The Ann Arbor Ozone Homecoming Parade: The Director's Cut

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.  

This is the director's cut of Sarris's 24-minute original created for Ann Arbor 200.

Transcript

• [00:00:00] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: The parade gets underway. [MUSIC] The parade gets underway.
• [00:00:38] MIKE GOULD: It was the counter-culture, interesting creative people of Ann Arbor back in the '70s gathered together to match. This all happened during homecoming, where the fraternities would make giant footballs and parade them through the streets. The fraternities lost a lot of favor during the late '60s, early '70s so they decided not to have it, so the hippies took over.
• [00:01:01] 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.
• [00:01:14] 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 da, da affair.
• [00:01:28] VICKI HONEYMAN: Oh man. The Ozone Parade was the ultimate hippie parade in the '70s. 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, and it was the parade of hippies and Ann Arbor was hippie town in the '70s.
• [00:01:58] TASHA LEBOW: In 1972, because it was probably the peak of the hippie years. There wasn't a lot of interest on campus in the sororities and fraternity world and that whole culture. To the point where the university announced that "Due to lack of interest, they were canceling the homecoming parade in 1972."
• [00:02:19] LARRY BEHNKE: I remember watching the traditional homecoming parade. All the raw, raw stuff that you usually see in homecoming parade, but right in the middle of a bunch of people protesting the Vietnam War, and everyone was cheering them because that was our cause. At the time, we were just so thrilled to see this bit of rebelliousness in the middle of this traditional homecoming parade, but the university probably didn't like it much. I think it might have been the next year, along with the disinterest in fraternities and sororities that the university decided to cancel the homecoming parade. That's when a bunch of people decided to continue the parade but make it the Ozone Parade. Wow, what fun that was.
• [00:03:09] TASHA LEBOW: Oh yeah. Everything in those years was political in the Nixon era.
• [00:03:15] SUE DISE: All things are political and certainly they were in the early '70s, Watergate was happening, Agnew was being indicted, the government was falling apart and 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 $5 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.
• [00:03:51] MIKE GOULD: John Sinclair had just been released from prison. He was in the parade, dressed up in a prison parody suit with Pat Lesco in a car.
• [00:04:01] 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 you 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.
• [00:04:20] 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.
• [00:04:30] PETER STRUBLE: Some people did present, some politics generally. The field of parade was just a joyous thing and everybody loves the parade.
• [00:04:38] PAT OLESZKO: No, I don't think it was political. I think there was some ideas that were critical commentary in a social commentary.
• [00:04:46] SUE DISE: I don't think there was anything overtly political. It was just spontaneous weirdness which was, let's face it, what made Ann Arbor fun place to be in those days, spontaneous weirdness.
• [00:05:01] DAN GUNNING: The legend of the Ozone Parades was part of the appeal of Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor was legendary for John Sinclair. The Ozone Parade commander Cody was a big deal and that stuff really defined this town. You know, ozone was a concept back then, but defining the principle of Ann Arbor subculture, it was a talisman word.
• [00:05:23] MIKE GOULD: Ozone was just kind of an Ann Arbor word and concept was an interesting time, if you were in the ozone, you were really stoned.
• [00:05:30] DAN GUNNING: It was a reference to being really high to go beyond your rational mind.
• [00:05:33] STEVEN COLE: There was this thing in the air if you wanted to find it and you could breathe it. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:05:40] PAT OLESZKO: It also had to do with the song that Commander Cody wrote, Lost in the Ozone Again.
• [00:05:45] PAT OLESZKO: A famous song from the first album was Lost in the Ozone Again, that's how it became the Ozone Parade.
• [00:05:54] DAN GUNNING: The Ozone. What is it? There's a prescription, two shots of gin, it's in the song tells you how to do it. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:06:02] VICKI HONEYMAN: It was all about Joie de Vive and having a public voice about joy and being just utterly goofy and silly. I'm assuming that Commander Cody, George Frayne'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 and a clown, not in any way in the conventional sense of a clown. He lived life to the fullest and I think that that's where the Ozone Parade came from, his brain I assume.
• [00:06:46] TASHA LEBOW: Chris came from a filmmaking background. George Commander Cody, Frayne was also an art student in Ann Arbor. Their dad was a very well-known and highly respected filmmaker. That Chris and George were editing films when they were kids with their dad.
• [00:07:02] PAT OLESZKO: Commander Cody and the Lost Plan 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 like a really talented graphic designer and made posters and stuff.
• [00:07:18] DAN GUNNING: Big part of the Commander Cody appeal with the album covers. I've just always been a huge Chris Frayne fan.
• [00:07:24] TASHA LEBOW: Chris and George, both were two of the most scholarly experts of crazy movies and music from the '20s, '30s, and '40s. I don't know where they got that skill or how they were able to catalog it before the Internet. [LAUGHTER] They always had something else they wanted to show you from some crazy old movie. He had a collection of old movie posters from Grade B, C, and D movies. Then he would add a lot of collage art to them and then use those in various ways. 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.
• [00:08:25] VICKI HONEYMAN: Chris Frayne seriously, nobody in the world like that man, a one of a kind and such a great sense of humor.
• [00:08:42] TASHA LEBOW: It opened in 1972. It really was a home base for a crowd that actually probably started at Mark's Coffee House before the Pig opened.
• [00:08:51] PETER STRUBLE: I was hanging around Mark's coffee house as a hangout for anybody who was cool, Iggy Pop, who was one of his spots, and Commander Cody band and all those folks got to meet Ellen Frank and Chris Frayne and even got to be friends with them.
• [00:09:05] TASHA LEBOW: Then Mark shutdown and once the Pigs opened, a lot of that crowd started hanging out down there. The Ann Arbor Sun, the alternative newspaper offices were upstairs from the Pig, so there was a direct line there for advertising and for promotion and getting the word out through the Ann Arbor Sun. 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.
