Remembering Minimalist Painter Frank Stella

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Terry Gross

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we remember the artist Frank Stella, whose work was regarded as revolutionary. He died of lymphoma Saturday. He was 87.

His New York Times obituary describes him as, quote, a dominant figure in post war american art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence. Endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit, Stella is considered one of the fathers of the minimalist art of the 1960s. His early revolutionary work in the late fifties was a series of black paintings, black stripes separated with thin stripes of blank white canvas. The austerity of those paintings contrasted with the bold brushstrokes and drips of abstract expressionism. Art critic Peter Sheldahl described Stella's impact on abstract expressionism as, quote, something like Dylan's on music and Warhol's on more or less everything, unquote.

In the sixties, Stella moved on to geometrical paintings in vivid, contrasting colors. His work continued to evolve with paintings and abstract sculptures on a large scale. He sometimes used computer technology to generate images that he incorporated into his work. Stella was also admired for his ideas about art. In the mid eighties, he gave the prestigious Norton lectures at Harvard University.

Later we'll hear an interview I recorded with Frank Stella in 2000. Let's start with our first interview from 1985. In the first answer, he refers to Emile D'Antonio, who made the 1972 documentary painter's painting. The black paintings were very controversial. Emile D'Antonio, who had one of your early black paintings, tells a story of, well, he tells a story of how a couple of friends came over, saw the black painting, and one of them threw some recently acquired ether on it, and the other poured her drink over it because they thought, they thought it was some kind of joke or something.

Frank Stella

Well, you are an affront. Yes, that happened. I mean, I guess they were, you know, I guess they struck some people as being aggressively simple. I mean, I think that it's possible to see them, or it was possible then and maybe even now to see them as childlike or maybe even naive. But to tell you the truth, I mean, when I look at them, I don't see them that way.

I mean, you have to really force it to see them. I mean, they seem pretty straightforward paintings. It's not so clear to me that that if you didn't know what the paintings were about and who did them, and I include myself in this, that you could tell that they were either from someone's early work or later work or who or when they were made. I mean, it's not manifestly clear, looking at those paintings, that those are the paintings of a young man, be he good or bad. When you were doing the black paintings, were you uninterested in color at the time?

Well, you know, I was really learning how to paint, and I was really beginning, so I didn't have any particular stake in color one way or the other. To me, the black paintings were obviously exciting, and they were colorful. They were plenty colorful enough to me. I mean, it really was a question of dealing with what I had. I mean, I had arrived at the black paintings, obviously, by painting black over what I had been working on, but it seemed to provide something special, and it was quite colorful to me.

I mean, I didn't think of it as a particularly negative statement about color. When did you know that you wanted to start working with really brash colors? Well, my father said to me, you know, people, you need color in order to sell paintings. And when he said that, I started thinking about, you know, you can't. First I had made black paintings, then aluminum and then copper, and then I started to think about color.

And the only as soon as he said that, the idea popped into my head that I could make paintings pretty much striped paintings pretty much the same way I was making them. And instead of using color, I'd use something nearly as neutral as color, which would be just use it as it came out of the can. Like, I thought of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. And just using those colors. What kind of paints have you used for your color paintings?

Well, I've used all kinds, but, I mean, I find it very hard to restrict myself to what are called artists colors. I mean, I use a lot of commercial paint, and maybe it's just a habit that I picked up from working as a house painter, or, I'm not sure exactly why, but I like commercial paints largely because they combine sort of easily, and it changes the quality of the color. Fine art pigments are more intense in terms of color because they actually have more color in them, more pigment. They have less inert matter in them, and. But they.

It's nice to see a cheap red because you sense something cheap about it when you see it. I like to play a cheap red off against an expensive red somehow. It always sort of is interesting, at least to me, anyway. So you must mix your colors like people in paint stores do. You take big cans and you shake them up a lot.

Unidentified Interviewer

Right. It's not like working on a palette, which is. Right, right. Well, I. Yeah, I mean, Bob Rauschenberger said the whole world is his palette, but I used my whole studio floor as the palette.

Frank Stella

But basically it's a big palette. You go from canned to can, bucket to bucket. I mean, I'm fairly loose with the paint, and I don't mind if I sort of, you know, waste a lot of paint. Can you tell us how you started getting interested in geometric form as the subject matter for your paintings? You know, I never thought about that very much.

