Mel Brooks

DATE April 20, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Mel Brooks talks about his career
TERRY GROSS, host:

You know, some of my very favorite Mel Brooks moments are your big production
numbers, your Broadway showstoppers with big choruses for grim and totally
inappropriate subjects like "Springtime For Hitler" in "The Producers," or
"The Inquisition, What a Show(ph)" in "History of the World--Part 1." Did
you want to be on Broadway for real when you were growing up or did you want
to be a song-and-dance man?

Mr. MEL BROOKS (Director): To be perfectly frank, yes. The answer to all
those questions is, yes. Yes, I wanted more than anything--I wanted to sing
and dance and jump up and down on Broadway. And even more than that, on the
big silver screen. And my heroes when I was young were, of course, Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly, and I loved all those great old black-and-white
musicals like "The Gay Divorcee" and "Top Hat" and the color movies that MGM
made with Gene Kelly, you know. Fantastic. I loved "Singin' in the Rain." I
mean, who doesn't love a great musical? And in all of my movies, whether it's
proper or not, I squeeze in a number, you know.

GROSS: So when you were growing up and you really wanted to be on Broadway or
to be a song-and-dance man, how far did you get with that? Or how far did you
think you could get singing and dancing? Did you have...

Mr. BROOKS: Oh, I did it but I did in the sour cream factories of the Borsch
Belt, in the Catskills just outside of New York. There were these resort
hotels, and you started just by tending the row boats or being a bus boy and
you prayed you'd end up on stage, you know, in a variety show on Saturday
night. And I became a drummer, and I got out to the stage because the comic
got sick. So the boss Pinkus Cohen(ph)--redundant name. You didn't need both
Pinkus and Cohen. One would have covered it. He used to call me Melbmnnnn,
M-E-L-B-M-N-N-N-N. He'd say, `Melbmnnnn, the comic is sick and we know you're
cute and funny so jump on the stage and amuse the guests.' So that night I
went on the stage and I never went back to the drums.

GROSS: What did you do that night?

Mr. BROOKS: Well, that night I did a different--that's a good question,
Terry. I like you, Terry Gross. This is going to be a great show because I
like you and I like me, so I'm going to be in heaven, you know. What did I
do? That night I did a different kind of comedy because there was a maid who
was locked in the closet that day. She had somehow locked herself in a broom
closet, in a storeroom closet and she couldn't get out. And she was pounding
on the door and screaming in Yiddish, `(Yiddish spoken),' and screaming. And,
finally, somebody heard her, opened the door and let her out. So they let
Sophie out and she had a little attack of tears and nerves and then went back
to taking care of the rooms.

So everybody at the place knew it. It was like a scandal, `Poor Sophie.' So
the first thing I did that night, I said, `Good evening, ladies and Jews.'
You know, I did my thing. And I said, `(Yiddish spoken).' I just screamed
and then the place was pandemonium, you know, because they knew about it and I
decided to do like real comedy, peoples' comedy, or comedy that everybody knew
instead of making up, quote, "jokes." And I've been doing that type of comedy
ever since.

GROSS: I want to get back to your big, lavish production numbers like
"Springtime For Hitler." What possessed you, the first time you did one of
those? Like "Springtime For Hitler," for instance. It's such a wonderful and
really funny number, and I'm sure a lot of people thought it was just in
horrible taste.

Mr. BROOKS: It was in horrible taste. It was in execrable taste. I'm
ashamed of it to this day, but I do like that juxtaposition of those two
textures, you know. Let me tell you, the song itself composed--nobody knows I
wrote the music as well as made up those words. So I wrote the words and the
music to "Springtime For Hitler." The song is beautiful. People listen to
it, even today and they don't know it's "Springtime for Hitler." They listen
to the orchestration or they listen to the nonvocal version of it in many
cities. I was just in Chicago. There is an elevator playing "Springtime For
Hitler."

GROSS: Really?

Mr. BROOKS: And there are people going up and down but it just goes `dah,
dah, dah, dee, dah, dah, dah, dah.' They don't know it's (singing) `It's
springtime for Hitler and Germany.' They don't know that. They just hear the
music and they sway until they get to the 22nd floor, you know. And it's
amazing. And so the melody is almost like a Richard Rogers melody and that's
why, when you hear these crazy words against it, it all falls into place
beautifully.

GROSS: What do you think your most misunderstood scene is in any of your
movies?