• [00:09:40] PETER STRUBLE: Chris Frayne was outraged, said, what about the kids?
• [00:09:44] TASHA LEBOW: Let's throw a parade.
• [00:09:46] PETER STRUBLE: Within a period of less than a month, we organized, got a permit.
• [00:09:50] TASHA LEBOW: They got someone to go out and get the permit.
• [00:09:53] PETER STRUBLE: Got people involved.
• [00:09:54] 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.
• [00:10:04] PETER STRUBLE: It happened. It was pretty amazing.
• [00:10:07] 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. Then did all the editing and all the add-ons that happened to make the finished films.
• [00:10:44] TASHA LEBOW: Lindy Sinclair is on the back of the car with Pat Oleszko in it.
• [00:10:48] PETER STRUBLE: At the time, she was doing a lot of film work.
• [00:10:52] GERRY FIALKA: The grand mama 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 farther.
• [00:11:05] 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 was like an extension of the art school so much was planned there. Film Festival and 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.
• [00:11:42] TASHA LEBOW: I knew of Pat Oleszko from hearing my sister, who was a few years older than me and already on campus that there was this woman who was this crazy art student who would dress up every day and people would literally line the diag between classes just to watch her walk across campus every day.
• [00:11:59] STEVEN COLE: Pat Oleszko and what she was doing, it had no name. The term performance art did not exist until many years later.
• [00:12:08] 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. They canceled that. I entered myself as a float, and announced myself as the homecoming queen. I did it because I wanted to compete in the homecoming queen competition originally and then when they canceled it, then I said, oh, well, that's one way to win. Just announce it, and 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. I was wearing a stuffed nude body with a giant stuffed on rose, and I was sitting on the back of a red convertible that belonged to the noted civil rights lawyer that was in town. I was in a flurry of surrounded by pink tool. Once I'm the homecoming queen, I'm homecoming queen for life. [LAUGHTER] There were like four long haired hippies who had greased their hair back to drive the car and be mafioso protecting me and then I dressed off my nine roommates as the beautiful losers in all different ethnic dresses. We had people from art school that knew how to do baton work, so they were leading it and then there was the Dort Munder marching band in kazoo outfit, which was everybody else that wanted to be in the parade and two of my very good friends, Ruth Rachel, and Doug Hollis, had a big sign that said Jesus and Pat walk hand in hand, which got us into a lot of trouble because that picture happened to be in the Ann Arbor news or something like that. It wasn't free form, but it was a very riotous thing. This was still like the frat boys and girls doing their stick and then came me and all this, like rye bald, outrageous stuff and then they saw the anti Vietnam float which was humble, but nonetheless, it was, this was the height of the war, '69 and they started throwing shit at that float. My people started responding and so it would got into this melee of fisticuffs and pushing and name calling and this huge thing at the end of the parade and the relationship between the underground and the pigs, if I can use terminology of the moment. Back then it wasn't any good. They were arresting films at the film festival and there was a huge animosity. It was a big deal, the Funk home coming parade. That was the parade that inspired the ozone parade. For the first one they brought me in.
• [00:15:08] TASHA LEBOW: I don't think she was still living in Ann Arbor at that time. She was living in New York and coming back for it.
• [00:15:14] LARRY BEHNKE: But I remember Pat Oleszko, she was the homecoming queen at foggy times, and we were all stone so who knows how good my memory is, but I do remember her.
• [00:15:23] PETER STRUBLE: She was dressed up in one of her wonderful outfits that she made. John Sinclair was driving the car, I think it was a 1950 Chevrolet convertible and Chris enlisted me to be Commander Cody.
• [00:15:34] 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, signature cartoon characters that is part of the Commander Cody logo.
• [00:15:46] 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 Pat Oleszko with my arm around her, which it was a tough one.
• [00:16:00] MIKE GOULD: The parades all had clever names.
• [00:16:03] TASHA LEBOW: The first theme was reet-petite and gone [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:16:13] 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 so he blended jazz and RnB 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 and this is the key to alchemy in art form so that's what we did with the ozone parade. We created something new, but then we satirized our own new thing.
• [00:16:56] 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. The problem was I couldn't see very well. I regretted it right away because I couldn't see any of the other people very well. It was the blind pig's only vehicle. The person holding the pig is Tom Isaiah, one of the founders of the blind pig and the pig came from the farm that Jerry Hosers family owned. The pig had nail polish on, it was all cleaned up and powdered. Before the parade when Jerry stopped to visit his family in Dearborn, the pig escaped from the garage and he went out onto the street with the police all chasing this pig.
• [00:17:53] DERRICK WOLF: They had it cornered in a fenced yard.
• [00:17:55] TASHA LEBOW: I think the cops were going to shoot it.
• [00:17:57] DERRICK WOLF: Jerry showed up and convinced the police that it was his pig. He walked into the yard and he picked the pig up and so the cops just said to him, we don't want to see that pig again, so you've time to get out of town.
• [00:18:11] TASHA LEBOW: There was a crazy old guy who's in the first film, gives a finger as he rolls by in his car. He was very friendly but very eccentric character that everyone knew. He was an inventor, I think a retired, maybe engineering professor who had invented and may built crazy car vehicle type things that didn't really work. Ivory photo, I think that's them. They organized that and they made those crazy boxes.
• [00:18:39] ARWULF ARWULF: I was in Community High the first year that it opened, but it was too big for me so I went, I got scaled it down to Earthworks High, and I already had a tendency to do strange things. Somebody gave me a whole box of neckties that they found in an abandoned house so I started wearing like six of them at once to school all the time and I was hanging out a great deal with the rainbow houses and going to Tribal Council meetings. The very first one, which was in '72, as a 15 year old, I decided that I would just put some art together. I took some one by two's and somehow hammered them together in some very primitive structure holding a sign and the sign had some gibberish on it. I don't need to pay attention to if it makes any sense or not. 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 so there was this feeling that it's like we'll screw it. 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.
