The Ann Arbor Ozone Homecoming Parade

Mon, 03/11/2024 - 8:39pm

When: 2024

In 1972, the University of Michigan decided to cancel their homecoming parade due to lack of interest and dwindling attendance.  Into that vacuum stepped counterculture artists, musicians, filmmakers, and performers to create the Ozone Parade, a free-for-all that showcased the wild creativity of Ann Arbor in the 1970s.  In The Ann Arbor Ozone Homecoming Parade, filmmaker Terri Sarris takes us through the life of the parade through archival footage and the voices of participants and creators.  

And for more stories about the Ozone Parade, check out the 75-minute director's cut.

Transcript

• [00:00:06] TASHA LEBOW: In 1972, the university announced that, "Due to lack of interest, they were canceling the homecoming parade."
• [00:00:14] SUE DISE: Initially, I believe it was intended to be an alternative homecoming parade. A bunch of local artists and musicians and hippie types decided they would have their own.
• [00:00:26] MIKE GOULD: The hippies took over. It was the counter culture, interesting creative people of Ann Arbor back in the '70s gathered together to match.
• [00:00:36] DAN GUNNING: The premise was to replace the homecoming parade, which had died from apathy. It was all very camp. The Ozone Parade would probably be best described as a dada affair.
• [00:00:50] VICKI HONEYMAN: Oh man. The Ozone Parade was the ultimate hippie parade in the '70s.
• [00:00:58] VICKI HONEYMAN: Big over the top, just really loud and completely joyous and all about being as goofy as possible, because the Ozone Parade is the antithesis to a homecoming parade. It was the parade of hippies and Ann Arbor was hippie town in the '70s.
• [00:01:24] TASHA LEBOW: Oh, yeah. Everything in those years was political, in the Nixon era.
• [00:01:30] SUE DISE: All things are political and certainly, they were in the early '70s. Watergate was happening, Agnew was being indicted, so the government was falling apart. The war was still going on. Of course, locally, there was a lot of stuff happening in Ann Arbor at that time. The emergence of the Human Rights party and the Rainbow People's Party and the five dollar fine, the first hash bashes. The first LGBTQ city council, the person was elected here in Ann Arbor. There was a lot of stuff going on.
• [00:02:06] MIKE GOULD: John Sinclair had just been released from prison. He was in the parade, dressed up in a prison parody suit with Pat Oleszko in a car.
• [00:02:15] LARRY BEHNKE: In the early years, John Sinclair was a big factor because he was like a hero to us. But he was a spiritual leader to a lot of people. Of course, when he got thrown in jail for giving an undercover agent two joints, that really rallied a lot of people for a couple of years. All we heard was, "Free John."
• [00:02:35] MIKE GOULD: This is around the same time as the people's ballroom. A lot of the same people that were doing the ballroom were also organizing the parades, the people's council.
• [00:02:45] PETER STRUBLE: Some people did present some politics. Generally, the feel of the parade was just a joyous thing and everybody loved the parade.
• [00:02:53] PAT OLESZKO: No, I don't think it was political. I think there was some ideas that were critical commentary in a social commentary.
• [00:03:01] SUE DISE: I don't think there was anything overtly political. I think it was just a spontaneous weirdness which was, let's face it, what made Ann Arbor fun place to be in those days, spontaneous weirdness.
• [00:03:16] DAN GUNNING: The legend of the Ozone Parades was part of the appeal of Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor was legendary for John Sinclair. The Ozone Parade Commander Cody was a big deal and that stuff really defined this town. Ozone was a concept back then, but defining the principle of Ann Arbor subculture, it was a talisman word.
• [00:03:37] MIKE GOULD: Ozone was just an Ann Arbor word and concept, was an interesting time. If you were in the Ozone, you were really stoned.
• [00:03:44] DAN GUNNING: It was a reference to being really high, to go beyond your rational mind.