I mean, when I was in school, particularly at Phillips Academy, I mean, we had a studio course, and we studied art history. And, I mean, when I saw Mondrian, and then when I saw some abstract painting in the gallery, in the Addison gallery, the idea appealed to me immensely. I mean, it was a tremendous relief to think of the square as subject matter. I mean, it just seemed to me wonderful that I could paint squares while the guy next to me was painting a figure. I mean, when he was painting his sister, I could be painting another square.

I mean, it was easy to paint a square, and I liked doing it. Besides, I mean, it just seemed the big advantage was that I would be able to work sort of really directly on pictorial problems without worrying about figurative technique. I mean, I simply didn't have to worry about those kind of problems. I could really worry about getting a whole picture. Making painting work in sort of general terms, and which I think are still the most important terms.

The sense I could deal right away with a sense of wholeness and a sense of accomplishment. I mean, maybe the paintings weren't great, but they were accomplished paintings in the sense that they were coherent and whole right from the beginning. Painting sometimes becomes decoration when it's, you know, when it's purchased to put on your wall in the living room. What do you think of painting as decoration? I know it's a thought that upsets a lot of artists and that other artists find perfectly pleasing.

Well, I mean, the aim of art is to be more than decoration. I mean, if it's used decoratively, what can you say? I mean, if somebody likes something, you can't stop them from buying it. And if they decide that they really bought your purple picture because they want to hang it on their green wall, you've had it. I mean, it's going to hang on that green wall for a while, but I don't think that that's a really serious problem.

I mean, if the painting will find its way to its home one way or the other eventually, and, you know, if it's a good enough painting, it'll live through its life on the green wall and come to rise above it. You've never been a realist painter. Could you do a realist rendering if you wanted to? I mean, do you have the. No, truly, if I had to draw a picture now of Mickey Mouse, I would fail.

Unidentified Interviewer

Did that ever upset you when you wanted to become an artist? Did you ever think that someone was going to come in and test you and say, hey, we love your work, but prove to us that you can really do a rendering? You know, it never crossed my mind. I mean, I never could see. I mean, I never had.

Frank Stella

I don't, to this day, I don't understand what illustration has to do with making art.

It just, you know, there doesn't seem to be any point to it for me. I mean, and if I, you know, I'm sure that if I had to have people in my paintings, I'd figure out a way to put them in. A lot of modern art has sought after originality to try something new, to have a breakthrough concept or something. Do you think that we put too much of a premium on originality and art? How valuable do you think that is?

I mean, if it's really original, it's great. You know, the big thing in the critical literature is to make a distinction between novelty and originality. It's hard to know what's original. I don't think that you can find too many examples of originality. I mean, usually what we mean in art by originality is doing something first.

And in a sense, Picasso is certainly a very original painter. If he wasn't the first to make cubist pictures, I mean, he was certainly the first to make open sculpture. And, I mean, so he was a contributor on a lot of levels and a lot of ideas that, that were certainly around. They weren't necessarily absolutely his original ideas, but he gave them form, the first form that really sprung them loose in the world. And so there are original people like that, original people who do that kind of original work.

And I think that that kind of work is rightly prized because it is relatively rare. There's an image of the artist as being heroic and romantic, and I think it's an image that was especially expressed through the work of the abstract expressionists and through the way some of them live their lives. What do you think of that notion of the artist as the hero, the. Romantic, you know, I don't have much interest in that. I mean, I don't feel that artistic.

I mean, I feel like a painter when I'm working on the problem of making a painting. But, you know, it's not, I mean, I don't really, I guess I have a slightly or quite a strong anti romantic bias, I guess. Why do you think you have that? Well, I mean, I don't like to, I mean, I find it offensive to think of myself as an artist, I mean, or an artistic personality. I mean, if someone said, well, you have, say, some kind of sensitivity that other people don't have, it seems to be manifestly untrue.

I mean, the only thing that I have is the will to make paintings. I mean, that's why I want to use what I know to make paintings or what I'm able to understand to make paintings. Frank Stella recorded in 1985. He died Saturday. I spoke with him again in 2000.