• [00:19:54] 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 just so perfect. It was Rose Bowl parade quality. It was very inspiring.
• [00:20:21] STEVEN COLE: I made this costume just because I wanted to make a statement and I got felt so inspired and I just said this has to happen so I made this and that was in the spring of '72. I thought, well, what do I do with that and I thought, oh, I have to go to the Ann Arbor Art Fair with this in the summer of '72 and so that's why when the parade came along I was all set to step out. For the next two summers I went out again to the Art Fair with it. I'm glad that I have movies taken at the Art Fair where Jackie made some films. The costume is mostly plastic flowers culled from a graveyard. It was a day like any other day. I was visiting a community garden so while I'm at the garden I just happened to glance over next door and there was a cemetery. I saw something I had never seen before. As I recall it was a bulldozer pushing a mound of plastic flowers toward a big ditch to dispose of them. It was a dump in the cemetery just for the plastic flowers. Why? Because this was springtime and it was time to remove the plastic flowers that had been there for the winter to make room for real flowers that would show up. It got to me viscerally, emotionally. You shouldn't put plastic flowers on their graves. [LAUGHTER] It's so fake, it's so superficial. It's so convenient. Then to see that the cemetery workers were then pushing it into a ditch and along with the flowers, the American flags that were on some of these graves and gold letters saying grandmother and stuff like this, it just hit me how that's the American culture. You do things for convenience, it's easy, it's all on the surface. It's not sincere enough, it can look beautiful but in a way it's ugly too because it's not genuine. I was offended but fascinated at the same time in this emotional state. I'm watching this pile of flowers and I'm starting to see something move and rise up and it's all made out of these flowers and it's rising up higher and higher. It starts to look like a conical shape, like the robe that a king or a queen might wear and I knew what its name was right away that I was looking at the Queen Mother of the Gross National Product. An embodiment of all that is crass, beautiful but banal, the darling of the disposable, the epiphany of plastic. The sovereign of the superficial, the guardian of the grandiose, the king of the gross national product. No, doesn't work. It had to be the Queen Mother of the Gross National Product. She's the overseer of the over the top. She doesn't know how to stop. It's just more and more. Miss Vandero, the architect, had a famous saying which was less is more. The Queen Mother says too much is just enough. Seeing this vision, I thought it's my mission now to realize this and make it apparent to the world. I felt I had to make a protest statement about our gross and I mean gross in more than one way national product. I thought my mission now is to give this actual form and realize it. Like any artist you have a vision now you're going to put it into a form others can see. I went back to the cemetery to get the flowers and those flags and the gold letters and filled the trunk of my car. I wanted what the ones I saw. I just made a chicken wire form and I started weaving in the flowers in that so you've got all these plastic flowers building up on this conical shape. I did my face in clown white because I wanted to be red, white, and blue because that's our colors for our country. The face is clown white. I used a blue acrylic paint for the eye shadow and lipstick red. Maybe it was Queen Victoria. Anyway, had a fan shaped collar behind her head. That was just black paper and the inside of that was all smile faces. The longer stem flowers were on the shoulders. The front was open. I put layers of nylon netting of various colors but I made the hem curved out and that was all ads from magazines about how to fix yourself up and be perfect overnight. On the back of this collar was the image of your typical middle class white family at church and on one side of that Donald Duck here, Daisy Duck. Then under this picture of the family is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Around the bottom I put the white fiber fill that you put into pillows so that it's like she's on a cloud. Also around the bottom were detergent boxes. As we go up we have the hat also made with chicken wire so that I could put more flowers in that. I have beer cans coming out here attached to that. At the end of the beer can is a photo of some woman from some magazine showing how beautiful you can be whatever. Then above that Easter grass out of that small American flags. This center cylindrical part of the hat is covered with photos of teen idols and then at the top of the hat, bigger American flags, the Queen Mother, the gross national product could be called the Guardian of the Gaudy and I could go on. I'm about 6'5" and so with a hat on and everything it must have been nine or 10 feet. By the way I want to say that I wasn't trying to bash my own country because I'm patriotic. I thought it's a beautiful place, it's wonderful. But then look at this, what we do the ideals are high. I don't know, beauty, freedom, perfection, whatever. But the problem was you could get there overnight if you just send us your money and we'll show you how to make your bosom bigger in just 10 days or whatever it was. It's the whole idea that things can be fixed quickly. That's not realistic and it's untrue so there was this falsity about it all. I think tawdry is a good word. I was being critical but not hating my country. It wasn't that [MUSIC] Drew Sparks put together the publicity stunt. She must have known that I had this costume and I was going to be in the parade and maybe she'd already seen it, or I described it to her. She had dimples and she would have this impish little smile when she got an idea that we'll do this. It wasn't really a stunt it was just me showing up on the die egg. Photographer from the Michigan Daily came and took pictures. It must have been somebody interviewing me but I don't recall that very well. The Michigan Daily knew to send a photographer. But then that could have been Drew calling them ahead and saying, hey, come on over. People were seeing me and stopping and going, huh? Which is the idea. I love performing. I know I felt that about it. That I was really happy. I couldn't jump up and down about it. In the costume I had to walk carefully because the hat could go. It was top heavy. I got all this attention of people just going, oh wow. I loved it. 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 talk to people very much and as the Queen Mother. They were the ones talking to me. I'm just focused on take a flower spray it throw way through the crowd but I'm in the middle of the street and they're off to the sides and I wasn't paying enough attention to that. Positive reactions. I don't know if I was aware they were giving out prizes. But first prize for best float was a handmade leather belt designed and made by Chris Frayne and that's saying something. He hammered in the letters on the back of the belt saying Ozone and then hand painted around this and then the buckle of the belt. It's a postcard that's varnished onto just a curved piece of steel and it's a postcard from way back maybe the '30s or '40s showing flowers and it's hand colored in and it says bluebonnets, the state flower of Texas. That was a prize indeed. I'm just so happy I got that. Just captures the whole spirit of those times which I loved. 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.
