The Problems with Contemporary Newspapers.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 21, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 042101np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: News is a Verb
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev sitting in for Terry Gross.

There are few journalists who can speak with as much authority about the state of newspapers today as Pete Hamill. Since his first job as a cub reporter at the New York Post in 1960, Hamill has worked as a columnist, rewrite man, war correspondent, and editor. He's also a prolific novelist.

His writing style, like his colleague Jimmy Breslin's, is not the conventional objective news voice. It's often been described as "direct as a punch in the face." Hamill has covered the streets of New York. He's reported on the Vietnam War; also Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Nicaragua, Washington politics, mobsters, and celebrities.

Just last year, he was appointed editor-in-chief for the New York Daily News, with the idea that he would resurrect some of the qualities that made tabloids great back in their hey-day. The experiment only lasted eight months.

In his new book, "News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the 20th Century," Hamill writes about his experience at the Daily News and what's wrong with newspapers today. Hamill says in the public's mind, tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily News are synonymous with trash -- and that it didn't used to be that way.

PETE HAMILL, JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, "NEWS IS A VERB," "SNOW IN AUGUST," AND "A DRINKING LIFE": When I was a young reporter breaking into the New York Post, the columnists included Murray Kempton, Mary McGrory, Marcus Childs (ph). In sports we had Larry Merchant (ph), Leonard Schechter, Jimmy Cannon (ph) -- all kinds of very good writers who did not write down to the audience. They didn't think the audience was stupid. They thought the audience was smart and they wrote to that audience. They were there for that audience.

What's happened in the meantime is that they've begotten much more coarse, much less -- much less trusting of the audience. And I think there's reasons for that. I think there is a growing gulf between the people that run newspapers and the people that read them.

Too many editors live in the suburbs; too many editors are separated from the people they hope will read their newspapers -- and therefore become much dependent on things like focus groups and studies and all this other semi-sociological gobbledygook, instead of getting on the subway and seeing what people are reading and talking to them about what they're doing.

BOGAEV: Isn't part of the problem too, though, that our cities are changing? That the people are much more mobile. They move around. You don't have as many life-long Chicagoans or Philadelphians as you used to have. Cities don't have this firm identity, perhaps, that they once had when the population was more stable.

And it is true that while editors and reporters more and more live in the suburbs, also, newspaper readership of city papers lives in the suburbs. There's just a completely different framework and context for the print media.

HAMILL: Well, if the newspaper gives up on the -- on the central city, then I think they make a big mistake. In a city like New York right now, where we're in a particularly good period, where crime has been cut way down; where the middle class, who used to flee when the kids got to be five or six years old, is now staying because even the public schools in certain areas are much better -- then in the end, the central city has to be the focus of the newspaper.

You have to be able to say: "why is it not working?" -- and do something about it; use the muscle of the newspaper to analyze what is not working well and what the answers -- what the remedies are.

To say -- for example, if you take a New York City newspaper and lead your sports section with golf, you've obviously decided that the suburban mind is -- and the suburban concentration of attention has shifted. But if you're out in the subway and you're taking the subway, you know, you don't hear people sitting around talking about golf. You don't hear people in the bars of Brooklyn or Bensonhurst or Queens talking about golf, except for occasional phenomena like Tiger Woods.

So, I think you have to be much more focused on that inner-city. There are very good newspapers in the suburbs. In New York, Newsday is a terrific newspaper. But they are specifically focused at those suburban concerns.

And I think -- by the way, the New Jersey and other suburbs -- the Bergen Record and others -- excellent papers. But the New York City paper better not become suburban or it's saying: "we're gone; we're out of here; we're another hole in the ground." And I don't think we -- that's the ambition.

BOGAEV: When you took over as editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News last year, you tried to resurrect some of the things that you felt made the tabloids a great read in the past. And one thing you insisted on was covering immigration.

HAMILL: Right.

BOGAEV: Management wasn't too happy with this, like I guess they thought it wasn't a sexy story. What was your argument in favor of covering immigration in newspapers in a sustained, in depth and frontpage way?