• [00:03:48] STEVEN COLE: There was this thing in the air if you wanted to find it and you could breathe it.
• [00:03:54] MIKE GOULD: It also had to do with the song that Commander Cody wrote, Lost in the Ozone Again.
• [00:04:00] PAT OLESZKO: A famous song from the first album was Lost in the Ozone Again, that's how it became the Ozone Parade.
• [00:04:08] DAN GUNNING: The Ozone Institute. What is it? There's a prescription, two shots of gin, one, it's in the song. Tells you how to do it.
• [00:04:17] VICKI HONEYMAN: It was all about joie de vivre and having a public voice about joy and being just utterly goofy and silly. I'm assuming that Commander Cody, George, Fran's brother, Chris, started the Ozone Parade. The Ozone Parade is like completely the voice of the character that Chris Frayne was. He was like a cartoon character and very smart, very talented, an amazing artist and filmmaker. He lived life to the fullest. I think that that's where the Ozone Parade came from his brain, I assume.
• [00:04:57] TASHA LEBOW: Chris came from a filmmaking background. George Commander Cody, Fran was also an art student in Ann Arbor. Their dad was a very well known and highly respected filmmaker, so that Chris and George were editing films when they were kids with their dad.
• [00:05:12] PAT OLESZKO: Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen were essentially the art school band. When they performed places, the entourage was huge. Chris did all the posters for the band. Chris was a really talented graphic designer and made posters and stuff.
• [00:05:27] TASHA LEBOW: Chris contracted MS probably in 1980, 1981. Part of his frenetic energy was that unconscious knowledge, that I got to do a lot of work very quickly. That means the cartoons, and the sculpture, and the paintings and everything else that he was on the graphic arts, which, there's still a lot of businesses around town that have Chris's art in their logos or in their signage, which is wonderful to see.
• [00:05:54] VICKI HONEYMAN: Chris Frayne seriously, nobody in the world like that man. A one of a kind and such a great sense of humor.
• [00:06:07] TASHA LEBOW: Chris Frayne, Ellen Frank, a bunch of the crazy art students that were hanging at The Blind Pig pretty regularly held, I think, an impromptu meeting and said, lack of interest, we're interested.
• [00:06:21] PETER STRUBLE: Chris Frayne, who was outraged, said, "What about the kids?"
• [00:06:24] TASHA LEBOW: Let's throw a parade.
• [00:06:27] PETER STRUBLE: Within a period of less than a month, we organized, got a permit, got people involved.
• [00:06:32] TASHA LEBOW: Put up flyers all over town doing an all call to anybody that wanted to dress up and be in a parade and it just took over.
• [00:06:42] PETER STRUBLE: It happened. It was pretty amazing.
• [00:06:45] TASHA LEBOW: Ellen was one of the people that worked with George Manupelli very closely. Then I think after he retired or left the area, she took over running the film festival. Right from the get go, Chris and Ellen's plan with the Ozone Parade was to film it, to make films, to enter into the film festival. My recollection is that Chris did the organizing for the films once he knew the parades were going to happen, and probably contracted with people to do the filming, as well as some of the still photography, and then did all the editing and all the add ons that happened to make the finished films.
• [00:07:19] GERRY FIALKA: The grandmama of it all is Pat Oleszko because she was teaching us right then in the '70s what is performance art and how can you take it further.
• [00:07:31] PAT OLESZKO: I went to school in Ann Arbor. The art school was pretty much the center of the universe in Ann Arbor, if I may be so bold, sitting in Dominic which was like an extension of the art school. Much was planned there, Film festival and the The Once Festival and The Ozone Parade. That was the core center. I was part of the festival from the third festival on and became the film festival girl. I was doing a different piece every night for the six nights. I had a huge presence in Ann Arbor when I was going to school and then I continued coming back for the festival and for other things.
• [00:08:08] STEVEN COLE: Pat Oleszko and what she was doing, it had no name. The term performance art did not exist until many years later.