• [00:30:49] DAN GUNNING: They used to start all the way up by the stadium there.
• [00:30:52] TASHA LEBOW: It used to be this big fenced off area next to the stadium.
• [00:30:55] DAVID SWAIN: It was Keech and Green ended up on Division, went up, Division turned east south again on the state and ended up at the gas station South U and the forest.
• [00:31:11] TASHA LEBOW: There were live musicians. Commander Cody. They're in the first parade but they're walking. They're not playing anything.
• [00:31:18] PETER STRUBLE: Commander Cody, the bus was in the first parade.
• [00:31:21] TASHA LEBOW: Radio King in his court of rhythm was one of the bands that played.
• [00:31:25] SUE DISE: There were so many local musicians here in town at that time because you can still afford to live here and be a musician and had lots of venues to play in that it was inevitable that a couple dozen local musicians were probably going to be showing up in that parade in one form or another. [MUSIC]
• [00:31:58] DAVID SWAIN: That's over-dubbed by the guys from the other band, from Rich Dishman's band.
• [00:32:04] BENJAMIN MILLER: Swain might have started some goofy motif that we followed.
• [00:32:08] LAURENCE MILLER: With a little brown jog maybe. Through that end. David, you must have heard something. [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:32:13] DAVID SWAIN: There was a word on the street that I would go see Commander Cody.
• [00:32:18] LAURENCE MILLER: Well, this is Ben and Swain contacted us. Swain had a way of finding his way into these situations, [LAUGHTER] and it was like okay, sounds like fun.
• [00:32:31] BENJAMIN MILLER: That's about what I remember. I think David probably came by with his VW bus and picked us up, and we went down and said, let's do it. What do you say, David?
• [00:32:42] DAVID SWAIN: 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.
• [00:33:02] BENJAMIN MILLER: David, how did that happen?
• [00:33:03] DAVID SWAIN: We were the sharp end of the stick. [LAUGHTER] I'm sure that the dude with the gorilla suit, he was the guy in charge. That was Chris, and so he said, you guys go first because then right after us was Sinclair and Pat Alesco.
• [00:33:23] LAURENCE MILLER: This is Ben. I was wearing something my mom made me. I got the material from Kmart. It was not a gown, but it came to my sleeve with some frills and then it was knee length or something. It was like a psychedelic robe of some kind.
• [00:33:43] BENJAMIN MILLER: That, and you were wearing my orange glitter pants.
• [00:33:46] LAURENCE MILLER: You had blue glitter pants.
• [00:33:47] BENJAMIN MILLER: Pink green.
• [00:33:48] LAURENCE MILLER: I don't know where those went. Why you weren't wearing those?
• [00:33:51] BENJAMIN MILLER: Metallic.
• [00:33:52] DAVID SWAIN: I had my striped pants that my mom made, and I had part of a marching band tunic. The top of one.
• [00:34:04] LAURENCE MILLER: Well, I wore the cap that David so graciously allowed me to done, a military aviator cap. Right, and the caps on the ears in case I got to the elevation and got too high. Loved it. I always loved that.
• [00:34:20] BENJAMIN MILLER: I was jealous. Swain turned us on to art on Sound Chicago Sun rise.
• [00:34:25] LAURENCE MILLER: Alberta. We were doing stuff that was whack a doodle dandy and even had some of it could fall into a marching chaos.
• [00:34:34] DAVID SWAIN: That was what we were doing anyway.
• [00:34:35] LAURENCE MILLER: Yeah where it was just the most natural thing to do.
• [00:34:38] DAVID SWAIN: There was ozone in the wind and you just went with it. [MUSIC]
• [00:34:43] PETER STRUBLE: A lot of people showed up on the day of the parade, including the Ann Arbor Police that showed up in their motorcycles and their outfits in order to direct traffic and block the streets, and they looked a little stunned when they saw the caliber of the participants for the parade.
• [00:35:09] DAVID SWAIN: Well, they were bemused, certainly, and I think that they were more concerned with traffic control and making sure that nobody got hurt, but they were completely, totally friendly. Sheriff Harvey hated hippies and stuff, but really all, you know, the U of M and the City and the City Police, they were all whatever about it, that was 72 they'd made their peace with all of us by 70 or something basically.
• [00:35:42] ARWULF ARWULF: There was that attitude where even authority was letting its hair down.
• [00:35:47] PETER STRUBLE: We certainly got a lot of dirty looks from the cops. They did not seem to be enjoying holding traffic back for all these crazy wild people. [MUSIC]
• [00:36:01] DAVID SWAIN: The crowd reaction was fascinating.
• [00:36:04] PAT OLESZKO: There wasn't an organized crowd, I don't think, because people didn't expect there to be a parade unless they were part of this crazy crew that was getting involved with it. We knew it was going to happen, but other people might not have known it was going to happen, and the idea of surprise and delight featured into that. I remember State Street being fairly crowded, and a lot of little kids sitting on the curb. Normal people seemed delighted with the parade, and were laughing and enjoying it greatly, and how just crazy and spontaneous it all seemed, even though some of us had worked for months on our costumes. We did get a lot of funny looks from people that didn't get it.