Mr. BROOKS: I'd think it's--that's a good question, Terry Gross. That's a
very good question. What is my most misunderstood, or misinterpreted theme?
Yeah, vulgarity, or bad taste. I use it, therefore I'm painted with that
brush. Critics, and a lot of people don't understand that bad taste is a
wonderful device for unearthing truth that is all around us and evoking
laughter. So that is the bane of my existence, is that I'm continually
accused, like the overhead shot of the swastika in "Springtime For Hitler." I
mean, it was a very important point in a very important musical in a very
important story. So I don't think--they just single out, you know, something
that they feel is in horrible taste and they don't know that it's used to
illuminate something.

GROSS: When you realized, as much as you loved song and dance and Broadway
shows and musical comedy movies, when you realized that you probably weren't
going to be a leading man--you weren't going to be cast as a leading
man--well, eventually, you started casting yourself as a leading man in
parodies of those kinds of movies. But were you ever really heartbroken,
knowing that you wouldn't be in the serious versions of those movies.

Mr. BROOKS: That's a good question. Yeah, in my heart of hearts, I always
wanted to be Errol Flynn. Yeah, I was heartbroken. And I always wanted the
most beautiful, long-waisted, long-legged women in the world to fall on their
knees and pray to me. But as life and God would have it, it was the other way
around. Every time I see a tall, beautiful woman, I just crash to my knees
and I pray to her. I say, `Please, just give me a slap in the face,
something. Show me that you know I'm alive, too.'

I made myself a leading man in "High Anxiety" because I always wanted to
imitate Frank Sinatra. So there was a chance to write a song called (singing)
`High anxiety,' and sing it at a bar, which was a dream of mine. And I made
myself--I guess I made myself a leading man because, in real life, I knew I
could never be a leading man.

GROSS: Well, I'm going to play some of "High Anxiety."

Mr. BROOKS: Oh, thanks, Ter.

(Soundbite from "High Anxiety")

Mr. BROOKS: (Singing) `High anxiety whenever you're near. High anxiety,
it's you that I fear. My heart's afraid to fly. It's crashed before. But
then you take my hand, my heart starts to soar once more. High anxiety, it's
always the same. Anxiety, it's you that I blame. It's very clear to me I've
got to give in. High anxiety, you win.'

GROSS: We'll get back to our interview with Mel Brooks after a break. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our 1991 interview with Mel Brooks. His new
adaptation of his comic movie musical "The Producers" just opened on Broadway.

What kind of roles do you think you would have gotten if you weren't writing
your own?

Mr. BROOKS: Oh, my favorite role would be the king of Germany, the `kaiser
roll.' That would be--no. Two demerits for that. I can't help it. Look,
when you work in the mountains, it never leaves you. You know, cheap jokes,
cheap jokes. I mean, I'm a purveyor of cheap jokes. Now what kind of roles
would I--say again, Terry?

GROSS: What kind of roles do you think you would have gotten do you think, if
you weren't writing your own?

Mr. BROOKS: Well, in the '30s I probably would have been a bell boy in hotel
movies, you know. And then, I guess, in the '40s, I would have been, you
know, like, you know, a good-natured soldier from Brooklyn. I know the roles
they would have given me. They would have called me `Brooklyn. Hey,
Brooklyn,' you know. And then in the '50s I would have been the band boy with
the rock 'n' roll group, you know, touring the--I know that's why I wrote
these movies, you know, or else I would have been stuck with all these parts.
I would have been called Blinky and Winky and Knot.

GROSS: Before you started writing for "The Sid Caesar Show," did you have any
outwardly Jewish people to see yourself in, outside of the Catskill comics;
but people who were not only Jewish in show business but were doing sketches
about being Jewish, or who were writing stories about being Jewish, or, you
know, who were Jewish in any outward way?

Mr. BROOKS: Good question. No, the only role models had gone away and that
was Yiddish Theater. Yiddish--you know, the...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BROOKS: ...Yiddish Theater of 2nd Avenue in New York. And that was long
gone by the time I had made my way into show business. I had only seen one
play. And the second act of the Yiddish Theater was an incredible device. It
was great. It was the most emotional point in the play. This is the second
act curtain I'm talking about, before you went into the third act. This is to
hold the audience so that it would sit through the third act. And the
daughter would come home to them. She was missing, and she would come home
and she would enter stage left and the mother was stage right looking at her.
And she would open her coat and she would show this big belly, and the mother
would scream in Yiddish, `(Yiddish spoken)' and she'd faint and the curtain
would come down, and that is, the mother would say, `She's pregnant.' And
they always had where a soldier would come home and the mother would say,
`(Yiddish spoken),' `He's blind,' and then the curtain would come--I mean,
they always had this--they had these tragically emotional moments. And I
learned that somehow at the end of the second act--and I do that in all my
movies--you've got to hook the people so they're excited about at least the
danomar--I mean, the rush to the end, you know.