• [00:08:19] PAT OLESZKO: The real genesis of the Ozone Parade was the Funk homecoming parade that I started in 1969. That was the year that they decided that having a homecoming queen was no longer relevant, and so they canceled that. I entered myself as a float and announced myself as the homecoming queen. The reason I did it, because I wanted to compete in the homecoming queen competition originally. Then when they canceled it, then I said Well, that's one way to win, just announce it." Then put out the flyer to get all my friends to bring this thing across. In those days, you really didn't like ask a whole lot of permission, you just did stuff. It was a big deal, the Funk Homecoming Parade. That was the parade that inspired the Ozone Parade.
• [00:09:22] TASHA LEBOW: For the first one they brought me in. I don't think she was still living in Ann Arbor, she was living in New York and coming back for it.
• [00:09:30] PETER STRUBLE: She was dressed up in one of her wonderful outfits that she made, and Chris enlisted me to be Commander Cody.
• [00:09:36] TASHA LEBOW: The guy with the blue face and the big cowboy hat and a big nose, which was one of Chris and George's both signature cartoon characters. That is part of the Commander Cody logo.
• [00:09:48] PETER STRUBLE: Chris had made a giant paper mache head with a big cigar and two fake hands. My job was to sit next to Pad Lesco with my arm around her. It was a tough one. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:10:00] MIKE GOULD: The parades all had clever names.
• [00:10:04] TASHA LEBOW: The first theme was Reet-Petite and Gone.
• [00:10:08] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Reet-Petite and Gone.
• [00:10:11] PETER STRUBLE: Old Louis Jordan Film.
• [00:10:13] GERRY FIALKA: I thought that was really appropriate because what Jordan was doing was alchemy. He was blending two things and coming up with a third unknown thing. He blended Jazz and R&B and came up with jump blues. We were doing the same thing with the Ozone Parade. We were taking two things, a traditional parade and performance art, and we came up with a new unknown thing. This is the key to alchemy in art form. That's what we did. In the Ozone Parade, we created something new but then we satirized our own new thing.
• [00:10:56] TASHA LEBOW: Chris is in a white gorilla suit with roller skates on. He had a real penchant for roller skating, he loved to skate. I was in it. I made a costume where I'm a clown on my hands doing a handstand. Shoes on sticks, and a paper mache head down low and gloves on my feet. I regretted it right away because I couldn't see any of the other people very well.
• [00:11:21] ARWULF ARWULF: The very first one which was 72, is a 15 year old. I decided that I would put some art together. I took some one by twos and somehow hammered them together in some a very primitive structure holding a sign. The sign had some gibberish on it. I don't need to pay attention to if it makes any sense or not blind. Ooh, axle duck, memorial crater, and then an arrow pointing to nowhere. I think we are on the back of the rainbow multimedia truck, and I was already wearing this first of many headdresses. actually. My eldest sister had taught me the Afghan stitch.
• [00:12:01] TASHA LEBOW: He was the Queen Mother of the Gross National Product and he had this elaborate costume. It was Christmas tree shaped and it was covered with plastic flowers, and he had a head dress with beer cans and baby doll heads, and lots of makeup, and it was so perfect. It was Rose Bowl parade quality. It was very inspiring.
• [00:12:27] STEVEN COLE: I still had leftover flowers. What do you do when you have really a lot of leftover plastic flowers? Well, if you're the Queen Mother of the Gross National Product then you bring them with you and you take a flower occasionally, and you toss it to someone who's gawking at you. Someone was with me pushing a shopping cart with all these extra flowers. But since it's a plastic flower and doesn't smell, I spray it with Glade so it'll smell like a flower before I toss it to them. I never talked to people very much as the Queen Mother. I'm just focused on, "Okay, take a flower spray it throw". Waved to the crowd, but I'm in the middle of the street and they're off to the side. I got all this attention of people going, oh "Oh, wow". Jackie appeared as the little known sister of Otto Preminger, the famed film director Olga Preminger. Don't fault yourself if you have never heard of her. No one had heard of her until the Ozone homecoming parade when she appeared with the help of Jackie.