• [00:36:46] VOICEOVER: Editor, the news. Two news articles on the ozone homecoming parade appeared in the news this past week. I think to say the least that you should have more thoroughly explained the orientation of this parade. I took my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to see it [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:37:47] VOICEOVER: The floats were well thought out. The band was great, the girls, pretty and not a hippie in sight. Congratulations, pioneers, and down with the U homecoming parade. Signed. Disturbed parent.
• [00:38:03] 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 dressed in wizard finery. I marched in that I was jamming along with my kazoo. I was working as a printer for youth, for understanding, and I asked for the afternoon off to attend the parade because this was important and they didn't let me do it, and I got all my work done and then said I got to do this. I left and I got fired the next day for being AWOL. 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.
• [00:38:47] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Here they are, Martian Entropy Band.
• [00:38:49] MIKE GOULD: In later events I was in the Martian Entropy Band, very heavily influenced by Frank Zappa, played a lot of odd meters. I played bass and wrote several of the songs and was the front man, and for three or four years we put the band on a rolling cart and set up a little PA on that and played tunnage and had a great time. Spaceman bass man. Somebody gave me an Air Force helmet. I added a propeller to it and a horn and an antenna, and I wore that along with the wizard robe to play the bass on the trailer in the parade. [MUSIC]
• [00:39:37] PETER STRUBLE: Chris and L and Frank were living on 500 Spring Street. Luster Simpson was also there, who's now a famous glass artist out on the West Coast. This scene happening there at the 500 Spring Street was the nexus for a lot of the art and happenings and music, and when year two came along, we actually decided to get a little bit more formal. Rich Dishman called it the Cripical Committee, and we had a few meetings, mostly just sitting down and drinking and doing things like that and talking, and came up with the theme of the second parade, and it was Rich's idea.
• [00:40:09] VOICEOVER: All that meat and no potatoes.
• [00:40:10] VOICEOVER: No potatoes.
• [00:40:11] TASHA LEBOW: [inaudible 00:40:11] All that meat and no potatoes.
• [00:40:12] PETER STRUBLE: All that meat and no potatoes. Just take it as it is, which was the WC. Handy song that Fats Waller made famous.
• [00:40:21] TASHA LEBOW: Yeah. The second parade was probably the peak, even bigger than the first one.
• [00:40:26] PETER STRUBLE: I don't know if it was a bigger parade, but certainly more organized.
• [00:40:29] TASHA LEBOW: A lot of food costumes, a lot of related costumes. [MUSIC].
• [00:40:54] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Hey pops, What's wrong, Daddy? You look like something's bothering you.
• [00:40:57] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: See nothing bother me on it that a piece of roast beef can't fix up.
• [00:41:01] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Well, I'll tell you one thing, Pops a man works hard, then comes on home.
• [00:41:07] MIKE GOULD: David Swain leading the parade in a flag powered skateboard.
• [00:41:11] DAVID SWAIN: The second one I had my skateboard and a big American flag.
• [00:41:16] PETER STRUBLE: David Bernstein was a sporting clam. [MUSIC]
• [00:41:24] LARRY BEHNKE: All that meat, no potatoes. I remember that very well because all the people I worked with, that's a Del Rio dressed up. There was a head of red cabbage and marching potatoes.
• [00:41:34] TASHA LEBOW: A bunch of potatoes. I remember thinking, how can they see. Sarah Brown, the bass player who is now famous down in Austin. She was one of the potatoes, so I think she's the queen potato.
• [00:41:45] VOICEOVER: Chris made his fabulous lobster costume.
• [00:41:48] TASHA LEBOW: He's the lobster, the wonderful lobster costume I get on roller skates. That's me. The second year I was the chicken, one of my housemates made an egg costume. We were chicken and egg. We played tag through the parade. I remember, that was fun. That's one string Sam who played the opening night at the Pig, we opened.
• [00:42:15] ARWULF ARWULF: One string Sam, I'm the musician. He had a slide, one string guitar. He performed at the '73 Blues and Jazz Festival.
• [00:42:25] TASHA LEBOW: That's Tom Copy is really at the balloon man, I forgot about that shot. [MUSIC] Mad Cat Ruth. There is Shaky Jake, he is in the second one. The blind pig crew made a giant rat out of a homemade little tiny trailer.
• [00:42:50] DAVID SWAIN: There George Berdard was in the second one. He's got that beautiful gown on and he looks great.
• [00:42:55] PETER STRUBLE: Then George, I think, was carrying a sign to Mcdermot and his sister Maurice, wearing the bathing suit made out of pork chops or something. That was ahead of his time, so people around Ann Arbor knew me as Carson.
• [00:43:12] TASHA LEBOW: You made this fabulous horsehead.
• [00:43:14] PETER STRUBLE: I was on roller skates in my father's 1937 Panama suit that he got married in the giant horse's head that I made out of phone. [MUSIC]
• [00:43:24] STEVEN COLE: I was just thinking food. I just made myself into a walking shopping bag with a shopping cart and I just made large scale vegetables, carrots, and stuff out of paper. Now I call it the shopping shopping bag at the time, I wish I'd thought of calling it that. But anyway. [MUSIC] There was a film made of it. The second film christed all the illustrations for the intro outro. After the parade, someone thought, hey, let's do like a spoof on, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and have a couple hosts, and we'll film them at community TV station there. Then we'll combine that with the footage we have of the parade. I don't know who it was. I don't remember anymore who got me and Jackie to do this. Not much of a memory of it anymore.
• [00:44:38] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: And welcome to Ann Arbor Michigan for the annual ozone homecoming parade. Yes, it's a lot.
• [00:44:44] STEVEN COLE: You weren't Lauren Green and Betty White which were the actual hosts for, I believe, the Macy's parade every year. His hair was white at the time, so I was line green, and I guess I felt well, that fits in with the food theme, and then Jackie was Betty, what. Well, there certainly has been a fulfilling afternoon and now this is Lauren Green.
