phase.

Thomas Beller: Well everything is a phase.

Christina Ricci: Everything is a phase. I always felt that I would be complete, no one could ever fu&% with me or make me feel bad if I was really thin, because then they would have nothing to make fun of me about.

Thomas Beller: How thin… How low did your weight get?

Christina Ricci: I was like 75 pounds and the same height I am now. I was really skinny. It was kind of scary. And I have kind of a big head, so I looked kind of like E.T. I was just like these two big eyes and then like nothing here. Hollow cheeks. Like my neck… I never knew you could lose weight in your neck. My neck was like the width of my arm right there. It was really weird.

[MUSIC: Freddie Jackson - “Easin’ On Down”]

David Gerlach: The conversation later jumps to a controversy Ricci had stirred up around this time. In came during another interview she gave. She had joked about incest being cool. Years later she would become a spokesperson for a national anti-sexual assault organization. But at this time, back then, she was still realizing the power of sarcasm when you’re in the public eye..

Thomas Beller: So did you ever see this interview you gave in The Face. Did you see that?

Christina Ricci: That’s the one I got in trouble for.

Thomas Beller: Yeah, why? What did you say that got you in trouble?

Christina Ricci: Because the incest thing.

Thomas Beller: Yeah, you said you were really into incest.

Christina Ricci: Yeah, I got in trouble for that. Even though I was being sarcastic.

Thomas Beller: In trouble for… what do you mean?

Christina Ricci: I got yelled at.

Thomas Beller: By?

Christina Ricci: My agents.

Thomas Beller: What did they say?

Christina Ricci: That was the whole thing. They said to me: ‘Imagine some little girl who is getting raped by her father or her brother and sees this and thinks I shouldn’t really be upset by this?’ Which I think is wrong. I don’t really believe in incest, it’s just more fun and easier to say this.

Thomas Beller: I feel bad I got you after already after the weird spin control ideas coming like down on you. You’re not going to be… personal

Christina Ricci: No, believe me. I’m still like… I’m not like at that point where I’m not going to talk about anything risqué. It’s just like certain things I shouldn’t talk about anymore. I can move onto other things that are equally… that can get me into equal amounts of trouble.

Thomas Beller: Like what?

Christina Ricci: I don’t know, I already talked about my pus&% a couple times in front of you.

Thomas Beller: Just once. Or 12

Christina Ricci: (Laughs)

[MUSIC:  Beatconductor - “Guarambembere”]

David Gerlach: So the last outtake we have from this interview occurs when Beller and Ricci, are on the street. They have left the restaurant when he asks the actress about her car. It’s parked outside.

Christina Ricci: It’s a ‘67 Ford Falcon Futura station wagon. It’s turquoise and sparkly.

Thomas Beller: So let me get this straight though: You bought this huge car that you couldn’t drive that was totally awesome and had like a 12-word title to it.

Christina Ricci: Yeah. It’s awesome. I bought it before I had my license. I got my license. And I drove around. But it was really old and we got all this work done on it. But, um… the brakes. My legs, first of all, my legs are too short. And secondly I’m not strong enough. Because you have to hold it, like hold the brake down when you stop.

Thomas Beller: It’s not automatic.

Christina Ricci: And you have to press on them a half-mile before you have to stop.

Thomas Beller: It’s a huge behemoth car.

Christina Ricci: Oh, yeah. It’s really heavy.

Thomas Beller: So the first time you were driving it, you are trying to brake and freaking out and clutching the steering wheel.

Christina Ricci: I was really nervous. But it’s fun.

David Gerlach: That’s actress Christina Ricci back in 1999 talking about anorexia, a controversy about incest, and her 1967 Ford Falcon Futura. Thanks to Thomas Beller for bringing us this interview. The interview was actually the foundation for a cover story he wrote for SPIN magazine. Beller has also authored several books. Please check out all of his work at ThomasBeller.com. And for all the journalists, interviewers, authors and documentary filmmakers listening: we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews at blankonblank dot org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

Tift Merritt: There was a moment in time where you were hesitant to become an artist. What were your reservations?

Kiki Smith: Well, I grew up with artists (Laughs).

David Gerlach: That reluctant artist is actually quite a famous sculptor. Her name is Kiki Smith. Her can see her work at museums across the country. And she’s speaking with another artist, a Grammy-nominated musician named Tift Merritt.

[Music: Tift Merritt – “Mixtape”]

David Gerlach: Now I’ve known Tift since the University of North Carolina back in the mid-1990s. Back then she was playing in small bars near campus, had a band called The Carbines. And one thing I always remember is that she loved to hear and tell stories. So I wasn’t really surprised to learn she had a monthly interview program. It’s called The Spark; it airs on Marfa Texas Public Radio. She records her conversations with interesting people who create art, who create something. So she sat down in Kiki Smith’s kitchen, and we’re bringing you part of that conversation. Our theme today is making your own art—whatever that may be. Even if it’s tattoos. This is Blank on Blank.

[“Mixtape” continues]

Tift Merritt: Oh my gosh. Kiki has the cosmos tattooed all over her body.

Kiki Smith: (Laughs)

Tift Merritt: Can you tell me why or what it means?

Kiki Smith: There’s a younger artist that I know named Jenny Bornstein and she has really beautiful beauty marks all over her, and she’s also one of those people who writes notes on her hand.  I have a couple of friends of mine who do that.  But somehow the combination of the beauty marks and the ink on her body, I thought I could tattoo her beauty marks onto me.  And then I was at another artist’s house and they had a little bit of paint on their fingers.  And I thought, I could take a mark from somebody else’s body and put it on my body and then I would remember. That way you would have this weird little reminder to them.  Then I started getting constellations.  Just ones that I liked, or I asked the astrologer what would be good for me to get. And then I started getting them as a pattern, stars as a pattern.  But then I got allergic to the ink and I had to give in to reality for five seconds of my life.

[Music: Tift Merritt]

Tift Merritt: I was thinking about how you really love the process of what you’re doing and want to be in the middle of it. That’s the hardest place in the world to be, in the process where you don’t know where you’re going and don’t know what you’re doing. And it seems like you don’t doubt yourself very much in that place.

Kiki Smith: I do in every other aspect of my life; I’m insufferable. But in that one area…maybe it comes from growing up in a family of other artists. But the point isn’t to know what you’re doing. The point is to have an experience doing something. If I look back on my work, my work has taken care of me. It’s very fulfilling, working and making something out of your own being. Being able to apply your energy. I’m not saying one always likes what one’s doing or anything like that. You’re just who you are and there’s not a lot you can do about that.

[Music: Tift Merritt]

Tift Merritt: How are you insufferable in the other aspects?

Kiki Smith: I’m not the easiest person to be around. I’m not the most endlessly interesting, pleasant person to be with.

Tift Merritt: You seem lovely to me.

Kiki Smith: That’s because you’re a stranger. (Laughs)

Tift Merritt: I was so surprised when I read that you thought about being a nun.

Kiki Smith: You know, I still think about it. I think to have that orderly life of devotion, which is sort of like being an artist, where it’s for the greater community. You don’t always have to be putting yourself first. When you’re on your own, you’re putting yourself first often and sometimes that’s burdensome. I’m someone who’s lived alone my entire life and have no aspirations of living with other people, but in my fantasy life I would live in a more communal aspect. But now I think you need a college degree to become a nun. I don’t think they just take any old body anymore. So I think I would have a hard time becoming a nun now.  I was just in France, and these abbeys were these people are growing lavender and having honeybees and they’re singing and praying and stuff and I thought that doesn’t seem like such a bad life.

Tift Merritt: No, that sounds pretty great.  Can you give me the address? (Laughs) If I were your student, what advice would you give me?

Kiki Smith: For students, I just tell them to work, because you don’t get from one place to another by thinking about it. You have to do the physical work, because the physical work is where things are revealed to you. When I was younger it was much harder to distinguish between thinking about something and the thing. To me, it’s the journey between those two things where you actually accumulate that information. And then also looking at other people’s work. Looking at what people have done in the past, because you can see that people, in some weird way, are working in continuums. And it’s nice to know your history and it’s nice to know that you’re a part of that.

[Music: Tift Merritt]

David Gerlach: Many, many thanks to Tift Merritt for allowing us to bring this conversation to you. Check out her show at marfaspark.com. Tift is also working on her fifth album; it comes out October. It’s called “Travelling Alone.” Amy Drozdowska produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, non-fiction authors and documentary filmmakers listening: bring us your unheard interviews. We want to hear them. Drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.  That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

Ben Sidran: On one song, he wanted to keep a take where I was playing piano and I didn’t really know the song.

David Gerlach: That’s pianist Ben Sidran. He’s played with everyone from Van Morrison, Diana Ross, the Rolling Stones, Steve Miller Band. But things didn’t seem to click at this one recording session back in the early 1970s. He was playing with jazz lyricist and king of scat, Jon Hendricks.

Ben Sidran: I appealed to him by saying, “Let’s do another version.” And he said, “No, I’ll never sing it better. We should use that take.” But I said, “Jon, I’m making a lot of mistakes.” He said “Ben, you don’t understand: Sometimes the mistakes are the only parts that’s jazz.”

David Gerlach: In this edition of Blank on Blank, learning how to communicate and the swing of language.

[Music: Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan – “Cousin Mary”]

David Gerlach: Over a five-year stretch in the mid-1980s, Ben Sidran hosted a really remarkable show on NPR. He sat down with legends Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie. I reached out to Ben to see if we could bring some of these remarkable conversations to you, our listeners. Our first remix is a conversation Ben had with his old friend—that guy from the recording session—Jon Hendricks. And Hendricks is any interesting story. He was headed to a career in law until he was at a club in his hometown when he met Charlie Parker. Yet, despite the stamp of approval from Bird, Hendricks says he literally had to learn how to speak jazz.

[Music: Jon Hendricks and the Horace Silver Quintet – “The Preacher”]

Jon Hendricks: You know I came from a very straight-laced, staid family. My father was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church. And he was the cultural and the moral foundation of our entire neighborhood in my hometown. So we had to exemplify all the things for which he stood. We had to…When we got up in the morning, we had to pray. Before went to sleep at night, we prayed. We learned very early that we are children of a living God and that we bow our head to God, but to no man. So we were militant in our self-respect. So I had a straight life. Never engaged in gambling. There was no alcohol in the house. No smoking. We never used any profane language.

