AADL Talks To: arwulf arwulf

Tue, 02/18/2025 - 2:22pm

When: June 29, 2023

In this wide-ranging conversation, local radio personality and cultural historian, arwulf, recalls the many Ann Arbor institutions, icons, and events that shaped his life. He discusses the impact of Ann Arbor’s counterculture during his youth in the late 1960s, from an early introduction to 1950s-1960s blues, rock, and jazz; psychedelia in its many forms; and Ann Arbor's anti-war movement, to his artistic awakening through film, theater, art, and radio. He also shares memories of his interactions with members of the Rainbow People's Party, his work as a Psychedelic Ranger during the legendary Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festivals, and Ann Arbor’s experimental alternative education movement.

Transcript

[00:00:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi, this is Elizabeth.
[00:00:09] AMY CANTU: This is Amy. In this episode, AADL talks to local radio personality, musicologist, and all-around cultural historian Theodore Greiner, better known to Ann Arborites as arwulf arwulf. In this wide-ranging conversation, arwulf shares personal memories of the Ann Arbor institutions, icons, and events that shaped his life. He covers the impact of Ann Arbor's counterculture during his youth in the late 1960s, from an early introduction to Black music, psychedelic drugs, and the anti-war movement to his artistic awakening through film, theater, art happenings, and radio. He also shares personal memories of encounters with members of the Hill Street commune, his work as a Psychedelic Ranger during the famous blues and jazz festivals, and he details his involvement with Ann Arbor's experimental alternative education movement. Well, thank you so much for coming. Very excited to chat with you today, arwulf.
[00:01:04] arwulf: My pleasure.
[00:01:05] AMY CANTU: We like to generally start with just a little background. If you could talk about where you grew up and what brought you to Ann Arbor.
[00:01:13] arwulf: I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1957 and I've lived all over the country before I came to Ann Arbor. I lived in Auburn, New York; Syracuse, New York; Concord, Massachusetts; Bozeman in Montana. People always say to me, were you a military child? Actually, my father was an electrical engineer with academic pursuits driving him around. I think he was a bit insecure. He really wanted to find just the right place. We really covered a lot of ground. We didn't get here until 1968, fresh from Concord, Massachusetts. I arrived here as an 11-year-old, very precocious, very impressionable with two older siblings living at home. I actually have three sibs, but three and six years older than I, respectively. Since it was 1968, and I was very precocious, and so were they, we got into all kinds of things that were very common for young people to get involved in at that time, and we can dip into that as we move forward. Ann Arbor was a much smaller but much different town in many lively ways than it is now. I will say that we landed near the intersection of Miller and Maple, which was the boonies. That was the Styx. The street across from our house was not paved. There was swamp water with algae growing in it. It was like the land is out here but it was not so "developed" as it has become. I went to Haisley Elementary School, which was a marvelous school, and I think still is. That was a good place to start for me. I was relieved to get to a city that appeared to be stable for me, and something told me I was going to be able to stay here and root down. There was a lot going on here within six months of moving here, but my older brother and I found ourselves on the U of M Diag. From that point onward, whenever I got out of school, be it Haisley Elementary or Forsythe Junior High School out on Newport, I would get out of school, and I would walk all the way into town, or I would walk from our house.
[00:04:10] AMY CANTU: It was a hike.
[00:04:12] arwulf: A good distance, but I was really into walking, and most of my experiences in the first couple of years in this town were by myself just wandering around, just absorbing what this little town was like. But with every step that I took, it seemed like I was getting closer and closer to where it was really happening, and I say this for two very distinct reasons. Ok, three. The two distinct reasons for where I would land would be Mark's Coffee House, which was located where NYPD Pizza is, my favorite pizzeria in the world, right at Maynard and William. Then over on North University, the late lamented Drake's Sandwich Shop. Those were the two places that I would go as a quiet young man most of the time, quiet when I was around other people because everybody else was making so much noise. I love going to Drake's because it was quieter and I could get a little pot of Assam tea and get out a book. It's always been very bookish. These two places were very different, actually. Mark's started out as a place where U of M students could go and hang out and study. The younger crowd made it so that it was much noisier. We made more noise as a group, and everybody chain-smoked except me. I was not smoking tobacco at that time. Although I did discover Maison Edwards Tobacconist in the Nickels Arcade, which is still there. As a 12-year-old, I would go in there and purchase Doctor Romney's mentholated snuff. This is nasal snuff, not the type you put in your mouth, but up the nose. Everybody thought I was really unusual because I would sniff little bits of that and I would walk around, and I would quote Edward Lear or Edgar Allen Poe. [LAUGHTER] I was a very strange kid in some ways, but very impressionable. The Diag was where it was really happening. The Diag at that time was most of the time just packed with more people than you ever see on the Diag now and a much different approach to being there. It was more like a nonstop party. There was a lot of smoking going on, there were people with wine bottles. There was less of a police enforcement about such things. By 1970, I remember this distinctly because, on the last day of being 12, I was really depressed. I thought, I don't want to grow any further. Adults are all very miserable-looking, and I just want to be 12, 12 is really cool. I went for a walk all the way around the Huron Parkway bridge. I was downwalking in the river and my sandals were getting pulled off my feet, and then I walked back up to the Diag, and the reason I'm inserting this into the story is that I walked back up to the Diag after taking this long, moody existentialist stroll by myself. I got onto the U of M Diag and right over there near where the Chemistry Building now is and also the Dana Building. There was the Tenants Union. Remember the Tenants Union?
[00:07:59] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
[00:08:00] arwulf: Imagine Ann Arbor having a Tenants Union. Is there still a Tenants Union? I don't think so. Heavens, no. Why would we want that? But the Tenants Union, they had staged an encampment. This is a protest, and they had tents. But they also had a campfire.
[00:08:21] AMY CANTU: Right there, huh?
[00:08:22] arwulf: I'm walking onto the Diag after going for this existential walk, and here's this campfire. Don't try this nowadays. These people are passing fat greasy joints around the fire on the Diag. I'm not saying that the police never came onto the Diag and confronted people, but a lot of my memories of law enforcement or people in uniforms were of rent-a-cops. There was more rent-a-cop presence on the campus. They didn't really have the force that they have now, and given what's happened in this community over the years, they've had to have better enforcement to deal with violence and crime. Back then, it is interesting to look back on, because there was a lot more room for misbehavior. I saw a guy get hit over the head with a wine bottle once and took him off the Diag very quickly and tried to help him. I was probably 16 by the time that happened. We saw a lot in this town. Back to my first years here, though, before all of this, I was getting ahead of myself. One of the first people I met whose name is recognizable in this community was Hiawatha Bailey. I met Hiawatha by walking my favorite way in, down Miller. Sometimes I would turn right on Main Street. I'll talk about Main Street in a minute. But I would often take Miller, and it would become Catherine, and then I would hang right on Fourth Avenue, and there was the Wooden Spoon bookshop, great used bookshop. I would go in there and I would just be fascinated because I'm endlessly bookish. I got that very much from my mother. I got a couple of cheap books, and then I walked up Fourth and got to Huron Street, and there was this gas station.
[00:10:37] arwulf: Now it became lawyers' offices. It's all painted white. It's across the street from the Embassy. But at the time, that was an actual gas station. There was this beautiful, dark-skinned man, very tall, angular with almond-shaped eyes. He looked really sullen and he was pumping gas. The minute he saw me hanging out, he showed me how to use the wiper on the windshield and got me involved, and this is something he's always had a reputation for being great with kids. But I found out years later from him that the reason that he was working at that gas station was that his probation officer -- he probably got busted with a bag of pot or something -- his probation officer had an office right across the street. He could look out the window and keep his eye on him. They arranged for him to work this job, and then he could keep an eye on him. I had asked just a few years ago, I asked Hiawatha, Don't I remember you? I remember you going up onto the second level, there was all these tires on the inside of the gas station. I remember you grabbing these enormous inner tubes and throwing them down. What was that about? He said, We used to take those and shoot the rapids down at Delhi. That's what those were about. But he told me that one day he'd be so frustrated because his friends would be coming by to go to the free concerts down at Gallup Park. One day he said he just hopped in the back of the truck and quit the job. I said, that's it, maybe took a couple of inner tubes with him when he did that. I'm not sure. But Hiawatha is still one of my very favorite people in the world. I'm thinking chronologically but if you want to ask any questions, that's fine, or I can just keep improvising.
[00:12:44] AMY CANTU: Well, you're in 1968 already. I know that... I read that you were a fan of John Sinclair and all that he brought to town, you were a Psychedelic Ranger. You went to the free concerts. You appreciated the culture that they brought at the time. Can you talk a little bit about your involvement in that?