• [00:45:18] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: And Betty White.
• [00:45:18] STEVEN COLE: Betty White saying, shall we meet again?
• [00:45:23] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: Bye, bye. [MUSIC]
• [00:45:41] STEVEN COLE: I don't think at the time we were thinking this is historic or this is so important. It was just, we're having fun, we're doing this, this is great, let's do it, and we enjoyed it after that second year, I didn't even think of it. I just had other interests and other things were happening for me and I didn't even go to see it.
• [00:46:02] ARCHIVAL AUDIO: What does every man look at first? [MUSIC]
• [00:46:11] PETER STRUBLE: Chris Swain had the idea of naming it first, I look at the purse after the Ray Charles song, and that's what it was, and so it was a money theme. [MUSIC] I went as a giant dollar sign I had made out of cardboard. I was playing my trumpet because I was a trumpet player at that time. I was playing my trumpet through the dollar sign. [MUSIC]
• [00:46:46] TASHA LEBOW: The third parade, it wasn't quite as big but there were very inventive costumes. [MUSIC]
• [00:47:33] PETER STRUBLE: The third year, they actually had a judging committee. My mother was on the committee, and they stood on the steps. They actually had a little podium in front of the Michigan Union, and they judged all the floats as they went by.
• [00:47:51] TASHA LEBOW: The theme was, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. [MUSIC]
• [00:48:02] PETER STRUBLE: I came up with the idea, they don't mean a thing, but they got that swing, keeping with the song titles and I actually did go down to the city and went to the police department, where they issued the permits and got a parade permit and it was all good. Of course, there was a police escort if there is parades and they closed streets off, and it was a big deal. Ann Arbor started changing in the late '70s, a group of us from Ann Arbor, mostly musicians, emigrated to Austin from Ann Arbor.
• [00:48:31] MALE_1: Chris, was moving basically from New York to California all the time and stopped in Ann Arbor. But Ellen left and went to New York.
• [00:48:40] LARRY BEHNKE: Later on when it was dying out, I decided I would try to keep it alive, and so I drew up a bunch of posters and I said, let's continue this because it's so much fun and so nobody else was organizing it towards the last few years, and 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.
• [00:49:09] DERRICK WOLF: We were waiting at the staging area by the UVM stadium, and we were waiting for our police escort to arrive and I'm pretty sure if they had a permit. There was no police escort and we waited and so finally there was just so many people that were anxious to get going that we just started to take off on our own. So one of our friends, Sue Pledger, who was dressed up like a Kabuki character, she let off the parade and she had a six foot bamboo pole and so she would run into the intersections ahead of the parade and stop the traffic so that the parade could go through. The parade went on regardless of whether or not we had our police escort.
• [00:49:54] GERRY FIALKA: [MUSIC] My dad like Boomer's parents, documented their family history with super eight. I don't know why I film, I would say it comes from my dad's mentality to document his family's history, so it was like we'll document your friend's history. I just remember, wow, we're doing this, let's document it. It was just like breathing, I guess.
• [00:50:25] 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.
• [00:50:39] GERRY FIALKA: I didn't know what I was doing, thank God. I just learned how to shoot film and got obsessed with single frame and the MC five said what our theme was. It takes 5 seconds to decide if you're the road or the steamroller. That's what we're doing as paraders in the ozone parade. We're mashing them both 'cause we got feet on the road. But we're also like a sonic steam roller, a surrealistic sonic steam roller, just garishingly waving flags in performance art. Why? Because we're free to create, it wasn't like, well, let's do this for a reason.
• [00:51:32] TASHA LEBOW: Someone else entered the parade with almost the exact same car. The other car actually turned around during the parade and then backed up so they looked like book ends and went down the whole parade route, turning corners and things just fouling our viewing [MUSIC].
• [00:51:53] ARWULF ARWULF: I lived in this old house, one of the pillars just fell off in front of the house, and I was so negligent. I just took this thing, so I found the outer shell of a water heater and I took this and nailed it to the bottom end of the pillar and wrapped it around. I understand why you'd look at it, looked like a really badly rolled joint. I took a toaster and somehow nailed it to the top of the thing. I don't know why I called it the ham daddy. I just called the ham daddy, and then somebody asked me to verify that, and I said, well, formally it's the ham father, but you can call it the ham daddy [MUSIC].
• [00:52:33] DAN GUNNING: The whole idea of the Ozone Parade. You're just like, this corny iconic thing is withering away. Let's just jump in and celebrate it. There was a celebration of a parade. It was like a joke, a parody of a parade.
• [00:52:50] GERRY FIALKA: It was like dazzling that we could just gather and subvert a tradition, which is the parade for a sporting event and we take that form and go, well, let's subvert it. This is like how you have a revelation is you're willing to transform something that already exists.
• [00:53:15] LARRY BEHNKE: I guess we continued themes every year. There was another one that had a alien theme to it, outer space aliens [BACKGROUND].
• [00:53:25] SUE DISE: I remember seeing stuff on kiosks and lamp posts, and again, that's how we communicated in those days, and it seemed to work pretty well. I used to live in the house on South Division, directly across from L Bell field, so it was a nice day, the was out, and I'm sitting with my housemates on the porch and I'm thinking some substances might have been used sitting on the porch. We see this parade marching by and we go, oh, it's the Ozone parade and we look at each other and go, why don't we join it? My roommates and I happen to own matching silver plastic bomber jackets, and another one of our housemates was a motorcyclist and had a bunch of motorcycle helmets. We put these helmets on and we put these jackets on, and we just hopped in and joined the parade. We're marching arm and arm here just these silver beings walking down the street and a good time was had by all.