GROSS: Your parents were Eastern European immigrants. Was mostly Yiddish
spoken in your house?

Mr. BROOKS: No. No. My grandmother did. My mother, as a matter of fact,
said, `erl' and `berl.' She was a New Yorker, you know. She came here when
she was three years old. She learned English from--as most immigrants did
when they came here as little kids, they learned English from Irish teachers,
Irish teachers in New York. And they were the--the Irish got all the jobs,
so, therefore, all the teachers were Irish, and everybody was talking like
this in Jewish households, `Hey, Murshie(ph), would you pass the kasha(ph).
Thank you very much, Mursh.' I mean, of course, I'm overdoing it. But my
mother actually did say, `turlet.' She never did say toilet. She said,
`turlet,' like the Irish do.

GROSS: Can I hear about what your bar mitzvah was like?

Mr. BROOKS: It was fast and short. In those days there were not--today--I
just went to a bar mitzvah, and it could have fed all of Kiev where my mother
came from. It's an amazing difference. My bar mitzvah took 15 minutes, and
the kids threw hard candy--and a couple of them hit me with it--and it was all
over. And, of course, I'll never forget the breath of my rebbe. I mean,
rebbe breath is famous. I mean, they eat garlics and onions and then they try
to teach you Hebrew. And they would breathe in your face and say, `No, not
(Hebrew spoken), not (Hebrew spoken),' and then--it was quite an experience.
Ask any little Jewish kids who's bar mitzvahed about rebbe breath.

GROSS: A lot of your movies are parodies of genre films. When did you fall
in love with movies? Did you go a lot when you were young?

Mr. BROOKS: I went a lot, and I didn't have a lot of money, so the way I used
to get into movies was when the audience who had just--when the movie would
break and the audience would walk out, I would join them and I would walk
backwards until I was in the theater.

GROSS: Oh, so it looked like you were exiting.

Mr. BROOKS: And I would hide in the back row.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. BROOKS: And then when the new audience came in, I mean, I would watch
the movie. And that was the only way I could get to see movies because I
couldn't afford the--whatever it was--the 15 cents to get in to see them. And
my mother used to search for me in the movies because I would see the same
movie--you know, if it was "Top Hat," or "The Gay Divorcee," forget about it,
I'd see it 16 times; I knew every step. I knew every nuance, every lilt,
every note, every fill. I mean, I just--I was addicted; I was addicted to
movies.

GROSS: Mel Brooks, recorded in 1991. His new adaptation of his movie musical
"The Producers" just opened on Broadway. It stars Nathan Lane and Matthew
Broderick.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite from "The Producers")

Unidentified Singers: Prisoners of love, blue skies above, can't keep our
hearts in jail.

Mr. NATHAN LANE: Tempo, fellas, pick up the tempo.

Unidentified Singers: Prisoners of love...

Mr. LANE: That's it.

Unidentified Singers: ...our turtle dove...

Mr. LANE: Yes.

Unidentified Singers: ...will soon come 'round with mail.

Mr. MATTHEW BRODERICK: Sing out, boys. Let 'em hear you in solitary.

Unidentified Singers: Well, you can lock us up and lose the keys, but hearts
in love are always free. Prisoners of love, blue skies above...

Mr. LANE: Take it home.

Unidentified Singers: ...but we're still prisoners...

Mr. LANE: We open in Leavenworth Saturday night.

Unidentified Singers: ...we're still prisoners, we're still prisoners of
love.

Unidentified Man: Hey, Bialystock, Bloom and Liebkind, good news. This just
came from the governor. `Gentlemen, you are hereby granted a full pardon for
having through song and dance...'

