I came to NPR and to Prairie Home Companion in college, after a childhood filled with moves, losses, and failures. I greatly enjoyed the music and the stories, to the point where I once had a Powdermilk Biscuits t-shirt, and still have a PHC tie. However, the dedications they read at intermission really made the show for me; in the notes people wrote to each other celebrating their various graduations, anniversaries, relationships, and communities, I saw a real-world analog to Lake Wobegon's strong women, good looking men and above average children. I think believing something like that was out there, somewhere, helped me reshape my life to transmute the moves, losses, and failures into relationship. community, and hope.
I find Lake Wobegon to be sentimental, but in a way that matched my sentimentality. I'm really grateful for the part Mr. Keillor's show has played in my ife.
My friends and I all grew up listening to Garrison Keillor, raised by parents who themselves grew up listening to Garrison Keillor. Keillor's retirement has very much felt like abruptly losing contact with many old friends at once.
I just hope Lake Wobegon is doing alright without us.
I'm 33, I've been listening to PHC since I was 10 or so, its something I've spent a majority of my Saturday afternoons doing - I look forward to the new host and the new format, but its clear to me that it will never be quite the same.
I grew up the same way :) ... except he rubs me the wrong way, I think he's not at all interesting or clever, a completely banal failed ironic, with a deep streak of hate inside.
I found PHC style humor completely insufferable and unlistenable, but members of my family (who grew up in the Midwest in the 50s and 60s) just love it, and there's no accounting for taste of course.
I always thought the show stood as sort of the perfect archetype for what you'd call "white" American culture. Which I'm pretty sure is what David Simon was trying to say in this classic clip from The Wire:
I used to feel that way, with much annoyance. But it dawned on me that Keillor was really an ironist (a rather prickly one), and that the sentimentalism and old-timey nostalgia were largely camouflage.
I think the day I started changing my view was when they were reading birthday greetings passed up as notes from the audience. Keillor read one that said "Happy birthday to Grandma so-and-so in X-ville, upstate NY. 96 years old and still chopping her own wood." The audience dutifully went "awwww" and clapped. Keillor paused and said: "Why doesn't anybody up there help that old lady out?"
You're confusing sarcasm for irony. Once upon a time you could be ironic without implying anything negative about the subject or object of the irony. Perceptive and incisive irony can elicit complex emotions and thoughts about a subject, but it can and often does end there, regardless of the speaker's personal beliefs.
A quote from Garrison Keillor reprinted in the article alludes to this: "You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories."
American law schools use the Socratic method for teaching. A good law school professor will never answer a question even when directly posed, but merely respond with another question, often times using classic Socratic irony. With the really good professors, no matter how heavily laden with innuendo their questions, in three years you'll never figure out their actual opinions or beliefs about a subject without resort to their published material outside of class.
(And, FWIW, the biggest mistake you could ever make reading Plato, for example, is to believe that it's obvious what kind of point his protagonists (e.g. Socrates) are trying to make. The Laws is an excellent example.)
That's the type of character Garrison Keillor seems to be, particularly when it comes to questions of culture and sentimentality. If you think he's gaming his audience, then that's sad.
As a "non white" child of immigrants I had no idea what this show was that was always on late Saturday afternoons as I'd be in a long car ride with my family (they listen to NPR during the week in the car). I didn't understand why there was a studio audience or what this man with "the voice" was talking about, until I decided to research it recently amidst the buzz about the retirement. Listening to some clips now and still can't say I really understand it, but that's fine. It's funny though, I also share some nostalgia about PHC, but for me it's for the old tradition of changing the radio station in the car on Saturdays away from this show, and for so many others it's the show itself.
I'm black and I loved PHC. It and Car Talk were the only things that made me seriously consider donating to NPR. It was the only show I would make an effort to catch on Saturdays when I had to make long drives back and forth from NYC.
It's long saddened me that you can't get Prairie Home Companion as a podcast: there's too many songs from too many authors so they don't even try to acquire the rights. Our copyright regime still needs to adapt to the modern world.
http://prairiehome.org/shows/ has the archive, and it is kind of sucky to use their player when out on a road trip here on the prairie. I'm not on the same edge of the prairie as St. Paul, but the cellular network isn't exactly top notch on the roads I travel here in SE Indiana. So, I yank down the episodes that I miss the live broadcasts.
Note: the archive only has Sept 2012 onward - http://prairiehome.org/shows/2012/09/ Before that, episodes are Realplayer RAM files on the old archive page.