[00:13:06] arwulf: Sure. The first free concerts that I attended I believe he was still in prison. I didn't meet him until summer of '72. But I used to go to these free concerts at Gallup Park. The greatest thing about that for me as a hungry youngster was that the Hare Krishna people would be set up right there, and they would have all this rice, short grain brown rice and steamed carrots and those beautiful rolled up cookies, Hindu cookies. I remember this guy handing me a plate of food and saying, here, this is Prasad. Krishna just had it. Now you get to have some. I'm like, This is great, can I have seconds? But it was that kind of a -- for a young person, it was just wonderful, this festive atmosphere, rock bands carrying on, lots of people enjoying themselves. It wasn't until, it was a couple of years later, 1972 really, that they started... they moved the free concerts to what John Sinclair officially pronounced as Otis Spann Memorial Field, named after Muddy Waters' piano player. I was working at these free concerts, and I should say that a lot of people I knew were doing this. Please make a note: I want to talk about the alternative schools that I went to in this town. The first one in line was Solstice School, which was in a wood-framed house in the 700 block of Oakland, right up near Monroe and we were legion in there. We were just a bunch of swarming young loonies, very precocious, very intelligent little crowd I was running with, but they all became Psychedelic Rangers, and so did I. The theory behind being a Psychedelic Ranger was that it's probably not safe for the police to enter into the concert area. There's a lot of people who might misunderstand why the police are there. We don't want anybody to get, an altercation going, so let's just have the Psychedelic Rangers. We had coaching. I said, Here's how to help people. Here's the drug teny and first aid is over here. Lost children is over here, and so forth. I was already involved in that in the summer of '72. That's how I started hanging out at the Rainbow People's houses, the communes on Hill Street near Washtenaw. That's where I first met John. He had this big office, and I remember going into the office. I was looking at all the posters on the wall of different musicians. Then I noticed that he had been cleaning some marijuana. This was when this is a time when there was an inexhaustible supply of Colombian brown reefer in this town. It was just everywhere. It was like currency. He had cleaned some up for himself, and then he had thrown some aside, and he was going to throw it away. Being a resourceful young person and I remember him being amused at that in a nice way. He was but that's just incidental. What I noticed about John right away, was that he wanted to impart his insights and wisdom to people. He had some very concise messages to get across. Now, apart from the fact that there is a grievous misunderstanding of, let's say, the teaching of Mao Zedong -- no, thank you very much, no. But there was actually a lot of progressive thinking, a lot of, I think, very positive things being said. The most important thing that John Sinclair did for us young people was he kept us off the needle drugs. He really made an effort. Also, at that time, there was a huge influx of pharmaceuticals. Does this sound familiar? Is this happening nowadays? Back then it was quaaludes people said quaaludes and people were dying from those. Of course, that's nothing like now. This is a horrible epidemic that's out of control. The word "control" -- I've often laughed at the phrase controlled substances because that's what the government calls substances that they're unable to control. I always laughed at that. It was easy for me to be irreverent. Now that marijuana has been legalized, we see how badly they want to control something that is big business, It's odd. But looking back in these relatively innocent days of the early 70s, John was really making an effort to give us some insights. We were each given a copy of his book of prison writings, Guitar Army. I think mine is all scribbled up. I have it somewhere, underlined every word, every sentence. But he... I'll never forget reading those, being a very impressionable, by that time, 15, 16-year-old, and realizing that I had something really important in common with John. That was that neither of us can bear to watch television because it's just, it's obviously there's so much indoctrination, and it's... What is that doing to your brain? For John, he's like, well, he published at the back of his book: Here's a reading list. Here's a listening list. What are you doing with that brain of yours? I totally feel the same way. I remember right in the autumn of 1972, there was something called the People's Community Center and the People's Ballroom. They also had... Drug Help was also in there. It was, I believe, one of the locations of the sexual assault crisis line as well, although that was located in many different places when it first started. In fact, my wife, Lindsay Forbes, was one of the people who first staffed that, including at St. Andrews.
[00:20:14] arwulf: I could really tell you some stories about that, of protecting the women and children who are taking shelter in the church and having the dude come and pound on the door. The cop shop is a block away from St. Andrews, so it's like, help will be here soon, guys, just keep knocking. But anyway, so there's no such thing as perfect times. This was a challenging time. There was a lot of substance abuse, just as there is now, but there was just a lot of substance use. The message again and again and again was that you can't really group all this together. There's different ways to treat your bloodstream, to treat your nervous system. Some of this can be very positive. I will say that temperance was not necessarily part of the equation. I think that's probably what helped things cave in when they did. It's taken a long time for me to even understand what the word temperance means. I will say that, by far the most damaging drug of anything I've ever encountered from my own experience or anybody around me, is alcohol, because it is so much a part of the world culture. I used to say, Well, we don't have billboards with these drugs. Well, now we have reefer billboards everywhere you go. But back then, especially, that was like... the Black Velvet hard alcohol sign up above the Main Street Party Store, which the feminists would get up there and deface, of course, because it was objectifying women, of course. Oh, I should say, feminism I first discovered in 1970, when I was going to Forsythe Junior High School. A lot of the people I was going to school with were politically active. Greta Schiller you ever heard of Greta Schiller? You know the documentary film Rosie the Riveter?
[00:22:33] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
[00:22:34] arwulf: Greta Schiller is one of the people who made that film, bless her heart. I really looked up to her, and there were people... Joe Tiboni I first met when I was still going to Forsythe Junior High, and somebody started a politically progressive mimeographed paper at Forsythe. What do we call our paper? Let's call it Venza Ramos. Then, we were meeting upstairs, the church was like ok, kids want to get together and talk things over. We were having this kind of politically charged discussion without having a whole lot of idea of what we were really talking about. Joe Tiboni showed up to help us to understand to offer some advice about how to organize political action. This was a very important part of the landscape, so it fits right in with talking about John Sinclair and the Rainbow People's Party because before I had anything to do with them, there were causes that made themselves known to me. I was already an avowed pacifist when I got to Ann Arbor. Before I get to the anti-war movement, surely, people who are listening to this will recognize the most important elements in what came to be called the counterculture. There was obviously, and so often somehow marginalized in the discussion, there was human rights. The civil rights and human rights movement. There was the free speech movement. There was the anti-war movement, obviously. There was the organized labor movement. There's women's rights, and then there's gay rights. Of course, there's more...oh, the environmental action. I think I've touched on the main ones here. Probably one of the first ones that I found myself directly involved in happened during one of my little peregrinations around the U of M campus. Boy, once I discovered that Grad library -- I'm still running through that library, doing it all my life. You can't get enough of it, breathing in the smell of all those books --but I found my way over to that lovely fountain in front of the Michigan League, the Women's League. I was sitting there dangling my feet in the water, and this young man came up to me and said, Having a good time? I said, Yeah, and he said, Well, how would you like to come with us and we're petitioning the A&P grocery over here on Huron Street, which was near what used to be the Drake's gas station right at Division and Huron. Now, I'm getting like Laurie Anderson saying, That's over where this used to be, and this used to be, down the block from where this used to be. That's all part of growing old. But he invited me, and I thought, Well, this is interesting. Now, why would you be boycotting a grocery? This was the great boycott, Cesar Chavez organizing the great boycott. I had my experience, my first experience of going and handing out or trying to hand out leaflets and having some people aggressively shove them back at me, and this guy stuck right up for me since he had gotten this little kid involved. He said, Hey, go easy on this, no violence. But learning step by step about what different parts of humanity were experiencing. This happened fairly swiftly in this community because there was so much political activism here. I'll get back to John Sinclair in a minute, and the Rainbow people. But what I'm getting to right now predates my involvement with the Rainbow People. The pacifism really set in for me, although during the drives across the country, analyst drives in the station wagon across the country, my older sister, she would teach us to sing songs from the Theodore Bikel records, "Donna, Donna, Donna" used to sing that over about the calf bound for slaughter. In fact, that's probably why I became a vegetarian more than 50 years ago. It was just that one song and also the sensibility that I don't think this is food, so I'm not going to eat it. But there was a lot of anti-war sentiment in the folk music that we were already listening to, particularly in Concord, Massachusetts, 1967 to early '68, we lived there. Then, the date that will live in memory for me, October 15, 1969. Do you know what happened on that day?
[00:28:02] AMY CANTU: Was that the protest at Crisler?
[00:28:09] arwulf: Yes, October 15, 1969, there was an Anti-war Moratorium gathering on the Diag. I was still at Forsythe Junior High School. A bunch of us walked out wearing black arm bands, some of the teachers wearing black arm bands. As usual, I walked all the way into town with my little Afro-American Mexican friend Haywood Hall, who, by the way, has since become a great healer, a great medical practitioner in Mexico, I believe, a great humanitarian effort. But Haywood and I walked down all the way into town. To Mark's Coffee House, of course. Mark's was on that day...somebody had donated a vast amount of cider that was just starting to go hard. It didn't really have alcohol in it, per se. But they were giving out free hard cider out in front of Mark's. We each got our little cup of cider and we're walking towards the Diag. The minute our little boots hit the pavement at the start of the Diag right there at State and William, Haywood hit the play button on his little handheld Panasonic tape machine. That's the first time I've ever heard Led Zeppelin, the beginning of the baseline of Good Times, Bad Times. Looking back, it's really...it's fascinating to look back on being 12 and hearing "In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man." I'm still trying to figure that out. But we walked into the Diag and there was more and more and more people gathering, and it was very inspiring. There were speeches and then we all marched all the way up to the stadium. By that time, it started to grow dark, and there was lots of lights on in the stadium, and you could hear people giving speeches. I'm told Joe Tiboni was in there giving a speech briefly but I never made it into that stadium because my older brother had taken some tainted LSD. The poor thing was...he was having a panic attack and so I and my girlfriend at that time were across the street where there is now a cafe, but that was a gas station, another one of those long gone gas stations in Ann Arbor. We stood there trying to comfort him and eventually... I think somebody gave us a ride home. But I'll never forget my brother looking at me, grabbing me by the shoulders, and saying, You're not real. I said, No, I'm real. I'm honest, I'm real. Trust me on this. But it was another lesson. I became wary of what would happen to people if they were putting things into their bodies. Not that I didn't end up doing a lot of that myself, but at the time, being so young, seeing people having difficulty, seeing people drinking way too much, and getting wiped out in public.