[Music: Jon Hendricks – “Gimme That Wine”]

Jon Hendricks: That’s the way I grew up. Then when I started singing jazz, and I had to consort (laughs) with these musicians, I had to maintain two vocabularies. I couldn’t come to the gig and say: “My wife and I went to a cinema today.” Which would be the way I would normally speak if I were in university. I would say: “Me and my bed buddy took in a flick.” (Laughs) It gave me a much more broad spectrum on life and outlook on life. To this day, I think the language of the American jazz musician is the most functional and, in its way of expressing itself, the most beautiful of all languages. It’s the greatest way to speak, ever.

[Music: Jon Hendricks & Friends – “Shiny Stockings”]

Jon Hendricks: I always try to swing, whatever I do. That’s what I got most from singing with good jazz musicians. You don’t have to swing just on the bandstand. Everything you do can swing. The way you relate to your fellow man—that can swing. The way you pick up your little child and bounce him. There’s a swing to that. Everything can swing. I think everything in nature does swing.

[Music: “Shiny Stockings” continues]

Jon Hendricks: When you are improvising, it’s no mind on the earth at work. Because when you approach that with your mind of the earth, your earthly mind, you don’t even know what that is. And I can see when you speak to jazz musicians about solos that they’ve done, they’re apt to say, “What solo? When?” Because it’s not they who did it; it’s whatever muse speaks through them that has done all solos.

[Music: Lambert, Hendricks & Ross – “Untitled”]

Jon Hendricks: And they are perhaps the last person you should ask about that. That’s when I found that—when I approached myself. I myself was the last authority on what I had done. Because I had no idea. I had to relearn what I had done. I felt stupid.

[Music: Dizzy Gillespie & Jon Hendricks – “Untitled”]

Jon Hendricks: Your own is further away from you than anything. Have you ever had a dream and you’re slowly waking up. And as you awaken, you want to remember this dream. And as you realize you want to remember it, it’s fading. And then when you’re fully awake, it’s totally gone. Has that ever happened to you?

Ben Sidran: Oh, yes.

Jon Hendricks: That’s what it is. Whatever that is, that’s what it is.

[Jon Hendricks begins to sing]

David Gerlach: Many, many thanks to Ben Sidran for allowing us to bring you this interview. Read the transcript, hear the entire conversation, plus more talks with jazz legends at bensidran.com. Amy Drozdowska produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, non-fiction authors and documentary filmmakers out there: we want to hear your unheard interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is presented by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[Jon Hendricks continues singing until end]

David Gerlach: We’ve added another lost interview to the archive. It’s a conversation with Martin Scorsese and it’s about all the soundtracks that play both in his films and in his life.

Martin Scorsese: It’s a little bit at the end of the day now, I’m a little tired, but I’ll try to do the best I can.

David Gerlach: Now Scorsese has made dozens of movies. “Taxi Driver.” “Goodfellas.” “Cape Fear.” So many classics where the music is just as important as what you see. Now James Sullivan interviewed Scorsese in the late 90s while writing for the San Francisco Chronicle.

James Sullivan: One of the interesting things about doing that interview with him was that it was for one of his less-well-remembered films. I mean “Bringing Out The Dead” does not come up in the Top Ten of Scorsese films. But it was drenched, big time, with scenes that were cut clearly to the rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.

David Gerlach: Now the thing that I love about an interview are all the twists and unexpected musings, the things that come up. This part of the tape is great. Martin Scorsese flashes back to his childhood in New York City and what he heard on the streets.

Martin Scorsese: I grew up downtown. I was in the Italian-American area, but it was right off the Bowery. I never forget growing up with the alcoholics and homeless and everybody in the gutter. And hanging out with them, talking to them. It worked sometime when they were sober. And when they were drunk they were like maniacs. Scary. It was really something

David Gerlach: So the tape continues to roll and Scorsese moves onto source music he used in his films when he was just starting out. The teenage filmmaker. I looked this up and source music, it’s different than background music. The score. Something laid into a movie. Source music comes directly from something you see in a scene. Maybe it’s a band or a radio. Scorsese takes it from here.

Martin Scorsese: So I was always interested in using source music for movies. Even the little short films I made when I was a kid or something. 1961 I think it was. I didn’t have any synced track back then. In order to show the movie I had to, I borrowed a friend’s 8 mm camera and shot this little movie, very bad, juvenile. And I would present it to our friends. We would screen the picture, and I would do the dialogue with a friend literally by the side of the screen and I played records.

[MUSIC: Lonnie Donegan - “Lost John”]

Martin Scorsese: The music was everything from Prokofiev to Lonnie Donegan, if you remember.

James Sullivan: Didn’t the Beatles back up Lonnie Donegan?

Martin Scorsese: John Lennon used to have a skiffle band.

James Sullivan: Oh, he was his hero.

Martin Scorsese: Yeah, he loved Lonnie Donegan. So I had that in there, mixed with music from the 30s, the Prokofiev, Dunayevsky, all kinds of stuff.

[Sound of car starting]

Martin Scorsese: There were some times I would come back, let’s say I was taking a yellow cab from 86th street all the way down to Houston Street or something at three in the morning. And the guy would have Flamenco on or some jazz or some rock ‘n’ roll, I mean, it was like no cars on the street. Sliding down the avenue. It was fantastic.

[MUSIC:  Przemyslaw Haluszczak - “Tangos Rompeserones”]

Martin Scorsese:  The only other time I really had fun with that was really driving my own car in Los Angeles. I design so many scenes, listening to music, driving on the freeways.

James Sullivan: Isn’t it amazing how your mind works when you’re on the highway with loud music on?

Martin Scorsese: Yeah.

James Sullivan: It’s one of the most creative times when you’re awake. Isn’t it?

Martin Scorsese: It really is. One of the things I did if I had to go to a studio or some event, not an event, but an office or whatever, I memorized the route and never varied from the route. So I wouldn’t have to think. I won’t have to think about the driving, you know what I’m saying?

David Gerlach: That’s Martin Scorsese on the soundtracks that play in his life. I want to thank James Sullivan for bringing this conversation to the archive. This interview was produced by me and Dave McGuire. Great work on this one, Dave.  Jeffrey Alan Jones brought us our sound logo. And you can discover more lost interviews, interviews you can’t hear anywhere else, at BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

Danielle Sacks: Typically when I’m doing a profile I always try and get the subject in their natural element. Usually you want something that is a window into who they are.

David Gerlach: That’s Danielle Sacks. She’s a senior writer for Fast Company magazine.

Danielle Sacks: So in the case of Bill Draper, I went to his office in San Francisco and his mahogany bookshelves were just–the thing that struck me–they were just filled with photograph after photograph of Bill Draper with famous person after famous person. Before we sit down and get comfortable and get into formal interviewing mood, I’ve got to prompt him to tell me about some of these photographs.

Danielle Sacks: Do you want to take me through some highlights? I see several Presidents of the United States here….

Danielle Sacks: So I quickly fumble in my purse and get my tape recorder out.

Bill Draper: That’s me telling them what to do. I’m telling him what to do, and he didn’t do it.

Danielle Sacks:  Bill Draper is considered the godfather of venture capital and he’s one of the few patriarchs of a dynasty in Silicon Valley.

Danielle Sacks: So why did you meet President Obama?

Bill Draper: I met him because my daughter is a strong Democrat and she worked for Obama. These guys are Jeb Bush, and that’s Mitt Romney, and Meg Whitman and John McCain.

Danielle Sacks: Where was that?

Bill Draper: Palo Alto. We got the Pope; he blessed the UN programs for me. And Sandra Day O’Connor. She’s a good friend of ours.

Danielle Sacks: Then I see Bill Draper and his wife in a photograph next to a gentleman with a long grizzly beard in army fatigues, and I suddenly realize Bill is standing next to Fidel Castro.

[Music: ]

Bill Draper: He’s a charming guy. We spent five hours together. It surprised me when I saw he’s not tall, but he came into the room and seemed bigger than life because he’s got the uniform and that presence, that stage presence.

[Sound clip of Fidel Castro giving a speech]

Bill Draper: Now he’s quite sick, I think.

[Music:]

David Gerlach: So just how did a venture capitalist end up at a dinner with Fidel Castro? Well after more than 20 years investing in technology, President Reagan named Draper the head of the Export-Import Bank in 1981. Five years later he was tapped for a big position at the United Nations.

Bill Draper:  I was with the UN. I ran this large aide program, the UN Development Program. I went down to Cuba. We had a resident representative in each country. And anyway, he gave a dinner at his house in my honor and Castro came.

David Gerlach: So men began talking and it wasn’t long before Draper let Castro know exactly what he thought about the state of Cuba.

Bill Draper: In the exchange, I said, “It’s honestly the worst economy.” I was really truthful. “This is the worst economy that I ever encountered.” And I’ve seen lots and lots of developing countries. And he immediately shot back, “It wouldn’t be so bad if your country didn’t have these sanctions and embargoes.” After saying that, I shot back, “Hey, the US wouldn’t have those sanctions if it weren’t for your human rights record.” And all these people are listening. I’m a pretty direct guy. And he said, “Human rights record? Carlos, do we have a human rights problem? “No, no, Fidel.” “And what about New York, all that poverty there? I was just there.” He had just been there. He brought his own chickens to eat. Live chickens. I said, “It’s true in New York we have a lot of poverty, but still there’s no military presence like there is here in Havana.” And he said, “Military presence? Carlos, do we have military presence?”

And then I said, “Maybe we ought to talk about something less controversial.” And he said, “No, I’m having fun.” So I then I said, “Okay, I’ll bet you on the Nicaragua election.”

David Gerlach: Now just to provide historical background here: Draper and Castro met in 1990. It was just months before the stunning election of Violeta Chamorro over Daniel Ortega. Let’s put this in perspective: Chamorro was favored by the United States and Bill Draper while Ortega was backed by the Soviet Union and Castro’s cuba.

Bill Draper: “Ortega 2-1,” he said. And then I said, “I’ll bet you $20.” And he said, “Okay, Carlos give me 20 pesos.” And he knew and I knew but I didn’t say anything. I pulled out my wallet, and he got the 20 pesos, the two 10 peso notes.  And before handing them over, he pulled out his pen and he signed both of them and they went way up beyond $20, and he winked. Not wanting to be outdone, I pulled out my pen and signed my money, which stayed exactly the same value. And we traded.  I still have those two 10 peso bills on display in our living room at the house.