HAMILL: Well, there were two arguments, basically. One is it's a great story. Anything that repeats a cycle that a city like New York has gone through before, 100 years later, and shows that that cycle is still full of energy and vitality -- that must be covered. There was also much evidence to show that the immigrants were in fact adding to the social cement of the city. They were revitalizing certain neighborhoods -- buying houses, fixing them up through sweat equity, if that's the phrase, and changing the city. So, you had to know something about that.

They were also changing the culture. Immigrants always bring some new thing, whether it's food or music or language, into the culture. I have heard Koreans call their stores "bodegas." I saw a headline in one of the Spanish papers about four months ago: "Un Politico de se No asun Schmuck."

LAUGHTER

"A politician says he is not a schmuck." In Spanish, there is a mixture of language that creates a sort of linguistic and cultural vitality you gotta be aware of. Is that page one? Of course not. That's not what I'm saying, but it is at least as important as the latest homicide. It is a major factor in a city with a million immigrants in it to cover that million immigrants with some kind of intelligence.

The second part of it, beyond it being a great story, is that it's good business. You might not get the immigrants to buy your paper today, but there's an accumulative effect of good coverage. Joseph Pulitzer knew this when he was running the New York World, and the reason he knew it is was he was an immigrant from Hungary.

And he knew that even though the immigrants didn't maybe read the newspaper -- the New York World that morning because they were in it; that long-run they would buy it. And that's in fact exactly what happened, 'cause you're not just talking for the immigrants, you're talking for their children.

BOGAEV: You also tried to make the paper, the Daily News, more literary. You serialized Norman Mailer's book, "The Gospel According to the Son" (ph). That's a fictional exploration of Jesus.

HAMILL: Right.

BOGAEV: Now, you did choose to serialize that book at the same time that I think the New York Post was serializing a book about Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (ph) -- the famous mobster.

HAMILL: Right.

BOGAEV: So, you were setting up a kind of a high road and a low road situation there.

HAMILL: Well, I wish -- that was not the plan, because I certainly would have run Sammy the Bull's book too. In other words, what I'm saying is, I think there's room for certain kinds of fiction in newspapers. New York is where most of O. Henry's stories were published. There's been a tradition in Europe for years of people like -- ranging from Alberto Moravia to Umberto Eco writing for newspapers.

I was saying: we don't think the audience is stupid. We think the audience is smart. And there was a terrific reaction to that serialization. That doesn't mean I would not have run Sammy the Bull, too.
Not the same week, maybe, but...

BOGAEV: Let's talk about celebrity journalism for a bit here. You really were a master -- are a master of celebrity profiles. You've done a series on a number of people. I'm thinking of a wonderful profile you did on Frank Sinatra. How did you and your editors handle the celebrity stories differently in the past? I'm thinking in the '60s and the '70s -- when to run them and where to run them in the paper, and what detail to go into.

HAMILL: Well I think -- I'm not against celebrity journalism as long as its journalism. In other words, don't take a handout from a press agent and put it in the paper. Don't let the press agent tell you where it's going to run. Don't let the celebrity say: "I will talk to you, but you can't talk about my life, my wife, my girlfriend, my lover, my dog, or anything other than my movie." You know?

We're not in the business of helping somebody sell their movie or their book or anything else. It has to be journalism to start with. In celebrity stuff, and it's one of the reasons for the title of my book, news is a verb. They have to do something. "Madonna shops" is not interesting. "Madonna throws Sean Penn under the Third Avenue bus" is a story. It's got an interesting verb.

BOGAEV: Pete Hamill is my guest. In the course of his long career in journalism, he's been a reporter, a columnist, a war correspondent, a rewrite person, and an editor. He served as editor-in-chief both for the New York Post and just last year was editor-in-chief for the New York Daily News. His new book is News is a Verb. It's about the state of journalism today.

We're going to talk more after the break.

This is FRESH AIR.

AUDIO GAP, WILL SEND TRANS

... Verb," about the state of print journalism today.

One of the things you say you -- that you were first taught was: "never use the word 'tragedy'."

HAMILL: That's true.

BOGAEV: Never say it's a tragedy.

HAMILL: That's true. I thought of that when I watched again this Princess Di coverage and heard that this was one of the great tragedies of the millennium. I said: "shut up; quiet. Get out of -- get off." No, the great -- the great piece of advice was: "never use the word 'tragedy."' Let the reader say "this is a tragedy." You don't have to tell the reader how to feel.

