A few years ago, as a dedicated listener to the NPR show This American Life, I experienced a giddy radio moment. Having procured my This American Life secret decoder ring, I awaited the voice of Fred Foy, Lone Ranger radio announcer. I unscrambled the secret message he intoned, and, though the message itself was nothing special, something in the timbre of Foy's voice crackling through the wireless conjured an air of the Atomic Age. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear President Eisenhower next, or to wander out to the driveway to find a Chevrolet with sizeable fins.
The show's inventor and master of ceremonies, Ira Glass, specializes in moments like that, moments that really do tap into some shared notion of the weirdness and singularity of American life and history. When, as an NPR reporter and producer in the mid-'90s, Glass was given a shot at his own show at Chicago's WBEZ, he sought out the unusual convergences of emotion, drama and news that make for compelling radio.
"There's a kind of story that's on public radio—one of those stories where you can't get out of your car—there's something about the way the story's told," Glass said in a recent Advocate interview. "And I thought, OK, what if you did a show—what if you strip away the constraints of 'it'll be about the news, it'll be news and analysis,' and what if you stripped that away and simply tried to make a show entirely of those stories that make you sit in the car? What would that be like? And that seemed kind of doable."
It's the very antiquity of his medium that originally prompted Glass to venture into live stage shows of the sort he brings to Northampton this week. "It came about because we're a public radio show and we had no money for advertising at all," says Glass. "It's the technology of 1930 to publicize something, but radio itself is the technology of 1930, so it fits perfectly.
"I've been doing this since the radio show started on the air. About once a month, I go to a city and try to promote the show. I sit on stage with a mixing console and CD players, and in the CD players I have the kind of music that we use in scoring the stories on our radio show, and then also quotes from specific stories. I try to talk about the radio show, but then I also explain things by narrating my way through actual stories that we've done on the show."
Glass is a busy guy—in addition to the weekly radio show, This American Life has moved to the screen with a Showtime series. And the radio show alone requires herculean effort. Truly compelling moments are not, of course, as easy to come by as average ones, and Glass says any given week requires the carving of 10 or 15 stories down to just three or four.
"Generally, at the end of each week, there's at least one thing that we wish we could put on the air that we don't have time for. For example, last week, to do the elections, we went to Pennsylvania," says Glass. "We finished but then killed a nine-minute story by a really good reporter about trying to reach young people, trying to get young people who are not in college to vote, and why nobody does that. We killed a story on the Amish and how they will vote. We killed a story comparing the field operations between the McCain and Obama camps in just one county, Montgomery County. We killed a story about swing voters in the Philadelphia suburbs that we had done, or started, anyway. We killed an entire conceit that then we brought back in the podcast where we were going to follow talk radio across the state. That we scaled down to one guy's talk radio show on this one very fascinating day, and that we ended up scaling down from a 12-minute thing to a three-minute thing that we put in the podcast, but didn't put into the radio show. So that's kind of typical."
This American Life has not shied away from such political stories. In 2006, the show received a Peabody Award for an episode called "Habeas, Shmabeas," in which the Bush administration's assault on the writ of habeas corpus (the right to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment) was addressed head-on. The episode included some of the first interviews with former Guantanamo inmates.
Considering the ease with which terms like "treason" have been dished out from the right since 2000, it's surprising that This American Life's 2008 pre-election show received more vitriol than the 2006 Guantanamo episode. "People didn't take that [Guantanamo episode] as a partisan knock against anybody," says Glass. "Partly because the questions we were trying to answer were so basic. Like, what is habeas? What does the 'writ of habeas corpus' mean? Because we keep hearing that on the news. And also, at that point, nobody who'd been in Guantanamo had been interviewed at length in the press in America. So a lot of the show is just us talking to a bunch of guys who had been in Guantanamo, asking them, 'How were you treated? What was it like? How do you feel about America?' And truthfully, their answers were so unpredictable—like almost everyone who we interviewed who had been in Guantanamo, they had no problem with America. They hated what happened to them in Guantanamo, but they still liked America.
"One of the things that we did take on in a very frontal way is that the Bush administration had said, over and over—and this is all of them, Bush, Rumsfeld, a bunch of others—had said, 'These are the worst of the worst.' We basically just went to these studies that had looked at, well, what are these cases, and said, actually a lot of these aren't anything—these are not the worst of the worst. It was sort of us just calling them liars. Somehow that didn't seem to exercise people. I think that there was so much basic data we were giving people that they took it that way."
On the other hand, the pre-election show provoked a firestorm. "We just got reamed last week," says Glass. "Just from all sides. The Republicans thought that we were just trying to make the Democrats look good, and the Democrats thought it was entirely an apology for McCain and tried to make Democrats seem like racists, and one Republican former Navy man wrote to thank us for the most objective piece of reporting he'd ever heard. … It was a really crazy assortment of stuff in a way that was sort of stunning.
"We think of ourselves as non-partisan, mainstream journalists, so we do care about that. But then at a point, you have to stop caring about that," says Glass. "People see bias in every direction, and often very unpredictably."
When Glass visits the Calvin this week, his concerns may be less political, but they will certainly be more local. "I'm probably going to play a story from the TV show at the talk, because one of my favorite stories from the show I filmed in Northampton," he said. "I filmed a story about a then-14 year-old who had decided that he wasn't interested in love. He saw his friends starting to fall in love and he decided that was for suckers, like it always leads to something bad and he would have no part of it. It's a really, really lovely story, because the kid was so incredibly charming and charismatic. I may show that. I invited him to come—I hope he doesn't get embarrassed."
Best of all, you won't have to sit in your car with the radio on to hear the whole show.
Ira Glass: Nov. 15, $25-45, 8 p.m., The Calvin Theatre, 19 King St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686.