How do copyright laws differ between podcasts and broadcast radio? Wouldn't the rights need to be acquired anyway to put it over the airwaves, or is there some fundamental difference between how things are handled on radio vs. the internet?
There's a fundamental difference. Radio broadcasts are generally considered public performances, and generally handled under blanket licenses with ASCAP, BMI, and the like. There is also a separate blanket licensing scheme for digital streaming radio, SoundExchange. There is no blanket licensing for digital downloads; thus, to provide digital downloads that contain music, PRI would have to negotiate separate contracts with each of the copyright holders.
Radio stations can pay royalties to a middleman (SoundExchange) for "ephemeral" rights, but since the mechanism of podcasting requires on-demand playback and downloading to the device, acquiring ephemeral rights is not sufficient.
I think streams where you don't pick the song that comes up next can also be licensed more similarly to radio broadcasts.
The law itself isn't really the question here; it's more the economic entities and standard agreements built to sustain broadcast use of music can't be adapted to podcast use in a cost-effective way.
This is also why we don't have the Massive Attack song as the intro to "House, M.D." on streaming services any more.
I don't think GK hates anyone or anything but I remember the day I completely lost interest in PHC: it was the day an interview ran and the intro explained Garrison lives in NYC.
The thing is sometimes there's not much distance between an homage and a satire. Fred Armisen's Portlandia is a good example of a show that wobbles between gently poking fun and outright mean-spirited mockery.
Once I learned all the Prarie Home Companion episodes were written from New York City it became much easier to see some of those skits as GK laughing at Lake Woebegone residents rather than with them.
GK was 45 years old when he first did a show in New York. He moved back to St. Paul five years later. The show is typically touring around the country and the world. He has split his time since 1987 living in New York and Minnesota. How does the fact that he decided, in his middle age, to live in New York at various times. suddenly change his work into mean-spirited mockery?
I don't think you understand his work. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't mean you know what he's trying to say.
It's obviously a matter of perspective: for me writing an opening monologue of "Well, it's getting colder here each night in Lake Woebegone" from a Starbucks on Broadway doesn't feel as sincere as writing the exact same words in St. Paul.
I understand he's trying to depict a bucolic lifestyle and portray himself as a resident and narrator of this fictional little town. But in my opinion if you're sitting at a remove from the area that inspires these stories it's possible for another perspective to color your view. Culturally NYC and St. Paul much less Lake Woebegone are vastly different.
Nobody's saying you have to agree with me, but I do get what he's trying to do. I just find it harder to believe it's anything but entirely fiction as opposed to a tapestry woven from an underlying truth with the names changed to protect the innocent, and for me that makes all the difference.
It'd be one thing if he was born and raised in NY, but he grew up and spent most of his life in Minnesota. Surely as a writer he is able to invoke his past memories with sincerity in creating this fictional narrative. Or do you believe that as soon as he crossed the Minnesota border, all that was lost, and as he stepped into a NYC Starbucks he became a jaded cynical New Yorker.
I hate to break it to you, but it is entirely fiction. There is no Lake Wobegone. St. Paul is not a little town either. Sorry to further shatter your suspension of disbelief.
Don't worry; Garrison is plenty attached to St. Paul, getting in spats with the neighbors, enjoying his lovely house. All his love affairs started in Minnesota and that's something. I don't think they all ended here though.
One of the things Keillor handled so well in his story telling was the mostly insignificant but somehow important differences between Lutherans, Catholics, and the other denominations and religions. I grew up in a very small town in Ontario and it often felt like he had borrowed characters from my past (and then softened them and made them more likable).
I greatly enjoy(ed) PHC and some of his commentary about the different Christian denominations. I should say though that the one thing that was annoying was that he likes to often poke fun at Unitarians in a not so 'laughing with us' way. Counting myself as a Unitarian, I did find the bit in his last show in which he joked about the word changes for 'Marching to Zion' for Unitarians to be spot on though.
Personally, I am a huge fan of Guy Noir. I wonder if he ever found out the secrets that the city was trying to keep from him - or if he found the answers to life's persistent questions... Guy Noir, Private Eye.
The News From Lake Wobegon is available in a podcast, with a very long archive: http://prairiehome.org/listen/podcast/ - and really it's better as a podcast
I come from serious taciturn people and grew up in a separatist religious sect that believed that every word and deed should be to the glory of God and here I am winding up forty-two years of talking my head off, much of it silliness, and portraying a private eye and a cowboy. This was not supposed to happen. As Robert Frost did not write:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And, sorry I could not travel both,
I chose the one with the galloping hooves and the barking spiders
And now I’m trying to figure out why.