• [00:54:29] DAN GUNNING: I dressed up. I just put on a random collection of surreal clothes and flowing things.
• [00:54:42] VICKI HONEYMAN: I didn't know about the Ozone parade, that there was going to be an Ozone parade, but I remember the first time I saw the Ozone parade, it was on State Street by the Union and I was just overjoyed and overwhelmed with the utter silliness of it and counterculture, which I very much embraced and was definitely a counterculture person. I guess I must have just run back to my place to throw together a costume. I don't know but it's a long time ago and I could have been under the influence of something. Who knows what? Maybe just happiness. [LAUGHTER] You've sent me pictures of me as the aluminum lady. Is that what I was called an article about me? Frankly, I just don't remember, [LAUGHTER] which is too bad but it's clearly me. I looked at the picture that you sent me and it's definitely me. I think it's really great that I turn myself and my bicycle into the aluminum lady because that's what I had at my fingertips to use [LAUGHTER]. I should do that again. I'll say that not only did it sweep me along as it did Sue Dise, but it swept me off my feet. I love a parade and I've always loved art to the fullest when it is as non conventional as possible. I probably wanted to run away with the band, whoever that was with the whole thing. I just wanted to run away with it and just live in it.
• [00:56:26] SUE DISE: I definitely remember music because what's a parade without music? I remember seeing a bunch of local musicians who would essentially be wearing like a tarp or something. They're all connected to each other, but they are one entity moving down the street.
• [00:56:45] ROSS ORR: Looking back at the pictures I took in 1977, I can see I must have followed the parade all around downtown. But unfortunately, I barely remember anything about it. One thing I do remember is the people in this Volkswagen, first of all, the passenger had done this very simple but brilliant thing with the bubble wrap alien head. But there was this guy sitting on top of the car with a regal attitude and it sure looked like he had just come straight from his day job as a welder. He was just wearing all the standard protective gear. But as he looked out over the crowd, he would waggle his arms and his fingertips at people, like he was sending out some energy ray and that was so conceptual. I still really love that [MUSIC].
• [00:58:41] ARWULF ARWULF: I really enjoyed the fact that people were going to get out and just celebrate in whatever way that they felt like celebrating and taking theater of the absurd approach to it. [MUSIC].
• [00:59:20] MIKE GOULD: They couldn't get a street permit, so it was on sidewalks or something, so we didn't have floats and stuff.
• [00:59:26] LARRY BEHNKE: [MUSIC] 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, wow, that's not going to work. We don't have that money, and 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 and 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 Liberty 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. [MUSIC]
• [01:00:51] DAVID SWAIN: Apparently in 1979, I again had my skateboard. That picture, I've never seen that before. I'm balancing just on the front wheels of these. The board, it's quite, my friends were all impressed [MUSIC].
• [01:01:12] ARWULF ARWULF: The arm chair intellectual actually dates from 79, even before I was the arm chair intellectual. I had a bunch of my family's old furniture and it had all personal almost a Kirch fiters type of thing. This is personal, and in fact, Schitters was probably one of my main influences. I think I was also aware that as a very bookish person, it seemed like I was maybe pushing back at that phrase. But also I was letting people know that I'm intellectual and that I wasn't afraid to wear an armchair walking down the street.
• [01:01:51] MIKE GOULD: It was in every single one of them, including the last one that petered out. Things happen in phases.
• [01:01:57] SUE DISE: I suspect like a lot of nifty things in this town. It ended because perhaps the DDA or whatever it's equivalent was in those days was less amenable to spontaneous weirdness.
• [01:02:14] VICKI HONEYMAN: I think it just fizzled out. I think it had a life and it took on a life and it just went away. But it could be that the people who were part of it went away, [MUSIC].
• [01:02:32] TASHA LEBOW: I think because a lot of the folks left. A lot of the prime movers moved on.
• [01:02:44] LARRY BEHNKE: Why did the ozone parade in? 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.
• [01:02:55] DAN GUNNING: I think a homecoming parade may have returned and taken over for the ozone parade.
• [01:03:00] TASHA LEBOW: The university had taken back the homecoming parade concept by about the late 70s.
• [01:03:13] ARWULF ARWULF: Now, it's really bizarre now for us to look back on this and it's like, wow, the town has been getting completely eaten by the athletic industrial complex and it's not pretty.
• [01:03:24] DAN GUNNING: Used to be cheap in Ann Arbor, and that's why it happened here. You don't have quite as many of those things happening here.
• [01:03:30] TASHA LEBOW: In a way, the Full Moon and FestiFools, I feel is a grandchild of the ozone parade concept, but it's been cleaned up and sophisticated a lot, but still wonderfully wacky.
• [01:03:42] DAN GUNNING: FestiFools and all the stuff that happens in is epsy glow. It's just cleaned up for the parents and stuff.
• [01:03:48] SUE DISE: FestiFools tries to do it, but it ain't the same. I think it lacks the sas of something like the ozone parade.
• [01:03:59] VICKI HONEYMAN: FestiFools embraces that sentiment and that freedom of expression. But FestiFools is, it's sponsored, it's a huge event, it's not spontaneous. FestiFools is fabulous, and it makes people really happy, and I'm glad to know that Mark is bringing it back.
• [01:04:21] MARK TUCKER: I had not heard of the ozone parades before I started FestiFools, but somewhere along the way, someone sent me a YouTube video showing the old eight millimeter films of the parade. I was so happy that I hadn't seen those before I started FestiFools because I'm not sure I would have started it because these very few images I saw were so fantastic, so real, just crazy. I'm not sure I would have thought that we could have lived up to that.The ozone parade took place in a time where it was really, I think much more shocking, that's the big difference now, is that people know that yes, I can like this. Yes, I can smile, yes, I can go out on the street and make a fool of myself. After a 1 hour FestiFools event, the next day I drive down Main Street and it feels completely different to me. It's been transformed in some way by all the people who have come and taken over the streets. I imagine that the ozone parade in its day had a similar feel.
