The White Stripes source material Click For Full View Photo: Whitney Pastorek

Enter The White Stripes pt.3
by Whitney Pastorek

11/26/2007

Once I stopped glowing, I had to face a certain reality: I had interviewed the White Stripes, and it had been an amazing experience - but now I had an hour of digital tape staring me in the face. And I had no idea what to do with it. Nor did I have any way to listen to the interview, since it was on DAT.

Um.

Luckily, I worked at NYU's theater school, and the sound design department had one sitting around. I borrowed it ("Just for a week!" I told them) and put it on my living room floor.

The steps I took to get from the tape of the interview to a script:

1. Listen to the tape. Cringe at my annoying voice and even more annoying stupid questions.
2. Listen to the tape again, this time jotting down non-stop notes on a legal pad. Do not pause the tape at any point, just write as fast as I can. End up with insightful information such as "Ha! He mentioned Zeppelin!"
3. Begin to pull out segments that might be useful. Spend a lot of time rewinding and fast-forwarding, trying to scribble down every single word. Note start/end time of each quote.
4. Slap a bunch of random thoughts into a Word document, along with the transcripted quote sections, and send to Sharon Ball, my editor.

All this took place between April 7th, when I interviewed them, and April 16th. During that time, I think I listened to that DAT tape twenty times. And going back to read those random thoughts, some of them are pretty good, I think. One section says:

But the discussion of trickery and manipulation raises another interesting contradiction: for a band that so vehemently insists that they never expected or wanted any of this, they are incredibly media savvy. Jack has a laundry list of topics he mentions whenever possible - childhood, the blues, storytelling, and of course, the name of the band - and if I didn't know better, I'd have thought he had this interviewing stuff scripted.

Something else that got included in this initial script explosion was a series of transcripts compiled by Athena Desai, an NPR employee, who had been dispatched by Sharon to attend a White Stripes show in DC and interview some fans. This hadn't even occurred to me as a necessity, but I would use a lot of her work in the final thing. She sent two full minidisks of drunk teenagers screaming things like, "MEG'S REALLY HOT!!" and some short clips of the concert itself.

Sharon and I had another phone session after I sent the Word document over, and she gave me some more quick suggestions ("Make Meg a section in the piece, or drop her in? Comic relief?Point/counterpoint?"), and then said to get to work on an actual script.

So, having no earthly idea what I was doing, I sat down to do just that. I slapped a structure together, I cut and pasted like crazy, and I sent her a three page thing that ranged from ok ("The White Stripes are a bit of a mystery to any pop culture junkie: a two-person band that came out of nowhere to become not only a critical darling but the kind of group that can sell out four shows in New York City in two hours.") to just plain dippy ("The music's confusingness is strongly rooted in both 1930's delta blues and the rock bands of the seventies, with a little grunge thrown in for good measure."). What's interesting about looking back at that first script, though, is how many of the interview quotes I pulled ended up in the final thing. I'm not sure if that's because I nailed it the first time or I'm just really lazy and hated that damn DAT player.

Sharon's response to that script was, "Really good start! I'll call you later."

And then I didn't hear from her or anyone else for two weeks.

Here is where this story takes a little detour. Turns out I'd wandered into the "restructuring" of NPR's Cultural Desk, and as I was sitting at home grumbling about being neglected, more than half of the department that had accepted my piece was being laid off. The final exodus wouldn't happen until later in the summer, but I think the chaos had started at this point, and Sharon was obviously dealing with a lot of stuff that made me and my silly rock band piece a low priority. I haven't spoken to her since, and I do hope she's doing well wherever she is - because she ended up doing me a huge, huge favor. Rather than letting me get lost in the shuffle, she had the presence of mind to pass me on to another editor.

I'm sitting at home biting my nails about how no one seems to want to call me back (but sort of glad I don't have to touch the DAT, which is still in the middle of my living room floor, covered in legal pads). And then I sort of give up, and realize this may never happen.

On May 30th, over a month since I'd last heard from anyone, I get a call from Alyne Ellis, who says that Sharon has passed the story to her, and she's my new editor, and I should send her my script. Feeling fairly confident about my "really good!" piece of journalism, I email it away. And Alyne's response is, "I think we have a lot of work to do here. You're almost completely on the wrong track."

Oh, crap.

Not only that, but if this piece is going to go on Morning Edition, which is the plan, it's going to have to happen on June 7th, which is the day after the MTV Movie Awards and a live television performance by the White Stripes. Alyne has decided that's the "peg", or reason for the piece to be broadcast, and so my deadline is now IN ONE WEEK. I call my mom and cry.

Whitney's Interview Notes (Click Images for Full View)

I don't know how to write a script. I don't know how to edit sound. I don't even know how to get the sound off the damn DAT player, for crying out loud. I spring into action. First step: email Jay Allison and check the Transom Tools column for salvation. I am told I need to buy an MBox. I do not know what this is, but I go online and search for it and find one and buy it and have it shipped overnight. Apparently, this device will allow me to input any kind of sound directly into my computer and let it be edited by ProTools. Great. I install it and sort of read the instructions and notice a pesky one: sound should not be edited directly on my hard drive, because it will cause fragmentation. I need a separate hard drive. Great. I go buy one. I'm not even sure what I'm buying (and if you're keeping track, I've spent quite a bit of money at this point), but I plug it in and it lights up in a comforting blue color, and I try to play with a ProTools tutorial for like 5 minutes but then I freak out and figure I'll just figure it out as I go along. Or something.