A lot of what's going on in some of this writing right now comes from not trusting the reader to get it. And that comes, I think, from television, where they have to put soundtracks on things to tell you what you're supposed to feel. And so, you get a lot of writing that all feels like it's in italics, because they don't trust that the reader can get it, you know.

And when I was breaking in, I fortunately was in the hands of a lot of people older than I was, who thought the reader would get it -- trust the reader. The reader's not stupid.

BOGAEV: It sounded like you guys had a lot of fun there.

HAMILL: We sure did.

BOGAEV: Wild times. A reporter friend of mine told me, while I have you here, I have to ask you about the time the guy working at the copy desk died.

HAMILL: Oh yeah, it was a -- it was a fellow named Herbie Naegler (ph) who was the news editor, which would be, at the New York Post, the guy in charge of the whole copy desk. Sitting next to me one night, there was a fine older fellow named Dexter Teed (ph) who had a wonderful Dickensian name and looked just like what a Dexter Teed should look like -- a little sort of tiny mustache and bow tie and suspenders and very careful fellow who wrote the press digest every night, which meant he would tell you what the editorials in the other papers all said.

Herbie Naegler, the news guy, had one of the strangest accents I ever heard. It was very nasal and guttural and Germanic. And I'm sitting next to Teed one night when Teed fell forward, hit his head on the typewriter, and died, at which point the next sound I heard was: "copy boy, copy boy -- get me the clips on Dexter Teed."

And if Dexter Teed was still alive, that's the last thing he heard because it was all over.

LAUGHTER

You know, the newspaper -- it was a rough room, you know, I mean, to work at a newspaper in those days. I mean, all they saw -- they didn't go rushing to help this guy. They had this thug figuring out: can we get the obit into the paper?

BOGAEV: You tell a lot of stories about those days -- how drinking was just part of the workday. I like the one you have about Murray Kempton -- a legendary New York reporter.

HAMILL: Right.

BOGAEV: One election night, he sent his copy down to the editor's desk one line at a time.

HAMILL: Right.

BOGAEV: And then finally the editor, whose name was George Trou (ph), a wonderful man -- 'cause Kempton's office was one floor above the city room. Finally, he told the copy boy going up and getting Kempton's -- there were no computers or anything like that: "ask Mr. Kempton how much more?"

So the kid ran upstairs, went into Kempton's office, and said: "Mr. Kempton, Mr. Trou wants to know how much more?" At which point, Murray lifted up his bottle, looked at the bottle, and said: "oh, about an inch."

LAUGHTER

And sent the kid on his way.

BOGAEV: Novelist and long-time newspaperman Pete Hamill is my guest.

You were a columnist for a number of papers all throughout your career. You had a really distinctive voice in your columns. One memorable column you wrote was about the death of Robert Kennedy, who was a friend of yours. You actually saw him get shot. What were the circumstances that you were there when he was assassinated?

HAMILL: Well, I was out -- I was in California actually covering election night. And I knew Bobby for several years fairly well. And I was with the group up on the stage as he said "we'll see you in Chicago" and so on. And I was there as the decision was made to go into the pantry of the -- this is all at the Ambassador Hotel -- to go through the pantry to cut back to the elevators.

And I was walking backwards, watching him with several other reporters. It's one of the weird skills you develop in the reporting business, is walk backwards so you can watch the person you're covering. And he turned to shake hands with somebody, and then suddenly "pop, pop, pop, pop" -- these small, short, almost cap-gun sounds. And there was, directly to my right, Sirhan Sirhan with the gun.

Nobody knew who Sirhan Sirhan was at the time. Nobody knew what Palestinians were at the time. I mean, it was a different era. You know, we thought it was maybe some nutty Cuban or something. And a bunch of us jumped on him and slammed him up against the steam tables.

He kept firing the gun for, you know, some very long seconds, which is why as people tried to push the gun down -- and that's why some of the people who were behind Bobby got shot in the legs, because the gun was being pushed down.