David Gerlach: That’s Bill Draper on his $20 bet with Fidel Castro. I want to thank Danielle Sacks for bringing us this interview. And I guess I’ll let the cat out of the bag: Danielle is my lovely wife. She’s also a great journalist. And what we’ve been listening to is an outtake from her latest article in the July/August issue of Fast Company magazine. It’s a profile called “The Drapers of Silicon Valley.” Check it out. Thanks as well to Amy Drozdowska for producing this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, authors and documentary filmmakers listening: we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.  That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

Allen Ginsberg: Press the red button to record. Press the stop/eject button to stop…

David Gerlach: This is Blank on Blank. Where lost interviews come to life. Presented by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org. I’m David Gerlach.

Allen Ginsberg: Press the green forward button to play.

David Gerlach: That voice, poet Allen Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg: Volume control you have for playback.

David Gerlach: He defined the Beat Movement.

[Clip of Ginsberg reading “Howl”: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness]

David Gerlach: And what we’re listening to is a rare recording from the summer of 1984. Only a few people have ever gotten to hear it. It was actually found in a box in New York City just a few years ago. And on tape we hear an intimate audio glimpse inside a decades old friendship that cancer will soon cut short.

[Music: Phil Ochs - “When I’m Gone”]

David Gerlach: Here’s the story. Allen Ginsberg loved to record things for posterity, whether it was his poems or his photographs. And he had decided to bring a tape recorder to his old friend, Julian Beck. Beck was back in a hospital. Mt. Sinai in Manhattan. His stomach cancer had returned. And the next time the recording begins, we hear Allen Ginsberg at Beck’s bedside.

Allen Ginsberg: Well in case you want to write a book, here’s a machine to write it on.

Julian Beck: Oh, very good. How wonderful.

Allen Ginsberg: And it plugs in. I put fresh batteries in. I’ll show you how to work it.

David Gerlach: I won’t say much more as we listen in. The tape stops and starts as the two friends catch up. We hear bursts of hope and resilience. It’s just regular conversation about upcoming plans, film, politics, what old friends are up to. It’s banter with barely a whiff of mortality in the air. So for this episode of Blank on Blank, it’s on the theater of living, and we’re dividing it into three acts in honor of Julian Beck who literally lived a life of drama. He was co-founder of The Living Theatre in New York City.

[Clip of Beck: “Revolution!”]

David Gerlach: Now this was an avant garde group that brought social issues, politics and an audience literally to the stage.

[Clip continues: “I name you Someone Who Would Free Us.”]

David Gerlach: So here’s Act One: Really, I’m Fine. Julian Beck begins the scene:

Julian Beck: And I said, gee, this morning I’m not going to use that electric shaver. I’m going to make a nice clean shave. And the cold water, and the feeling. And in 10 minutes I said I don’t want that tube back in. I feel good. I feel wonderful. I couldn’t believe it. And then all day long yesterday I became livelier and livelier and livelier and livelier.

Julian Beck: The swelling has gone down about a third already of what it was.

Allen Ginsberg: The swelling was in the paraternium or something like that?

Julian Beck: It was in the whole abdominal area, it was like a basketball. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know whether to do surgery. They don’t know whether to do chemotherapy. Feed me and keep me happy and see how it goes for a while. And of course they also keep saying to me, “If you don’t want to anything, you don’t have to do anything.” And I just feel myself getting better by the hour. They’ve gone through test after test after test after test. They been saying, as you know, this is an invasion or a spreading of cancer, and yet the tests don’t seriously confirm what they believe. So I’m the mystery man.

Allen Ginsberg: That’s good, and you’ve got a view of Central Park with it, too.

Julian Beck: And I got a great view of Central Park with it, yes.

David Gerlach: This brings us to Act Two: Back to The Movement. Ginsberg picks up a copy of what I can only assume to be the famed Village Voice.

Allen Ginsberg: This is the new Voice.

Julian Beck: This is the Voice, yes.

David Gerlach: Now Ginsberg’s voice gets a little muffled here, but he’s taking issue with a recent review of one of Beck’s plays that The Living Theatre has put on.

Allen Ginsberg: This just isn’t correct. “The great failed experiment of the 60s is that they failed to make theater, politics and life continuous.”  That’s what Reagan and Nixon are doing.

Julian Beck: That’s exactly what they’re all saying. It’s the perfect conservative position.

Allen Ginsberg: No, Reagan he’s the actor and he’s making theater and politics continuous. It’s just whose theater do you want to go to? Whose theater do you like? Because everybody’s acting.

Julian Beck: Yes, surely.

Allen Ginsberg: That is what Abby Hoffman said years ago: We have a right to shout “theater” at a crowded fire.

Julian Beck: Yes.

David Gerlach: And now the final act. Act Three: Getting It On Tape. And here Ginsberg returns to the meaning of his gift. Of this tape recorder.

Allen Ginsberg: This is the microphone. This stops it. You have the strength to?

[Sounds of the recording stopping and starting]

Julian Beck: Now I have started it. And now it is recording.  Now I have nothing more to say so I press this grey button.

Allen Ginsberg: The other thing with that is that it’s tricky in the sense that I used those until about 1969. Then one day when I went out into the field and wrote this great epic about stars and crickets at night. I came into the house to transcribe it and I hadn’t pressed the right button. And that was the last time I depended on one of those. It’s so funny.

Julian Beck: I understand that very, very, very well. Two or three of the very best talks I ever gave just didn’t come out on the tape. Some of the worst ones where I fumbled and couldn’t follow my own thoughts are recorded as distinctly as…

David Gerlach: Ginsberg and Beck are together on tape here for another 23 minutes. The phone rings. The stream of visitors continues. Ginsberg talks about an upcoming adventure.

Allen Ginsberg: He and I are going to do a thing on peace and meditations, on dharma politics.

David Gerlach: The next time the recording begins it’s Beck, alone.

Julian Beck: Sunday morning, June 24th…

David Gerlach: Awake at dawn.

Julian Beck: It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m just finding my voice.

David Gerlach: He’s chasing his thoughts on theater. His art. His life.

Julian Beck: The objective must be a returning to, a facing again of, an embracing again of our own humanness…

David Gerlach: He continues freeform for almost an hour. And then the very last line we hear him speak.

Julian Beck: Attaching us always more firmly through the mistakes, the mistakes, the mistakes….

David Gerlach: After that it’s just the tape hissing.

[Sounds of tape hissing]

David Gerlach: As we were putting this piece together, we came across something fitting that Allen Ginsberg once said. Quote:  “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” Remarkably, Beck did bounce back from this latest stay in the hospital and for close to a year he was back working again. After decades focusing on the theater and avoiding overtures from television and from Hollywood, he hit the screen. He played a ghostly character in Poltergeist II, and he was a kingpin of sorts on an episode “Miami Vice.”

[Clip of Beck on “Miami Vice”: Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Miami Vice.]

David Gerlach: But on September 17, 1985, Julian Beck lost the fight. He died at age 60.

[Music: Phil Ochs - “When I’m Gone”]

David Gerlach: Many, many thanks to The Living Theater in New York City for allowing us to bring you this intimate lost recording. Be sure to check out livingtheatre.org to learn more about their new productions. A huge thanks, as well, to Libby Walker and Amy Drozdowska. Both of them helped produce this Blank on Blank with me. It was one big puzzle putting this together. Well done everybody. For more lost interviews and conversations that you can hear nowhere else, head to blankonblank.org. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please go over to iTunes and rate Blank on Blank. Give us a thumbs up. Even better, write a review. Reviews and reactions on iTunes will help more and more people discover our lost interviews. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[“When I’m Gone” continues]

Brian Raftery: Do you think sort of the reputation that you may have accumulated of being slightly humorless–do you think that’s fair?

Thom Yorke: No, I think its widely unfair, but whatever. It’s not my control. I’m humorless when I think people are wankers. You know, I’m not tolerant of idiots.

David Gerlach: Idiots and wankers. That’s Thom Yorke, lead singer and songwriter for the band Radiohead. Today we tackle the challenges that just about everyone faces:  confronting who you are and being comfortable with yourself and your life…even if you’re a huge rock star.

[Music: Radiohead - “Karma Police”] 
David Gerlach: Writer and author Brian Raftery interviewed Yorke in 2006. It was for a profile Brian did for Spin magazine.The pair sat down for a few hours in a Philadelphia hotel. Yorke had a new solo album out. But then Brian asked Yorke–who was nearing 38 at the time–how he felt about getting older.  This is Blank on Blank.

Thom Yorke: It’s a fucking weird thing because I’ve always wanted to do that thing of growing old disgracefully, one way or another. What I think is a bad idea is to say to yourself, “Well, you know I wish I was 20 again. I could do all this shit again. That would be great.” I hated it. I used to fucking hate it. I used to go through really bad, bad periods. And hey, now it’s no different! No…(laughs)

[Music: Radiohead - “I Will”]

Brian Raftery: Am I wrong in hearing a lot of bleak things in the lyrics?

Thom Yorke: I have many bleak thoughts. I mean, don’t get me started, man. It’s one of my specialities, apparently. I’m concerned for our future, generally speaking. I’m concerned for my children’s future. I guess it’s an environmental thing as much as anything.

[Music continues: I won’t let this happen to my children.]

Thom Yorke: When I got involved with this Friends of the Earth thing, I made the mistake of doing the launch of their campaign with them.

[Sound clip from Yorke’s media appearance for Friends of the Earth: Helping raise awareness is the singer Thom Yorke from the rock band Radiohead...]

Thom Yorke: It was me and this guy Tony Juniper and we did this whole day of media.

[Clip continues: Bit of a change for you, Thom, from Radiohead to Friends of the Earth, saving the world.]