• [00:13:31] PETER STRUBLE: They used to start all the way up by the stadium there.
• [00:13:34] TASHA LEBOW: It used to be this big fenced off area next to the stadium.
• [00:13:38] STEVEN COLE: It was Keech and Green ended up by Division went up Division turned east, south again and stayed, and ended up at the gas station South U and Forest.
• [00:13:55] TASHA LEBOW: There were live musicians, Commander Cody. They're in the first parade but they're walking, they're not playing anything.
• [00:14:02] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Commander Cody, the bus was in the first parade.
• [00:14:05] TASHA LEBOW: Radio King in his court of rhythm was one of the bands that played.
• [00:14:09] SUE DISE: There were so many local musicians here in town at that time because you could still afford to live here and be a musician and peddle lots of venues to play in, that it was inevitable though. A couple dozen local musicians were probably going to be showing up in that parade in one form or another. [MUSIC]
• [00:14:41] DAVID SWAIN: That's over dubbed by the guys from the other band, from Rich Dishman's band.
• [00:14:50] LAURENCE MILLER: Swain might have started some goofy motif that we followed with maybe.
• [00:14:53] DAVID SWAIN: A little brown jog maybe. David, you must have heard something. [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:14:57] LAURENCE MILLER: There was a word on the street.
• [00:14:59] MIKE GOULD: Well, this is done and Swain contacted us. Swain had a way of finding his way into these kind of situations. [LAUGHTER] It was like, "Okay, sounds like fun".
• [00:15:13] DAVID SWAIN: That's about us about what I remember. I think David probably came by with his VW bus and picked us up and we went down. It's always good.
• [00:15:21] PETER STRUBLE: Nobody contacted us about anything, we just showed up at the scene. We didn't know anybody else there because we were high school kids and it was all college kids or ex college kids. The lunatic friends there.
• [00:15:39] MIKE GOULD: The first year I just marched, I was wearing a wizard suit, and I had a kazoo with a funnel jammed in one end and a piece of hose dangling out the end of it and rest in wizard finery. I marched in that, I was jamming along with my kazoo. I was working as a printer for youth for understanding. I asked for the afternoon off to attend the parade because this was important and they didn't let me do it. I got all my work done, and then said I got to do this, and so I left, and I got fired the next day for being a wall. It was a defining moment in my life where I had to choose what's it going to be art or commerce. I've been on the art side ever since. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:16:23] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Here they are, Martian Entropy Band.
• [00:16:25] MIKE GOULD: In later events I was in the Martian Entropy Band very heavily influenced by Frank Zappa. I played base and wrote several of the songs and was the front man. Spaceman baseman. Somebody gave me an Air Force helmet and I added a propeller to it and a horn and an antenna. I wore that along with the wizard robe to play the base on the trailer in the parade.
• [00:16:53] TASHA LEBOW: The second parade, the theme was all that meat and no potatoes. [OVERLAPPING] The second parade was probably the peak, even bigger than the first one.
• [00:17:03] PETER STRUBLE: I don't know if it was a bigger parade, but certainly more organized.
• [00:17:06] TASHA LEBOW: A lot of food costumes, a lot of related costumes. The second year I wised the chicken.
• [00:17:12] PETER STRUBLE: Chris made his fabulous lobster costume on roller skates. The giant horse's head that I made out of foam. Year three, Chris, Fran had the idea of naming it. First I look at the purse after the Ray Charles song and that's what it was. It was a money theme. I went as a giant dollar sign and I had made out of cardboard. I was playing my trumpet. I was a trumpet player at that time. I was playing my trumpet through the dollar sign. [MUSIC]
• [00:17:43] LARRY BEHNKE: Later on, when it was sort of dying out, I decided I would try to keep it alive. I drew up a bunch of posters and I said, let's continue this because it's so much fun and nobody else is organizing it towards the last few years. I just decided to and I went to the police department and got the permits and then advertising, making the flyer and posting it all over town and trying to get people to join.
