Garrison Keillor looks back on decades of Prairie Home, the Lakers hire their 4th coach in as many years and we taste test CaliBurger, Pasadena's newest In-N-Out Clone
The Garrison Keillor exit interview: He was surprised to find Prairie Home was a good Companion
Off-Ramp's John Rabe conducts Garrison Keillor's exit interview. Keillor hosts his final "A Prairie Home Companion" July 1 at the Hollywood Bowl, which will be broadcast Saturday, July 2 at 6 p.m. on KPCC. New host Chris Thile takes over Oct. 15.
On July 6, 1974, then just 32-year-old Garrison Keillor hosted his first live "Prairie Home Companion" variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. Rejected by NPR's then-President Frank Mankiewicz, the show became a huge national hit and won a Peabody in 1980. The success of the show — at one time it had 4.1 million listeners — eventually allowed Minnesota Public Radio to, among other things, transform KPCC into a leading all-news station.
Keillor had a stroke in 2009, from which he's recovered, but in May of this year, he suffered a seizure and was checked out at the Mayo Clinic.
First of all, how are you feeling?
Garrison Keillor: I feel terrific. Never felt better. Everybody has brain episodes, sometimes self-inflicted, and otherwise they just come about. It's a mysterious organ compared to the heart. They know everything about the heart, they can put cameras up inside it, and the brain is very very murky. Neurology is no more a science than, I don't know, astrology or something.
You're doing your final show at the Hollywood Bowl in the beginning of July, which is almost exactly 42 years since the first "Prairie Home Companion." I want to know first, why did you pick doing the final show at the Bowl as opposed to doing it in St. Paul?
I've been suspended from broadcasting, John, for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and so they kicked me out. I didn't have a choice.
What's the real reason?
(Laughs) Do you have some kind of a truthful sensor? Why won't you accept that answer?
Because after doing a show for 42 years, you could pick exactly how you want to go out.
Why did I pick that? Because it's the end of the season. We do the show in these very nice units called seasons, and you know, you wouldn't want to do it March, because that's not the end of the season. So, July 1st, Hollywood Bowl.
Are you okay ending at the Hollywood Bowl and not in St. Paul? Don't St. Paulites deserve a final goodbye?
No, because I'm coming back here to St. Paul. They won't say goodbye to me. I'll be all over the place. I'll be shopping at Kowalski's. They'll see me at the Dairy Queen down on Lexington. I'll be at the public library. I'll be sitting down watching the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I'll be at the opera. I'll be everywhere.
What will your thoughts be as you're standing on the stage doing this final show?
The same as they would be for any other show. What do I do next? What do I say? What is going on in Lake Wobegon? Confusion.
You're being difficult! I'm trying to get at when is it going to hit you that you've done 42 years of this and this is going to be the end of it?
Oh, it hits me already. It's been on my mind for months, and I'm happy about it. Of course I am. If I didn't feel good about it, then I wouldn't have done it.
But if you're standing on the Hollywood Bowl stage with all of those people loving you... you'd be like Bernie Sanders at his final rally. That's something that I would find very hard to give up.
Bernie may find it hard to give up, but he's got to do it. You know. Why be a jerk?
Keillor went on to say, when asked what he's accomplished with the show over four decades, "I think that I've kept people company, at a time when they were looking for something." They're writing, he says, to tell him that listening to the show has gotten them though loneliness and heartache. "I had no idea, of course. I was only amusing myself." The Famous Self-Deprecator will admit, "It's interesting to find that you were of use."
Back in the 1970s, the show came out with a t-shirt and poster, which Keillor mentioned on PHC, and they were inundated with orders. That success spurred Minnesota Public Radio to form a for-profit arm called Rivertown Trading, a catalog company selling public radio-oriented items -- books on tape, book lights, etc. -- that MPR sold to Dayton Hudson in 1998 for $120m. That allowed MPR to create public radio's biggest endowment at the time and -- among other ventures -- come to California and transform KPCC, a small eclectic music station with perhaps 150,000 listeners, to the news station it is today with a weekly audience of more than 800,000 listeners.
Bill Kling, American Public Media's President Emeritus and the founder of Minnesota Public Radio, says that "might be an exaggeration." The sale of Rivertown and the huge boost to the endowment, he says, gave APM the ability - the "credit, the backing, the cash flow" - to take risks like transforming KPCC, but that the work was done by supporters in Southern California.
Kling hired Garrison in 1969. He remembers him as a "gangly college graduate hoping to make a career in writing; it was going kinda slow." Keillor first spiced up the morning classical music show with pop music, then started bringing in performers. Kling says he drew the line at a glass harmonica player, but suggested Keillor do a weekend show with music.