Thom Yorke: And I kept saying to them, are you sure you want me to do this? I’m kind of the last person on earth you want representing you at this point. I fly around the world for my job. I don’t have an electric car. I don’t have solar panels on my roof yet, and I’m a musician. I’m not an expert, and this is science, man. And it was a terrible day—horrendous. It ended up being live on TV. I was talking to this guy Jon Snow…

[Sound clip from Channel 4 News with Jon Snow]

Thom Yorke: …from Channel 4 News in Britain, and he said, “Well, what are you doing personally?” And I’d been up since 7 o’clock and I’d only had three hours sleep, so I said, “Not enough.” And it was one of those really awful TV moments where it’s silent.  Even Jon Snow’s ear thing is completely silent. And even Jon Snow’s like, “Oh” and I’m like, “Oh, why do I do this?”

I don’t want to make records that just talk about that, but to me I can’t help being part of what’s going on. Because you have your close life and then you have the wider things going on. And that’s what you have. That’s what you have to write about. What the fuck else am I going to write about? I could write about how rich I’m not. I could write about how difficult it is being a rock star. Why the fuck would I do that? If you’re a taxi driver in LA, why the fuck would you want to know about that?

[Music: Radiohead]

Brian Raftery: When you think about the world at this point… how do you keep an awareness of those things and still get up every day, and still talk to your kids and make them feel good, and not have it weigh down your life so much where you can’t think about anything else?

Thom Yorke: I have periods like that, which probably means I should be sectioned. That’s the way it is. But also I’m not a pessimist. I feel positive because I have to be positive, and also because, when it comes down to it, it’s all about how we should be caring for each other and how we interact and how we connect with each other and blah blah hippie bollocks. And also about–how do I say this without sounding really revolting–you have to get up every day and have love in your heart. There you go. That’s sounds American. I sound like some sort of lunatic.

David Gerlach: That’s Thom Yorke on the challenge of confronting yourself and who you are. Many thanks to Brian Raftery. Brian is now a contributing editor to Wired magazine. Check out all of his work at brianraftery.com. Amy Drozdowska produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, authors and documentary filmmakers listening: we want to hear your unheard interviews. So drop us a line to interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is presented by the Public Radio Exchange.PRX.org.  That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[Music: Radiohead - “Exit Music (For A Film)”]

[Music: “Sesame Street” theme song]

James Sullivan: I’ve done all kinds of interviews with all kinds of people and that was probably one of the most fun. I got to sit behind the trash can while Carroll did the Oscar character.

David Gerlach: That’s writer James Sullivan, and he got to do something that millions of kids have dreamed about doing–he got to go to Sesame Street. And when he was there, James met the voice behind both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. It’s a guy named Caroll Spinney, and James profiled this puppeteer–who was approaching 80 years old–for a story he wrote in the Boston Globe.

James Sullivan: Obviously anybody who has grown up with Sesame street has an affection for those characters. I was looking forward to seeing Snuffleupagus but I don’t think he’s on the show too much anymore.

[Clip of Mr. Snuffleupagus: “Oh, hi guys. I feel sad.”]

David Gerlach: Let’s get right to the tape. Here’s Carroll Spinney on the story behind Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird. This is Blank on Blank.

James Sullivan: Okay, I guess let’s start with Big Bird.  Can you just tell me, Carroll, how you came to do the Big Bird voice?

Carroll Spinney: Well, Big Bird’s voice was originally rather like a dinosaur we know.

[Clip of Barney the dinosaur: “I love you. You love me.”]

Carroll Spinney: But within the first year I felt he should be a child. So instead of sounding like: “Hi, well here I am. What’re you doing today?” He talked like a yokel.  But then I decided he should be a child and they all agreed. And I talked like this: “Hi there. It’s me, Big Bird. I have yellow feathers. Yellow is my favorite color.”

[Clip of Big Bird: “Hi, it’s me Big Bird and I want to talk to you about asking questions. Now, a question is what you ask somebody when there’s something you want to find out. Like, um...”]

James Sullivan: How did you come up with the voice for Oscar?

Carroll Spinney: Well Oscar was a harder one for my initially, because I had never did a big, rough, tough guy’s voice or anything. I got in a cab for my final audition across town here in New York City. And the guy said “Where to, Mack?” I kept saying to myself  “That’s a good voice.” So I kept saying in my head, inside my head: “Where to, Mack?” I got to the studio, paid him, and went in and Jim Henson was ready there with the puppet. He said “Well, knock on the trashcan and Oscar will come up.” (Knocks on desk) “Get away from my trash can.”  And Jim Henson said, “That’ll do fine.”

[Clip of Oscar the Grouch singing: “Oh, I love trash. Anything dirty or dingy or dusty. Anything ragged or rotten or rusty. Yes, I love trash.”]

David Gerlach: That’s Carroll Spinney on creating Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. But I wanted to play one more clip from James’ interview. I love this part. You see, before “Sesame Street,” Carroll Spinney got his start creating characters for “Bozo’s Big Top.” It used to run in Boston in the 1960s. And as you can hear, Spinney had no problem falling right back into character.

James Sullivan: How about Picklepuss? You want to tell me about that character?

Carroll Spinney: Picklepuss talked like this: “Hi, Bozo.” And they talked about things like: “Guess what, Bozo? Today’s the first day of spring. So I guess it’s time to bring out our mackinaws and gloves and boots because it’s going to get cold.”

James Sullivan: And Grandma Nellie?

Carroll Spinney: Grandmas Nellie: “Landsakes, Bozo. I’ve got a wonderful deal for you here. Just give me a dollar. You’ll love it.”

James Sullivan: How often do you pull these old voices out of the quiver?

Carroll Spinney: Never (laughs).

[Music: Jon Brion “Monday”]

David Gerlach: Thanks to writer and author James Sullivan for bringing this interview to the archive. Check out all of his work at JamesSullivanAuthor.com. Shawn Wen produced this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, non-fiction authors and documentary filmmakers out there: we want to hear your lost interviews, so drop us a line to interviews at blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange,PRX dot org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening. Content to be toggled.

David Gerlach: I want to get right to conversation today. It deals with a simple question about the ability of men and women to move on: is there a right way to deal with death and tragedy? Can you find laughs–or even love–at a funeral? Well, playwright Thomas Bradshaw thinks you can.

And he said so during an interview with Margo Jefferson. It comes to us from BOMB magazine  and this is actually an excerpt of a longer interview that you can read at BOMBsite dot com. But let’s get right to the tape and these eternal questions of life. This is Blank on Blank.

Thomas Bradshaw: I think the way we deal with certain major subjects in our art and the media bear no relation to the truth. Death, for one. There’s comedy in the midst of tragedy and tragedy in the midst of comedy. You actually can never separate the two and that’s what theater should be. It’s like, funny things happen at funerals.  Very funny, comical, human things.  You may not laugh, but it’s all mixed up together.  It’s all mixed up together. I was talking to one of my friends who, his wife died. And, you know, he felt some feelings of joy when his wife died.  Something that most people would never admit.  That it’s not all tears.

Margo Jefferson:  Had she been sick?

Thomas Bradshaw:  No, she died suddenly.  But their marriage wasn’t necessarily–you know what I’m saying?

Margo Jefferson:  Yes, I do.

Thomas Bradshaw:  They were married for a very long time, but it was not necessarily the happiest marriage.  His brother-in-law said to him, “Feel free to let your feelings come.  If you’re at the funeral and you find yourself being attracted to another woman, you see another woman, you just have to let that come.  Feel free to…don’t feel bad about these things.”  That’s how our mind works.  We actually don’t stay focused on this one thing that takes over our lives.  This is actually much closer to reality, because as humans we have to deal with many problems at once.  We don’t have the luxury of having one problem and just getting to fixate on this.

Margo Jefferson:  That’s right.  Half of your life is saying, “Oh, god, I wanted to go on with that obsession.  And now, damn it, my wife died.”  Absolutely. And then some new thing comes in and sweeps you off completely.

Thomas Bradshaw:  That’s the thing about being human that allows us to get out of whatever moment we’re in.  Everything passes.  If something really bad happens, I can have the feeling this moment will last forever.  Especially when it’s a bad moment.  It’s like this feeling is never going to go away.  And it’s this fact that life goes on, things keep happening, which allows you to move on.  Ten days later, I may not even be thinking about that thing.  Sometimes I’ll look back and I’ll be like, “Wow, I can’t believe in the moment I thought that would never end, and now I can almost not remember.”  Now that goes for good things also.  No matter how good a thing is, that’s going to pass. Bad things are going to pass.  Good things are going to pass.  That’s the beauty of life and living moment to moment.

Margo Jefferson:  And we are intensely, almost sealed into, that moment.

Thomas Bradshaw:  Totally sealed into these moments.  I try to capture that essence in my work.

David Gerlach:  That’s Thomas Bradshaw with his thoughts on man’s ability to move on form both good days and bad. Thanks again to BOMB magazine and its contributors for adding this interview to the archive. This Blank on Blank was produced by Shawn Wen and myself. Jeffrey Alan Jones brought us our sound logo. And for all the journalists, non-fiction authors, documentary filmmakers out there, we want to hear your lost interviews. So drop us a line to interviews at blankonblank dot org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.Content to be toggled.

[Music: Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” live at the 2008 Litchfield Jazz Festival]

David Gerlach: “Take Five” by jazz legend Dave Brubeck. He’s performing live here in 2008 at age 87.  Eighty-seven. Just amazing. And at this point Brubeck’s career he had already criss-crossed six decades of playing, yet he was showing no signs of slowing down.

Dave Brubeck: My energy’s still there. And I think my love of family, of my country, of jazz, of playing will make me put up with all the crap. (Crowd laughs and cheers)

David Gerlach: What we’re hearing is an interview Brubeck gave on stage during the Litchfield Jazz Festival. He’s speaking with John Dankosky, the host of Where We Live, a show that airs on WNPR in Connecticut. Anyway, it’s just an amazing conversation and when I heard it, I dropped John a note and asked if we could bring it to listeners of Blank on Blank, in particular this remarkable story Brubeck told about fighting communism with jazz. So here it is. Dave Brubeck remixed. This is Blank on Blank.

John Dankosky: Dave Brubeck, it’s been 50 years this year since your tour behind the Iron Curtain, and I’m wondering if you could reminisce a little bit about that time in which you played in front of audiences that had not previously experienced American music, at least not for a number of years, and what that was like for you because it was a remarkable, groundbreaking thing.

Dave Brubeck: President Eisenhower wanted jazz to go out into the world and especially along the Russian border.

[Sound clip: “Communism, according to all its own leaders, must be a system of international control and conformity.”]

