Revisiting - A Trip to the Dentist
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From PRX and Transom, this is Sound School. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Back in the early 1980s, the staff at NPR was freaked out and not sure what to do. But something needed to be done because the network was bleeding money.

Stephen Oney reported about NPR's financial crisis in his new book called On Air. It's a very comprehensive and very compelling history of NPR. Oney says that in 1983, the network had only $20,000 in the bank and was seriously in debt to the tune of $9.1 million. It was a major crisis brought about by bad financial management. The way Oney puts it, it was do or die.

Public radio old-timers have told me stories about this period at NPR. They say it's seminal to understanding why NPR sounds like it does today. And there's one story in particular that I've heard a few times, one that is not in Oney's book. In fact, I can't confirm the story, so maybe it's more of a tale than a story. But it involves one of the trippiest radio documentaries I have ever heard about

and, apparently, a reporter uttering the words, "No more trips to the dentist." In the 1970s, the early years of NPR, there was a tussle over the sound of the network. Specifically, should All Things Considered, NPR's flagship news program, focus on news and investigative reporting? Or should there be a mix of news and stories that were, well, let's just call them experimental, artsy features that would play with the form?

That debate went on for years at NPR as the network tried to get a grip on what it was and who it served and what it would sound like. They had just started up and they didn't know what they were doing. And so you could, you know, it was kind of an open door. You could walk in there and if the studio was

It wasn't, you know, doing anything. The engineers were happy to let you do stuff and you could do anything you want. Do anything you want and it just might make it on air, including Larry Massett's first long-form radio story, one that ran just over 15 minutes, a freaky piece called A Trip to the Dentist. Well, I really had to go to the dentist, you know.

And I wanted to do radio at the same time, simple as that. Larry said that so matter-of-factly, as though, well, of course I did. And of course NPR would air what I made. My, how things have changed. By the early 1980s, NPR had become a force in journalism. And an original voice on the radio. Nobody was doing what NPR did on the radio. And one way they accomplished that was to launch a second daily news program, Morning Edition.

Those two programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, were very popular, and NPR's in-depth reporting was highly regarded. You know, they were beginning to feel that they were important and that they were an important figure in, you know, journalism. And, you know, it was, you know, D.C., and they're hanging out with the guys from The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I mean, that's kind of where they were putting themselves.

Then came the do-or-die moment, and that debate over the sound of NPR came to a boil. They finally began to think, well, all things considered is a journalism show, and there are certain rules about, you know, journalism. One of them being that you have to be able to tell what's real and what's not real on the tape, which is not always the case in the stuff that I was doing. But, you know, the word was coming down that this is not quite strictly...

The kind of piece that we should be doing, I think, is what they thought. The people who have told me about this moment, including Larry, said that Robert Siegel in particular held the perspective that NPR should focus primarily on news. Siegel was a reporter for NPR at the time, and according to legend, Siegel summed up his position this way, "'No more trips to the dentist.'"

I wrote to Robert Siegel in 2011 asking him about this, and he told me he didn't remember saying that. So I don't know if he actually said that or if someone else said it. And even if no one said it, it's a strange but excellent encapsulation of what happened to the sound of NPR as it tried to dig out of its financial predicament.

At this pivotal moment, the network made a choice. No more trips to the dentist. And that's why today, when you listen to NPR, you hear excellent journalism, but it's delivered with a fairly predictable sound, day after day, story after story. ♪

Larry's feature is now legendary in some public radio circles, partly because of this tale that's associated with the piece and because it represents a bygone era in public radio. I featured a trip to the dentist on Sound School back in 2012, and I'm bringing it back today because Larry Massett passed away in April. I can think of no better way to honor his work, or maybe I should say his art. Art from the margins, as Jay Allison put it recently.

Get your ears ready. Here's a trip to the dentist. Okay, are you taking any medications right now for any reason? Are you allergic to any? I'm allergic to sulfa drugs. Okay, no history of any cardiovascular disease, heart trouble? No. High blood pressure? No major surgeries as far as you know? No. Still have your tonsils? No.