[00:31:40] arwulf: I should say, by the way, that within a year of that anti-war moratorium effort, I was hopping on a shuttle bus alone and going into Detroit and participating in an anti-war march going down the middle of the street in Detroit and you know, what was I? 13 by that time, maybe? So this was, you know, we were all very precocious, and we were all very committed to what we thought we needed to be committed to. To get back to those free concerts next to Huron High School, the ones where I really began participating as a Psychedelic Ranger. Those were interesting because we would get entire biker clubs would show up and right away, you'd learn that all bikers are not created equal. There was the Scorpions and the word about the Scorpions was to be polite, give them space. Then there was a group called The God's Children. They seem to exist mainly to just get inebriated and fall all over each other, you know. Again, I'm watching people older than myself being, you know, severe and potentially violent, which was not my thing. Then also, Okay, here's what can happen if you put a lot of toxins in yourself and become intoxicated, right? Nevertheless, there was a lot of free everything at those concerts. I began to realize that I could drink free wine. It was usually Boons Farm Apple wine or Strawberry Hill or Annie Green Springs. I remember all these got awful preparations. I was drinking -- I actually had started drinking when I was about 14. There was liquor around also, my parents were starting to break up, and so I was a moody, pissed-off teenager. Those are not excuses, they're explanations for why I started doing what I did. But the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, 1972, landed right around my 15th birthday. I was working there and enjoying it immensely. I have to emphasize this. We had grown up in a cultural environment where there was only a very small spectrum of anything being revealed to us on a regular basis, especially for music, and so there was all this Black music that we really hadn't experienced before. We'd hear some Motown on the radio. You'd hear the same thing over and over again. Suddenly, I'm at a festival and there's a big band, and there's one guy an old man with a guitar and then there's Ornette Coleman or Pharaoh Saunders. Sun Ra and his Orchestra, getting up there and putting on this intergalactic theatrical performance where they're preaching at us and saying, Why limit yourself to one little planet? We were all like, take us, you know? Why would we stay here? You're right. But it was also so actually, the one at '72, you could listen to the recording and what's on the recording, they come out and say, What planet is this? Is this the planet of life or death? If this is the planet of life, why are people dying, you know, asking these questions? You have people in the audience who are just hell-bent on just hearing what they already expect to hear. They'd be, you know, spilling beer on themselves and yelling rock and roll over and over again. At the same time, you're getting one of the most amazing experiences of your life, a total life-changing experience. Most of us who were at those festivals were dramatically changed permanently. This is why I got involved in radio. This is why I pursued all of the different music that I have to this day. It's not all I do, of course. It's not all I listen to. I am hopelessly susceptible to the lieder of Franz Schubert, for example, you know, if I'm really ill, I'll probably just lay there and listen to Schubert, you know. What I love is humanity. I'm a devout humanitarian. That's what it's about. That's why I could never understand why people keep hurting each other. That was always the basis of my pacifism. Pacifism didn't go over really well in some of these environments. I said earlier that there was a great deal of I think I hinted at it anyway, racial tension in this community in the late '60s. A lot of African-American students at Forsythe Junior High School felt antagonism towards white kids. Like I said, it had been a year and a half since those riots. There was an awful lot of inequity and an awful lot of racial hostility in the air and had been for as long as white people had been here. That was constantly being referenced. It was being referenced silently in people's eyes. It was very difficult, especially for a young person to understand, How do I communicate? How do I maybe possibly help these individuals to understand that I really care about them, and had to come to grips with the fact that, actually, there's people who just hate your guts just because of the way you look. This is the whole problem, is people see each other two-dimensionally. We see each other as caricatures. This is why we had, like, the Bosnian War. This is why...fill in the blank, right? I mean, it just keeps happening over and over again. I remember years ago, I had the honor of interviewing the writer Jamaica Kincaid. I was talking to her about this, and she said, You know, I did some research a while ago for me as an African-American person, I had to do this. I looked into the history of the African slave trade and she said, I looked...the more I discovered how much complicity there was, how one tribe was selling the other tribe into captivity. Then she said, Then I realized this is...history is all about humanity doing things to itself and I'll never forget that as long as I live, humanity doing things to itself. If we could just have...I mean, is that too simple? No, it's just that basic. But there's also a problem with people wanting everything to be what they think is contemporary, up-to-date information. We have a problem in this culture with the word history. Have you noticed that? We have this problem with the word history. You say, How's your car? Oh, the Chevy? That car's history. I let the city tow it, right? Or at school or in the workplace. Clean up your act or your history. Is that any way to talk about where our people have been? But it is so prevalent. I mean, it's just casually reinforced all the time. History is now, right now. It is a continuum, obviously.
[00:40:06] arwulf: When I teach U of M students about music and about broadcasting, I try and emphasize this over and over again because they really want to just be in this. They're fascinated with what's being fed to them. It's important what's going on right now. But where did everything grow out of? What's the difference between tradition and convention? Tradition is from the Latin, tradere, meaning the handing along of something. In fact, it's the root of the word trade, because the ancestors give to us, and we give back to the ancestors. It works both ways. Convention just means get with the program. Right now, the three of us are sitting here in this room. My ancestors and your ancestors are sitting together. We are each of us a living, breathing set of variations on our ancestors. How are you going to beat that? It's a really beautiful thing. Hiya people, we are legion, right? There's a whole bunch of people here in this room. That's the way I always look at existence with other beings. This goes very strongly back to what happened to me on the last night of the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Sun Ra had already played one of the previous days. Late afternoon, I was working towards the back of the field. I was still roused from hearing Howlin' Wolf live, just all this great music live, so much of which I never dreamt existed. One of the older people from Solstice School who didn't live much longer -- I think he might have committed suicide within a year of this -- but here his name is Raul Bernstein and Sam Raul. He wanted to be called Raul. He's a sweet guy. I always wished he'd lived longer because it would have been fun to have grown up a little and talked to this guy, but it was not to be. I think he was on something or other. He gave me a little piece of paper, a little hit of LSD. Not even short of 15-years-old by that time, I took my first hit of LSD, and I was enjoying myself. Then what happened was Marion Brown and Leo Smith. Leo Smith now known as Wadada Leo Smith. This is some very free improvisational jazz. They started just really playing this. I never heard anything like that in my life at that time. I'm afraid I got a little carried away. I started roaring with laughter. There was a wooden stockade fence around the perimeter of the field. I just started hurling myself into this fence, and the other kids that were with me were really worried about me. They didn't want me to get injured. I think, ultimately, I ended up laying on the ground with my head in this girl's lap, and she was smoothing my hair back. This is not unusual. Most of the kids that I knew I was actually late in the chronology of my life for having ingested this or done a lot of other things. Some of these kids had been taken to Woodstock a few years earlier to the festival. There was a lot of precocity. I've never had any regrets of that experience or anything else that I did. I've said it earlier in our conversation here, maybe before we started recording, no regrets, only lessons learned. In a way, I've had to do that just to keep from going crazy with regrets because I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. All I really want to do is to help other beings to have a better time. I want to help alleviate suffering. That's really, to me, that's why we're here. That's why it feels good. That's part of my spirituality. Anyway, I ended up working at the '72 and '73 Blues and Jazz Festivals. At the '73 Blues and Jazz Festival, much larger, much more difficult to control. But again, I'm seeing Yusef Lateef blowing his saxophone. First time I saw Ray Charles, so much great music. Sun Ra, of course, came back. He played at each of those three festivals. I remember just as the Sun Ra set was really getting going, there were two big looked like rugby players, and they were loaded, and they decided to start having a fistfight practically in front of the stage, right there. Lots of dust on the ground, empty Jack Daniels bottles getting kicked around. Us Psychedelic Rangers did what we knew would resolve the problem very quickly, and amazingly, it did, because maybe it wouldn't have. We each got two people on each one of these guys and stuffed a lit joint in his mouth. I got on this one guy's ear and said, This is a party, not a fight. There's a fight down the road. This is a party. You're at a party. Sit down. We just sat them down. Pretty soon, all these people are sitting in a circle, we're passing stuff around. Meanwhile, Sun Ra is up there with the stars. To see him with the stars up behind him pointing at the ground and saying, if you're here, pointing up at the sky, why can't you be there? If you're here, why can't you be there? To me, again, he was saying essentially what Diane Di Prima said--the imagination is a living being. Do not hem in your imagination. It will atrophy. It will fall off. There's another reason I refuse to engage with mainstream media because I think it damages people. I mentioned the People's Ballroom. You know what happened to the People's Ballroom? It wasn't there for very long. When they were laying the dance floor in summer of '72, this was located right where today is the entrance of the Tally Hall parking structure. One thing about the ideology of the Rainbow People was that the young people were, I don't know, were the vanguard or something, and that we should be included in everything. That's why there were so many young teenage Psychedelic Rangers. That's why we were often encouraged to do things that maybe we didn't know how to do professionally. Laying the dance floor, have you ever laid floorboards? There's this giant thing you hit with a rubber mallet, and you drive nails in. They were very patient because I tried a few of those, and I think got tired quickly. Anyway, but we laid the dance floor. There was a lot of rock bands, but also some Chicago Blues bands, Mighty Joe Young band was brought in there. I remember an alto sax player who never took his hat off and a trumpeter who kept taking a trumpet out of his mouth and looking at us and screaming, and putting his trumpet back in his mouth. Very exciting music. Light shows. It was a great thing to do with an old industrial garage. I remember that by this time, John Sinclair's people had printed up t-shirts that had a big picture of a Quaalude on it with an X through it. It said, Wake up, no more sleeping pills in our communities. I would wear that around.
