Travels with Jack

Abstract

Nonprofit arts organization the ZBS Foundation began as a “media commune” in the early 1970s and continues to the present day: a period that spans dramatic changes in American radio culture and audio technology. The key creative figure at ZBS is the writer and producer Thomas Lopez, whose work serves as a case study in a “post-network” style of radio drama, one shaped by multitrack editing, field recording, and the ethos of the 1960s counterculture. The ZBS aesthetic comes into sharpest focus in the Jack Flanders adventure series, which demonstrates how ZBS adapted a “theater of the mind” approach to radio drama to create a “theater of the mind-body” that re-accentuated earlier conventions of the radio adventure serial for a countercultural audience. Lopez’s increasing use of field recordings to structure his narratives established a formal tension between the inner exploration of the hero’s psyche and an encounter with different cultures. I chart the development of this formal tension in ZBS’s theater of the mind-body and argue that Lopez’s work with ZBS is a bridge across multiple eras of radio, an archive of enduring characters and distinctive styles of storytelling, and a sonic laboratory for the fostering of cultural dialogue through sound.