I had my tonsils out when I was little. Oh, okay. Because we do tonsils when we're not busy. I'm only kidding. The dentist, a living nightmare. For a long time, I'd felt the cavities growing in my mouth, spreading from tooth to tooth. They hurt with that insidious, narrow pain peculiar to bad teeth. I knew I was on the road to total decay. But, like many other people,

I was too afraid of the dentist to do anything about it. Finally, a friend of mine asked me to try her dentist. His name was Dr. Katz, and he had an office downtown in Washington, D.C. She guaranteed it wouldn't hurt. She swore it wouldn't hurt. She swore that it wouldn't hurt. I asked her why it wouldn't hurt, but she only smiled and said, "You'll find out."

The hardest thing is to get started. I guess since I haven't been in a long time, I probably have one or two cavities. It's not as bad as you've imagined it to be. Okay, we're going to be putting a lead apron over you right now. That's so as to protect you from any scatter radiation. So let's just go ahead and get a few films.

Okay, I need you to bring your head forward slightly. Okay, and I'm also gonna need one finger so you can hold the film in place. Don't put very much pressure on the film because if you do, the film tends to slide and I won't get what I'm looking for. You got a picture of my finger, right? Yeah. Okay. I wasn't afraid of x-rays. The only problem I had with x-rays was that they eventually got developed with an old-fashioned dentist

That could take days, maybe a week with any luck. But this dentist was very efficient. Okay, we've got your x-rays now. I just want to go over this with you to give you an idea of what I look for in an x-ray. Those are my teeth, eh? Every one of them, yeah. Now, decay...

You can see on this little picture, on this picture here, you can see that you have this sort of eaten out area. Looks like a sort of grayish spot. Yeah, it'll show up as a dark spot on an x-ray. Okay, let's go ahead and chart your mouth and look for the K. Okay, open wide for me. Okay, okay, we have a buckle in number six, buckle in number seven, number eight.

Mesial and the buccal in number 9, buccal in number 10, buccal in number 11, 12, 13. Gee, I'm sorry to give you all of this bad news. I have a lot of cannabidiol. Yeah, unfortunately you do. There's a buccal in 13, there's an occlusal in 18.

There was no hope for it. Years of snacking on candy bars and soft drinks has finally paid off.

My friend promised it wouldn't hurt, but my friend wasn't sitting in this chair. The drill and the other instruments of torture were hidden away behind the chair, yet I knew what was going to happen. I could remember stories of people who had bitten their dentist and run screaming from the office. Maybe there would be a fire. Or a hurricane.

I'm leaning you back right now and before I go ahead with the local anesthetic, as we discussed before, I'd like to give you some nitrous oxide. And the way that's administered is by this little nasal mask that I'll be placing over your nose. And I don't want you to hyperventilate or breathe any differently than you are now. Just breathe nice and easy through your nose and you can just put your head back and I'll put this over.

It takes a few minutes to start feeling any effect and it'll be a very calming feeling. You may feel some tingling in your toes and your fingers. You may have a nice overall warm feeling. It's a type of feeling you get after you've had a glass of wine. You feel comfortable and mellow and like, you know, you can sit down and just relax. That's the type of feeling I hope you'll experience with this today.

Is that comfortable by the way, that nasal mask? Yeah. Okay, good. I think this is one of the very few legal highs around, so enjoy it. I feel slightly stoned. Good. That's how I want you to feel. Okay, you're in luck. We sharpened all our needles today and I'm only kidding. What do you use? Most people say, "Well, are you going to give me Novocaine?" And I usually say yes.

Novocaine hasn't been used on a routine dental basis for quite a long time. The drug right now is called xylocaine. Here we go. You have the right form. Okay. Let's do that. Okay, well done. That wasn't bad. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

That's going to take a few minutes to take effect. So we'll just wait until you feel nice and numb and then we'll proceed from there. I really hadn't felt those shots. I was conscious, but lightheaded. I knew I was drifting off, yet I was determined not to let this dentist pull a fast one if anything happened.

I'm giving you a combination of about 30% nitrous oxide and 70% oxygen. I think you'll find I understand why it's called laughing gas. Peggy, do you have another coffee, please? I think you remember Peggy, my trusty.

Assistant, Peggy had a toothache today. Isn't that unbelievable? A receptionist having a toothache in a dental office. How did it feel? It's better now. You're not going to feel this, are you? No, I did not. What was that? Well, I just reinforced the... I also said the magic words to get you numb. What was that? Oh, I can't tell you that.