And then I saw Kennedy on the floor, and he had this sort of blissed outlook on his face. He was still alive. He lived for 24 more hours. And he had blood on his throat and on his fingertips. So, I thought he was shot in the neck. It turned out that what -- he was clearly shot right behind the ear and must have brushed his hand up there in a reflex and brought the blood to his fingertips and his neck.

But looking at him, I had seen something like that before. I had covered a fight with Emile Griffith and Benny Perret (ph), and Emile Griffith had knocked out Perret and left him on the floor in that same kind of almost sweet, accepting look on his face was on Kennedy as it was on Perret that night.

And I knew he was dead. I knew he'd never come back. There was -- it just wasn't going to happen. And the whole scene was -- outside in the ballroom, turning into pandemonium at that point. But inside, it was calm almost right away after -- 'cause Jesse Unruh, who was then the boss of California Democratic politics, kept saying: "we don't want Dallas here. We don't want Dallas here." You know, he was afraid, I think, that Sirhan would be beaten to death right on the spot. And we didn't have Dallas there.

BOGAEV: It sounds as if through this whole chaotic episode, that there was a part of you who was a friend to Robert Kennedy and also part of you who was a reporter -- was registering every detail.

HAMILL: The reporter was what was taking over. Somehow I -- I held onto my notes from that night and I can see, even in the handwriting on the notes, great shifts. Suddenly, there'll be small, tight writing -- "walk backwards, walk into" -- and then the words "blam, blam, blam, blam, blam" -- in larger lettering, you know, trying to in some way show what was there. Then the writing gets smaller again.

It -- the reporter takes over in those -- in those situations. The next day was not easy, though, and -- and I had a hard time after that happened for a variety of reasons. One was a professional one. I had made a mistake of being a friend of this man, which was a fine personal thing to do, but not a good professional thing to do. I don't think it's good to be friends with public figures if you're covering them, and I've never been friends with a politician ever since.

I don't mean that I'm an enemy of any of them, but what they do and what I do are different. And you can be an insider and be one kind of a journalist and you can be an outsider. And I think it's better to be an outsider.

But on a simple personal level, I was -- I was devastated by it. I had the only writing block of my career during that summer, until I came to New York and ran into Paul O'Dwyer (ph), who was a wonderful politician here -- an old, wonderful white-haired Irish semi-radical, I guess. And he said: "what are you writing?" And I said: "nothing. I've got this block." And he looked up and he laughed and said: "you're not important enough to have a writer's block." And I said: "you know, you're right."

And I went to work the next day.

BOGAEV: Pete Hamill, I really enjoyed talking with you today. Thanks.

HAMILL: Well, thank you for having me.

BOGAEV: Pete Hamill's new book is News is a Verb. It's part of a new paperback series called "The Library of Contemporary Thought" put out by Random House.

I'm Barbara Bogaev and this is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest: Pete Hamill
High: Journalist Pete Hamill. He's written a new book, a long essay really, about the troubled state of newspapers in this country. It's called "News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century." Hamill is also the author of the bestselling novel, "Snow in August," and the memoir, "A Drinking Life."
Spec: Books; Authors; Media; Journalism; Cities; New York; News is a Verb
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: News is a Verb
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 21, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 042102np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: The Road to Ubar
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:30

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev sitting in for Terry Gross.

The Koran, the Arabian Nights, tribal folk tales, the sonnets of Shelley and the expedition journals of the great early explorers -- all tell the tale of a lost city called Ubar. It's described as first among the treasures of Arabia -- an Atlantis of the sands.

As legend has it, it was an imposing city of great riches and immoral excesses. And like Sodom and Gomorrah, was destroyed by a wrathful God -- swallowed up by the desert sands without a trace.

Many explorers searched for it in vain. Even Lawrence of Arabia at the end of his life considered taking up the challenge. Over a decade ago, documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp first started reading about Ubar and became obsessed with the myth. He managed to put together two expedition teams to the deserts of Oman, where in 1992, using modern surveillance technology, they found the ruins of a city many archaeologists now believe to be Ubar.

Nicholas Clapp tells the story behind the discovery in his new book "The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands." One obstacle he and his team overcame was gaining access to the Omani desert.