Dave Brubeck: Our tour started for the State Department in Poland, which was communistic. You can’t believe how well we were received.

[Music: Polish communist anthem]

Dave Brubeck: They wrote about things like that we were from heaven, sent to them, can you imagine?

[Anthem ends. Jazz music begins.]

Dave Brubeck: We played 12 concerts in Poland. Underground meetings and underground concerts. The last night they threw a party for us and the president of the underground club wanted to give a toast and he stood up and said, “You’re going home tomorrow. I want you to know how we Poles love freedom as much as you Americans, and thank you for coming.”  So what we did, we didn’t understand how we could be that important. We had no clue that we were helping people break away from Communism.

Eventually we went to Russia three times, but twice our ambassador called me and he said, “Dave, don’t come. If you come, the Secret Police are going to have a table at the door and everyone who comes in, their identification card will be taken. They will never get an education; they will never get a government job or a good job.  I don’t think you want to come because some people are going to come and lose everything just because they want to see you.” Can you understand how that is?

David Gerlach: That’s jazz legend Dave Brubeck on Jazz Diplomacy behind the Iron Curtain. Many thanks to John Dankosky, the host of Where We Live. He’s also the news director there at Connecticut’s WNPR. CPBN.org. I also want to thank Amy Drozdowska for producing this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, non-fiction authors and documentary filmmakers out there:  we want to hear your lost interviews, your unheard interviews. So drop us a line at interviews@blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.  That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: Today: the art of interviewing a President. Okay. Cue the tape. This is President Barack Obama recorded in the Oval Office on Nov. 30, 2009.  Right here he’s reflecting on Republicans in the House of Representatives voting unanimously against his massive economic recovery act right after he took office.

Barack Obama: That was a big deal because it really set the tenure, the tenor for the entire year and I think it’s fair to say that that helped to create the Tea Baggers and empowering that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now basically controls the agenda for the Republicans entirely.

David Gerlach: Stop the tape…rewind that part.

Barack Obama: …you know, the Tea Baggers

Jonathan Alter: He called them Tea Baggers instead of Tea Party

David Gerlach: That’s Jonathan Alter. He writes for Bloomberg now after spending nearly three decades at Newsweek magazine. He’s interviewed every president since Nixon, except for Ronald Reagan. And this interview you’re hearing became a central part of Alter’s book; it’s called “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.”

[“Hannity” clip: So Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One]

Jonathan Alter: When details of my book leaked, Sean Hannity and others on Fox News blasted the President for comparing the Tea Party to homosexuals, because they thought he had intentionally used the word “tea bagger.”

[“Hannity” clip continues: You want to talk about setting the tone in America. Obama has set the tone repeatedly by completely dismissing people who don’t agree with his policies...]

Jonathan Alter: It was just like a slip of the tongue but an example of how pretty much anything you say in an interview can be used against you in a political context.

David Gerlach: A slip of the tongue. A surprisingly frank admission. Sometimes they do happen in what are often buttoned up interviews with journalists. Presidents rarely let their guard down. That got me thinking. This challenge, just how do you interview a president. I mean, what tack do you take? How do you start off on the right foot when you enter the Oval Office of a president like Barack Obama?

Jonathan Alter: He’s sort of famously uninterested in more than a minute or two of small talk. He’s very business like. So as we’re circling the couch on the way to where we are going to sit down I come up with a hugely imaginative, fresh question for small talk which was, “How was your Thanksgiving, Mr. President?”

[Music: Your Hand in Mind - “Tea Time”]

David Gerlach: I was also curious if any of Alter’s interviews with six presidents had stood above the rest. So I asked him. He thought for a moment. He had a favorite.

[Sound clip of Richard Nixon: Because people have got to know whether or not their President’s a crook. Well I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.]

David Gerlach: Richard Nixon there back in 1973 right before he resigned. He was president when Alter was a kid. And Alter says he had made it his mission to interview him before Nixon died. That day finally came in 1988.

Jonathan Alter: Reagan was getting ready to leave office, and I said, “So how will history view Ronald Reagan?” And Nixon said, “Well you have to distinguish between history and the historians. The historians are like you; they’re liberals. If you’re a liberal you go into history writing or academia or journalism. If you’re conservative, you go into business. And so history is dominated by the historians.” I loved that. The distinction between history and historians. All his resentment was all contained in that one answer.

[Music continues: Your Hand in Mind - “Tea Time”]

Jonathan Alter: You want these things to be a conversational as you can. You know that if you go in and start firing these questions at him that are very confrontational, instead of the interview being a half an hour, it will be five or 10 minutes. And then you’re really screwed. The press secretary can always end it at any time, so if you’re going to ask challenging questions you need to think about whether you really need to ask that question.

David Gerlach: Well, during one interview Alter thought it was worth the risk. It was toward the end of Bill Clinton’s second term. For the first time since the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Alter got to interview Clinton in the President’s limousine during a trip to Hartford, Connecticut.

Jonathan Alter: I asked him pretty early in the interview, “Mr. President, are you planning to seek or have you had any psychiatric treatment for your problems?” He got really mad. He had one of those purple fits. He said, “I can’t believe you’re asking me that question, Jon. I can not believe you’re asking me that question.” And I said, “Well you’ve talked about pastoral counseling.” And he said, “Then why didn’t you ask me about that?” So I said, “Mr. President, how is your pastoral counseling going?” and he sort of calmed down and answered the question. And then we talked about other things and he did the interview in a rather dutiful, not particularly friendly fashion. And when we got to the event he was going to, he just got out of the car without saying goodbye.

David Gerlach: So we’ve heard about Presidents Nixon and Clinton letting their emotions show behind closed doors while on the record. But what about President Obama? I heard a clue when I first listened to Alter’s 40-minute interview. It wasn’t a Clinton purple fit, but Obama’s emotions were bubbling right there below the surface. Listen closely.

Barack Obama: The job of the commander is to focus on the theater of their actions…

David Gerlach: Can you hear that? That tapping?

Barack Obama: …and to get as much as they can to minimize the risks of failure in that theater.

David Gerlach: That’s President Obama’s finger hitting the table over and over and over. It happened a few other times during their conversation. It just struck me, that tension. It’s such a different side than the measured president Americans get to see.

Barack Obama: And my job is to look at the whole, not just the part.

[Music: Shuta Hasunuma - “Discover Tokyo”]

David Gerlach: Many Thanks to Jonathan Alter for bringing his interview with President Obama and for his thoughts on the art of interviewing the president. You can pick up his book on Obama “The Promise” from Amazon.com. I also want to thank Amy Drozdowska for producing this Blank on Blank with me. Our sound logo comes to us from Jeffrey Alan Jones. And for all the journalists, interviewers, non-fiction authors and documentary filmmakers who are listening: we want to hear your lost interviews, your unheard interviews. So drop us a line to interviews at blankonblank.org. Blank on Blank is brought to you by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. That’s all for now. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: Today we’re happy to bring you a conversation with world champion surfer Kelly Slater. Now if you haven’t heard of Slater before let’s put it this way: He’s arguably the best of all-time, an icon of the sport. The Michael Jordan of surfing. So it is pretty remarkable to hear him completely open up about his failings out of the water. Family problems. This is Kelly Slater on his not-so-perfect-life.

Now as usual, you’ll hear some great music accompanying the interview, but what’s unique is this soundtrack comes from Slater himself. You see, he played the guitar and sang at different points throughout his conversation with Josh Baron, the editor-in-chief of Relix magazine. I really think you’ll enjoy it. This is Blank on Blank.

[Music:  Kelly Slater playing guitar: It’s hard to play when you’re cold. (Slater begins to sing.) Days are passing so fast may not make it through this. My self belief: better on my own.]

Kelly Slater: Early on, I would just want to win a contest on a tour, whatever. Win a regional contest when I was an amateur. Eventually it became ‘I want to win a world title’ and then ‘I want to win multiple world titles.’ I was going for all these kind of things, but I never felt comfortable in that moment in my skin. I was always worried about the past. Worried about the future and thinking about something that happened in the past and never like in that moment.

[Music:  Kelly Slater playing guitar and singing: The time is now, please don’t let this go. So let’s just sail away, and find our place today. Get their yesterday to living.]

Kelly Slater: When you break through whatever it is you need to break through to actually live in the moment, to have the experiences that are happening right now, for me that was a very special thing, which only probably happened, you know, in this decade for me. I had a few situations. My personal life, where I was forced… My dad dying. Cheated on a girlfriend. All these kind of things converged in one year for me in my life and I just sort of saw it pointing to the fact that my life was getting worse not better. And it should have been getting better, because I’ve done all the things, met all the people, been all the places, accomplished all the things I wanted to accomplish, but life was somehow getting worse. You know?

Josh Baron: You sort of alluded to it a little bit earlier: Eight world titles. It sounds like…

Kelly Slater: Nine, actually. (Laughs)

Josh Baron: Nine, excuse me. Sorry. Nine. My bad. A little embarrassing. Nine.

Kelly Slater: (Laughs)

Josh Baron: Sounds like you found someone you care and love deeply. You’ve traveled to pretty much any place I think you’d want to travel to on Earth thus far. Has anything eluded you?

Kelly Slater: Probably just experiences at home with family and friends and with my daughter who’s 12 now. I have some residual guilt there, because I’m just not home much. I don’t get to see her that often.

David Gerlach: Slater really opened up here about troubles in his family life and a few minutes later he again picked up his guitar and continued on that train of thought. Here it is:

Kelly Slater (playing guitar): I woke up on my mom’s birthday and wrote this one. It’s probably three years ago. I’ll just sing a verse. (Slater begins to sing.) I never really needed a father. I’ve never been that close to my daughter. Oh, but I, I’m coming home to you. (Slater stops singing, but continues playing.) Sorry, I haven’t probably played it probably since then.

David Gerlach: That’s champion surfer and musician Kelly Slater on his not-so-perfect-life and this is Blank on Blank. Thanks again to Josh Baron, editor-in-chief of Relix magazine, for adding his interview to the archive. For more interviews that you can hear nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

[Music:  Kelly Slater playing guitar and singing:  I’m coming home to you. Just like heaven in your eyes.  Now I think I realize.  Something like that.  Kind of summing up the people around me.] 