• [00:18:12] GERRY FIALKA: My dad like many boomer's parents documented their family history with super eight. I don't know why I filmed. I would say it comes from my dad's mentality to document his family's history. It was like, we document your friend's history. I just remember, wow we're doing this, let's document it. It was just like breathing, I guess.
• [00:18:38] DERRICK WOLF: We had our 1940 bu up and we were dressed up like gangsters and we had vote for Sam placards on the side of the car and we all had cigars and were acting like we were rough, tough gangsters.
• [00:18:52] LARRY BEHNKE: I guess we continued themes every year and there was another one that had a alien theme to it. Outer space, kind of aliens.
• [00:18:59] DAN GUNNING: I just put on a collection of surreal flowing things.
• [00:19:03] SUE DISE: We put these helmets on and we put these jackets on, and we just hopped in and silver beings walking down the street.
• [00:19:10] VICKI HONEYMAN: I turned myself and my bicycle into the aluminum lady because that's what I had at my fingertips to use.
• [00:19:16] LARRY BEHNKE: It seemed to go pretty well as the traditional street parade. But then one year I went and they said, well, it's going to cost you $1,200 for police guidance on the streets. I said, that's not going to work. We don't have that money. I think it was the police chief himself who suggested, well, why don't you have it on the sidewalk because then it wouldn't require any police guidance. That's when I decided to make it the first non motorized sidewalk ozone parade. The later years, it started outside the Del Rio and then we marched up Washington and State Street and it ended at Liberty Plaza with a band playing. The parade was ended, but the partying continued. I also thought it would be a good idea to move it to Halloween when people are already in the festive mood and dressed up in costumes. That seemed to keep it alive for another two or three years.
• [00:20:28] MIKE GOULD: It was in every single one of them, including the last one that petered out. Things happen in phases.
• [00:20:33] SUE DISE: I suspect like a lot of nifty things in this town. It ended because perhaps the DDA or whatever its equivalent was in those days was less amenable to spontaneous weirdness. I think it just fizzled out. I think it had a life and it took on a life and then it just went away. But it could be that the people who were part of it went away.
• [00:21:01] TASHA LEBOW: I think because a lot of the folks left, a lot of the prime movers, moved on.
• [00:21:09] LARRY BEHNKE: Why did the ozone parade end? Well, I left Ann Arbor and I don't know anybody else that organized it or wanted to organize it, so that was the end of it.
• [00:21:19] DAN GUNNING: I think a homecoming parade may have returned and taken over for the ozone parade.
• [00:21:23] TASHA LEBOW: The university had taken back the homecoming parade concept by about the late '70s.
• [00:21:30] VICKI HONEYMAN: I think about Ann Arbor from that time and definitely the ozone parade is one of the things that I think about and feel fortunate to have experience, because the '70s in Ann Arbor was a really special time [MUSIC] .
• [00:21:47] MIKE GOULD: It was a defining moment in my life, and I'm sure to a number of other people's lives.
• [00:21:54] TASHA LEBOW: I think it had great influence on my life and what I appreciate most.
• [00:21:59] LARRY BEHNKE: The stuff that I went through in Ann Arbor during that a magical time where we believe that we could have the life we wanted. That's what helped me to get where I am now. Very important that I lived through that magical time in Ann Arbor.
• [00:22:19] MIKE GOULD: What we have here is what John Sinclair used to call cultural artifacts [MUSIC] .
• [00:22:40] TASHA LEBOW: There was this feeling that it's like there's way too much conformity going on. We need to just cut loose and celebrate not having to be hammered into that mold all the time.
• [00:23:00] LARRY BEHNKE: Also, zone is etymologically rooted in the word celestial. We were seeking the stars, like Sly Stone said, everybody is a star.