Terry Gross

We'll hear that interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR. The following message comes from NPR sponsor Saatva founder and CEO Ron Rudson is proud that each Saatva mattress is made to order. Your mattress has a birth date after you order it. Nothing sits in muggy warehouses.

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That is where embedded comes in. We bring you documentary series that will change the way you think about things. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this podcast comes from the Neubauer Family foundation, supporting why's fresh air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. Let's get back to our remembrance of Frank Stella.

Terry Gross

The second time I spoke with him was in 2000. At the time he was creating large, vividly colored sculptures that sharply contrasted with the black canvases that made him famous and controversial in the fifties. Your work has changed so much since the late fifties, when the public became aware of your work and you first became known for your black striped paintings. And these were paintings that helped launch the minimalist movement. Then you did color paintings that often.

Unidentified Interviewer

Used very geometrical forms, and then eventually your work became wildly colored with drips and brushstrokes, and your work became more sculptural with a lot of edges, and you started working with hard materials like metal. Do you feel that by starting with all black and then by adding color and then adding more kind of wild elements to it, that you strip things down to a basic vocabulary of yours and then kind of added things to that vocabulary and built things up again? I suppose. I mean, you can imagine, I guess, a life story any way you want. I mean, it starts with a lot of youthful enthusiasm and ends with mature wisdom, which is a simplification of everything that happens.

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Or you can start out as a sort of aggressive, hard nosed, kind of arrogant youth and pare everything down and dare everybody to say that you can't, you know, that you can't get it all before you even know what it's all about. Did you feel like your early black canvases were a dare? They were, yes, I think they were. I mean, they were pretty aggressive. Yeah, but, I mean, I was.

But I felt very confident about them. Yeah. What did you think were some of the most interesting, on track and off track pieces of art criticism about your early work? Well, I had a hard time with criticism because, you know, I really liked what I did, and I was interested in painting, and I had a kind of critical attitude towards painting, but the writing about it was really a little bit beyond me. I mean, I was a relatively unsophisticated person in that way.

I mean, I really wasn't interested in philosophy or in, you know, in the notion that you could appeal to smart people by saying smart things about painting? I just wanted to make paintings that I liked. I didn't care. Smart people liked them, actually, unfortunately. But, you know, to me, criticism is like, I don't know, a sport or entertainment or something.

It's not, unfortunately, really serious for me. Artist Frank Stella is my guest. What was the impact on you to become famous and controversial when you're in your twenties and just starting off as a painter? Actually, the thing about being famous and never, I wasn't worried about it because the art world was a much smaller place. And I had not much interest in fame.

I liked other artists who were famous and I liked. But I really wanted more than anything to make art that was as good as the good artists were making. I wanted to make art that someday. And I didn't expect it to be that way right away. It would be as good as de Kooning or Klein or Newman or Pollock.

They were my heroes. And I wanted to make art that was as good as that. All I cared about was whether if you put one of my paintings next to a Rothko, it looked okay. That's what I wanted. Actually.

I was. I don't know. Actually, I don't know what fame is really. But I mean, that was what I was interested in. When you were in your twenties in the 1950s.

Unidentified Interviewer

It was a period when some of the very famous artists like Pollock were famous not only for their work, but for their lifestyle. Kind of bohemian lifestyle. A lot of drinking and everything. And some people, in their attempt to be artists, would emulate the lifestyle as well. Did that lifestyle mean anything to you?

Is it. No, it didn't mean much. Largely because I was so young. And it was just very hard to keep yourself together. I mean, to keep working, to get money, to do whatever you have to do.

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I mean, I didn't really actually have that much time to get drunk. You grew up in, I think, a pretty middle class family. Yes. Father was a doctor, a gynecologist. And apparently he worked as a house painter during the depression to put himself through college.

Unidentified Interviewer

And from what I've read, it sounds like occasionally he'd, like, repaint the house you lived in and you'd help him paint. I was in paint all my life, yes. Did you enjoy the feel of house paint or the colors of house paint? Yes, I did. I liked it.

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I mean, I always liked paint. The physicality of it. Yeah. It was never a problem for me. My mother was an artist too.

And she painted with oil. And my father painted with house paint. So I had paint pretty well covered. When I first saw de Kooning and Klein say, for example, and even Pollock. I knew right away how it was done.