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: The Steppenwolf Theater adaptation of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest" is now on Broadway. Coming up, we hear from the show's star Gary Sinise
and director Terry Kinney, two of the founders of Steppenwolf. And Ken Tucker
reviews the new CD by the band Guided By Voices.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney discuss the beginning
and growth of the Steppenwolf Theatre
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre has a new stage adaptation of "One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest" that's just opened on--that recently opened on Broadway and has
now had its run extended. It stars Gary Sinise, and it's directed by Terry
Kinney, two of Steppenwolf's founders. Last year, on the 25th anniversary of
Steppenwolf, I spoke with Sinise and Kinney about the company. As President
Clinton said when giving the company a National Medal of the Arts, Steppenwolf
stages edgy, experimental productions that still manage to attract mainstream
audiences. It's an ensemble company that shuns the star system, and yet it
has launched its fair share of stars. Among the company's best known alumni
are John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf and Joan Allen. Sinise is
the co-star of such films as "Mission to Mars," "The Green Mile," "Apollo 13"
and "Forrest Gump." Terry Kinney is a star of the HBO prison series "Oz."

Steppenwolf's first productions were staged in a Unitarian church, but in 1976
when the company grew to nine members, they moved to the basement of a
Catholic school in Highland Park. I asked Gary Sinise if there was anyone in
the audience when they started.

Mr. GARY SINISE (Actor): There were nights where people came; and there were
nights where people didn't come. You know, we actually really did, in the
beginning, have to do a lot of selling of ourselves to try to get an audience.
Here you got these, you know, college graduates and college folks that come
and are down in this basement of a Catholic school. But we would do all kinds
of things to try to get audiences in there. We'd walk in parades, and we had
bake sales and tried to have, you know, benefits. And, you know, in the
beginning, it was sort of a cool novelty. `What's going on down there?
There's these guys that are beating each other up in this basement,' you know.
You know, `We can get in and watch it for three bucks. Let's go,' you know.

And so it was kind of an interesting novelty. But as the winter months came
along, we started to go into, you know, serious audience emptiness. And I
remember there was one show we did called, "Look, We've Come Through," and I
think for that particular show, I remember we did a performance for maybe two
people and--out of 88 seats. And there were times where we just didn't have
much of an audience, but, you know, after a while we started getting reviewed
by The Chicago Tribune, and some of the Chicago papers started coming out and
watching us, and we started to actually build an audience, build one to the
point where it became clear that it was time to move into the city.

GROSS: Terry, when Gary was talking about how people would come to watch
people beating each other up in the Steppenwolf Company, what did he mean by
that?

Mr. TERRY KINNEY (Actor/Director): Well, I mean, one of the theater rules
that we completely ignored was "staged" violence, with the quotation marks
around `staged.' We tended, when there was violence on stage--and there quite
often was in our plays--we found these one-acts that we like to call now the
ax-murderer plays. It was "Indian Wants the Bronx," plays by Leonard Melfi
and Lanford Wilson and, you know, very bleak, early '70s plays.

And we liked these plays a lot because they offered great roles for our
actors. But there was usually some kind of violence and despair going on.
And in--it was one of our first four plays--"Indian Wants the Bronx," Gary and
I beat up our artistic director at the time, H.E. Baccus. He played the
Indian, with a lot of makeup, by the way. And we just beat him to a pulp; and
we didn't really mean to; we really loved the guy. But we did it to each
other as well. And the audience truly felt they were in danger sometimes
because we would almost spill into the audience quite often.

And we spent an hour before the show while the other one-act before us was
running, improv'ing about a hundred yards away, where we would--there was this
young kid that liked to hang out at our theater, named Michael Unger, and he
used to let us chase him around with knives in the neighborhood, etc. We
would pretend to vandalize the neighborhood. We didn't really vandalize
anything, but we became these kids--we just had a lot of fun playing. And the
stage manager would open the back door to the theater and wave at us when it
was time for the stage lights to come up; and we would sprint that hundred
yards straight onto the stage. And it was, you know, a lot of fun. But we
were so into it that we really did hit each other when we had to hit each
other. We've learned to stop that now in our old age.

GROSS: Why did you want to go so far as to actually hitting each other on
stage as opposed to faking it theatrically?

Mr. KINNEY: Well, because we hated fake theatrical stuff. I mean, one of the
reactions, really visceral reactions we had as a group to seeing the theater
that we were seeing in Chicago was the phoniness of it. And, you know, not to
disparage anyone's work, but at the time we were extremely cocky, you know,
narcissistic youths, and we really felt that we could take it to another
level, realism and hyper-realism. And so we tried to introduce this sort of
filmic dynamic in the technical end, and we also tried to introduce a kind of
a realism that we didn't feel people had seen.

