Frank Portman
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Frank Portman is best known as the lead singer/songwriter for The Mr. T Experience but now that he’s written his first novel, King Dork, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you referred to him as the next JD Salinger. But that’s a non de plume that the main character of King Dork, Tom Henderson, would hate. You see Henderson calls himself King Dork because of his status in high school. He only has one friend, Sam Hellerman, no girlfriends or friends that are girls and he hates the fact that every teacher in his school is obsessed with making the students try to be obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. Henderson spends his time making up band names for him and Hellerman and obsessing over girls he will never get to touch. But all that changes when he finds his dead father's copy of The Catcher in the Rye with many mysterious notes in the margins.

Buy King Dork

Daniel Robert Epstein: How long have you been working on King Dork?

Frank Portman: From the first time I had lunch with the editor to the publication was just about two years. My band was on tour in New York and the agent who was trying to talk me into trying to write a novel set up a lunch with an editor at this publishing company. I didn’t have a book idea and I didn’t really think I was going to write one, but I thought, “Hey, free lunch.” So I went there and talked to her and I had to admit that I hadn’t written anything and I didn’t have an idea. So she was like, “Well, that’s okay. You’ve written a lot of songs. Why don’t you try to turn one of the songs into a book?” So I thought about it and gave it a shot. But then it was a long process after that because I procrastinated for awhile and then I typed out the first draft, which took about a month. That’s the thing with a book, you have to keep doing it over and over again. So you turn in your draft and then you wait while you get it back with notes. It’s like being in school and turning it homework. You wait until you get your grade back and then you’ve got to go work on it again to improve your grade. Two years later, it’s published and then it’s all over.

DRE: Did you really adapt a song?

FP: Yeah, pretty much. The book turned out to be quite a bit different from the song as you’d imagine. But the song that I got the title from is called King Dork. In the song there was the character of the narrator, who is the same character who had been the narrator of several other songs actually. I just thought King Dork was a pretty catchy title, so I just tried to imagine what that guy in the song would’ve done as a little interior monologue and then eventually it turned into a book.

DRE: It’s amazing that the character in the book came up with all those band names and there wasn’t one having to do with Mr. T.

FP: Yeah I had made that mistake myself. I didn’t really feel like forcing it upon my fictional character. But the book takes place over three months so he was coming up with band names for much longer than that. By the time you get out of high school and have your own band there is no telling how many fake band names you’d end up accumulating.

DRE: Is that how you came up with Mr. T Experience?

FP: It was something like that. People often don’t seem to realize how little difference there is between the fake band that you make up in high school and actually having a “real band,” where you play shows and put out records. It’s all imaginary. But the way that my band ended up being called Mr. T Experience is similar. We’d be sitting around watching TV and drinking Budweiser and someone says, “Hey, let’s call it I Dream of Jeannie on Acid.” Everyone goes, “Yeah. That’s good.” So someone said at some point, “Hey. How about Mr. T Experience?” Everyone laughed and we were making a flyer for a show and we got stuck with the name because it happened to be what we put on the flyer. Then I was in denial about it for years. I never really thought I’d have to be explaining it 20 years later. That’s a pretty terrible name, but it’s by no means the worst name. Anything can be a band name. That’s really the lesson. I just noticed a brazil nut on the linoleum there in my kitchen. Brazil nut linoleum, that’s a band name.

DRE: That’s why you’re an author.

FP: That’s right. This is how the content gets provided.

DRE: Why’d you meet with those guys in the first place about doing a book?

FP: The guy who’s my agent now was a fan of my band when he was a youngster and he grew up to be a pretty sharp literary agent. He thought, “Hey. Maybe this guy could write a book.” So he contacted me several times over the last few years and I never took it very seriously because I didn’t really have any literary ambitions or the idea that I could really write a book. But in the end I gave it a shot. I typed out a few chapters like a demo book, just to ask him, “Is this the thing you’re talking about?” and then I didn’t hear from him for awhile and I thought “Okay, it sucks and that’s why I’m not hearing from him.” But then when I did hear from him, he said, “I sold this to Random House.” I was like, “Man. Now I got to finish it.” So it took awhile and it was scary because if you don’t finish it, then you have to give at least part of the advance back. So that’s a real incentive.

DRE: There are a lot of blowjobs in this book for a young adult novel.

FP: Yeah. There’s a long tradition of YA novels that deal with sex. A lot of traditional teen lit and movies tiptoe around the actual reality of it. I’m not the only one who ever thought this would be a good idea, but I just thought, “Let’s not tiptoe around it.”

DRE: I’m not criticizing it. I’m just saying.

FP: Yeah. I think a lot of people are surprised. “Wow. I can’t believe they let you do that.” But I was surprised because Random House is a big company so I thought there would be some attempt at censorship or trying to make it more commercial. But there was nothing like that. They made suggestions, but it was like, “You’re the writer.” That was a pleasant surprise.