[00:49:16] arwulf: I remember John getting up there in his black leather jacket with his long, curly black hair and he started just giving a little five-minute lesson to the people in the Ballroom saying, "You know, there's a problem, these drugs are infiltrating our communities. We feel that they're controlled drugs." The theory was the government is encouraging these things to come in and keep people distracted. Considering the way the CIA acted, even though the CIA was actually importing a lot of the things, the heroin and everything else that came in, there was so much corruption everywhere. But John was giving this lesson, and there was a guy who was a notorious Quaalude addict, who was slumped over against the wall. He was listening to John, and he sat up and he started heckling John about this drug that he was very obviously impaired. I'll never forget him saying, "Oh, yeah, you tell me, what do Quaaludes do? You tell me, what are they doing?" John looked at him and said, "Well, they make people really belligerent and unreasonable and irrational." It was a great lesson for me on how to use essentially media access, which is my wife, Lindsay, has always encouraged me to use media access wisely. Thank you, Linds. I'm trying. John had such a long radio background and a DJ background. How did I get involved in radio, you're wondering?
[00:51:04] ELIZABETH SMITH: Yes [OVERLAPPING].
[00:51:07] arwulf: Well, let's see. The Psychedelic Rangers didn't just work at the free concerts and the blues and jazz festivals, we volunteer worked at places in Detroit where there were live musical events. That's why I first saw the Chicago blues legend Sunnyland Slim playing at some outdoor park. But for a little while, there was a radio station, WNRZ and somehow the Rainbow People's Party got ahold of that radio station for a little while. They were playing Albert Ayler records on here. One day, Pun Plamondon, the late Pun Plamondon, who I had met just probably a few months earlier. As soon as he got out of prison, I remember Genie Pomondon, bless her heart, she was like the woman who oversaw the Psychedelic Rangers, a very good leading person. She said, I remember her looking at me very happy expression, saying, "Pun's getting out." When I finally got to meet Pun, and I remember, he just had this beautiful smile and this great joyous expression. Now looking back, I thought, he'd got out of jail. Of course, he was pretty happy to be out and also in a place where things were pretty free. They could do whatever they wanted to in those houses. The police never came in there. Pun took us to the radio station, the Psychedelic Rangers, a field trip for the Psychedelic Rangers. I still can't remember where this place was located, but we entered the radio station and there was no music playing, there was someone talking. It was a Malcolm X record being aired over WNRZ. There was Pun's beautiful smile. He was so happy that Malcolm X was getting played over the radio and he kept looking at us and going, "Malcolm's telling him, Malcolm's telling him," and I'll never forget that. Pun was a really good role model in many ways. I tried to tell people that role models work both ways. A role model can show you maybe things that you should do and maybe things you shouldn't ought to do. That's what role models are about. It's up to you to sort it out. Learnt this from my father the hard way too, bless his heart. But Pun was just really great force and he had a little bit of what Leni Sinclair would call that "gangster quality." I always loved the way she talked, and she was more clear-headed, clear-sighted, and dead serious than everybody put together at that place in that commune. One of the first things I ever heard her say -- she was listening to people exchange viewpoints and rhetoric, and she had her eyes wide open the way she did -- she said, "You people are so fucking idealistic." That little sound bite rings in my ears all the time. I loved her work, I loved everything that she stood for. She's still at it, she's such a great force in this part of the world. My admiration for Leni is boundless. She once asked me, she said, "Since you were actually there during a lot of this, would you want to help document?" But I'm sure someone else is doing that. She's probably doing it herself, but it's problematic when you have people who weren't [LAUGHTER] there or who don't have the right context for things, who try and write, that's when history becomes something else.
[00:55:26] AMY CANTU: That's why you're here.
[00:55:27] arwulf: Thanks. Well, I'm trying. My next real involvement with radio didn't happen until... I just want to make sure I'm not, well, I guess I'm so non-linear with this thing. I'll go back if I decide I left something out. But how did I get involved in radio? Well, I had a bunch of different jobs. I worked at the Sun Bakery, which is where that ziggurat structure is now at Fifth and Liberty. I only worked there for a little while. I worked at Little Things, which was a boutique and head shop and import shop on South State. I just kept working different jobs, but nothing really landed.
[00:56:27] arwulf: The Sun Bakery was good, but for some reason, I wanted to get... I got an offer to work in a greenhouse. I wasn't making dirt anywhere I was working, so why not go work in the dirt and make more dirt? I got hired in at like 2.50 an hour. Nielsen's Greenhouse is out on the north side of town. I worked like a mule, and over the years, I became a rose grower. I was their last rose grower. I go in and cut roses every single morning of your life, Christmas Day, New Year's Day. No matter what state you're in, you go in and cut roses. We grew so many different kinds of flowers, and it was a great experience. To this day, I can handle flowers. I can select flowers. I love bringing Lindsay flowers because I can really find good stuff and make a good call on it. I won't take up time listing all the different flowers we grew there, but it was astonishing how many flowers they, and eventually what happened was they started having us tear down the greenhouses one by one because they didn't want to heat them. They didn't want to spend money rebuilding them. I worked for that family for 14 years. The whole second half of that time, I was working upfront for the most part, purchasing the flowers, processing the flowers. Then I got even more experience in flowers grown in other parts of the world. Anyway, during that first, working like a mule period of my time at Nielsen's, I was standing with this guy in the carnation house and it was almost quitting time, and he said, "Do you want to come to the flea market Ypsilanti and look at old records?" Now, I had already been interested in old records. In fact, I already had an interest in older music. I might partially be because my parents probably my mother bought me a Shirley Temple record when I was like, four. Shirley Temple, I said, well, no, it's the songs from the 30s, I'm very susceptible to songs from the 30s. Some of them are a scream. Some of them are beautiful. Also, I always suspected, well, maybe she's got it made. Maybe I could somehow arrange to have a perfectly trained team of adults follow me around and sing behind me. But I'm not Shirley Temple. What the point is, I had this interest in older music. I was not allergic to it. I wasn't afraid of it. It didn't remind me of anything unpleasant. I was not a girl, so I was not forced to dress up like Shirley Temple and take tap dancing lessons, like a lot of unfortunate females in my generation. I had started running into 78 RPM records, and I liked them. I think this guy probably asked me because he probably already heard me talking about them. We went out to the Ypsilanti Flea market, and you could get a 78 RPM record for a quarter. Not great pickings, but it was fun. We had this friendship where we would go and find old records. One day, he said, So, you're going to come to the radio station on Sunday night? They'll let you play your records. I said, Where's that? WCBN? Oh, I'd been listening to CBN since 1972 when they went public. Before that, it was WABX, which is very creative radio out of Detroit. A very rambunctious set of people that ran their voices over there anyway on WABX. CBN was cheerfully experimental and reckless. The fact that I could actually enter there and bring some old records, I found pretty fascinating. The show in question, it was a one-hour show on Sunday nights, and it was called The Corn Belt Symphony Radio Hour. This was Mark Harden and Jack Mango, real characters, and they collected a lot of old records, and their principal was Thematic Radio. This week, it's songs about cars. This week, it's songs about fat people and thin people, food, and actually much more interesting and weird themes. I got fascinated with that, and I started looking for things that would fit into it. Well, I had already discovered Fats Waller, and Fats Waller became my obsession. I became very well known everywhere, sometimes to my friends' dismay because that's all I wanted to talk about or play or hear or anything. What really got me about Fats Waller was his piano. I love his voice, I love his band. But there's something really beautiful about the way that man played the piano and the organ. He was our first jazz organist. I would show up and I would. Fats Waller made about 900 sides somewhere around there. I would find stuff that would fit into the theme, and I would try and talk him into letting me fit into their show. One thing about the Corn Belt show, they would almost never play a song all the way through.
[01:02:09] AMY CANTU: Why?
[01:02:10] arwulf: Well, it was the fastest hour in radio, [LAUGHTER] and it had a theme. Get it? A theme. Also, because corn their theme song was, It's corny, but, "Gee, they love it!" They wanted things to be like this. They'd play just about enough of most songs so you would get the idea that it'd fit into the theme and then. Just do this neck-snapping transition into the next song. Most of the time it worked really oddly well. I started hanging out at WCBN right away because when I got in there, I realized very suddenly and distinctly, this is an element for me, where I belong. It's not surprising at all because my parents met in radio. Around 1939 at radio station out on the East Coast WBNX, The Bronx, the radio station that speaks your language. It was an international station. Imagine this. My mother was the drop-dead, gorgeous Polish DJ and announcer. My father was the painfully shy engineer. Then the next show after her was the German show, it was like every... I wish I had some recordings of that mix. Wow! But anyway, it must be in the DNA, right? There's also something in our DNA about theatrical presentation or anything presentational. Theater is a hereditary disorder in my family. There I said it. Did you know my brother is a professional actor?
[01:04:10] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
[01:04:10] arwulf: Zach Grenier? Okay. You know about that. He got me into theater right around the same time that we got to Ann Arbor. He had gotten cast as Henry V when he was, what, 13.
[01:04:25] AMY CANTU: Wow.
[01:04:26] arwulf: When we were in Concord in '67, '68. He never stopped, obviously. He dragged me along and got me into Junior Theater in Ann Arbor. I think I was a stage grip for some Junior Light Opera things. But then it really got it started to get more complicated when he was at Pioneer High School, and I was... The last year of my time at Tappan Junior High School he talked somebody into casting me in a production at Pioneer of Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano.