I mean, it didn't. It wasn't a problem for me about how to make those kind of paintings. And did you know that more from house paint than anything else? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I knew it from painting houses. And I mean, even at the time that Pollock was doing. I mean, there's a tradition for decorating and dripping paint on floors and on furniture and stuff. So, I mean, it's. It's been around.

I mean, it just hadn't been in the art world. So what connection did you see between, you know, the house painting and the Pollock? Well, I thought, you know, painting a wall is a big physical expanse. You do it. And I could see most of the time that if you stopped halfway through where you were painting your wall, it would be a lot more interesting.

But, you know, no one's going to let you stop instead of having half white and half red. But it was beautiful. And so I liked doing it. And I could easily see that you could make paintings like that. How did you get from painting walls to actually painting canvases?

Well, I mean, I painted all my way through school. I mean, I went to Phillips Academy in Andover. And I took art classes. And then when I was at Princeton, we had art teachers, you know, sort of not. And I took classes there.

And I just, you know, I was around the studios, as it were. Yet the impression I get from reading interviews with you is that you never studied the technique of representational art. That's true. When I was at Phillips Academy, you had to. There was an introductory course which consisted to the arts, to fine art.

And that consisted of an art history course and a studio course. It was a combination. So you went to art history lectures. And then you went to the studio and you made paintings in. One of the prerequisites in the painting course, the first thing was a kind of motif.

So you had to make a painting of a still life. You know, there was something set up, and that was. That was a requirement, but. And then you went on from there. And so I didn't really like it and everything.

And we had a class. And they started showing us about sera and neoimpressionism and things like that. And then I said to myself, oh, that's. You know, it's kind of obvious. So I ran downstairs to do my painting.

And I just made it all splotches. So I made a table with splotches, a cylinder with splotches, some ivy with splotches. And it all held together. It looked sort of like a painting. And everyone else was doing the modeling and the light and shadow and having a wonderful time doing what they were doing.

But I was done. And I showed it to Pat Morgan and he said, all right, all right. And he let me go. And from there on, I just did whatever I wanted. I didn't have to do any more representational art.

Unidentified Interviewer

So how much did you actually do before abandoning it? Well, I did about 20 minutes.

How old were you? I was probably 15. And I'm surprised that your teacher just kind of allowed you to dismiss the technique like that. Look, I was a wise guy, but, you know, a lot of teachers have to deal with kids who are wise guys. I mean, but if you know what you're doing, I mean, it's like, you know, what are you going to do?

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You're the tennis coach, and the kid comes in and he hits the ball 90, 80, 90 miles an hour, and no matter what you do, he hits it back. You know, you can say, well, that's not exactly the right way to do it. And you can talk to him, but you're not going to tell him to forget it. I mean, you know, either you can hit the ball or you can't. What was it that made you realize that you just weren't about representational art?

Unidentified Interviewer

Was it a technical problem or just. Like an aesthetic lack of representational art? On my window, my mother painted Santa Claus on there, and she was always making paintings. I saw representational art all the time. I wasn't very moved by it.

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But when I saw magazine reproductions of Franz Klein and when I saw. And when I saw the Pollock painting and paintings and Hans Hoffman paintings in Patrick Morgan's house and in the gallery at the Addison Gallery, I mean, I was overwhelmed by them. I mean, I just loved them. And I wanted to make paintings like that. And I just wasn't going to let anything keep me from making paintings like that right away.

I wasn't going to wait, you know, ten years and then make an abstract painting. Was there ever a point in your life where you said to yourself, I wish that I had studied representational technique and that I had more of that technique available to me. You know, I didn't understand representational painting very much, and I probably wouldn't understand representational techniques up to a point. But when I, you know, maybe 30 years later, when I. When I saw in the capitoline museum, Caravaggio, St.

John the Baptist, the young St. John the Baptist, it really knocked me out and I really liked it, and it was very real. And the realist technique, I should have said, oh, my God, but I can't do this, and I should have been very worried about it. But actually the effect was the opposite. It was a kind of incredible euphoria about saying, you know, actually that's it, you know, that's what painting is about.