Mr. SINISE: I think, too, there was something that was really developing
between the nine of us in the early days that was a lot about trust, and that,
you know, we were smart enough not to do each other real damage on stage, but
also, you know, we knew how to hit each other, how to punch each other where
it's not going to make the guy go to the hospital, either, you know. And
there was something about just the trust that was going on between us that was
very, very important, in that you could trust somebody to be in control of
themselves on stage enough that they could make it look really good, but that
you weren't gonna get, you know, seriously injured or something like that.
You know, we did have our cuts and bruises, but--in fact, there was one night
I closed a knife on my finger and had to get four or five stitches after the
play. The play went on, and I just wrapped my finger up in some dirty
newspaper that was laying on the ground and carried on with the play.

So we got a little crazy, but we also really trusted each other on stage, and
that was an important ingredient. You can't just have actors go wild without
any sense of what's going on our there. And we always did have a good sense
of how far we could go and what we could do and how far we could push each
other.

GROSS: In those early days, when there were times when no one showed up or a
couple of people showed up, would the show go on anyways? And if it did,
would you put as much into it as if it were a full house?

Mr. KINNEY: Yeah, absolutely we did. The show always went on if they wanted
it to. I remember we did a musical, and it was a big mistake. It was called,
"Mack, Anything Goes Over the Rainbow," which was music by Harold Ireland,
Kurt Weill and--Who's the third one, Gary?

Mr. SINISE: Cole Porter.

Mr. KINNEY: And Cole Porter--I'm sorry. And so it was a sort of a cabaret
show in which, again, the artistic director, H.E. Baccus, felt that it would
be interesting to have non-singers singing these songs because they were, you
know, songs to be acted. And we acted them badly, we sang them badly, in gray
turtlenecks and--no, black turtlenecks and gray pants, polyester pants. They
all matched and--it was a bad idea.

Mr. SINISE: From Kmart, by the way.

Mr. KINNEY: From Kmart; and they were quite inexpensive. We had a budget--as
somebody said, a budget in the tens of dollars back then. So one night there
were two people there sitting in the audience, an elderly couple; and we were
all peeking around the curtain saying, `Oh, gosh, I wonder--I hope they stay,'
and, you know, `I wonder if anyone else will show up,' but no one did. So we
went out. We walked out on stage and we said, `Well, you're the only people
here. Would it embarrass you to have us do the show?' And they said, `Oh,
gosh, no, it's like a command performance. We'd be pleased to have you do
your show.' So we did it. And we did it full throttle because these two very
grateful people were sitting out there beaming at us the entire time.

GROSS: Did you get a standing ovation?

Mr. KINNEY: No, I don't believe so. They just sat and clapped at the end.
`Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Good luck to you kids.'

GROSS: My guests are Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney, two of the founders of
Steppenwolf Theatre Company. More after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney. Sinise is starring in
the Steppenwolf Theatre's production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"
which is now on Broadway. Kinney directed it. They're co-founders of
Steppenwolf.

Steppenwolf was, especially in the early days, it's probably fair to say, a
very close-knit company and very much like a family, though often probably
very much like a dysfunctional family. And I think, you know, actors had
affairs with each other; some actors married each other within the company.
Is it possible to know the people you're working with too well, so well that
it might interfere with your ability to act with each other, to really become
different people with each other?

Mr. KINNEY: Gary and I talked about this earlier today, actually. We could
do a major expose of all the affairs in the company. Well, again, we were a
group of people living in a town which was a suburb of Chicago, so it was
mostly people older than us and settled and married with children, and then
high school kids and grade school kids; so nobody of post-college age. That
being said, we all became embroiled in many, many ways, you know. There were
lots of switching of relationships and broken hearts and friendships that
needed to sort of like mend for a long time. Somehow we always got the work
on stage to, I guess I would have to say, transcend that. Maybe it was
because of it that there was such energy on stage. But there was always a
great deal of loyalty to the cause, which was to put on this great theater
and, hopefully, have somebody recognize the fact that we were doing great
theater.

So no matter how we felt personally, there was always a lot of peer pressure
to get over it and move on. And so, yeah, we did that. We feuded, and our
company meetings were the most remarkably dysfunctional thing you could ever
see, screaming and yelling, and we even had the police show up once because it
was--we got along in these groups. We were like a tribe of cave people, but
somehow we would get on stage, and the space between the actors would always
be full.