[01:05:12] arwulf: I did that, and then within a year, I was in a different production of the same play at Pioneer, doing the same role, Mr. Firechief. I really enjoyed this because, by that time, I had also on my own, in my voracious auto-didactic way, I had discovered dadism. I was reading Andy Warhol's anti-novel A, you ever heard of that, A? it's an entire book of transcribed amphetamine babble. It's a speed freak -- speed freak opera queens jabbering at each other, pretty much. I discovered that when I was 16, and I was so happy because it was unlike anything else I'd ever read. I had no aversion to things that maybe might not make sense altogether. I actually reviewed that book for the agenda paper years later. It's one of my favorite things I've ever written because I don't think anything is off-limits to people. I object to the term avant-garde. It's a military term. Why is that being imposed on people's creative efforts? Because it was first put into use in that manner in the 19th century and you had critics who love to quibble, love to wage war on each other and they're saying, Well, there must be people who are ahead of the game, and then there's the reactionaries. What happens if the line of march gets reversed, then suddenly your butt is to the enemy? You're no longer the advanced garde here. It might be hazardous. The more I think about it, the more leery I am of that term. It's also the way the term gets used. It gets used like, Ok, watch out. This is avant-garde. You might like it at all. In fact, you don't even need to experience it at all, because it's not for everybody. That's offensive to me and it's also completely irrational because I love the music of Anton Von Webern. How can something he wrote in 1913 still be avant-garde? Is there an avant-garde tradition? What are you people talking about? For me, language has meaning. Can we get there, maybe? People just talk too much. That's why I'm appalled by talk radio, for the most part. Then, one thing I always say to students at WCBN I point to the microphone. This is not a cell phone. It's a microphone. How are you using it? Can you slow down a little bit? Who are you talking to? What are they experiencing right now? You don't know what they're experiencing. I did 25 years at WEMU on Sunday mornings, doing a three-hour traditional jazz show. The people who would call me up in different emotional states. Some people just come back from a funeral crying, saying, Thank you for playing that Johnny Hodges ballad. It's such a powerful medium, radio is, and all of our media are so powerful, and language is so very powerful and so recklessly used. I'm just pleading with people, and I don't think it's going to do any good, but people need to be more careful about how we use all of this power that we have.
[01:08:55] AMY CANTU: Can you talk a little bit about what got you over to EMU and then why you left, and a little bit also about your Face the Music program at CBN?
[01:09:13] arwulf: Well, I should probably explain why it's called Face the Music.
[01:09:16] AMY CANTU: That would be great.
[01:09:17] arwulf: Because this technically predates my getting involved at EMU. Let's see. After I had sat in at CBN for a few years, and they were kind of fascinated with this guy who would say almost anything and play some of the damnedest things, one morning after a New Year's party at this big house that I took over my parents' land contract and kept the big house, turned into an artist colony later. I have no idea why how I made it out of that alive. But really, I had a lot of people living there. It was an anarchic commune. But the program director Judy Schwartz, who has gone on to work out East with other student radio stations. She's still at it, a marvelous woman. I came... I got up on New Year's Day, and I went up into my music room upstairs, and Judy had gotten up, and she was standing there looking at this wall of 78 RPM records that I had, and on the other wall was this whole wall of vinyl records. She turned to me and said, We got to get you a radio show, boy. We got to get you on the air, so that we did. She was my first engineer, and I decided to call my show You've Got to be Modernistic, which is the name of a song written by James P. Johnson, the great guy who wrote the Charleston, the great piano player who taught Fats Waller how to play piano. I really liked the song, I've Got to Be Modernistic. It was lively. It was funny, and then I realized, it's also a piano solo. Nowadays, I would just play the piano solo version. But for quite a few years, I was calling my show You've Got to Be Modernistic. It was a lot like the Corn Belt Symphony in some ways. It was very thematic. I was very rambunctious and unpredictable in the way I would announce and the choices I would make. Things were going along pretty nicely there. I got pretty pretty quickly got involved with Eclipse Jazz and was asked many times to MC for nationally, internationally known artists and local artists. I ended up emceeing for the Sun Ra Orchestra at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, one of the greatest honors of my existence. I remember putting flowers all over their dressing rooms and giving June Tyson some orchids. Before I came out on stage, you know, Sun Ra always said he was from Saturn. I got this big color photograph of Saturn. I was wearing a three-piece suit, and I came out on stage with that Saturn where my head is. I was like this saturn-headed person coming out in a three-piece suit. But before I came out on stage and lowered the planet and started talking, I had been backstage with this picture of Saturn, and all the Arcist members were coming around and looking over my shoulder, and one of them softly said, It's a very nice planet. Like they'd played the holiday in there, you know. Anyway, so I had this really nice collaborative relationship with WCBN and Eclipse Jazz, and things were looking pretty good. Then one day, in the mid-1980s, a crisis happened that almost got WCBN taken off the air. I don't know if this has ever been properly documented. But I'm in a position to give, hopefully, a succinct explanation of what happened. Let's see. Down the hall from WCBN proper, there was this little studio that was used as an alternate station, an AM-style, more conventional style radio station. It was called WJJX. Why they changed it to JJX from WRCN, which is what it was before... Somebody must have wanted those call letters. I don't know. Why you would need call letters for a very weak signal. It was actually a carrier current. Carrier current just goes to a building and uses its AC system as an antenna, pretty much. If you're parked outside of the building, you could hear it, I guess. But you could hear it in university buildings. Generally, as I understand it, the people who were running WCBN if they sensed that the person who wanted to be on WCBN wasn't willing to get with the philosophy of WCBN, which was free form and creative and don't just play all, hits but actually do something creative with it, they would give him a show on WJJX a booby prize. Largely what I heard being played, when the door was open was just, a lot of AM hit 45s and at its best, particularly when it was still WRCN and Joe Tiboni was involved there, it was a fun send-up of an AM radio station. It was like, you want to do that tradition here? Here's a good place to do it. But after Joe had left, I don't think there was that kind of guidance. There was no guidance at all whatsoever. I should also add that John Sinclair had a radio show there called RE:Visions, R E Colon Visions, a fantastic educational program about all kinds of music. Anyway, there were some guys, young white men who had a show on there. I don't know what they called it, if anything, or maybe one of them had it, it's under his name, and then he had some friends with him. They're playing stuff and they're bored, and they're saying, I don't know, radio is supposed to be exciting and fun. I'm bored. What am I going to do? I say, I got it. Let's have a call-in show and people call in and tell a joke, and we'll put it over the air, and then we'll have a laugh track and applause. Brilliant. Again, some guidance, some educational. I'm always about the educational mission of everything, doesn't matter what it is. Mowing a lawn is an educational experience for me. Everything.