And I realized that Caravaggio's success and what made this painting beautiful, which was its sense of being very real, being very physically present, had to do with the fact not had actually nothing to do with the technique, but with the fact that Caravaggio worked very hard at painting and that he had wanted to make a painting. And once I realized that, you know, the goal is what counts, what you intend to do, what you want to make. Making things pictorial is what's important. The technique you use to make the pictoriality manifest, to make it successful, doesn't really matter. You know, you get the job done whichever way you can.

They never had a problem in the caves in Alaska or wherever, Altamira, they got the job done. When you were a student, were you ever afraid that a teacher would think or fellow students would think that you were a fraud or something because you had skipped that whole step in the evolution of mastering representational? Fortunately, I wasn't a particularly successful student, so all of the other students were more successful or seemed better at it. But I wasn't worried. I mean, the issue of being a fraud, that just never came up because, I mean, I worked.

You know, I was in the studio every day. I was there two or 3 hours a day. All the other students who were better and had this kind of technique, I never saw them there. I mean, they came for one or 2 hours a week. I was there nine or 10 hours a week.

So, you know, I mean, I know who's there and who's not. It doesn't matter what the technique is. It's what the effort is that goes into making art. Have you ever been through a period where you felt that you were at an artistic dead end and you knew that a series you were working on or a direction you were exploring was finished and you didn't know where you were heading yet? A couple of times, yeah.

Unidentified Interviewer

What did you do during that interim where you weren't sure what was next, but you knew what you had been doing was finished? I pretended it wasn't a problem. Why? Why pretend? Was that for your own benefit or so the people around you wouldn't lose?

Sponsor

Right? Or for everybody? Yes. Yeah. Art is a little bit like a performing art.

And if performers, athletes or singers or performers, whatever it is, if you communicate to those around you or outside of you a lack of confidence, you might just as well be dead. They thrive on your confidence. So you got to keep that to yourself if there's any doubts. Yes, it's better. One thing I learned early on was never to, no matter how bad my painting was or never to say anything bad about my own work.

Unidentified Interviewer

How'd you learn that? Because you say and make a casual remark to a friend about you don't like this part of your painting, some little trivial thing. And then you, you know, a couple of weeks later, you'll hear it from a museum director that that painting is a complete failure. Well, there's also a real stock market factor in the art, in arts, you know, where, like somebody's stock, the actual price of their paintings fluctuates, goes up and down over the course of the career, depending. Depending on, I guess, a lot of different variables.

Has that been something that's kind of that you found more. More amusing or disturbing that kind of stopped? No, it's just a reality. And it's a struggle. I mean, I've been up and down and up and down, and it's still the same.

Sponsor

It hasn't actually really changed very much for me. It's still very hard to keep it all together. You know, I could blame myself, I suppose, you know, if I didn't blow so much money or if I didn't spend so much money making art. But in order to do what I want to do, which is basically make art, it's a struggle to raise the money, really, to pay. To pay my own way, without a patron.

It's quite hard. I wonder if it's okay with you. Ask you about your finger. Uh huh. Yeah, it's okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You have one finger that. Yeah, I have a crushed left hand. Yeah.

I have one finger is half, and a couple of the other fingers are damaged. Yeah. It's a crush injury from when I was ten years old. What happened? A concrete urn in the yard was toppled over onto my hand.

That's all it was, a crush injury. And were the parts of your finger amputated on the spot or was that the. No, I mean, when it's crushed, it turns black. I mean, eventually they had to cut it off. Yeah, I went to the hospital.

Yeah. And you work. You do a lot of physical work. It's never interfered. Yeah, but I'm right handed, so it's not.

Unidentified Interviewer

And it's your left hand that was crushed, so you're okay with that? It's not a problem, I think. Did that get you out of the military? Actually, indirectly it did, yeah. And I wasn't thinking about it, but it was a turning point in my artistic career, because when I left school, when I graduated from Princeton, I went to New York and took a loft and started painting.

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And I wasn't really that aggressive about being a painter or being an artist, but I did it because I had to go in that September to go home to Boston to take a physical examination we still had for the draft. And I expected to be drafted. So I thought, well, you know, this is just dead time. I'll paint for a while and then go in the army, and then I'll worry about my career when I get out, after I do my military service. And that really was the only thought that I had.

