Winter is the perfect time to subscribe to the Joe Frank show. I finally broke down and put up my 9.99 for a monthly premium membership (all the shows for the past thirty years or so) and am enjoying them immensely. Hard to believe I have been a fan of this man's work for over twenty years. It was around 1987 that I switched on the kitchen radio one late night and heard this stream of unbelievable strangeness come forth. The man's voice has an amazing darkness to it. And one thing I am discovering by being able to listen to all these shows is how much ambient/drone he uses. This must have affected me more than I thought, and was probably the driving force that made me suddenly realize that I loved ambient music decades later.
There is nothing like this on the radio these days. It's hard to imagine that Joe Frank's work was once mainstream on NPR, for many years. The stuff that is on now, in its place so to speak (Wiretap, This American Life), is so watered down and derivative of Joe Frank, it makes me sad for the younger generation who are missing out on what radio can be.