[01:16:49] arwulf: That was lacking there. And so, t hese guys decided... They were waiting for people to call in. Well, they said, nobody's listening. Of course, people were listening, but they said, Nobody's listening. Nobody's calling in. Why don't you go and call in and tell a joke? It's in-house stuff. Notoriously, what happened was one of them or one of their friends called in and told a racist joke. It's not just a racist joke, not just a fourth-grade locker room racist joke. This would be like a drunken fourth-grader locker room racist joke. It was so debased, so vulgar, and had obscenities in it. It was no redeeming social value at all, and then down from there. It was just abhorrent and unforgivable. Well, people heard. Within a day of this incident, after it hit the fan, people were waking up on the other side of the planet and seeing the banner headline. People in Russia are seeing it in Pravda. "U of M student radio station airs racist jokes." The people running CBN were confronted with this, and they said, What?! They said, Well, don't you know what's going on over the radio station? We said, Well, that's not our radio station. It's them down the hall. It's not us. They said, come on. This is a student-run radio workshop. You don't have any control? What's going on? Well, obviously the guy whose name was on the show got kicked off. His friends weren't allowed to come around anymore. I think his parents made some huge gift, maybe bought some big archive or some library of media library or something to try and save face, but it must... Imagine if your kid did something like this. But already, the anger was there. The community, of course, all the African-American community, was furious. It's like, Look at this white racist institution. Look what these white kids are doing. There was picketing. Meanwhile, what are the radio shows I'm doing? Well, You've Got To Be Modernistic, but I also had a show called Real Black Miracles on Sunday evenings where I'm playing modern jazz pretty much exclusively African American musicians. A lot of the music that was going out over that station was specifically geared towards Black music because we felt it was underrepresented, and there was so much of it, and we really wanted to let it shine. Didn't matter. There was a huge backlash and the community was on tenterhooks for months. Then it got worse. We had a guy who was a dear, sweet, but very naive individual from a rural background who played a lot of country music on WCBN. I didn't understand it until later, but I think because of his upbringing, he didn't understand the power of using certain words, specifically a word that was, I think, developed by the English, a great way to put people down who have a lot of pigment in their skin. Internationally renowned word that has been very injurious throughout the years. He used this word too casually and when he heard other instances of that word occurring, like in music or elsewhere, it didn't bother him. He's playing a lot of rural music over the radio. Well, he played this one song that was a Georgia fiddling record that ironically I had told him about this. It was a band called Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. They're real fun, Riley Puckett. Alright, Riley, let's go. From the 30s. I'll just say it. The song was called Run Nigger Run. It was actually originally a slave shout song. It was about Run, you'd better get away. You have escaped, the patrols are going to get you, keep going. You have escaped the plantation. None of this context was there for anybody who heard it. Someone got very angry and everybody is waiting for CBN to make a mistake. Somebody called him up and started yelling at him and he didn't know what to say. He got tongue-tied. He said, Well, I thought it was some pretty good fiddling. That was it. Then this big tribunal happened and some of the U of M administration, because this guy was a community volunteer, a non-student, they wanted all non-students to be kicked off the air, even though the original offense was done by lily-white privileged white men. The irony of that has never left me, and it should be understood. What I did in response to this was I changed the name of my show to Face the Music, and it turned into a weekly... It was like a course. Students were showing up with legal pads and pens and taking notes. I went through and found every example of vaudeville music, early jazz, early popular music, ethnic stereotyping that I could find. I talked in between every single song. I would play it and I would come on the mic, and I would say, You like that? It's your culture. You're soaking in it. It was that confrontational stuff. I had a very confrontational approach to broadcasting for many years. I probably have the world-record for having aired the sound of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby more than anybody else in history. I would make different Oswald mixes. I was a nasty kid. Put some lounge music and Hey, everybody, do the Oswald. But I was six years old when that happened. I was getting it out of my system. It took about 30,000 airings for me to get it out of my system. But, think about it. When you're six, that was my first indication that I'm in a world full of insane people and that nothing is sacred, really. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out why and what we can do about it. But you remember the book Now We Are Six? That was my Now We Are Six. God help us. Anyway, we stood up to the administration on this one. We said, No, don't you see the irony of this? Why are you scapegoating the community volunteers and the CBN people made a list of all the shows that had been created or staffed by community volunteers that dealt with Black music. It was most of the shows. That was a pretty good pushback. I think for a while there was an arrangement made where if we had a student engineer, the students were actually physically, their hands were actually making stuff happening, and then we could host or co-host the show. That was how we got around that for a while. But there's always been this attitude that a radio station at a university should be like a swimming pool. Are you a student or are not? I said, Well, I'm a teacher, thanks. I'm a collaborator. This is an alternative educational broadcasting laboratory. Anyway, I just kept going there. Then, Michael G. Nastos from WEMU, the late Michael G, he was very active with Eclipse and with WCBN and he took him years to get the people at EMU, Jim Dulzo and the rest of them. Dulzo who I knew from the Rainbow People's Party, by the way. But finally, I got an audition tape in there. I think it was the whole show that I did of nothing but the Washboard Rhythm Kings. But they were always a little leery of me because I'm not a conventional person. Presentationally, in radio, I try and be very direct and very human, just a human being. I always advise young DJs: Don't be an imitation of a radio announcer, please. Can you just connect with people and be yourself? But also pay close attention to what's coming out of your mouth? It can be done. I got onto EMU in 1986. With the Sunday Best program, I was brought into that position by Michael Jewett, who had done the show for years before that. I knew him when he was a short-order cook at the Fleetwood diner. We go back, beautiful person, hardworking, dedicated. That was a... With all my CBN background, it took a long time for me to figure out what the hell I was doing with that show. It was ostensibly a traditional jazz show, which is why he asked me to do it, because that's largely what I played, but not exclusively on CBN. But that show I did that for just a couple of months short of 25 years. We went through a lot of changes, particularly when the funding kept getting cut, and there was more pressure put on the management there.
[01:28:37] arwulf: Then when Art Timko retired, then he put some other people, Molly Motherwell, who's done a magnificent job of keeping the place afloat. But there were some other people who were part of the administrative staff there. The more the funding got cut, the more they started relying on NPR consultants. I want to emphasize I have nothing but praise for what Molly Motherwell and the current staff and the staff up until now have done with WEMU. But those NPR consultants really rubbed me the wrong way. They particularly... I'm glad I wasn't at the meeting with them when some guy came in and was trying to advise us. You shouldn't play music that's too modal. It's one of the top radio stations for jazz in the country. No, modal, you know, that's bad. You know, like Miles Davis, dude, you know, what are you talking about? So these know-nothing consultants sort of a consultant industry where you don't necessarily have people who know what they're talking about. They're just smooth operators. Little bit of that goes a long way. And I'm afraid that I had some differences at the time. I want to establish I was not fired. There was a huge rumor going around that I was fired. I walked and Molly said, I really wish you wouldn't do this, she wanted me to stay. And we're good friends nowadays. I've been back once for a fundraiser, a few months ago, just to help. Dear hardworking people, a syndicated show. I wish maybe I could have found a way to do a syndicated show long ago through so into NPR. But that's a different, a whole different game. And I'm very happy doing radio now at WCBN. In fact, during COVID, I figured out that I could create these shows and send them into the robot for remote broadcast at WCBN. So my shows are cooked up in advance, and I'm able to find material that I don't own and that I've never heard before or that I knew about and I've always wanted all my life to be able to share with people. I send shows to John Sinclair every week as well for his Radio Free Amsterdam project. So we're in touch all the time with that. He's a dear sweet and difficult fellow. I think he would smile at that. He firmly believes in what he believes in, and I've always thought he was a really good role model. I know we're probably, Oh, do we have a little more time?
[01:32:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: We do. We wanted to get back to your education. You said you want to.
[01:32:04] arwulf: That's where I wanted to go.
[01:32:06] AMY CANTU: Okay, and film. Yeah. Great.
[01:32:09] arwulf: So Solstice Free School. That was really a place where it was, like, a big learning exchange. There was something called the Free University here in this city. Solstice was not accredited, obviously. It was not even directly connected to the university. There were U of M students who were some of the older people learning, and I say older because there was a lot of kids, and I was like, the second wave of younger kids. But it was you could go in and there you go into this front -- what would you call it? Not a vestibule. Yeah, a vestibule of the or atrium between the wooden staircase and the living room, which had a fireplace, nice old house. And there would be these two walls, and one would be classes offered, and then another one would be classes wanted. And there was nobody saying, Why did you offer this class? Do you really know what you're talking about? No. That's cool. It was like, it's open. It's open-ended. I was like 1971, '72. And so I was one of the wild young things that ran through there. Again, very bookish. There was a nice library of donated books up there on the second floor. There was a third floor, the meditation room. It was a lot of rooms in this little house. My memories of it are somewhat Lewis Carroll, I mean, it was just we were in there at all hours. A lot of times they would get an old pageant projector from U of M, and they'd show movies in the living room of all sorts, experimental movies, educational films, documentaries about atomic war, atomic blasts, all things that it left imprints on us. I've often wished that the young people could have listened more. I think some of the older ones who are still around have memories about, that was good, but, you know, you guys some of you guys just didn't get it and weren't listening. And there were some kids that were just uncontrollable. One of the main people at that school was Kenny Kornheiser, Kenneth Kornheiser. He lives in Kalamazoo. That's another canoe. And he's now a retired veterinarian and an amazing natural historian. Posts a lot of pictures on Facebook of himself in his canoe with his dog Lucy. He goes up and down all the rivers in that part of Michigan. And most excitingly, I suppose, for a lot of people, he is a virtuoso blues harpist. And when he gigs with some of these bands, he'll have a belt around his chest, and it has, like, all these different like every harmonica imaginable, you know. So he's a wonderful, sweet man he was one of the first to really connect with a lot of us there. I remember him making us all lay down in the living room. And then he played for us some George Harrison song, Isn't It A Pity, how we don't treat each other better? And then he read to us from Be Here Now, from the book Be Here Now. So he's a really special individual. There were other individuals. I mentioned Sam Bernstein. He actually did a I think they would take turns leading these sessions where you'd get all these people to lay down. And, of course, we're all young, restless kids, but they would do the sensory relaxation exercises where you say, Okay, relax your toes. Now, relax your ankles, and go up. I remember you couldn't repress these kids. At one point, we were all laying there and it was, Okay, now we're all going to be quiet now. You're all relaxed. And about 2 minutes into that, you could hear a wedding went by, and it was like, unh unh. With the cans and this kid laying next to me just very quietly said, funeral. And we just all busted up laughing because it was so irreverent. We love being irreverent. But I think there was some real learning that happened there. But it was so very experimental and unstructured. And I think I sometimes think that some of the people who really got the most out of it were the people who went upstairs to meditate and do yoga on the top floor. But it was, you know, that we tried to get that house saved, but the U of M wanted to I think U of M technically owned the building, and they wanted to put a parking lot there. So bang -- so we ended up moving to the Friends Center on Hill Street. Not far from the Rainbow house, it's actually the other side of the street from there. And then it dissipated, and we all got into other things. By that time, I had been asked -- I had been taken aside at Tappan Junior High School by Janet Stolarevski, who was a theater teacher there, and Margaret Copley, who was a very sweet, instructor.
[01:38:29] arwulf: They both liked me and thought I had a lot of potential as a person, they could see through the fact that I sometimes wore eight neckties at once and I would crochet these headdresses and wear them. I was a very interesting-looking kid. But they could see how bookish I was. Stolarevski really liked the fact that I was interested in theater. She knew my big brother so she wanted to give me a hand being in theater. They took me aside and they said we want you to know there's an alternative school that's opening up on division and they're going to call Community High, and we recommended you, and we think that you would do really well there because you're a free thinker and so forth. I thanked them and it turned out that I did enroll there. My first day of high school ever, and my first day at Community High School, was the day after the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972. I went in there like, but it was fine. It was great and I was very creative. I painted stuff all over the walls when they were just starting to put murals up on the walls in the hallways. I had some great forum leaders. I was pretty ruggedly autodidactic, always have been and have just gotten more and more so. In fact, if you were to try and get a GPA on me, forget it, because I gave up taking tests in ninth grade. I said forget it. In math class, I refused to write numbers. I would turn in poems. This poor guy was trying to teach math. In this way, just like really the rest of my life, I've gone in the back door and the side door and I've set up challenges for myself by being different but not just for the sake of being different it's because that's what felt natural to me. I'm not saying this would work very well for everybody but it's part of why I am the way I am and why I've done what I've done and continue to do. It's interesting that I never got involved in the theater department there.