• [01:05:25] MIKE GOULD: It was a defining moment in my life, and I'm sure in a number of other people's lives.
• [01:05:31] TASHA LEBOW: I think it had great influence on my life and what I appreciate most, it's also influenced my kids, the spirit of the ozone parade, our daughter who was a fashion designer, I think that was one of the things that contributed to her very wacky sense of fashion.
• [01:05:46] 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.
• [01:06:00] LARRY BEHNKE: The stuff that I went through in Ann Arbor during that magical time where we believe that we could have the life we wanted. That's what helped me to get where I am now, so very important that I live through that magical time in Ann Arbor.
• [01:06:26] ARWULF ARWULF: [MUSIC] I'm part of the alternative underground intellectual resistance movement. That you can use that, what I just said, and that's what everything I've done in this town since I got here as a kid in 1968 has really been about that.
• [01:06:45] LARRY BEHNKE: Since I was about three years old, I always wanted to be an artist and it was around the early '70s where I realized that, and this is my favorite quote, what you think about and think about and feel good about you bring about. That's been my philosophy for decades and it works. The best part is it really works.
• [01:07:05] STEVEN COLE: I continued in the arts in that I became an art teacher that was mostly in Chicago. It was a good experience. I have now finished my tour of duty as an art teacher in the public schools, and I'm living happily ever after with my pension. All things are possible, there's an openness, there's an acceptance of creativity of others, and I certainly wanted that from my students when I was an art teacher. Something childlike about it and playful, I hope I'm always going to be that way.
• [01:07:43] SUE DISE: I was a professional video journalist for the NBC affiliate in Detroit for 30 odd years, which was all about capturing other people's spontaneous weirdness.
• [01:07:54] GERRY FIALKA: I'm an antiquarian ne'er do well, a genuine fake artist and a writer. I was called a cultural revolutionary and I thought, hey, that was pretty appropriate.
• [01:08:07] MIKE GOULD: I spent 20 years doing IT work for the University of Michigan. I've retired. Now I do laser shows. My official position is in charge Iluminado Lasers. This is the logo I designed for us. I do all our design work. This is the molecular disruptor. This is an art piece.
• [01:08:27] DAN GUNNING: My creative output has been college radio, so I've been doing that here and when I was in California. I've been particularly interested in seeing local live music wherever I am and I eventually become sometimes very close friends with local musicians.
• [01:08:42] VICKI HONEYMAN: I was running Cinema 2 and then I ran Cinema Guild. I wound up being Director of the Annaor Film Festival for 15 years. I am also known as Sache Delmonico, where I'm a volunteer radio DJ at WCBN, the student community radio station at the University of Michigan.
• [01:09:01] TASHA LEBOW: I worked at the University of Michigan School of Education most of my career working on educational equity work on a federal project that served public schools in the six Great Lakes states. Now retired. I work with Jazz History, which is a wonderful live program that combines Jazz and history with the area's best Jazz musicians. It's a program that's won a lot of awards. This is our 30th year. It was invented by and still led by Vincent York, who's one of the best horn players in the country.
• [01:09:35] BENJAMIN MILLER: When I lived in New York, I did a bunch of stuff, a saxophone orchestra, touring in Europe, playing with the Glen Branca Ensemble, so we've all continued.
• [01:09:48] STEVEN COLE: Ben was written up in the New York Times not too long ago for his guitar stuff. Both of them were members of the legendary Destroy all Monsters.
• [01:09:58] LAURENCE MILLER: Ben and I and our brother Roger. We three have gone through a lot of different stuff. A lot of it's been experimental, but some of it's been pop rock, whatever. A wide range of all stuff.
• [01:10:12] LAURENCE MILLER: Do we win Nixon? Who knows what happened to Nixon?
• [01:10:16] STEVEN COLE: Speaking of Nixon. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:10:21] PAT OLESZKO: Well, I'm still a fool after all these years. I wear my art on my sleeve, using it on whatever stage that I deign necessary to comment on or with or through and the world is my stooge. The stages go from the street to the screen to the stage to the mountaintop to the stream and oceans and deserts and burlesque houses and anything that I deem necessary to play in. [MUSIC]
• [01:11:09] PETER STRUBLE: I've always been interested in music and I've always been interested in architecture and design. I did go to architecture school at University of Texas. Something I could stand on as a legacy that would be, Austin Soundscape Project would be it. The idea was to put musical instruments in parks and playgrounds. Started in 1998, so this is the year 25.
• [01:11:29] DAVID SWAIN: We've all [OVERLAPPING] that's a tough. I've played with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, and I've played with Kid Rock.
• [01:11:53] MARK TUCKER: The foolishly fleeting nature of impermanent and temporary spectacles. I wrote that. I still believe that 'cause I think I wrote it three days ago. [LAUGHTER] I can't believe I wrote that.
• [01:12:08] DERRICK WOLF: I graduated as a Journeyman Electrician in 1975. I built the Nutra Light aircraft. I got a job at Willow Run Airport at San Top Airline. With my best friend, we've started a home inspection company. I did that for 13 years until I retired a few years ago. [MUSIC]
• [01:13:37] GERRY FIALKA: What we have here is what John Sinclair used to call cultural artifacts. [MUSIC]
• [01:14:48] STEVEN COLE: Also zone is etymologically rooted in the word celestial. We were seeking the stars, like Sly Stone said, everybody's a star. Not just the marching band or the athletic football heroes.
• [01:15:08] GERRY FIALKA: Everyone loves a parade, but the ozone parade loves you back.