David Gerlach: We’re happy to have more from fashion deacon Tim Gunn. This time on his FBI agent father. Yes, Tim Gunn’s father was J. Edgar Hoover’s right-hand man. This conversation with the “Project Runway” host comes to us from Danielle Sacks, a senior writer for Fast Company magazine. This is Blank on Blank.

Danielle Sacks: Did I read somewhere that your father was …

Tim Gunn: An FBI agent. Yeah. For 26 years.

Danielle Sacks: Wow. What was that like?

Tim Gunn: Well, he worked side-by-side with Hoover.

[Sound clip of J. Edgar Hoover speech: There is no doubt as to where a real communist’s loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia, not the United States.]

Tim Gunn: He was Hoover’s speechwriter. He was Hoover’s ghostwriter. He did most of Hoover’s books. He traveled with Hoover everywhere. He was only a, what do they call them, I can’t remember now… a field agent for two years. His station was in Newark. So who wouldn’t want to escape that?

Danielle Sacks: My mom was from Newark.

Tim Gunn: Sorry, only in the nicest way.

Danielle Sacks: No, no, no. It was actually kind of nice back in the day. She tells me, at least.

Tim Gunn: And at the time of his appointment to the bureau, he was the youngest agent in their history.

[Music: “Dragnet” Theme Song]

Tim Gunn: So he was very quiet about it, because a lot of it was strictly confidential. He couldn’t talk about it.

Danielle Sacks: But did that impact you in indirect, interesting ways?

Tim Gunn: It certainly impacted me because he was my father and he was a major part of my life. But I will say, not wanting to turn this into a soap opera, but it was not the best of relationships by any means. I was not the son he wanted to have. He was a big sports guy and I wasn’t. He was one of those guy guys. I was about as far from that is you are going to get. Some of my most painful childhood memories were things like going to his FBI colleagues’ houses and having a father-son touch football game. You know, I’m there like, ‘Ahhhhh.’ I wanted to run and hide in the car. So we had a complicated relationship. But I will say this about him: He was always, always, always there for me in a crisis. Whatever it may be. Always. And for that I will always cherish him. And he was good in a crisis.

[Song: Horace Silver - “Song for my Father”]

David Gerlach: That was Tim Gunn on his FBI agent father and this is Blank on Blank. Thanks again to Danielle Sacks, senior writer for Fast Company magazine, for adding her interview to the archive. To read her profile on Tim Gunn and more, check out DanielleSacks.com. Now to hear Tim Gunn talk about his stylish vocabulary plus a slew of other interviews you can find nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: You’re listening to Blank on Blank.  I’m David Gerlach, and thank you for joining us as we partner with journalists and interviewers, writers and authors.  Together we’re building an archive of American interviews.

Today we have actor and comedian Ricky Gervais on his beliefs, atheism, and why jetpacks top his wishlist. It all comes from a conversation he had with Jane Borden; she’s the comedy editor at Time Out New York magazine. They spoke by phone a few years back and we jump in with Ricky Gervais explaining why his views about religion aren’t central to his routine or his punchlines. This is Blank on Blank.

Jane Borden: You don’t seem to be out trying to skewer religion in your work.

Ricky Gervais: Why do I care? Why do I care if someone believes in God? It doesn’t bother me at all. Just like I don’t care what people think of me and my beliefs. I haven’t really got a campaign.

Jane Borden: You just want someone to disagree with you when you make fun of the way you look.

Ricky Gervais: (Laughs) Yeah. Oh, that would be a good campaign, wouldn’t it?

Jane Borden: That seems to be what you’ve said you’re doing.

Ricky Gervais: Yeah, that’s right

Jane Borden: We all have one great motivator.

Ricky Gervais: Yeah. It’s always a worry when you bang the drum on everything. Because, why? Why would I… just because I know there is no God. I say it if I’m asked. I’d even… If someone wanted me to lecture in atheism at Oxford University, I’d do it to people who turned up to that class. But, no, I’m not going to go door-to-door… an atheist Mormon or a Jehovah’s witness, that’s what I do. Yeah.

[Music: Lou Donaldson - “It’s Your Thing”]

Ricky Gervais: You’re hard wired. You are what you are. So there’s no explaining why you feel something about something more strongly than others. You know what: I’ve never understood train-spotting. But I now know that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter why someone is excited about trains. I learned this when people said to me things like: ‘Why do you like that?’ I’m thinking: ‘Well because I do.’ ‘Why do you think that’s funny?’ ‘Because I do.’ Trying to explain something you feel strongly about in art or politics is rather like saying, ‘How can you have a pain in your leg? I can’t feel it.’ ‘Because I have.’ That’s how it is.

[Music continues]

Jane Borden: What’s on your life wish list?

Ricky Gervais: Well, apart from the obvious ones? You don’t want to die lonely and in horrible pain. That goes without saying, doesn’t it? That would be… What are the things… I wish there was a God. That would be amazing.

Jane Borden: Why?

Ricky Gervais: Because from what I’ve heard, he’s all-powerful and he’s all good. So he would sort a few things out.

Jane Borden: The lamenting atheist; that’s interesting.

Ricky Gervais: It would be great. It’s just not true. It just can’t be, so… So what I’m really wishing for is justice in the world, honor, really, and wishing that every one gets their reward, which clearly isn’t true. So let’s see… An individual jetpack. I’ve been waiting for that for ages. They promised me that from the 60s that in the year 1984 we would all have jetpacks. That was a load of rubbish.

Jane Borden: How would a jetpack work? It would burn your feet. You’d burn up.

Ricky Gervais: Okay, a hoverboard then. I like the idea of a jetpack.

[Music: Theme from “The Jetsons”]

Ricky Gervais: What’s my biggest wish? That everyone died in their sleep. Then nothing would matter. You would go out… Every day and night would be great.

Jane Borden: People would stop sleeping. They would try to beat death. (Laughs)

Ricky Gervais: What I mean is whenever you died, it was just peacefully in your sleep. So there was no pain.

Jane Borden: Right, I know what you mean. But if that were the case, don’t you think people would try to find a way to cheat it?

Ricky Gervais: Oh, you’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined the jetpack and the sleeping…

Jane Borden: (Laughing) Oh, no. I’m a terrible person.

Ricky Gervais: Ok, world peace. No, I’ll change that: Jetpack. As long as I can fly, I’ll just stay out of bad areas.

[Music: The Specials “A Message to You Rudy”]

David Gerlach: That’s comedian Ricky Gervais on atheism and jetpacks, and this is Blank on Blank. Thanks go out to Jane Borden, the comedy editor for Time Out New York, for adding this conversation to the archive. Her extended interview with Gervais can be read at TimeOutNewYork.com. Also be sure to check out Jane’s new memoir. It’s called “I Totally Meant to Do That.” It comes out in March 2011. Now for more Blank on Blank interviews that you can hear nowhere else, including Ricky Gervais on those small differences between the United States and England, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: This is Blank on Blank and thank you for tuning in as we build this  archive of lost American interviews. I’m David Gerlach.

[MUSIC: The Larry Page Orchestra - “Zabadak”]

Back in the 1960s the Playboy clubs were hot. Hugh Hefner’s nightclubs in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles… all the big stars came out. The feminists hated the clubs. But the bunnies who waited tables in those custom-made, tight-fitting, satin get ups, well these bunnies made a pretty good living.

Elle Parrino: We were bringing in $500 a week, no problem. You know you’d sit there and the door bunny would just say, ‘Good evening. How are you this evening? May I see the Playboy key?’ And they would look at the key and say ‘Thank you mister so-and-so’ and direct them. And they would throw you a hundred dollar bill. It was unbelievable.

David Gerlach: That’s Elle Parrino. I wrote a profile on her for a weekly magazine in New York back in the early 2000s. Elle was approaching 60 at the time. Yet life, her life at the Playboy Club, was clearly still with her. So the story begins in 1965. Elle was almost 20 and she needed to find work. I taped conversation on one of those old school microcassette recorders. Enjoy the tape.

Elle Parrino: I couldn’t get a job, because in those days to work in an office the only thing I was qualified for essentially was to be a receptionist. And they still wanted navy blue suits and the little white gloves in those days. I just didn’t fit the bill. So one day I walked myself into the New York Playboy Club and ended up being there for 17 years. You know when I first started there they called me the lone virgin (laughs), because I had an Italian–American father. And even though I had my platinum blond hair and too much makeup on, I was very naïve. I think I was more of a romantic than naïve. But it was just you know….

[MUSIC: Juan García Esquivel - “Miniskirt”]

Elle Parrino: Even the way they served a drink was totally their style. The bunny dip you’ve heard of?

David: That’s how you had to serve a drink a certain way.

Elle Parrino: Yeah. When you walked up to the table. You had to… You weren’t allowed to show your front. You would walk up to the table and tail the table. You would stand there like this.

David Gerlach: Now right here at this point in the interview Elle stood up. She grabbed a tray and moved away from the table. Right there she pulled off the bunny dip with ease almost 40 years after she first sauntered up to a table. I was pretty tempted to order a Manhattan.

Elle Parrino: And that was the bunny dip. Knees together and this roll forward kind of thing.

David Gerlach: What did you go by?

Elle Parrino: Elle. E-L-L-E. I was Bunny Elle. You weren’t allowed to argue with the customers. You had to just stand there. They were not allowed to touch you. You were not allowed to give them any personal information about you at all. As liberal as the magazine is, that’s how conservative the clubs were. Because they had to be. … I gotta tell you that bunny dressing room was a magical place. It had anything you needed from mascara to a shoulder to cry on. And there’s something about standing stark ass naked next to another person, another human being, day after day. It is kind of as basic as you can get. … I was Bunny Mother for the last six years the club was open on 59th street. It was a silly title, but it was also meant so that the girls could always feel comfortable to talk to me about absolutely anything. The idea was to keep them happy. I learned one lesson: if you treat ‘em like ladies, they’re going to act like ladies. If you treat ‘em like whores, they’re going to act like whores. I treat all my girls like they are going to do the right thing. That is part of my Playboy training. It was really brilliantly thought out.

[MUSIC: Piero Piccioni - “Isabel”]

Elle Parrino: These women’s liberationists used to picket in front of the Playboy Club. What is liberation? It is freedom. How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do. Isn’t that what you are fighting for? If I want to walk into this place and make gazillion dollars wearing a skimpy costume and high heels, who are you to tell me I can’t?