NICHOLAS CLAPP, FILMMAKER, AUTHOR, "THE ROAD TO UBAR": We were the first archaeological team allowed in in the recent past, in that the area we went to had -- had had a revolution take place there back in the '50s, and was still a little bit wild and woolly. There was a little bit of a -- the Ubar Road, by the way, was being used to some extent for drug trafficking. And so, we had to be very, very careful where we went and how we went and who we went with.

But the Omani government was terrific. We had Omani police guards with us and everything went, actually, very smoothly.

BOGAEV: On your first expedition into the desert, you headed out in this old helicopter.

CLAPP: Mm-hmm.

BOGAEV: You didn't have quite enough fuel and the pilot dropped you all off in the middle of the desert to lighten the plane and go refuel and then return to pick you up. That just sounds terrifying to me. Was it?

CLAPP: It -- well, everybody kind of pretended it wasn't, but it kind of was, in that we didn't have enough fuel to get back from out on the dunes. And it was a very, very hot day. It was well over, maybe 122, 124, which meant the helicopter burned a lot more fuel than he thought he'd need. And so, the only way to get out of there was to drop everybody off and take quite a bit of the cargo off it as well. And then for the pilot alone to go back and get some fuel and come back and retrieve us.

And in the haste to do all this, realizing every second counted, when we got out of the helicopter, we got out, but most of the water stayed on the helicopter. So, we had relatively little water. But he assured us he'd be back in an hour. And about a couple hours later, we were getting a little nervous and a little thirsty. And what had happened is the fuel depot had been raided by God knows who, and so he had to limp even on a little further and fuel up and come back. But that was a very nice sight to see -- just a little helicopter coming from way off across the dunes in our direction.

BOGAEV: What does a hot day in the desert feel like?

CLAPP: A little -- it's a unique experience. It's a little like -- the thing that comes to mind, it's like a sauna, but it's much more intense. It's like kind of walking into a furnace. And you know, particularly if you, say, get out of a air-conditioned vehicle or you get out of a helicopter, it really hits you like a blast.

But, you get adapted to it. And there's a kind of a saying that I actually got from some ranger friends in the California desert, and they said that the human body is designed to work up to -- quite effectively up to about 130 degrees, as long as you had enough water.

So we always had, you know, bottles of water with us and we almost had to drink as frequently as every two to three minutes. But if you did that, you were OK.

BOGAEV: What did you find on your first expedition?

CLAPP: We found the road and -- which was a great relief. And we also found very good evidence that the road was really, really old in that we found where it had come out from underneath a sand dune that was about 600 feet high. And a sand dune like that would take, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years to form. So we knew that the road preceded the sand dune and thus was very old.

And, we tracked quite a bit of the road by helicopter. And beyond that, we didn't find too much. In fact, we were kind of discouraged and in fact thought that our sponsors would dump us when we came back pretty empty-handed. But they didn't, and they said: "well, won't you come back and try again?" -- which we did.

BOGAEV: What does an ancient road look like? In the sands?

CLAPP: In the sands -- it's a series of parallel camel tracks, and I think there are pretty close to 100 of them running side by side where in the old days, evidently, there are some classical reports of caravans having as many as 2,000 camels. And they often -- and they would go in as big a cluster as they could, so that the outriders could protect them from being -- from attacks and marauding.

And so, you have these parallel tracks and -- to the width of about a hundred yards, which is about a 10-lane freeway, which was pretty neat because that really did show up from space. Although curiously, though you could see the road very clearly from hundreds of miles up, you could actually get down on the ground and not see it at all. It was invisible in some places -- in fact, most places.

And that's because the satellites were not so much measuring the physical road, but measuring where the Earth had been compressed and kind of hammered down by the passage of thousands and thousands of camels in caravans.

BOGAEV: Driving on a sand dune seems to take a special skill, and it wasn't one that you possessed.

LAUGHTER

CLAPP: Absolutely not.

BOGAEV: You find -- how -- what are the problems of driving on the sands?

CLAPP: Well the right way to do it is the way the Bedouin do it, and it's almost like a Zen approach to driving, is that they -- they just glide across -- I don't know how they do it. They just glide across the dunes and they can hop into a vehicle that's not theirs -- they've never driven before -- and go through the worst sand and just -- and it's absolutely effortless.