[01:41:18] ELIZABETH SMITH: Were you still doing theater in High School? Like at Pioneer or another organization?
[01:41:23] arwulf: At Pioneer. Because my brother had, that's where he had been very active. Alan Schreiber was at Pioneer before he became one of the administrators along with Tom Dodd at Pioneer 2, as it was called. It sounds like a satellite. Which is it's a satellite. We'll call it Pioneer 2. The students decided to call it Earthworks High. I started Earthworks, I think I did a full two semesters at Community High. The one thing I want to say about my time at Community High, and it's a good one, I think, is I formed something called the Trashy Fiction Club. My theory was that in order to really appreciate good literature, and we want to encourage you to read as much good literature as you can, you really ought to find some really crappy literature and we should discuss with each other why it's crappy. I even had a trash evaluation. What was the title of the book? Did it have a plot? If so where did the plot really fall apart? I was just being a smart-ass kid. But there was this one guy who really was fascinated and he was not a scholastic guy at all. After a few months of this, his mother was there to pick him up and she came up and gave me a hug. She said, You've got my son reading.
[01:43:07] AMY CANTU: Whatever it takes.
[01:43:09] arwulf: Nobody had been able to do that. It was some dopey espionage novel, or novelette. But that was a good feeling. I thought, Well, I'm onto something here. By the time I got to Earthworks, I was not at all afraid to try and teach other things. The great thing about Earthworks, I had already discovered Dadaism and Surrealism but at Earthworks, I was really acting like it. I was starting to paint objects. I was famous for taking discarded ironing boards and painting them with bright colors. I would paint anything I found. I would paint bright colors. I started having happenings. I would take this junk and paint it and put it outside in the schoolyard and then stage these events and narrate them through a big construction cone that I found in the street. I think one time we tied Tom Dodd to a tree and menaced him with one of my sculptures. It was fun. I started taking this stuff into the streets and that led to me going into the Ann Arbor Art fairs with objects on wheels or more specifically, furniture or other objects on my body. I became very famous for this. Why? Well, it was fun and it was art. Also, I felt that there was not enough art at the Art Fair. There was art and good luck to the artists. It's hard. It's a tough gig. But then there was all the businesses. This grew out of Dog Days of Summer, Dollar Days. Men's slacks 30% off. Into my young mind I'm like, No, this is the Art Fair. Come on. I was being too specific. But it really grew into a fun thing for a while with CBN had a stage up on front of the union. I used to have the annual search for art up there with a PA system. My favorite shtick was to say, We've located the art. It is inside the art museum and then I do the old prison film thing. "Alright, art. We know you're in there. Stay in there and you won't be bought." Just a schmucky theater like this. It's always a lot of fun to stir things up and try and get people thinking. Also, I enjoyed making fun of things probably more than I do now. I try and tone that down a little because it takes a lot of energy to be a smart ass. It really does. You wouldn't think so but it really does. Some people seem to be able to do so inexhaustibly. But let's see. Other things about Earthworks High. Where did that name come from? Well, we named our school after the Hopewell Indian Mounds in Ohio, and we used to go down there. We would camp at the Old Man's Cave. It was a beautiful thing. We would go down and actually go on these field trips together and they would also study history and study nature together. But I've got to say unlike Solstice School and more like Community High School, at Earthworks there really were classes. There were teachers coming in and teaching things. There were U of M student teachers, students who taught. I hope they got some credit at U of M for doing this, but they came and worked with us. One of them, Mary Matthaei for the Mathhaei Botanical Gardens, she noticed that I was so fascinated with art history, modern art. It's because of her that she took me down to campus and together, we crashed one of Diane Kirkpatrick's art history lectures. The slide shows. Fantastic.
[01:47:40] arwulf: With Auditorium A of Angell Hall packed with people. Pardon me. These were very, very popular, very entertaining lectures, particularly the modern art, and Diane had this wonderful deadpan sense of humor. Years later when I started working at U of M as a technician, I had the honor of working with Diane quite a bit and I was the one showing her slides. This is one we're still showing slides. But anyway, so there was sitting in on those lectures, but even more unusual, Mary Matthaei took me one day to the campus at Eastern Michigan University. The guest lecturer was Allan Kaprow, K-A-P-R-O-W.
[01:48:34] ELIZABETH SMITH: This is what I have been most interested about the whole time. I'm glad you're talking about it now.
[01:48:38] arwulf: Oh, really?
[01:48:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: I studied art history.
[01:48:41] arwulf: Oh, good. Then you love this. What I miss, by the way, about being a technician for U of M classes is everything is so PowerPoint now. I used to get to be up there in the booth or in the back of the auditorium taking notes and focusing those slides. But anyway, Allan showed up. He was wearing all blue denim, a beard looked a little bit like Lenny Bruce, only healthier. He was in this small lecture hall, and along the walls were these video monitors, which at the time, were big tube things. This is 1974. A bunch of art students had come in there. One of them actually had a copy of Allan's book, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, which I have a copy of at home. This student was actually waving it around in the air after Allan's presentation and accusing him. I don't know what he was accusing him of just goofing off or something, 'cause what Allan was presenting was this formulaic stuff where he'd have videos of people doing simple things. He had formula A and B hold hands. Then you'd see these two hands hold hands and then they would come apart. The next one, A and B hold hands for a longer period of time. They come apart. It went on for a while, and then it was A and B hold hands until perspiration forms. Really a long time. Then the hands would come apart and you could see a little sweat on them. I was just delighted with this. I thought, Boy, I love this guy. Then it got even more challenging for these opinionated students because he had videos. He found office buildings where the floors needed to be waxed in the middle of the night. He'd just have people running these floor waxing machines. Very repetitive. Finally, that's when that guy stood up and was waving this book. He said, What about all this? Allan said, Well, that's from 10 years ago. That's what I was doing some of it even earlier. This is what I'm doing now. The guy said, This isn't art. This is boring. Allan said, Oh, I'm sorry you got bored. Tedium is the medium here. He was such a gentleman. I thought he was just a bloody genius what he was doing his entire career, what he did. He explained why he stopped using the word "happening." He said, the day I decided that I couldn't do happenings anymore and I'd start calling my things events was he said I went to the grocery store, and there was a box of Velveeta cheese. It said, happening inside. He buys this block of Velveeta cheese. He gets it home. He opens it up. There's a recipe. The happening is you make this slop with whatever you make with your Velveeta and then you eat it, and that's the happening. He said, that's it.
[01:52:49] AMY CANTU: No more.
[01:52:50] arwulf: You killed it. Then I spoke with him a little later. I said, I too, have your book and I have so much respect for you. Can you tell me I noticed there was a guy named George Brecht in your book. He had some stuff that was a formula like this. It reminded me of what you're doing. He said he smiled gently, and he said, Oh, that's well, what he's doing now is more like what I used to do and I'm doing what he used to do. It was conceptual art, man. Get off it. People do what they feel they need to do. If nobody's getting hurt, then come on. That was a beautiful offshoot of being at this weird little former elementary school on North Maple, where I'm painting ironing boards, and my schoolmate, Francesca Palazzola who is still an incredible gifted oil painter. She was over on the other side of the room doing Botticelli-style painting, and I'm smearing stuff on, look what I found, and put some bright orange paint on it. That was what was necessary for me to do at that time. It's weird since then for me to fill out a form where they will say educational level. College graduate? No, pardon me. I'm not a college graduate. High School graduate. I'd get real persnickety. People would say, Doctor arwulf, what's that from? I'd say, well, you ever heard of Dr. John? Come on, a doctor, anybody. That's in the African American community, it means you've done some service and you've gained some knowledge. Thinking, oh, no, no, doctor, are you a real doctor? Then I'd get come back with I got the same degrees as you, 98.6. Which is not respectful, that's a tough gig to get a PhD and to get a doctorate. But I'm the son of someone who was very obsessive about becoming a doctor. My goodness, eventually ended up at Penn State, good for him. But anarchy is hard work.
[01:55:37] AMY CANTU: You mentioned about the film and media. Just a little bit about it.