DRE: I thought it was cool when she wrote “slurp” on the note.

FP: That was cool. I’d like to get a note like that.

DRE: Why aren’t I getting notes like that?

FP: Yeah, sometimes you get lucky. You should go around telling people you’re in a band because that’s a good first step towards getting notes like that.

DRE: If I had known when I was young that being in a band would’ve done for me, in terms of girls, I would’ve been in a band since I was five.

FP: I just stumbled onto it blindly. No one told me. But it’s a valuable lesson.

DRE: My kid’s going to be jammin'. I’m going to shove an instrument in his hand, if and when I have a kid, If I have a girl she won’t be in a band!

FP: Yeah. The dynamic might be a little different. You make your decisions on child rearing yourself though.

DRE: Is the book autobiographical at all?

FP: Not really. The narrator is not me. But the general experience of what happens when you are an alienated teenager, even alienated from within the alienated subcultures, is what I experienced. If you were on the A list socially in high school, it’d be hard to write a book like King Dork, but by definition most people were not on whatever the A-list is, so I think that’s why it’s relatable.

DRE: What age did you start a band?

FP: I first started to say I was in a band around 13. But I was in a “band” long before I even had an instrument or anything. In fact I probably had like 20 or 30 bands before I actually learned how to play the guitar. If there’s any message to that book it is that having a band where you play instruments is optional. It’s more the concept and if you say that you are in a rock and roll band, you pretty much are in one.

DRE: When did you get your first girl as a result of being in a band?

FP: It was almost immediately. It’s the strange power of rock and roll, but I merely point it out.

DRE: When did the idea of the mystery of the Tom Henderson’s father come into your mind?

FP: One thing that writers often say that I always found pretentious is that once you have your characters and your setting, you start writing to find out what’s going to happen and the characters take on a life of their own. That is sort of what happened. One of my hobbies is that I collect found objects like letters and cards and various things from other peoples’ lives that are interesting or amusing or poetic. So I really like to go to yard sales and used bookstores and the Salvation Army and look through the books because a lot of times people have interesting things written in books. I noticed that the book that tended to have the most things written in it is The Catcher in the Rye. So as I was writing this book and I was engaging in my hobby of looking through these books, I had the idea, “Well, what would be interesting is if something written in one of these books turned out to have a mysterious significance in this character’s life.” Once I had that idea, then the plot snapped in. But of course the mysteries and the paranoid idea of conspiracies is really just a structure to hang the characterization on.

DRE: Is Henderson a good looking guy?

FP: He doesn’t think so. He’s probably not bad looking though because if you remember his sister’s really good looking. His parents are good lucking. But he’s a nerdy guy with glasses so you don’t really tend to think of yourself as really great looking when you’re in that mode. But if you’re anywhere shy of being a hideous monster and maybe even if you are a hideous monster rock and roll can counteract almost anything.

DRE: Is Sam Hellerman based on anyone you know?

FP: He wasn’t really based on anyone I knew. I was a little more like the Sam Hellerman figure in my childhood than I was like the Tom Henderson. You always find that books and movies are from the point of view of a single person with another person there so that there’s something to interact with or else it’s very hard to get anything going. For dramatic purposes I needed there to be a friend of some kind.

DRE: Do you like Catcher in the Rye?

FP: I reread it while I was writing the book and I liked it better than I did when I was a kid. I didn’t hate it as much as Tom Henderson does but I did feel that there was something weird about how everyone was in love with it. The only explanation Tom can come up with is that it’s a sinister cult. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I did think there was something a little spooky about how everyone was under its spell without reservation. Now that I’ve written a book that is more or less an attack on it, although an ironic attack, I’m running into more people who say, “Yeah. I’ve always hated that book.” I never met anyone who did when I was a kid or up until now. I just thought it was required that you love it or else they put you in jail or something. Any time you are forced to feign enthusiasm for something, it fosters an antipathy. There’s a lot of stuff in school like that. It doesn’t have to be that particular book. It’s anything that your teacher is really excited about. Your job is to come up with the best way to act like you’re excited about it as well, but you want to find your own things to be excited about. So there’s a classic tension there with Catcher in the Rye.

DRE: Whose idea was the cover?

FP: That was actually my editor’s copy of the Catcher in the Rye that she used to carry around with her when she was a kid. We just took that and defaced it. It was fun. I was originally worried about being sued by the Salinger estate because I know they sue people and he’s still alive, which I was surprised to learn. But the result from the legal department is that it’s the same company. They can’t sue themselves. We can do anything we want to that cover.

DRE: What’s going on music wise for you?

FP: I have my eye on doing another rock and roll album, although it’s not completely in the planning stages. It’s past the fantasy stage and now it’s more in the daydreaming stage. But I’m writing some songs and trying to pull together some ideas. I’m really hoping I can get my act together enough to do another tour in the fall.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Frank+Portman/