I am a writer who got tangled up with Minnesota Public Radio and A Prairie Home Companion and not because I was ambitious or had aptitude, but simply through a series of coincidences. I was like a kid in Port-au-Prince who’s never seen ice and whose family is too poor to travel but he reads a book about Antarctica and is fascinated and eventually becomes captain of the Haitian Olympic hockey team. He’s not a great player but he’s pretty good for a Haitian. That’s my story. And now, as retirement nears, it’s a revelation to be accosted by people who want to say: Your show has meant a lot to me. Some of them have been tuned in for most of their lives. It’s very sweet. Also confusing, since I never was a big fan of the show myself. I enjoyed doing the show — it was the only social life I had — but the show was never as good as I wanted it to be, and that’s just a fact.
I’m 73, in good shape for a writer, working on a memoir and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, writing a weekly column for The Washington Post, planning to take brisk walks and start reading books again and rediscover the pleasures of the Weekend. Meanwhile, I am grateful beyond grateful for the people I’ve met along the way, Richard Dworsky, Tim and Sue and Fred, the ladies I’m singing with, Sara and Sarah and Aoife and Heather, and Suzanne Weil who was the first person to ever put me on a stage. She is here tonight and it is all her fault, every bit of it. Had it not been for Suzanne, I would be preaching every night at the Union Gospel Mission on Skid Row and all my friends would be old drunks. Millions of people would never know about Lake Wobegon or Powdermilk Biscuits or the power of rhubarb to ease shame and humiliation. But in the course of fifty years of preaching, I would’ve brought three, possibly four, men to eternal salvation. I will have to make peace with this myself. Meanwhile, thank you for listening to the show.
This isn't the only long - term show to end - Whad'ya Know (notmuch.com) wrapped up a 30+ year run the last weekend in June though it was ended due to declining numbers and being expensive to produce (live audience, traveling shows, etc.).
I caught Whad'ya Know when they came to town many years ago. The musical guest was Reverend Peyton and his Big Damn Band and Jim Packard was (or pretended to be) uncertain whether he could say that on the air, so the first time he introduced them he called them the Big Darn Band.
Was overall a quite entertaining experience, but my local NPR station dropped the show a long time ago so I haven't kept up.
First NPR didn't come out with phc or car talk in the first place. They were both produced by affiliated local public radio stations and then syndicated (phc is an american public media syndicated show for instance).
Second affiliated stations are still producing great national programs. Stalwarts like "this american life" and "on the media" or newer shows like "the moth radio hour" seem to directly contradict your statement.
You mean charming radio unfriendly experiments that slowly build up deeply devoted followings over time?
Might see something out of left field from a member station, it's hard to say. Podcasts are doing alright though, probably providing more variety than NPR could ever support.
There's something about the usability or delivery of a radio station though. Low budget college stations and shock jock conglomerates are equally accessible to any user. For a niche podcast to take off, it needs exposure. People need to learn what a podcast is and how to download it.
For NPR shows, well, they were already beamed into everyone's homes. If users just dialed through the static, something they already knew how to do, they'd hear it.
I grew up listening to Garrison Keillor and stories from Lake Wobegon. Listening to it as an adult, I have to say, it's not very good quality. I guess it's impossible to keep up a high level of quality week after week for so many years. But when I listen to it I hear a man rambling almost incoherently. There's not even a reasonable arc most weeks, he just babbles until time is up and Garrison abruptly says ".. and that's the news from Lake Wobegon".
For me, that's almost part of the charm. Each show doesn't itself need to be a masterpiece in order to play a part in the overall narrative of Lake Wobegon and Keillor's psyche. The show gained narrative force through its many years of accrual.
Also, the stories and jokes _needed not_ be top-notch (even though the way GK brought them to life on the radio always was). They tell you about mediocre, often weird people quietly but merrily living their lives just the way they want to, thank you very much. Turns out surprisingly many listeners liked that. NFLW was a celebration of natural, unashamed, funny, sad, humane mediocrity. I only came to know the show about two years ago and will miss it for a long time to come.
My sister and I, long time listeners to PHC, had both noticed that the monologues had declined in recent years, but we felt that they had gotten a bit better in this last year. I think Keillor wanted to go out on a high note and do his best in these final shows.
I'm amazed he sustained this as long as he did. It was a charming concept when he got started ... but its frozen-in-time quality lost me after a while.
Doing a show about a weird little slice of Americana will never grow old. It's just that the slice needs to keep changing every 5-10 years.
