All I Did Was Ask | 91FM

Fresh Air host Terry Gross' first book, All I Did Was Ask, is a compilation of some of her most captivating interviews with legendary artists, actors, musicians and authors who have appeared over the years on the daily NPR program. You can receive an autographed copy when you pledge your support to WHYY, but before you pick up yours, treat yourself to a brief excerpt from Gross' introduction, at right. You can also sample a snippet of the journalist's interview with comedian Conan O'Brien, who is featured in All I Did Was Ask. Gross will appear on O'Brien's show on NBC, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, on Wednesday, September 22.

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Introduction | All I Did Was Ask

"I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air …

But this is a book, not a radio show. You may be wondering what the point is of reading interviews that were meant to be listened to. I've asked myself that. But in going through transcripts in preparation for this book, I was pleasantly surprised that so many of the interviews I remembered as having been good radio also made for enjoyable reading. In reading the ones gathered here -- I probably shouldn't admit this -- I've learned things from them that went right by me in the studio…

I try in my interviews to find the connections between my guests' lives and their work (the reason we care about them in the first place). I'd love to know how Chris Rock got to be so funny, how Dennis Hopper developed his screen presence, how John Updike became a great writer. Unfortunately, these kinds of questions are often unanswerable. Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable. Autobiography provides an alternate route -- a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist's sensibility and the experiences that shaped it. At the very least, the kind of interview I do offers me, and the show's listeners, an opportunity to learn more about someone whose work has moved and delighted us and perhaps, in some small way, altered our perceptions of ourselves and the world."

Mom, Dad, I Want To Be A Tap Dancer Conan O'Brien | All I Did Was Ask

"I recorded my first interview with O'Brien in 1996, after public opinion about his show began to change in his favor. My second interview with him was in 2003, just before his prime-time tenth anniversary special. What follows combines questions from both of these interviews.

Terry Gross: When the show was first on the air, did you watch yourself every night to get an idea of what was working and what wasn't?

Conan O'Brien: Yeah, yeah I did. Once I got over the shock of just how fat my Irish head is, I started to make adjustments, a lot of them visual. Okay, the lighting's all wrong. I'm wearing too much makeup -- I look orange. I'm a big rockabilly fan so I got into the habit of combing my hair up and out, like Eddie Cochran. For the first six months of the show, I had this giant pompadour that was knocking klieg lights out in the studio. It was frightening viewers, so I combed my hair down a bit.

TG: I imagine when you started to do the show, you had to create a TV version of Conan O'Brien. Would you talk about the process of figuring out who you would be?

O'Brien: A lot of the good stuff, if we want to qualify any of it as good stuff, is unconscious. These silly, weird abstract things that I do on the show, like pretending to pull my hips with a string or licking my eyebrows or growling, it's stuff that I was probably doing on a playground when I was eight years old. It just comes out of me. If I have any persona on the show, it would be the guy who has mistakenly been given a late-night talk show, but he's going to do it anyway. I mean, I don't come out in an appropriate authoritative way. I jump around, I hiss at the camera, I hide from the camera, I start weeping openly. I do all these things that a talk-show host probably should do, and for some reason it seems to work for me.

TG: As a teenager, did you behave around the girls the way you do around the attractive actresses on your show, growling at them and playing "the comic guy"?

O'Brien: Sadly, yes, and I'm being serious about that because if you grew up the way I did -- a fairly repressed Irish-Catholic -- you're too scared to try anything. You're fascinated by women, you want to make them laugh, so there's the whole bag of tricks you do -- but God forbid any of them ever made a move towards you. Then you'd run for the hills. That's where the whole persona came from. You always had the idea with Bob Hope that if he ever got Dorothy Lamour, he wouldn't know what the hell to do with her. He'd be panic-stricken.

TG: You took tap dance lessons when you were nine years old, didn't you?

O'Brien: That's right. Nobody forced me. That's the sad part. I think the story is much less frightening when you say, "Well, my parents made me." But it's scary to think that a nine-year-old boy says, "Mom, Dad, I want to be a tap dancer." You think, "What is with this kid?"

TG: I find it really endearing that a nine-year-old would want to learn a form that's become pretty archaic.

O'Brien: I knew when I was young I wanted to be in show business. My view of show business at the time was based on the movies that they ran on Channel 56, which was the UHF station in Boston when I was growing up. They used to show movies from the forties, like Yankee Doodle Dandy and On the Town. As this little kid, I didn't have a sense, "Well, this movie was made a long time ago." I didn't know. I'm still, to this day, not that bright.

But I would watch these movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy with Jimmy Cagney, and he's singing and tap-dancing. I thought if you want to be in show business, you've got to be able to tell a joke, put a song across, but most importantly, you have to be able to break into a ten-minute tap dance at any moment. So I went to my parents and said, "I got to take tap dance lessons." They considered that for a few days as said, "All right, he really wants to do it." They hooked me up with a guy named Stanley Brown. He was this older black gentleman who had been the protégé of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the great tap dancer who'd been in all those Shirley Temple movies.

I really got hooked up with the master. And remember, I was this nine-year-old, really pale, round-faced kid with bright, bright orange hair. My dad would drop me off on his way to work on Saturday mornings in a part of Boston that's right near the Berklee College of Music. I would walk up this rickety, old ten flights of steps into his dance studio. And it would be all twenty-four-year-old black men and women, and then one orange-haired, freckled kid sitting there, holding his shoes in a box.

I did that for a number of years until Stanley Brown passed away. Then I got this huge growth spurt. I grew to six-foot-four in a day. It was like I was irradiated or something. I lost all my coordination, and tap dancing fell by the wayside.

TG: Did you have a sense of rhythm when you were nine?

O'Brien: Since we're on radio, I'll just say, yes, I did. And by the way, I'm extremely handsome right now, for those of you who can't see me."