GROSS: I think the company wanted to be very non-hierarchical. How much
power does a director have in a company that's trying to not have any
hierarchies? Does it inhibit the ability of the director to direct?

Mr. KINNEY: That was always something very clear in our company, that there
were leader figures, people with ideas, people with plays to bring in and
direct, people with administrative ideas, and there were people that acted in
plays. There was always friction about, you know, who should have power and
who does have power, etc., again, in the company meeting situation; but the
leader figures always remained the leader figures. And there was never any
proletariat that was very real. There was a hierarchy.

GROSS: Terry, you once resigned in protest or in anger; I'm not sure what the
circumstances were. And then you decided that you wanted to go back into the
Steppenwolf Company and the members of the company had to vote to decide
whether to let you come back. What was that about? Why did you resign, and
then why did you decide you wanted to come back in?

Mr. KINNEY: Oh, gosh, who have you been talking to?

Mr. SINISE: It wasn't me.

Mr. KINNEY: No, no. Well, I think I resigned over the fact that I was
breaking up with a girl, I was very upset, and the current executive
director--we had so many that we considered doing a benefit where we chained
them all together and paraded them across the front of the stage. But the
current guy had this plan where we would clean out an entire crawl space of
all the stuff that was in there--and it was in there before we ever came into
this church basement--clean it out and then assign bathroom duties, you know.
And I think I got assigned the first bathroom duty. And I said, `Well, I'll
clean the toilet every day, but not by assignment,' you know. This was where
the proletariat was important to me. And I think I quit in protest, but it
was probably some personal problem that I was having. I left for a while, and
then I missed everybody, and my friends missed me. When I came back, somebody
decided that there should be a company meeting just to make it official, since
I had left the company, that I should, you know, be brought in by vote.

GROSS: Gary, were you at that meeting?

Mr. SINISE: Oh, yeah.

Mr. KINNEY: Yes, I was shocked, and I had to wait upstairs. But I also felt
it was kind of right, you know. It had been a while, had been about three or
four months. So I waited upstairs with a friend. And an hour passed, and
then two hours passed, and I started to become very concerned about, you know,
what are they talking about? Are they evaluating all of my, you know,
personality traits, or what are they doing? Am I not a real company member?
And I started really doubting that they were gonna let me back in. And in
reality, they were talking about a number of things, I heard later. Gary can
talk to that.

But the next thing I heard was a loud scream. Now I mentioned a while ago
that the police had come to a company meeting. This was the one. I heard
someone screaming, and I didn't know what it was. I ran down the stairs, and
the door to the theater was open and no one was in there. So I ran outside,
and they were all holding down--it was Moira, it was Gary's wife. She was
upset about some other things as well, but she couldn't believe that they were
talking about this. She really--on my behalf, she was very upset. I've
always been grateful for that. And she was screaming bloody murder. And the
police kind of showed up, and we got rid of them. And then somebody turned to
me in the middle of the fray and said, `Oh, you're in; you're back.'

Mr. SINISE: That kind of settled that.

Mr. KINNEY: Yeah.

GROSS: Gary, why did it take so long to decide whether Terry Kinney should be
allowed back in the theater that he co-founded?

Mr. SINISE: You know, I mean, it's a long time ago, and I can't remember all
the details of the meeting.

Mr. KINNEY: Senator.

Mr. SINISE: But we had never, you know, faced this kind of thing before, so I
assume we were yelling at each other about the principle of, you know, going
off. And we--you know, leaving and how that should affect the group. And I
remember shortly after that, you know, Malkovich went off and did a play with
some other company, and that was the first time that had happened, and we had
to have a big meeting about that. You know, we had meetings all the time
because, you know, we had to discuss what it was we were doing and, you know,
`If we're gonna be a theater then we're gonna all work together and this is
what we're gonna do and we're not gonna do anything else,' you know, and
yelling at each other about that kind of stuff. And that was the first time
Terry quit.

Mr. KINNEY: Yeah, there had been another--I quit another time as well.

Mr. SINISE: I can't remember what that one was about, but it might have been
about a girl; I don't know.

Mr. KINNEY: I could have been. It could have--I mean, yeah, there was always
that, you know.