I mean, it wasn't complicated, and it wasn't conflicted or anything. I mean, I was just painting and living in New York with my friends, meeting people and making paintings. And then I went to take my physical examination, and I didn't really want to go in the army, so I did all the things. I wet my bed. I sucked my thumb.

They just laughed at me. They stamped all my papers. And then the last guy, there were three doctors in a row on the table. And the guy looked at me and he said, let me see your left hand. And I said, yes, sir.

And he picked up an envelope, and he held out the envelope to me. He said, put this between your thumb and your index finger. And I said, yes, sir. Your third finger, your fourth finger, your little finger. And I said, yes, sir.

He said, you know, son, you have faulty opposition. And I said, yes, sir. And he said, you don't want to go in the army, do you? And I said, no, sir. Which I think is not exactly what I should have said.

And he said, you know, he said, you went to Princeton, didn't you? And I said, yes, sir. He said, I don't think you'd make a very good soldier anyway. And he picked up the other thing, and he stamped it, and I was out. How'd you feel?

Well, I felt weird, actually. I mean, I was happy not to. Be in the army. And then I suddenly realized that I was going to go back to New York to my studio, that I didn't have a career ahead of me in the army. They kept telling me my tour of duty would be in West Germany or Korea, and I wasn't sure which fabulous place I wanted to go to, but I had these fantasies of going on tour.

The army tour is a little bit different than my idea of touring. But anyway, I called up my father and I said, gee, I'm sorry, dad. I have bad news. I failed my physical examination. I won't be able to go in the army.

And he said, too bad. It would have made a man of you. And I said, well, I'm just going to go back to my studio. And that was it. Were there things you had to face in the studio that you didn't feel ready to face yet because you thought you were putting all that off till after your tour of duty.

You know? No, I don't know. I mean, I didn't. It wasn't a problem. I don't know why.

I just went back to my studio and kept on painting, you know? You know, life at that age, it was a nice, you know, New York was sort of relatively gentle there. I mean, there were artists around and you could sort of bum around and it was okay. You could manage.

Unidentified Interviewer

Do a lot of young artists want advice from you? I don't see too many young artists. They don't know. I haven't had anyone ask me for advice, actually, I don't think anyone has ever asked me for advice. How do you keep yourself isolated from that?

Sponsor

I don't know. Maybe I just don't attract the kind of people that need advice, I hope. I don't know. I'm not sure. Well, Frank Stella, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you. It was fun. Frank Stella recorded on fresh air in 2000. He died of lymphoma Saturday. He was 87.

Terry Gross

We have another remembrance coming up. Duane Eddy, one of the most influential early rock and roll guitarists, died last week. We'll feature a 1988 interview with him after a break. This is FRESH AIR. The economy right now is bewildering, impenetrable, inconceivable.

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Not when you have the indicator buggy in your ears in under ten minutes. Every day, we simplify the complicated news. Like, how does inflation drop? What the heck is this sPac? Why are trendy little high fiber sodas.

Suddenly dominating store shelves? And more. Listen to the indicator from planet money and NPR. Okay, close your eyes for a second. Now imagine you're on your dream vacation.

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No work calls to answer, no text messages to respond to. Just your suitcase and an opportunity. The opportunity to just take yourself out. Of your routine and travel deeper. How to actually take that dream trip that's on the Life Kit podcast from NPR.

Summer is for going to the movie theater because it's too hot to stay home. It's for driving with the windows down, listening to your favorite music, stretching out while you're on vacation to gobble up a tv show for a guide to some of the tv, movies and music we are most excited about this summer. Listen to the pop culture Happy hour podcast from NPR.

Terry Gross

One of the most influential guitarists in early rock and roll, Dwayne Eddy, died last week. He was 86. He was one of the first instrumentalists to become a rock and roll star. His New York Times obituary describes him as, quote, having played a major role in establishing electric guitar as the predominant musical instrument in rock and roll. His hits included Ramrod and 40 Miles of Bad Road.

His first top ten hit was this one rebel rouser.

I spoke with Dwayne Eddy in 1988. His hits from the fifties and sixties had been reissued on CD, and he'd just released his first new album in a decade. When he was a teenager in Phoenix, Arizona, Duane Eddy was playing country music at local clubs. But in 1955, when Elvis Presley's music hit Phoenix, it was easy to switch over to rock and roll. I always said most rock and roll is country music with drums, and you had a drummer and maybe a saxophone player, too in those days, and you were doing rock and roll.