All the while, Alyne and I are editing. We are going back and forth like crazy, her fixing one word here, cutting two there, having me read the script to her over the phone as though it were real-time. We make changes like going from "The White Stripes give few interviews, but there's a reason they gave this one," to, "The White Stripes give few interviews, but SAY there's a reason they gave this one." She is very concerned that I did not ask the White Stripes about their marriage or lack thereof (told you this would come back at me), and we go about finding creative ways to get around that. I am no longer doing much of anything at my day job. We go through three versions in one day. Alyne is a genius, and handles my total inexperience in the best way possible: by ignoring it. Her advice and guidance are invaluable, and also a pain in the ass, because why won't this woman just leave me alone? Just let me be mediocre already! I don't wanna be on public radio anymore! Waaaaah!

Alyne says I need to have tape from the MTV Movie Awards. Luckily, they taped the show over the weekend, and so I tell MTV to send me a copy. I can do this, just call up MTV and ask for things, because I work for NPR. Then, Alyne says I have to have an expert. What's an expert? An expert is someone other than me, who can lend an expert opinion. Who do I know who is an expert? I call Rolling Stone. I ask for Joel Levy, Senior Editor. I can do this. I work for NPR. Joel Levy says he can maybe get me someone, and then I remember that I KNOW someone who works for Rolling Stone, a young man named Rob Sheffield, who I met because his girlfriend at the time is in a theater company with - oh, never mind. I know Rob Sheffield. I get his phone number from my friend Emma and I call him. Can he meet me the very next day at the NPR Bureau to be interviewed about the White Stripes? Sure! So the next day, I'm back at the Bureau! I'm interviewing Rob Sheffield! I'm back on the floor with the DAT, making notes on the exhausted legal pad! I'm revising the script! It is now June 4th!

Drunk on power, I am a bit taken aback when the videotape MTV sends me is of the three-quarter variety, something I've never seen before. But this is not a problem: did I mention I worked at NYU? I march over to the film department and hassle GAs until one of them finally hauls out a three-quarter machine and transfers the sound to DAT for me. Jesus, more DAT. But I am unfazed! It is June 5th! I haven't slept in 48 hours!

At home, I am MBoxing like crazy. I have bought the wrong cables from Radio Shack, but thanks to the amp cord from my guitar (and by transferring all the minidisk tracks to DAT before feeding them into the MBox), I press on. The tape from the White Stripes interview is in! The tape from Rob's interview (which went really well, thank you) is in! I am going through the minidisks that Athena sent me of the concert! I am pulling out choice quotes! I am trying to find good cuts of the live music to use under my narration of the quotes! I am doing a hell of a job! I am cutting and pasting again but this time with sound, zooming in to look at tiny lines that mean breaths or snaps or "um"s or whatever, and moving things around so that it sounds like people said things all in one sentence when in reality they said them half an hour apart. I cut my clips for the interview and from that point on, whenever I read the script to Alyne, I play her the real sound off my computer. I have not been to my day job since Tuesday! It is Thursday morning, and the final version of the script is done! I have not slept in three days, but thank god for World Cup Soccer, which refreshes me at 3:30 am when I am thinking about making a break for the Canadian border where they will never find me!

The afternoon of Thursday, June 6th, I am sent to the Bureau for the last time, to do the mix and the "tracking" ("tracking," I soon learn, means "recording narration"-- this was explained to me after an aborted late-night attempt to record my vocals in my closet) with Manoli Weatherell, the greatest sound engineer of all time. We schedule a two hour block of time. Recording the narration is cake, I'm a natural (except for how I keep giggling), but then we sit down to mix this thing, and we spend four hours there, not two, moving things up and down by tiny, tiny degrees, lining up beats in the music with beats in the interviews, fixing the levels on this and that and the other thingÉ and finally, glorious god, it is finished. Manoli has worked crazy overtime for me, and I love her for it, and it is 6pm on the day before the piece is scheduled to air, and it is PERFECT.

Manoli gets on the phone with NPR in Washington to announce that we are upfeeding the piece. This is so exciting! Someone else in the Bureau has come in to listen and been amazed at the brilliance of it all! We are going to upload it and -

"What do you mean, it's not on the schedule?" Manoli says, into the phone.

[deep breath.]

So. The piece eventually aired the following Tuesday, and it was a great, great moment in my life. My mother called me immediately afterwards, a huge smile in her voice. Long-lost high school classmates emailed to say they'd been startled awake by my voice on their clock radios. A guy I used to be in love with heard it but didn't bother to get in touch and I had to hear it third-hand, jerk. I walked a recording of the piece over to the White Stripes's publicist and was thrilled to hear that they'd "loved it." And two months later, I returned the faithful DAT player to the sound department, who honestly had forgotten where it was.

And have I done any radio since? No. Alyne lost her job in the Cultural Desk restructuring nightmare shortly after this piece aired (which I think is a crime, but no one's asking me), and I lost my job at NYU, in large part because I hadn't done much of anything there in weeks. But I'm getting back after it now , and I asked for a new microphone for Christmas. I have high hopes that this was not a one-time miracle occurrence and that it really is a "beginning".

Now. Understanding that the above may not be the most useful of information (did you like all those exclamation points?) I present to you an interview conducted the other day between Alyne Ellis and myself, in which she offers calm, rational tidbits and reflections. It's 4am, as I wrap this up - I've stayed up for old times' sake and to try and get back into the mindset of my surreal public radio experience. This is important historical documentation, you know. I hope it proves useful. I hope some of the rest of this has been useful, too. And that you will all get off your asses and make radio now.

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