And what they're doing is that they -- they can what they call "read" the sands. They can see just by the way the light refracts, the coloration, the slip-face in the dune. They can know just how soft it is and exactly the speed they need to go through it, and the angle to take and so forth. And you know, any of us would try following one of these guys and we'd immediately be dug into the hubcaps -- I mean, in a matter of seconds.

So our only solution, which worked out OK, was a very foot-to-the-floor, very, very fast driving -- almost reckless -- so at least we had a lot of momentum going in case we started to get stuck. And we -- of course would get stuck a lot. But there was a little technique -- there's something that they used over there that we don't have here called "sand ladders."

And these are aluminum ladders and you get stuck, and you jack the vehicle up and put the ladders under the tires, and then get enough speed on these eight- or 10-foot aluminum ladders to just drive out and be on your way.

BOGAEV: You write that you ran into things like "camel wallows."

CLAPP: Yeah. Those would be -- back where there -- on the gravel plains where there were often some kind of tracks -- old military roads or -- leftover from oil explorations -- you could follow for part of the way -- is that the camels would pick a particular place to their liking and use it to take sand baths. And they'd wallow around it, and basically create this patch which would be maybe, oh, 20-feet long, 30-feet long and three or four feet deep -- and just like quicksand.

And you'd be driving along and, you know, fairly fast -- maybe 50, 60 miles an hour, ripping along these gravel roads or tracks, and you'd hit one of these things and the vehicle would spin and slide all over the place. And it was -- 'til we learned about them and how to handle them, it was a little startling.

And there were -- they're quite routinely in that part of the world -- quite a number of vehicles flip over when they hit camel wallows. And what we did was, we kind of mapped where they all were so that we knew at 32.1 kilometers to expect one, so we could either go around it or speed up and go through it really fast, with kind of a death-grip on the wheel.

BOGAEV: I'm talking with Nicholas Clapp. He's a documentary filmmaker. About a decade ago, he became fascinated with the legend of Ubar, an ancient lost city in the Arabian Desert known as the Atlantis of the Sands. Using modern radar technology and a lot of old-fashioned exploring, he believes he found Ubar in the deserts of Oman.

He's written about his quest in his new book The Road to Ubar. We'll be back after this break.

This is FRESH AIR.

If you're just joining us, my guest is documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp. He spent over a decade searching out the fabled city of Ubar in the desert of Oman. His new book is The Road to Ubar.

While you were investigating in the desert, you were visited by tribesmen, who you say drifted down from the mountains, and you write that their hair had the fragrance of frankincense.

CLAPP: Mm-hmm.

BOGAEV: Did it really? I mean...

LAUGHTER

CLAPP: Yeah. They were pretty startling people. The -- the kind of the geography of the area is you have the coast and the mountains, and you get out to the desert and eventually the dunes. And in the mountains, there is a tribe called the Shakra (ph), who believe and quite rightly so -- we too came to believe -- that they were actually descendants of the people of Ubar.

And they -- their dress was extraordinary. They wear these kind of purple robes that were slung over one shoulder like in classical times. And their hair was braided and wound around their heads. And their hair was often dyed blue. The men used makeup -- you know, eyeliner and so forth.

They're very striking people and they're -- and it turned out their language was fascinating because it -- they didn't speak Arabic. They spoke a language that came before Arabic -- came before Hebrew -- a very, very early Middle Eastern language, which was very strange-sounding. They -- one name that's been given is the "language of birds," and it sounded like there were a lot of chirps and squeaks and so forth that were very bird-like when they talked.

BOGAEV: One of these men became your guide, and he had studied in -- is it in England that he...

CLAPP: Yeah. Yeah.

BOGAEV: And he had become kind of a amateur historian of the tribe. And he took you to a very famous place called the "Veil of Remembrance," which is a...

CLAPP: Mm-hmm.

BOGAEV: ... valley where this tribe had -- and many Arabic tribes had laid their dead to rest. What does it look like there? Can you see skeletons, bodies in the sands...

CLAPP: Yeah.

BOGAEV: ... or you just see graves?