Unidentified Interviewer

I read somewhere that some of your early records were cut in a studio that didn't have an echo chamber, so that you faked one. Well, no, actually didn't fake it. What we did was we went out and bought a. A big several thousand gallon water tank and put a speaker in one end and a mic in the other, and that was our echo and used to sit outside the studio and we'd have to go out and chase the birds off of it in the morning, which is great fun. And if a fire engine came by while we were in the middle of a take, that was it for that take, I mean, because it'd reverberate around through the tank.

You had hit records of the themes from Peter Gunn and from Paladin. Was it your idea to record those? Not Peter Gunn. That was the sax players. Steve Douglas, he came in one day and wanted to do it in an album.

Duane Eddy

We were in the midst of our second album and he had this idea, he'd worked it out on sax, that he could do it. And I wasn't all that anxious to do it. There wasn't much for me to do at the time, but I did work out an ending and, I mean, an intro and the middle part and everything. So we did it for the album and then Australia released it as a single and it went to number three there. So Great Britain decided to release it as a single a few months later and it went to their top ten.

So finally America decided to. Jamie, records here has decided to release it and it became a hit here as well. You recently rerecorded the Peter Gunn theme. Why did you decide to do that? And did you do anything differently on it that then?

Unidentified Interviewer

Did you do anything on it that you would have liked to do the first time around, but couldn't. No, this was an entirely different approach, entirely different record. This was with a group called the Art of Noise, and they're an english group and very avant garde and very big hit with the dance crowd these days. And they contacted me and I fell in love with the idea. I thought it was great because the art of noise has their own sound.

Duane Eddy

I know it's very strange and unusual to some ears, but it is very distinctive and I figured it might work and it did.

Unidentified Interviewer

Why did you retire from music? And when did you first retire from music?

Duane Eddy

Well, when my record stopped selling, I sort of retired. It was mandatory retirement. Although in 1970, I tried a record called Freight Train with Jimmy Bowen producing, and it got in the top ten of the easy listening charts, which kind of seemed strange to me from the short space of a few years. I'd gone from being rock and roll and hard rock and all that to easy listening. But things had changed so much in the intervening years that that's what it was determined as being.

Unidentified Interviewer

Your new album is your first album. In America in a long time. A couple of the songs on the new album are in a minor key and have this mysterious sound to them that really almost reminds me of certain tv themes, westerns or spy shows. And I wonder if you feel that way, too. Yeah, I think most everything on the album could fit as a theme for some tv show or movie.

Duane Eddy

Recall the one song Jeff Lynn wrote called the theme for something really important because we couldn't come up with a title. We thought of all these grand titles and thought it was a bit too pompous sounding, so we just decided to instead of title it to describe it.

Unidentified Interviewer

You must have, over the years, heard many guitarists who obviously patterned their sound on yours. And I wonder what you think about when you hear that. I'm really knocked out when I hear that. That got me through a lot of lean years when I thought everybody had forgotten about me and things weren't going very well and all that sort of thing that happens to people and it happened to me. And then all of a sudden I turn on the radio and hear somebody doing my sound and I thought, hey, great.

Duane Eddy

This is wonderful. Haven't been forgotten. And so it was a great source of happiness to me. Well, I wish you the best with your new album, and I thank you very much for talking with us. Well, thank you.

Terry Gross

My interview with Duane Eddy was recorded in 1988. He died last week. He was 86. After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review calm Tobin's new novel Long Island, a sequel to his best selling novel, Brooklyn. This is FRESH AIR.

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Why is everyone so obsessed with traditional wives or trad wives on social media? This week, we're talking about the viral videos of women making marshmallows and mozzarella from scratch, and how behind the sheen of calm kitchens and cute fits, there's some interesting pessimism about our modern world. And that's worth digging into. Next time on it's been a minute from NPR. Moms know the ups and downs of life.

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Subscribe for yourself@wh.org. Freshair novelist Colm Tobian has said he always had a sense that he would return to the story of the heroine of his 2009 novel, Brooklyn. Our book critic Marine Corrigan says she's glad Tobin followed his instincts. Here's her review of Long island, the. Sequel to Brooklyn, the outer boroughs of New York City to Long island.