What was Keillor like to work with, I asked. Would he come into the office, put his feet on the desk, and chat? "No, none of the above. It's not what he's about; he's an internal guy. Garrison works all the time." If he has five free minutes, "he'll start to write something, or he'll observe something that he'll turn into a sketch."
Is it time for Garrison to retire? Kling says it doesn't matter what he thinks, but that "Garrison is as good if not better than he has ever been, but he wants to do other things. I think the Hollywood Bowl show is going to be an enormously emotional show because for him it really is letting go. I mean he'll show up again, of course he'll be on the show when Chris Thile is doing it, and you'll hear him again, but in terms of the show that he's in control of, that'll be the last one."
When I counter that Garrison says he's just going to be "the grey eminence in the background," and hasn't said he'll be actually on APHC 2.0, Kling says, simply, "Sure."
Listen to the bonus audio for much more from Bill Kling on Keillor's early years.
This story has been edited from it's original form to add comments from Bill Kling.
Jesse Thorn of Bullseye: Keillor's departure could clear space on the dial for other voices
Millions of Garrison Keillor's fans will mourn when he quits hosting "A Prairie Home Companion" after the finale Friday at the Hollywood Bowl (the KPCC broadcast is Saturday, July 2 at 6 and Sunday, July 3 at noon). But there will be many who will shrug, or celebrate.
Jesse Thorn, the host of "Bullseye," which we air Saturday at 3 p.m., is in one of the latter camps. "I have to speak from self-interest," he halfway laughs. "As someone who for the last 10 years or so has been trying to get an hour-long national show onto public radio stations, it's good news for me that he's retiring. For much of my career, and I mean no disrespect towards Garrison Keillor, [my distributors] have been saying to me every six months, 'Don't worry, Garrison Keillor is about to retire.' I see this an an exciting opportunities for new voices on public radio."
Thorn acknowledges that Keillor was a groundbreaker, a game-changer, that he has had an extraordinary career, that he gave voice to a part of the country that is often ignored or mocked and that he was an early and loud supporter of roots music. He even likes Keillor's writing. But he candidly just doesn't like the radio show.
"I'm 35, and Garrison Keillor's been doing his show since before I was born. For me as a teenager, when I turned on the radio and heard 'This American Life,' what I thought was, 'Oh my gosh, this is something that includes me.' When 'A Prairie Home Companion' was on the radio, I did not feel welcomed by it."
"A Prairie Home Companion" occupies prime real estate on the radio, at least two hours every weekend, he says — "Four hours in a lot of places. Many places play APHC twice per weekend." He's right. If you figure roughly that the prime listening hours are from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., that's 24 hours per weekend, and Keillor is using 1 out of 6 of them on many or most stations.
Thorn says, "The truth is that the structure of public radio, because it's donor-supported, makes it very difficult for program directors to change their schedules, and that makes it very hard to grow new hit shows."
How does the real science behind 'Finding Dory' and 'Finding Nemo' hold up?
Pixar's "Finding Dory," the long-awaited sequel to "Finding Nemo," opened in theaters all over America this month. KPCC's critics liked it OK, but what about the science?
Milton Love is a marine biologist at UC Santa Barbara. He says the film's animators did a great job showing the biology of these fish accurately — they look pretty darn realistic, right? But it's not perfect.
First: gender. Remember how Nemo lost his mom in the original film? Impossible.
"Nemo is an anemone fish, and anemone fish all over the world are what are called 'sequential hermaphrodites,'" said Love. Wait, what does that mean?
"If the female dies, the male becomes the female. And the largest juvenile becomes the new male."
That doesn't mean Dory — the perpetually forgetful blue tang — is off the hook.
"Nobody seems, at least in the movies, to be terribly concerned about the memory issue. They're concerned about finding her," said Love.
Love says reef fishes generally have very good memories. They're territorial fish — if they can't remember where their territory is, how do they defend it? Or feed in it?
Dory should know where her home is, then, right? "The fact that she can't speaks of some real problems. And it's probably not senility — that would be where we would first go," said Love. Fish generally don't get senility.
"What I fear is going on — and which is being given short shrift by the film — is that she's suffering parasitic worms in her brain," Love said.
It's as serious as it sounds. Parasites like that alter a fish's behavior, and let them be more easily eaten by predators.
Lastly, the fish in Nemo's universe exhibit a plethora of dialects and accents. How about that?