David Gerlach: That’s Elle Parrino on life as a bunny at the New York Playboy Club during its heyday in the 1960s. I do have some sad news to report. After I produced this interview with Dave McGuire, I learned that Elle had passed away just a few weeks earlier. She died after a long battle with cancer. You know, Elle really was the perfect mix of sweet and salty and I’m really glad you got to hear her story. This is Blank on Blank. I’m David Gerlach.

David Gerlach: This is Blank on Blank and thank you for tuning in as we bring you this archive of lost American interviews. I’m David Gerlach.

[Music:  Bob Marley & the Wailers - “Dreamland”]

Rona Steinberg: David, I feel almost like is there an interview here to do?

[Music: “Dreamland” continues]

Rona Steinberg: They think their mom is cool, because I was in the room with Bob Marley and gave him chocolate pudding.

David Gerlach: That’s Rona Steinberg and she is kind of down playing what really is a remarkable story. I mean when I first heard about it, I wanted to know how and when and where and just why she give Bob Marley pudding. Chocolate pudding. So I gave her a call.

Rona Steinberg: I was green. (Laughs) I just got out of getting my masters in nutrition. This was my first job as a registered dietitian

David Gerlach: The year was 1981. It was springtime. Rona was working at Cedars Medical Center. It’s down in Miami. That’s when Bob Marley, who had been battling cancer for a number of years, he came in for treatment. Here’s what happened next.

Rona Steinberg. There was a buzz about Bob Marley being in the hospital and they wanted someone to go in to find out what he can possibly eat. I was asked to go in. And I had to be very respectful, because this guy was really on his way out. He was very, very sick. I didn’t want to come in there like, “Oh my god, Bob Marley.” He was lying in bed and he was surrounded by all his bodyguards and some relatives. I basically really spoke to them and of course looked over at him and he looked at me. You know I think he was just very, very weak and glanced at me. Maybe tried to give me a little expression, smile, whatever. And we came down to what he could really tolerate, just you know something soft. What did he like. They told me anything chocolate. I said ‘How about some chocolate pudding?” And that’s really what it came down to.

[Music: “Dreamland” continues]

Rona Steinberg: He was a nice man. I felt like a gentle energy from him. Even though of course he was sick and weak. But that’s the only way I can really express it.

David Gerlach: What about now when you hear his music: what goes through your head?

Rona Steinberg: I do remember the image of him lying in his bed. He had gotten very, very thin. But he had all this hair. These Rastafarian long locks. And it was a little bit sad, because he had so much energy and he was so cool and being up on stage and dancing around. You know and then here he was. He died very young. But I guess he did a lot in his short life. He really made quite an impression. I guess God allowed him to do that in his short life, and I guess it was time for him to move on.

[Music: “Dreamland” continues]

Rona Steinberg: It was like monumental, I think, in a sense. This was somebody who was extraordinary and why was I able to get in there at the end of this life? I guess you can get philosophical about it. But I felt sort of privileged to be able to just be in his presence. Even at that point. I felt honored to be able to help him if that was helping him and giving him some type of satisfaction. That felt good.

[Music: “Dreamland” continues]

David Gerlach: That’s Rona Steinberg on her chance encounter with reggae legend Bob Marley at the end of his life. Now Bob Marley was never able to leave that Miami hospital. He died a few weeks later. He was just 36 years old. This interview was produced by me and Dave McGuire. Thanks to Jeffrey Alan Jones for our sound logo. And you can find more interviews that you can’t hear anywhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: Welcome to another edition of Blank on Blank.  I’m David Gerlach and thank you for joining us as we partner with journalists and interviewers, writers and authors. Together we’re building an archive of the American interview.

Today we get to hear from legendary pop photographer Terry O’Neill. Now O’Neill did have a famous marriage to actress Faye Dunaway. But he made his name taking candid pictures of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Elton John long before they turned popular music upside down.

 

This conversation comes to us from Josh Baron. He’s the editor-in-chief of Relix magazine. And we begin with Terry O’Neill. It’s the early 1960s. He’s working for a newspaper in London. And at night he likes to check out some of the upstart rock ‘n’ roll bands that are popping up. He takes pictures of them. Then, when he gets back to work, he’s in the newsroom. He often shows these photographs to his editors. But guess what? They don’t like them. They don’t like them at all. They don’t think they’re suitable for print. So what happens next? This is Blank on Blank.

Terry O’Neill: I only photographed musicians I liked. You know? I got asked to do these Beatles. The picture published them and the paper sold out. So the picture editor said to me: Who else was out there? I had been watching a group called the Rolling Stones who were playing down in a little town called Richmond.

[Music: Rolling Stones “I Wanna Be Your Man”]

Terry O’Neill: I told them about them and I wanted to photograph them. They were horrified how they looked. So they said “God, aren’t there any good looking groups?”

David Gerlach: Just to note the obvious irony in that editorial observation since Mick Jagger became one of the biggest sex symbols in rock ‘n’ roll history. Lips, hips and all. But O’Neill also says that when he photographed the Stones way back in 1963, this was before they were big, the band was clearly still finding its way. It was even looking for its face. And as proof, he looks at one of those pictures from back then and O’Neill says that Mick Jagger was still just one member of the band.

Terry O’Neill: You can see from that lineup that Mick wasn’t really the star of the group at that time. The star was Brian Jones. When I photographed the Beatles for the first time, John Lennon was to the fore and the other three were sort of behind him. You know what I mean? He was definitely the leader. But as time goes on the singer becomes more of a star.

David Gerlach: So Terry O’Neill was making a name as a new breed of pop photographer and now he was ready to make his mark across the Atlantic with American movie stars.

Terry O’Neill: When I was 24 I quit the job at the paper and came to work in LA. You know, I wanted to go to Hollywood and I met people like Fred Astaire. Funny enough, I mean, I was always friendly with the Beatles and the Stones. We all used to go to this club called the Ad Lib Club. We used to sit and joke about what job we were going to get when all of this was over.

David Gerlach: O’Neill says there was one other running joke at this club. A joke about when the game would be up for Mick Jagger.

Terry O’Neill: We used to laugh behind his back saying, “Can you imagine Mick singing at 40?” And he’s bloody nearly 70 and he’s still going.

[Music: Rolling Stones - “Under My Thumb”]

Josh Baron: Is there a difference in photographing musicians versus actors or royalty or other people?

Terry O’Neill: Well they’re more laid back and easier to do. I feel always at home. You know what I mean? With a royal it’s more on a formal basis. I mean, the funny thing with movie stars is people think they make the picture. None of them really like being photographed. It’s a privilege really. They don’t mind the movie camera, but the still camera’s not nothing. So you’ve really got to become friendly with them and break down their resistance.

Josh Baron: How does that work as a photographer?

Terry O’Neill: You get a reputation. People open the door to you and suddenly it becomes easy. But you got to get the reputation and I was just obviously sort of taking the right sort of pictures. So it all worked. I was one of the first people… When I first went to Hollywood I was using 35mm, and they’d never seen that. All the stills men used these 5x4s and 10x8s and God knows what.

Josh Baron: Very intrusive.

Terry O’Neill: Yeah. So I was going around with a 35mm and people loved that, because it was all so easy. It wasn’t a big deal to do sort of natural, candid photos. People loved that. That really opened up Hollywood to me. When I came back to England the whole music industry was dead. So I was known for picking out great musicians or future great… And they said ‘Who’s great?’ And I said ‘I had heard this kid called Elton John.’ I think he is American. Well it turned out he was English. So I went to photograph him and nobody really wanted to publish the pictures. Vogue magazine published one and that started the whole thing off.

Josh Baron: Vogue did you say?

Terry O’Neill: Yeah. I mean all the papers thought he wasn’t attractive and all the rest of it. I thought he was one of the greatest piano players I had ever heard. I thought he was fab.

[Music: Elton John “Bennie and The Jets”]

Terry O’Neill: So I really got behind him and of course I ended up doing a lot of work with him.

David Gerlach: That’s photographer Terry O’Neill on why he took pictures of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Elton John long before they were famous and this is Blank on Blank. I do want to thank Josh Baron, the editor-in-chief of Relix Magazine for adding his interview to the archive. Now for more interviews that you can hear nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening. 

David Gerlach: The question today is: just how does a song become more than just a song or even just a popular song? How does it come to define an era and carve out a prominent place in American history? Well, our contributor Josh Baron got an answer when he spoke with folk music legend Pete Seeger. They talked over the phone and Seeger was still going strong past 90 years old.

Pete Seeger: Josh Baron, this is Pete Seeger. But I’m hard of hearing, so you have to speak very, very clearly.

Josh Baron: It’s a deal.

David Gerlach: Now back in 1963, Pete Seeger recorded the song “We Shall Overcome.”  It was played during a famous concert at Carnegie Hall. This just weeks before the March on Washington. And the song proved to be a huge hit for Seeger. But he says this anthem of the civil rights movement has many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. So here’s Pete Seeger on genesis of this very famous American song. This is Blank on Blank.

Pete Seeger: The person who was really responsible for making it the number one song back in those days was a man named Guy Carawan. He got involved in the civil rights movement and was in charge of music at a tiny little labor school call Highlander Folk School. In 1960, Guy Carawan sent messages to the civil rights movement all through the South from Texas to Florida to Maryland and he said, ‘We’ll have a whole weekend of singing in the movement.’ “The movement” meant, of course, the civil rights movement. And Guy introduced this song with a new rhythm that I had never heard before. It’s called 12-8 time. You still have four beats there.

[Music: Guy Carawan “We Shall Overcome”]

Pete Seeger: You divide up each one of the four beats into three short beats. So it’s one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And on the bass string of the guitar you get those 12 beats going and a very steady tempo. And if you clap your hands on it, it’s on the second beat and the fourth beat, not on the first and third. So it’s one, we shall overcome. It was the hit song of the weekend in February 1960. During the next few months it was not a song, it was the song all across the South. I’ve found out since then that the song started off as a union song in the 19th century. It was probably sung fairly fast, “we will overcome, we will overcome.” Because there was a gospel tongue and this is one of the verses in it.