GROSS: Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney are co-founders of the Steppenwolf
Theatre. Sinise stars in, and Kinney directed, Steppenwolf's production of
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which is now on Broadway.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews a new CD by Guided By Voices. This is
FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Guided By Voices' new CD "Isolation Drills"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Guided By Voices is a rock band led by Robert Pollard, a 40-something former
elementary school teacher from Dayton, Ohio. Since forming his band in the
late '80s, Pollard has been notably prolific. Guided By Voices' new CD called
"Isolation Drills" is the band's 12th release. Rock critic Ken Tucker rates
it one of Pollard's best.

(Soundbite of "Skills Like This")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) Reinvented nightly, wake up with skills like
this. And do you want me in your head? But what's behind your scattered
eyesigns? I want to reinvent you now.

KEN TUCKER:

That Guided By Voices song is called "Skills Like This," and among Robert
Pollard's skills are an almost eerie ability to turn out rock songs with
melodic guitar and drum hooks that each last about two minutes tops. They
make their frequently gnomic points and then scram. But the best tunes linger
in your mind. People as old as Robert Pollard usually hear echoes of The
Beatles, The Who and The Raspberries. The people for whom Pollard and his
Guided By Voices cohorts actually play are more likely to connect his musical
dots to Nirvana and a slew of bands that have spent the past decade being
called low-fi as opposed to hi-fidelity. You can hear all of this in one of
the best new pieces of music here, the tough but tender rock 'n' roll of "Glad
Girls."

(Soundbite of "Glad Girls")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) Hey, glad girls only want to get you high. Hey,
glad girls only want to get you high. Hey, glad girls only want to get you
high. And they're all right, and they're all right, and they're all right,
and they're all right. Glad girls only want to get you high.

TUCKER: Pollard claims to write an average of a hundred songs a year, and I
admire his work ethic, if not always his method of delivery. His previous
Guided By Voices album, 1999's "Do the Collapse," was produced by Rick Ocasek,
whom people Pollard's age know used to lead the sterile '70s pop rock band The
Cars. That Pollard collaboration suffered for Ocasek's typical sterility.

"Isolation Drills" is produced by Rob Schnapf, who has done a lot looser, more
style-specific work, with acts ranging from the Foo Fighters to Beck. He
isolates Guided By Voices' best qualities in a soaring song such as "Chasing
Heather Crazy."

(Soundbite of "Chasing Heather Crazy")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) Trailing off the likes of it, she likes it when
it grows. Sending out a candidate, she's sinking her foes. Peaking out then
leveling wherever it goes. And her mother will greet you and a river will
reach you, breaking out to make you slave again. Chasing Heather crazy,
chasing Heather crazy, making sure that all the world is coming down, all the
world is coming down on her. Anywhere I want to...

TUCKER: Profiles of Bob Pollard invariably refer to his ability to consume
massive quantities of beer to stoke his live performances. On this CD,
Pollard takes his drinking seriously enough to write a song about it. As in
the clear-eyed country music classic by Webb Pierce called "There Stands the
Glass," Pollard admits his habit and his excess and confronts his reality.

(Soundbite of "How's My Drinking?")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) How's my drinking? I don't care about being
sober, but I sure get around in this town. To hell with my church bells, and
leave me die with you. I won't change.

TUCKER: The last line of that song is, `I won't change.' It would be a
sobering conclusion, coming as it does as the CD's 13th song, except that
Pollard has three more songs in him, including the one that immediately
follows "How's My Drinking?," a lovely ballad called, "The Brides Have Hit
Glass."

(Soundbite of "The Brides Have Hit Glass")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) I don't come around, never call or let her know.
I got a life of my own. You know I hate to be around her when she's like
that. I wrote a song once about her called, "The Brides Have Hit Glass." You
know, it just won't last to be on top of your own world. With no guardrails
to cling to, you fall so very fast. It's very odd to find her up again
staking out expansion, seeking new exposure. And when she holds out an empty
glass and she comes for a handout and I ask for the same thing, it's sad.

TUCKER: As usual, on a Guided By Voices collection, Pollard's fecundity
ultimately works against him. There are too many facile songs surrounding the
terrific ones; and after putting out more than a dozen releases in this
manner, you wonder whether Pollard can't tell his good work from his mediocre
stuff, or whether he's obsessively compelled to put on tape nearly everything
he writes. Whatever the ultimate reason, we end up with another almost great
Guided By Voices album, which is a heck of a lot better than what most rock
bands give us.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Isolation Drills," the new album by the band Guided by Voices.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "The Brides Have Hit Glass")

GUIDED BY VOICES: (Singing) And I'll hold on so confident that it's all I can
give to try to find my way back just to hit glass.
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