Maureen Corrigan

Such was the exodus route of many mostly white, working and middle class New Yorkers during the late 1960s and seventies, when the city was perceived to be in decline. So it makes historical sense for Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller Brooklyn to be called Long island. Where else would Tobin's heroine and irish immigrant who married italian american plumber Tony Fiorello be likely to end up? But as anyone who's read Brooklyn or seen the 2015 film starring search Sharon knows Eilish is a restless soul. The opening shocker on the second page of Long island is that the easy going Tony, her husband of now 20 years, has been getting restless himself.

Before I go further, a quick word about sequels. I don't usually review them because not everyone has read the first book or seen the movie, but in this case it would be worth your time to catch up. Long island, together with Brooklyn, is a devastating diptych about a woman in two different seasons of her life thrashing against the constraints of fate. Tobin, whose novels have animated greek myths as well as the subtle minds of masters and magicians like Henry James and Thomas Mann, also invests even these routine lives with tragic dignity. Long island opens in 1976, when a strange man appears at Eilish's door and bluntly announces that Tony has impregnated his wife.

The humdrum stasis of Eilish's suburban world shatters as if Zeus himself had struck the house with a thunderbolt. The man also informs Eilish that when the baby is born, it will be deposited on her doorstep. What ensues for the remainder of part one of this novel is a fraught pantomime of silence and secrets. Eilish and Tony's house stands in a cul de sac where all the other houses are filled with Tony's extended family, his parents, two of his brothers, their wives, and lots of kids. The Fiorello enclave, which Eilish thinks of as the great family net, is as watchful and stifling as the town of Enniscorthy in Ireland, where Eilish grew up.

When she learns that she's one of the last family members to find out about Tony's infidelity and that her mother in law, who lives next door, has already agreed to adopt the baby, Eilish realizes she has no one to turn to. If she told someone about it, Eilish thinks, then she might know how to feel what she should do. She had never confided in her mother, who was in any case in Ireland, with no telephone in her house. Her two sisters in law, Lena and Clara, were both from italian families and close to each other, but not to Eilish. Given that the situation at home is unbearable, Eilish decides to visit her 80 year old mother back in Ireland, a place she hasn't returned to in almost two decades, with good reason.

There she'll discover, much as another Long Islander named Jay Gatsby once did, that you can't repeat the past. Tobin floats with ease between time periods in the space of a sentence. But it's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working class, catholic pre therapeutic world where people never speak directly about anything, especially feelings. Here's the conclusion of a scene where Eilish and her mother in law, Francesca, have been sitting in Eilish's kitchen, having a halting, evasive non conversation about the baby. Francesca stood and waited for Eilish to stand up, too, and accompany her out, but Eilish remained seated.

Francesca left the room and made her way alone to the front door. Since her mother in law was a stickler for form, Eilish knew this studied insult would not be forgotten. It would create a chasm between them that would not be easily bridged, and that made Eilish feel satisfied that something at least, had been achieved. There are no innocents in Tobin's world. Every character has at least a slim streak of malice in them.

Indeed, the bitter pleasure of the Ireland section, which composes the bulk of the novel, lies in witnessing how characters Eilish underestimated years before exact their own long delayed retribution. Silently, of course, nobody in this world would ever dare say a word. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Long island by Colm Tobin. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salat, Phyllis Myers, Roberto Shorrock, Ann Marie Boltonato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram.

Terry Gross

Our digital media producer is Molly CV. Nesper, Thaya Challoner directed today's show. Our co host is Tanya Moseley. I'm Terry Gross. Taylor Swift has dropped a new album.

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Listen to embedded for moments that stay with you. I could smell the smoke, I could smell the dust. Voices that resonate, stories that change the way you think about your life. How. How did we get here?

The embedded podcast is NPR's home for original documentary series. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I hear you have a birthday coming up. Yay. If you're listening to this, that means you have a birthday coming up eventually.

And here at Lifekit, we want it. To be a special one magic can happen and good luck can happen and serendipity can happen if we're open to it. How to have a good birthday even if you're not a birthday person? That's on the Life Kit Podcast from NPR.

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Remembering Minimalist Painter Frank Stella

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