CLAPP: It's a very spooky -- it's a long canyon that goes from the mountains down into the open desert. And it's filled with graves of all periods, right up to the present. And you can tell like recent burials -- well "recent" being in the last 1,300 years, because there's -- the graves are laid out so the deceased would face Mecca. But when you don't have that alignment, you know you're dealing with earlier graves.

And there was -- they're even kind of walled-off sections, and you could find a little niche, open place in the wall and peek in, and see just rows of skulls looking back out at you. It's very, very eerie.

BOGAEV: So, finally, where did you find Ubar?

CLAPP: It was actually right where it ought to have been, and if we'd been a little smarter, we would have found it right away. It was out on the end of a long gravel plain where the camel caravans would have come, and just before the caravans went into the dunes. And something that we found out was that camels are a little like cars in that you need a different tread for different terrains.

So for instance, if you're going to take a four-wheel drive across a flinty gravel plain, you need very hard, narrow tires. But as soon as you get in the sand, you need -- or you best have big balloon tires. Well, the same thing with camels -- and -- that they had in ancient days and still today, camels that go out across the plain, have small, very tough feet, and then the camels that go on into the dunes have great big floppy feet -- many times the size.

And so, Ubar was the changeover point and it was -- they selected it for -- mainly because of a terrific water supply there. And if we'd put that all together, figured out where did the camels change, you know, where did they change from one set of camels to another, that would have taken us to Ubar a lot, lot sooner, but we found it nonetheless.

BOGAEV: You began an excavation in a fort that had -- a kind of ruined fort that people said "ah, this could never be Ubar, it's too -- too young. It's not old enough." It had been discounted many times by other explorers. But you believed that there was an older fort under it.

CLAPP: Yeah.

BOGAEV: And you started an excavation. Why don't you -- you know, tell us at what point did you think: "oh, I found it. We got it."

CLAPP: Yeah. It was -- yeah, we dug there. At first, there was really nothing to say that this wasn't a fairly recent ruin -- "fairly recent" being maybe 500 years old. But we were kind of desperate and this was our last place, so we figured, well, the only other alternate was kind of sneaking out of the country. So, we started to dig.

And two things kind of happened. One was we found very identifiable ancient pottery -- Greek, Roman, Syrian, Persian. And that put the threshold way back. We knew right away that we were dealing with quite an ancient site. And at the same time, we found that the little fort that was the first thing we saw, was actually part of a -- just a corner of a very large citadel, with towers and walls that was Ubar.

And it was buried, you know, very close to the surface.

BOGAEV: Did the ruins you found paint an unambiguous picture of how this city came to be a lost city and how it was destroyed?

CLAPP: Yeah, that was -- that was really the -- kind of the clincher. I mean, it was in the right place. It was the right age. It fitted in with the frankincense trade. And in the legend of Ubar, it -- we could never quite figure it out until we came to the place. In the legend of Ubar, it was destroyed by sinking into the sands.

And you know, many ancient cities are burned or pillaged or wrecked by earthquakes, but what did it mean that it was -- it sank into the sands? And it turned out that was actually what happened, in that the city had been built over a water source, and the water source was an underground cavern.

And the more the city prospered, which it did, the more the water was pulled out of the cavern until one day, probably sometime after 300 AD, it collapsed overnight, and fell into what became a sinkhole -- quite a spectacular sinkhole. And that was the end of Ubar.

And it was the same in myth as in reality.

BOGAEV: Now are you just famous, as this amateur who stumbled upon an ancient city, among archaeologists? Or did they dispute your findings?

CLAPP: No -- I -- you know, the -- I was pretty wary about, you know, being an amateur, but one -- one thing we did was we -- we didn't kind of romp off on our own. We -- we involved professional archaeologists every step of the way. And -- and the relationship with professionals has been wonderful then and since.

And they've -- oh, a good dozen archaeologists have pitched in kind of helping us figure out the little ramifications, nooks and corners of the legend and exactly who these people were and how they related to the ancient world.

So -- you know, once thing that was nice about being an amateur is you could really afford to fall on your face and really take almost absurd chances because you didn't have a career at stake, so that was to the amateur's advantage. But the relationship between amateur and professional worked out terrifically.