"I don’t think they’ve ever looked at accents, but many fishes do communicate with sounds — all kinds of sound; croaks and strumming sounds," said Love.
At the end of the day, creative license wins out. And brain parasites are gross, anyway.
3 non-basketball questions for new Lakers head coach Luke Walton
This week, the Lakers officially brought aboard their fourth head coach in as many years: Luke Walton, a former Laker and the son of former NBA and UCLA great Bill Walton. Before he took this job, he was an assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors, a team that narrowly lost the NBA Championships to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
It’s a weird new chapter for the Lakers. It's the team's first season without Kobe Bryant on the roster 20 years.
The day after the Warriors' loss, Walton drove from Oakland to Los Angeles, and on Tuesday he gave his very first press conference as the team's head coach. After the conference wrapped up, he answered for us these questions three:
Did you really drive down here on Monday from Oakland?
I drove down Monday morning. Today's Tuesday, right? Yeah, I drove down Monday morning, got here around 5 or 6, and here we are.
It was a crazy drive. It was beautiful outside. The emotions were high about coming to this incredible opportunity in L.A. There were times I was sad and depressed about leaving what we had going up in Oakland.
Five hours of that, and I was pulling up in my driveway.
Five hours is pretty good time.
Call it five-and-a-half. I stopped at the In-N-Out Burger on Kettleman.
What's one thing you missed most about Los Angeles in your time away?
A lot of my family lives down here in Southern California — three brothers, bunch of nieces and nephews, my mom and dad are still all down in Southern California. It's going to be great to to see them more often again — and the beach down here is tough to beat.
You were born in San Diego. You went to college in Tucson. You just came from the Bay Area, now you're in Los Angeles. Those are probably four of the greatest burrito cities in America. Which city has the best?
San Diego. The California burrito's delicious. Taco shop to taco shop, I'd have to go with San Diego. You get carne asada, they throw french fries in there, guacamole. Sometimes they'll go sour cream, pico de gallo. That's the foundation of that burrito.
In-N-Out rival CaliBurger opens its first California location in Pasadena
Protect your pet from the Southern California heat wave
We had a nice break from the hot weather for a long time — but then boom, in came the heat wave. And with the 90- and 100-degree weather that's with us for a couple weeks, you'll want to prevent heatstroke in your pet — and know what to do if it happens.
For advice, I went to the Pasadena Humane Society to get tips from Laurel Birmingham, the shelter's health care manager.
Wanna know how hot it is for your pet? "Put on a fur coat," Birmingham says. That's what it's like for dogs and cats, except they can't perspire like you and me. And if you can't take the heat on the sidewalk on your bare feet, it's certainly too hot for your dog.
A tip from Laurel: buy an electronic rectal thermometer now and keep it on hand — properly labeled. "The dog's core temp is between 100-102," she says. "If it's over 103, they're in the danger zone."
Listen to my interview with Laurel above, and check out these tips from the Pasadena Humane Society website:
- Keep your pets hydrated with plenty of cool water.
- Provide shade and water, if your pet is outside.
- Avoid exercising pets during peak hours. Exercise them early morning or later in the evening.
- A dog’s paw pads can burn easily when walking on asphalt, artificial grass, cement or other similar surfaces. Walk them later in the evening or early in the morning when it’s cool.
- Apply sunscreen on your dog’s nose, ears and belly to prevent sunburn. Ask your veterinarian what brand you should use.
- For rabbit owners: Place a two-liter frozen bottle of water in your rabbit’s hutch. This acts as a natural air-conditioner.
- For cat owners: Place your cat in a sink or bathtub with a few ice cubes to play with. This way your cat can have fun and stay cool at the same time.
- For dog owners: Fill a wading pool with shallow water and let your dogs play around in it. Make sure to supervise your dogs while they play.
- Do not leave your pet in the car.
- Pets exhibiting signs of heat exhaustion (e.g., excessive panting, heavily salivating, and/or immobile) should be taken immediately to a veterinarian for assessment.
Song of the week: The Americans - "The Right Stuff"
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “The Right Stuff, the latest single by the Los Angeles band The Americans. True to their name, "The Right Stuff" is American as apple pie — or Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, at least.
https://soundcloud.com/theamericansmusic/02-the-right-stuff2
Formed in 2010, the Americans have served as the backing band for Lucinda Williams, Nick Cave, and Courtney Love. They've performed on the Late Show with David Letterman, and you can hear their music on PBS's upcoming documentary American Epic.
Check out a video of The Americans performing "The Right Stuff" live for Oregon Public Media: