Martin Perlich: Interviewer Has Handle on Medium

Interviewing Martin Perlich can be an intimidating experience. After all, Perlich has spent four decades conducting radio and television interviews with writers, poets, musicians, artists, and film directors. Perlich condensed all his knowledge of preparing for and conducting interviews in “The Art of The Interview” published this spring. For seven years, Perlich has been program director and an afternoon host at KCSN, the radio station at California State University, Northridge. Every weekday for a half hour he conducts an interview with visiting performers. Perlich began his career in radio at WMMS in Cleveland and later worked as co-producer on ‘The Midnight Special” television show on NBC, hosted “Singer Songwriter” on PBS, and at now defunct Los Angeles station KMET. Being able to talk with his interview subjects has been an education for Perlich. . “This is like getting an advanced degree,” Perlich said. “Imagine getting to ask the leading people, ‘What’s up?'” Q: Why did you decide to write the book? A: I had been sick and when I got out of the hospital a friend said I was the best interviewer anybody knows why don’t you write a how-to and I’ll get it published. At first I resisted. But she persisted and I wrote it. She got a publisher in New York and that was the first small edition that really didn’t go very far. But it was soon picked up by a large, international company (Silman-James Press). Q: So the book is about what you’ve learned. A: Exactly. I never studied how to do it. What is an interview? I never thought of it as a calling. The lessons you learn you then have to draw on and then tell yourself, ‘What did I do right?’ You learn and mostly it’s from mistakes. Q: Have there been times when doing a live interview when there has been dead air because of a question or a response? A: Yes, very recently. The actress Karen Black was on the show. I had never met her and she called and said you are the best interviewer I want to be on your show. She came on the air and started flirting with me, but obviously not in a real sense. She said, ‘Girls, you should see him he’s so cute; he has curly hair ‘ I was completely shocked. I didn’t know what to say. You just have to let it play out. You have to have a sense that things will work out. Q: What about not answering questions? A: There are some people who just answer the question and don’t go on. The great Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel, the first time I interviewed him I knew that I had better be prepared. I had five pages of questions and notes. I asked him a question and he’d answer and stop. That would be it. I’d look at him like, ‘Yeah?’ and he’d look at me with ‘Yeah?’ and I would have to ask the next question. The next time I interviewed him it was fine. There’s also a sense you are like a movie director here. If a person stops talking and you want them to continue to talk there are lots of ways to do that. One is not to say anything. When I want someone to talk I use that time to push back from the microphone because I am running the board and cueing the next record and I am doing it all so they know they have to talk. That always works because it’s collaboration. Q: What have been some of your favorite interviews? A: Leonard Bernstein. The last interview I did for ‘Singer Songwriter’ was with Randy Newman. It had been a very long taping and Randy played about 15 songs. I sat at the piano bench with him and we talked about how he wrote. At the end we did a sit-down interview session. We’re just about finished and then I said, ‘You had a car accident that screwed up one of your eyes when you were a kid. What effect do you think that had on your personal development.?’ He looked at me like I was crazy. There was this long silence and I just sat there. He tried to blow it off and said, ‘It made it hard to catch fly balls.’ Then I said, ‘Did it perhaps sensitize you to the pain in other people?’ And then another long silence and I thought he was going to get up. He said, ‘Yeah, guilty as charged.’ I just said, freeze frame; that’s Randy right there. That to me was moving. When your guest moves you then you have to feel the audience is there with that. Q: Is the goal of a radio interview to try and find that quote or series of quotes that resonates with a listener. A: That’s one form of a valuable response and it’s a very good one if you can get it. That kind of response is rare but it does happen. The goal of the interview is much broader than that because it is different from print. In print you can structure the article however you want. You are imposing a whole different set of parameters on what we are doing. If this were a live radio interview I wouldn’t have the luxury of doing that and a great quote might just fly by. I might say something, you might something that is really valuable, that is really well put or meaningful my job then, if I am interviewing you, is to give a little room around it or point it out to the audience, just to give it some room while people ruminate on it. But the interview has to go on. You can’t end with that. In the Randy (Newman) interview that was the last thing we did in the taping and turned out to be the end of the show. Q: One of the lessons of the book is preparation. Can you be too prepared to do an interview? A: There’s no such thing as too much preparation I think. The question is how you use it and how you apply it. Sometimes I don’t have time to prepare at all. You find a way to do it with minimal or less than ideal preparation. In general, when I do these live interviews I do far less. There are people who come back and do another concert. I know what they are playing and there is not too much preparation to be done. On the other hand if someone’s written a book on Chopin, you have to read the book. You don’t read the review. Or read enough of the book to get three or four interesting questions or to get enough of a sense of it. You do what you can in real time. Q: Are your interviews with people you are personally interested in wanting to talk with? A: It has to come from the heart. What I try to do is find something to like about a person’s work. You have to put yourself in the mind of your audience. Are they going to be enriched by this? Can I find a way to enrich myself and thus enrich them? Also, and this is a big thing, to challenge your guest substantially enough to cause them to do new thinking. I’ve also overcome my initial negative recognition to some assignments. You’re going to interview Roy Orbison. I didn’t really care about Roy Orbison at that time but I found a way to enrich myself open myself wider and had a great interview and I gained from that.