[01:55:42] arwulf: Sure. First filmic memories of being in Ann Arbor. Shortly after we got here, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. It was shown at the movie theater that was at the Fox Village Theater. That's where the big Plum Market is now. We went and saw that. It was such a 70-millimeter with all extra speakers and everything. It was really so disorienting and fascinating. But the point where the computer house being dismantled and ends up singing Bicycle Built For Two, my dad had that. He came home with a flexi disk from work in like, I don't know, 1962, maybe 60, 61. We used to hear that in our living room. When that showed up in this movie, I was terrified. I was, What are my dad's records in this movie? But anyway, and so I knew that cinema had some power. I remember being in a theater with my brother seeing Gone With the Wind in Boston of all places. We were one of those multiple-tier balcony places. I remember at one point, everybody who was female in the entire theater getting out their handkerchiefs and going, who, and crying when. What happens? A little girl falls off the horse or something. I thought, this is powerful. The same thing happened with music. I told you about the records that I had, did I mention the Popeye record? You're probably thinking, No, I wish you wouldn't, too. This is one of the taproots of my getting into radio. Because my father said, I'm an engineer. I'm going to make my own stereo system, get out the plywood and cut it up and stuff. They gave me some records. I mentioned Shirley Temple. The other record they gave me was a Popeye record. I discovered early on that Mae Questel's Olive Oyl voice could make everybody in the house cringe instantly. I knew at that point I said, this is power. This is really powerful stuff. Now, I wouldn't do that to people on a regular basis or ever. But anything that could convey that energy cinema, music, anything that's recorded and played back, always fascinated me. But a real important turning point was in around 1971, as one of my friends at Solstice School, he said to me, You want to come to the old architecture design auditorium and see a Truffaut movie with me? I said, Truffaut movie? I'll come. We went and saw, I think, the 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut. I thought, This is great. You can come, I think it was $0.75 or $1 or something. We could see these movies with subtitles. I love it because I love reading words. He spoke fluent French because he came from a multilingual family. We were going to these films. He really wanted me to see Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. He told me on the way there, he said, You remind me of this guy. To this day, I've come to realize that's probably the greatest compliment I've ever been given in my life or ever will be. I think it was because I had this way of going around and staring. It's that fascination with reality, just like with Andre Breton and the first Surrealist Manifesto, the higher realities that are right here. Was it el raur, who said that there's a higher reality. It's right here in this one. There are other worlds, and they're right here in this one. That's the same thing Sun Ra said. We're all Surrealists, if we just lighten up a little and get closer to our subconscious. But anyway Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. The only other film of his that I really crave and I want to see in the full 70 mill is, Play Time, where he went bankrupt, making this replica of part of Paris. Wow. What a guy. I was seeing Truffaut, Godard and Tatt, those are my three favorites. But also these film groups, they were all over campus. What was then the natural sciences, auditorium A of Angell Hall, Modern Languages Building, Auditorium 3. There was a whole Gumby festival there. Can you imagine an entire festival of Gumby short films? Every damn one of them began with these people going, "Gumby!" We were just beside ourselves with them, something or other, by the end of that evening. But the fact that there were people willing to share these films with us and the fact that people were willing to go into a large darkened room and sit together and absorb things together, react together to things. I really looked up to the U of M students, more so at those films screenings than just about anything, because they were so joyously responsive. You'd see a Marx Brothers movie, and they would cheer when there'd be a good joke or groan when there'd be a good pun. Or if Zeppo came on, he's just a pretty boy, they'd all hiss. That's why I first saw You Can't Take It With You, Frank Capra, and also, It's a Wonderful Life. There wasn't any home video, so we were all going and experiencing these things together. That culture's where is it? Then there were the Ann Arbor Film Festivals that started in the old architectural design auditorium, which is now Lorch Hall 140, which is mainly Econ lectures because some hate-crazed staff member or GSI who grad student torched the Econ building on the Diag right before Christmas. Was it 1981?
[02:03:00] arwulf: I was on the radio that night. Somebody came running in, Hey, Econ Building's on fire. Life. You never know what's gonna happen next. What I loved about the film festivals being in what was then the old architecture and design auditorium was all those glass display cases along that hallway were all stuffed with weird art, and there was this willingness to have art everywhere. A lot of that got pushed to North campus. We got to make way for more serious concerns. Yeah, we'll have the Art Museum and Tappan Hall, the Art History library, but the rest of you put it on North campus. When I hired in at the U of M as a temp in 1992, the department, which wasn't even a real department was called Film Projection Service. I was running films. Sometimes, Herb Eagle's Slavic Studies course, I would be showing a Russian film, 16 millimeter silent, so it had to be silent speed, which means take the back of the projector off, change the belt so that it's going at silent speed. This was very, very mechanical stuff. Right away, I knew that Herb Eagle was the person that really wanted to keep working with. He was so patient. It was a Ukrainian film in three reels, and it was cinemascope with the subtitles kept going off the bottom of the frame so you couldn't understand what they're saying. He was like, Okay, let's show this, and I started the film. I hear him running up the stairs, and he said, That's real two. Can we see real one, please? [LAUGHTER] He was very sweet. I said, I'm sorry. He said, That's okay. I started the other one that I had ready to go. It was not real one. It was the other real. He's so patient and so forgiving. I've learned from him that feeling of just like, what the hell are you gonna do? What is happening here in the room? Who were you with? What energy are you giving them? But over the years, and he's now an octogenarian, and I'm still working with him, and I work with him much more closely than is normal with our technicians in our department, LSA Technology Services, Sight and Sound operations is the group I'm with. Years ago, I had to show clips from a DVD from a Bosnian war film that was actually made by Serbs while the war was still in progress called Pretty Village, Pretty Flame. Hard, difficult, but most of these students don't even know that this war even happened. You got to give him a little wake-up call. He gave me the time codes. Originally, he used to show up with cued videotapes, a stack of them, 15, and those were pretty neat. He just popped in. He cued them. It almost always worked. But now we were with a DVD, and he gave me all these time codes. Unfortunately, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame is, I've described it to the students as sort of a Gordian knot of a film, flashbacks within flashbacks, within flashbacks. I said, We need to make clips of this thing. Then, even once we had clips, I was up on the booth. He doesn't want to wear a mic. He doesn't want to touch any technology. He's trying to talk to the students about what really matters, his great humanitarian approach to teaching and using film. Unit 1 is Holocaust films. Unit 2 is The Lives of Working Women under State Socialism, like Soviet Bloc. Unit 3 is the Bosnian War Films. That's his main course. We also do a Polish course, Czech course. He's got a Ukrainian film course he's going to launch in January. I have taken to just going down and running his media from the podium or what I call a lectern, and the industry calls a Podium, because I don't stand on it. I stand at it. But this totally frees him up to interact the way he wants to with the students. I'm able to show a clip, and then while I'm cueing up the next one to have a still image up there. I have thousands of stills that I have gleaned from all over the place. It's been pretty popular course because we're keeping their eyes busy, we're keeping their minds busy. He's a great instructor who you can really learn a lot from if you care to. That's the single best thing that's ever happened to me at the University of Michigan, is working with Herbert Eagle, looking forward to doing it again.
[02:09:05] AMY CANTU: Well, as an autodidact, what are you most proud of, of everything... You've had such a varied career in Ann Arbor. You've been involved in so much of the culture here. What in its history, and in your involvement in its history, are you most proud of?
[02:09:26] arwulf: I don't know if I'm proud of it, but I'm happy that I'm not stuck in the mainstream. I'm happy to inspire other people to be true to their own spirits and to speak the truth more and to find ways to speak the truth, always tell the truth. But it's tricky, and it all depends on who you are. I'm a member of the dominant social group. The truth coming from me is going to sound different than it does from someone else. The fact that I'm born male makes what I say and my perspective different from the two of you...were born women, right? Basic things like that. I'm happy to have been able to have stayed in this community all throughout this, and it's getting more difficult to be here, frankly speaking. It's way too crowded. There's a lot of noise and confusion, pollution. I'm not really crazy about how the plume has been ignored for so long. That's endangering everybody. The number of ways there are for everybody to be endangered. I guess if I had to feel really gratified about something, it's how with poetry, with theater, with showing movies, all the different media, all the different forms of human communication and expression that I've been involved in, anything I've done that can help other people, to me, the alleviation of suffering is the highest order of business and the bottom line. I don't know if it's the Lutherans or who it is that say, Oh, now just putting band-aids on stuff. No, you don't get it. There's so much pain in the world, and there's so much confusion. People who are called crazy or who think they are crazy are often so frightened that we need to have more compassion for each other, and that needs to lead to some really positive action. That's really what I'm trying to do with language, with everything that I've done so far... And thank you for having me here.
[02:12:19] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much for coming.
[02:12:20] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.

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June 29, 2023

Length: 02:12:34

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

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Subjects
Alternative Education
Ann Arbor Art Fairs
Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival
Anti-War Movement
Art & Artists
Civil Rights Activists
Community High School
Drake's Sandwich Shop
Drugs
Earthworks High School
Eclipse Jazz
Environmental Action
Film Societies
Film Projection Service
Forsythe Junior High School
Free Speech
Friends Center Meeting House
Gallup Park
Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
Happenings
Hill Street Commune
Jazz Music
Maison Edward
Marijuana
Mark's Coffeehouse
Nielsen's Flowers & Greenhouse
October 15 1969 Peace Rally
Otis Spann Memorial Field
Pacifism
Performance Artists
Pioneer II
Demonstrations & Protests
Anti-War Protests
Broadcasting
Radio
Rainbow People's Party
Rock Music
Sun Bakery
Sun Ra and his Arkestra (Musical Group)
The People’s Ballroom
Vietnam War
WABX
WCBN-FM
WEMU
WJJX-AM (Radio Station)
WNRZ
WRCN
Ann Arbor Tenants Union
Ann Arbor
Films & Filmmakers
Local Creators
Local History
Social Issues
AADL Talks To
Arwulf Arwulf
Theodore Arwulf Grenier
Allan Kaprow
Alan Schreiber
Art Timo
Diane Kirkpatrick
Francesca Palazzolo
Genie Plamondon
Greta Schiller
Herb Eagle
Heywood Hall
Hiawatha Bailey
Janet Stolarevsky
Jim Dulzo
Joe Timon
John Sinclair
Kenneth Kornheiser
Leni Sinclair
Leon Smith
Lindsay Forbes
Mae Questel
Margaret Copley
Marion Brown
Mary Matthaei
Michael Jewett
Michael G. Nastos
Molly Motherwell
Pharaoh
Pun Plamondon
Raoul Bernstein
Sun Ra
Tom Dodd
Yusef Lateef
Zach Grenier