[Music: The Mighty Clouds of Joy - “We Will Overcome”]

Pete Seeger: When it was taught to me I changed it to “shall.” It opens up the mouth better. I recorded it at Carnegie Hall.

[Clip: Pete Seeger Live at Carnegie Hall, 1963]

Pete Seeger: It was the only record I ever made which sold. The record was called “We Shall Overcome.” It sold 500,000 copies, which for me was a huge sale. I was singing for some young Lutheran church people in Sundance, Idaho, and there were some older people who were mistrustful of my lefty politics.  They said: ‘Who are you intending to overcome?’ I said: ‘Well, in Selma, Alabama they’re probably thinking of Chief Pritchett.; they will overcome. And I am sure Dr. King is thinking of the system of segregation across the whole country, not just the South. For me, it means the entire world. We’ll overcome our tendencies to solve our problems with killing and learn to work together to bring this world together.’

[Music: Guy Carawan “We Shall Overcome”]

Pete Seeger: The trouble is I can’t talk anymore, because I’ve arrived where I’m supposed to be.

Josh Baron: Okay.

[Crowd in background cheers]

Pete Seeger: I just walked into the hall where I’m supposed to sing in a few minutes.

David Gerlach: That’s Pete Seeger on the genesis of the song “We Shall Overcome” and this is Blank on Blank. Thanks go out to Josh Baron, the editor-in-chief at Relix magazine for adding his interview to the archive. Now for more interviews you can hear nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: So what’s it like to grow up in a really funny family? Where it’s more than just hilarious road trips or nightly comedy routines around the dinner table? I’m talking about a family where your dad makes a living making people laugh. Does the comedic touch rub off? And can anyone get in the last laugh? Well our contributor, Jane Borden, a comedian herself, got the answer when she interviewed Bob and Chris Elliott. Now Bob’s the father and you may know him from the legendary live comedy duo of Bob and Ray. Chris is his youngest son who’s built his own successful comedy career on TV and in film. So here’s how Bob and Chris Elliott remember growing up in Manhattan. This is Blank on Blank.

Jane Borden: What was it like living with a comedian for a father, Chris?

Chris Elliott: You know, I’ve been asked before. It was pretty much, I think, like growing up with anybody as your father just in the sense it wasn’t a big show business lifestyle that we led. It wasn’t flashy. We lived in New York City. My dad left in the morning to go to work in a suit and carrying a suitcase, and he came home in the afternoon.

Bob Elliott: It was fortunate for me, because I got out of the house early. I had a early morning show.

[Clip:  Bob & Ray Public Radio Show show intro]

I was home the end of the day when they got home from school.

Jane Borden: Did you leave your job at the office, at the studio, or would you come home and joke around with each other?

Bob Elliott: Well, we all joked with each other. I think it was a very happy childhood.

Chris Elliott: Well, I can remember tyring to impress you with my sense of humor. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. There was probably two sets of senses of humor going on: one that I knew would impress my dad; And then, I was the youngest in the family so I was always trying to make my older brother laugh. That sense of humor, too, was slightly more aggressive. So I think probably when I went into the business, my sense of humor kind of combined both and ended up being a little bit more, um…

Bob Elliott: Edgy.

Chris Elliott: Edgy. Thanks, Dad

Jane Borden: (Laughs) Is he always punching up your punchlines?

Chris Elliott: Yeah

Bob Elliott: I’m a good editor.

[Clip:  “Bob & Ray: A Night of Two Stars” at Carnegie Hall in 1984]

Chris Elliott: I think that the Broadway show… when my dad did that. I guess that was ‘69 or ‘70. I was about nine years old and I think that’s when I realized: “Oh no, I should try do this. This is what I should try to do.” Indirectly or directly, I think I always knew I was going to go into it.

[Music: Vitamin String Quartet - “Stand”]

Jane Borden: What’s it like to be the father of a comedian?

Bob Elliott: I try to see everything he does.

Chris Elliott: I’m amazed that you do seem to catch everything I do. Because I don’t announce it. I don’t call anybody in my family and tell them that I’m on. Inevitably, I’ll talk to my dad a few days later and he’ll say he saw me on Letterman or saw the thing on this or that. And he doesn’t have TiVo, so he has his own mind…

Bob Elliott: I don’t have a TV set either. [All laugh.] Which is even more miraculous that I can see what you do.

Chris Elliott: Well so you are making it up then? It’s all just…

Bob Elliott: Yup.

Chris Elliott: Alright, well…

Bob Elliott: It’s ESP.

Chris Elliott: It still means a lot.

[Music continues]

Jane Borden: What’s the worst thing, Chris, you ever did as a child?

Chris Elliott:  That I ever did as a child?

Jane Borden:  What was your biggest punishment?

Chris Elliott: That’s putting me on the spot! What did I ever do? I did things that my dad doesn’t know about that I can not reveal now. When they were up in Maine and I was at home in the apartment. But that’s… everything was cleaned up and put right back in…

Bob Elliott: Son, from what I’ve heard, it was a rousing place. You had a good cleaning service.

Chris Elliott: I do you remember my brother and I throwing eggs at the neighbor across the street in the apartment. The day you and Mom were coming back from Maine, and he had put a huge sign out aimed directly at your bedroom window that said, “Please stop throwing eggs.”

Bob Elliott: You were throwing them from my bedroom window. That was the problem.

Chris Elliott: Well, it wasn’t the problem. That’s where you could throw them. So we had to keep the shades down in your bedroom when you came back and sort of keep you away…

Bob Elliott: I wondered about that long time.

Jane Borden: Now, Bob, what was your disciplinarian style?

Bob Elliott: I didn’t have a great deal of disciplinary ability, I don’t think. I really think I was fairly easy going. The kids were good. They caused no problems…

Chris Elliott: There was a strong sarcastic strain that could come out if you’d done something embarrassing or out of the norm. And that was as bad as any whipping would have been.

Bob Elliott: About the worst thing I did was take “Gilligan’s Island” away from him for a couple of weeks.

David Gerlach: That’s comedian Chris Elliott with his equally funny father Bob on comedy that’s all in the family, and this is Blank on Blank. I do wish to thank Jane Borden for adding this conversation to the archive. You can read more from her interview with the Elliotts at timeoutnewyork.com. She’s the comedy editor over there and she’s also the author of a new book. Check it out. It’s really funny. It’s called “I Totally Meant to Do That.” Now for more interviews you can hear nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.

David Gerlach: This is Blank on Blank.  I’m David Gerlach, and thank you for listening as we build this archive of lost American interviews. Some months back I sat down with Peter Straub. He’s a novelist that works in some of the darkest, bloodiest realms of horror fiction. He’s sold millions of books. And after I pressed record, I thought we’d get into his secrets to co-writing two books with Stephen King. Or maybe how he comes up with his stories in the first place. But instead he dropped a detail of a guilty pleasure. A key to his writing ritual that ends with him playing a retired, blind cop.

Peter Straub: I’ll get to my desk at like 11 o’clock. I’ll do email and work until about 1:30, 2:00 because at 2:00 is the holy hour when I must watch “One Life to Live.”

CLIP: “One Life to Live”

Peter Straub: My soap.

CLIP: “One Life to Live” Theme Song 1985

Peter Straub: I started watching soap operas, because my daughter who watched “All My Children” went to camp and she asked me if I would watch “All My Children” for her and then tell her what happened. So I sat there. I didn’t know who anybody was, so I just made stuff up. I knew there was a character named Erica Kane, so I described Erica Kane going into a jewelry store and killing the clerk and stashing his body behind the counter.

CLIP: “All My Children”

Peter Straub: But after about three or four weeks I knew everybody on the program and I was hooked. So then I just wrote a long serious analysis of what was going, descriptions of what was happening on “All My Children.” When she came back from camp she said, “Daddy you’re crazy.” But then we watched it together.

[MUSIC:  Actress - “Maze”]

Peter Straub: Years went by. I began falling asleep in the middle of “All My Children” and waking up in the middle of “One Life to Live.” Eventually I realized that to me anyhow “One Life to Live” at that time was a much more interesting program. So I stopped watching “All My Children” and I started watching “One Life.”

David Gerlach: Now that was in the 1980s and nearly 20 years later, hundreds, probably thousands of episodes later, Straub’s wife surprised him for his 60th birthday with an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour of the “One Life To Live” set. Straub was thrilled. During the tour he handed out some signed copies of his books that he brought along. And he struck up a conversation with a huge fan of his work: Lt. John McBain. In real life, actor Michael Easton. They soon became good friends and one night they got to talking about another well-known writer who also loved “One Life” and who even appeared on the show as an extra. But thing was he wouldn’t say any lines.

Peter Straub: So I said to Michael: “I would say lines.” He looked at me in astonishment and inquired whether or not I was really serious about being willing to be on this program. I said: “Of course I’m willing. I’d love to be on your program.”

CLIP of Straub on “One Life to Live”

Peter Straub: His name is Pete Braust.

CLIP of Straub on “One Life to Live” Continues

Peter Straub: Pete Braust is a retired, blind cop. We learned he’s blind in the middle of the scene, when he stands up and we discover he is holding a white cane. The whole point is: I’m blind so I hear extremely well; I hear nuances, so I can tell what John is really saying when he’s not saying it.

CLIP of Straub on “One Life to Live”

David Gerlach: Was it difficult playing a blind man? Had you experienced that before?

Peter Straub: No. But it’s not too hard to figure out. There’s one thing I do that no real blind person ever does: when I tap my cane, I look at the cane. (Laughs) Real blind guys have their heads pointed up when they tap.

David Gerlach: Do people see you now? Does anyone notice you from the show?

Peter Straub: Not a single blessed person as ever come up to me and said: “You’re that guy from ‘One Life to Live.’” But it’s still fun to think that in this kind of silly way I reach millions more people than I will ever reach through writing books. I don’t do much once I have them in front of me. But they’re sitting there watching anyhow.

CLIP: “One Life to Live” Theme Song

David Gerlach: That’s horror novelist Peter Straub talking about how he became addicted to the long-running soap opera “One Life to Live.” Now ABC is set to end the show’s run in early 2012 after decades. Though it is expected to find a new life online. Thanks to Eric Mennel and Dave McGuire for producing this interview. Jeffrey Alan Jones brought us our sound logo. And check out BlankonBlank.org for more lost interviews you can’t hear anywhere else. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.