Does that feel pretty numb right now? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Okay, I'm going to get started now. If you feel any sensitivity at all, by all means let me know. Oh, stop. There we go.

Maybe I could feel the drill, and maybe I couldn't. I didn't care. I was walking down a pleasant tree-lined street. There were children playing on the lawns, laughter in the air,

Everyone said hello. There was Gladys Knight in the pips, Albert Einstein, Mozart, and Ruff, the talking dog, the only dog ever to swim the English Channel. Overhead, angels came into it.

carrying baby teeth taken from the pillows of sleeping children. The angels were exchanging the teeth for quarters. Mother beans, pink beans, different kinds of beans, snap beans, peas, tomatoes.

dried apples, all kinds of jellies and jams. And there was my grandmother. Cucumber pickles, and sauerkraut, ham, bacon, ribs, sausage, corn, tomatoes, beans. I was almost home. How are you feeling? I didn't feel anything. Okay, good.

Comfortable? Mm-hmm. Good. I'm not gonna do something. Dentistry, besides being a science, is also an art. So what I'm doing is I'm putting in this filling material and I'll probably have to carve it down a bit and reshape it. I used to be in Arts and Crafts Council, by the way. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Transgalactic Flight Number XRD00. I am T42, your pilot.

In just a moment we'll be passing the planet Earth. It's one of the most primitive of all the planets we keep under surveillance and as usual we'll stop to pick up a few teeth for our collection. For those of you who haven't seen one before, we're displaying a human tooth on the screen in front of your seats.

Notice the white outer layer made of enamel, then a yellowish inner layer known as dentin, and right in the middle of the tooth is the area called the root canal, where we find the nerves that transmit pain. We're not sure what pain is. We do know what it does. In the case of teeth, it serves as a warning signal, telling the earth people that their mouth has deteriorated.

We don't know why the root canals use pain as a signal rather than a recorded message saying "Fix your tooth" Simple blinker light This is odd when you consider these people are technologically advanced For example, they discovered a skateboard some years ago We'll be landing in five seconds Normally we stop in a cornfield in Iowa and try to scare the daylights out of a farmer but this afternoon we have something special

We are going to visit a dental office in Washington, D.C., where our subject is having tooth repair under anesthesia. Our mission will be to break through the anesthesia and make the subject stay uncle. What I'm doing right now is shutting off the nitrous oxide and I'm just putting me on pure oxygen. Because we're almost at the end of our procedure. I feel slightly dizzy. Yeah, well, we want to get rid of that. I think that's nice and smooth now.

Just put some Vaseline over that just to protect it while it's going through its final setting stage and I think we're all through.

Free at last. I marched off proudly, standing tall. I was cured. I'd never be afraid of the dentist again. From now on, I was going to brush my teeth after every meal, and I'd use dental floss the way Dr. Katz had showed me. An orange sun was setting over rush-hour traffic as I struggled home, still a bit dizzy.

I jaywalked insouciantly. I was a happy man, a man on the road to better dental hygiene. A Trip to the Dentist, produced by Larry Massett in 1977.

Larry told me he produced the piece with three reel-to-reel tape machines. No Pro Tools or Hindenburg, just razor blades and China markers coupled with a good sense for composition. Some of those mixes got fairly complicated and probably not quite right. You know, technically, we were really pushing what the studio could do. And apparently, I have a knack for it, you know. So it was a lot of fun.

I never met Larry in person, I'm sorry to say, but his work has inspired me. It's a touchstone, and I'm not alone by far. You can hear from a handful of people he inspired at transom.org. Barrett Golding, one of Larry's longtime colleagues, assembled a requiem for Larry. It features many examples of Larry's work, plus missives from Jay Allison, Erica Heilman, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Robin Wise, Keith Talbot, and Susan Stamberg, who said this about Larry.

He never tried on the NPR girdle. On the last episode of Sound School, I dropped the first of two episodes called Writing Makes All the Difference. I anticipated dropping the second one into the feed today, but because of the news about Larry, I postponed it. The second episode of Writing Makes All the Difference will drop next time. This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom.

My thanks to Genevieve Sponsler, Jay Allison, Jennifer Jarrett, and WCAI. Music in this episode comes from my friends at Stellwagen Symphonette. This is Rob Rosenthal coming to you from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe. Thank you for listening.