BOGAEV: Thanks a lot for talking today, Nicholas Clapp.

CLAPP: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

BOGAEV: Nicholas Clapp's new book is The Road to Ubar.

Coming up, "Decksanddrumsandrockandroll."

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest: Nicholas Clapp
High: Documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp. His new book, "The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantic of The Sands" is about his search for the lost Arabian city of Ubar. Described in the Koran as "the many-columned city," Ubar was said to have been destroyed by God for the sins of its people. Using satellite maps to help locate it, Clapp organized two expeditions to Arabia to find Ubar. And he found it in 1992.
Spec: Middle East; History; The Koran; Cities; Ubar; Religion; Islam; Archaeology
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: The Road to Ubar
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 21, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 042103np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Propellerheads
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:55

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: "Propellerheads" is a pair of musicians from Bath, England, Alex Gifford (ph) and Will White (ph), who are the leading proponents of the latest electronic noise in Britain called "Big Beat" -- a combination of electronic collage and drums played by humans.

Propellerheads' debut CD is called "Decksanddrumsandrockandroll" -- "decks" being hip-hop slang for the turntables they use to scratch bits of music on.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "DECKSANDDRUMSANDROCKANDROLL")

SAMPLER: What -- what -- what

What's different, Pete, about the '69 that makes it so exciting to (unintelligible)...

2,000 people in a seething, roaring shouting mass...

All the people I know are musicians. I revolve around music. It's all I know.

They've each got their own little thing that they like.

KEN TUCKER, FRESH AIR COMMENTATOR: Describing a Propellerheads' live show, Alex Gifford said recently: "it's just the two of us with four decks, drums, which Will plays, the Hammond organ and bass, and lots of running from one thing to the other, desperately trying to keep it all together."

Like other performers of their ilk, such as California's "Dr. Octagon" and "The Crystal Method," the results are not the chilly stuff of electronica, but an artful mish-mash that organizes itself around the beat.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "DECKSANDDRUMSANDROCKANDROLL")

Propellerheads also operate at a slower speed, hooking into florid movie soundtrack music that they like by composers such as John Berry (ph), Bernard Herman (ph), Lalo Schiffrin (ph), and Michel Legrande (ph). You can hear that influence in a moody piece like this, called "Clang."

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "CLANG")

You can hear it even more overtly, more campily, more acutely, on "History Repeating" -- a track that Propellerheads cut with the Welsh R&B vocalist Shirley Bassey -- best known here for singing the theme to a James Bond movie "Goldfinger."

There's a James Bond revival in British music circles these days. Propellerheads themselves recorded a version of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" for a chi-chi compilation album last year called "Shaken, not Stirred." But Bassey's performance on History Repeating is truly stirring and it can leave you shaken.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "HISTORY REPEATING")

PROPELLERHEADS AND SHIRLEY BASSEY, SINGER, SINGING:
The newspapers shout
S new style is growing
For it don't know if it's coming or going
There is fashion
There is fad
Some is good
Some is bad
And the joke is rather sad
That it's all just a little bit of history repeating

And I've seen it before
And I'll see it again
Yes, I've seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating

Some people won't dance if they don't know who's singing
Why ask your head?
It's your hips that are swinging
Life's for us to enjoy
Woman, man, girl and boy
Feel the pain, feel the joy
(Unintelligible)
The little bits of history repeating

TUCKER: That song can stand as a statement of Propellerheads' philosophy. The message is: things may seem new, but it's all been done before. It's just a matter of making it sound new.

Pop music both bad and brilliant has been operating under the influence of this theory for close to 20 years now, in everything from Bruce Springsteen to the Pet Shop Boys to Nirvana. The trick, and it's one that Propellerheads pulls off more than once on Decksandrumsandrockandroll -- is to make the echoes of the past sound like statements of the present and intimations of the future.

BOGAEV: Ken Tucker is critic-at-large for Entertainment Weekly.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

Dateline: Ken Tucker; Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews "Decksanddrumsandrockandroll" the new release by Propellerheads, a pair of musicians from England, making the latest electronic noise known as Big Beat.
Spec: Music Industry; Decksanddrumsandrockandroll
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Propellerheads
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.