RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Legendary Music Producer Chris Strachwitz and Filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

From left: Chris Simon, Chris Strachwitz, and Maureen Gosling at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 15, 2013. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz,
filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon

This Ain't no Mouse Music! paints a "vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth" as the film takes "a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll.”

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

See Bob Simmons' YouTube videos from the show, Below.

Legendary blues and roots music producer Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, whose This Ain't no Mouse Music! about Arhoolie premiered at SXSW in Austin, were our guests on Rag Radio, Friday, March 15, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Chris Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling, and Chris Simon here:



Born to an aristocratic family in a section of Germany that is now part of Poland, Chris Strachwitz came to the United States after World War II. He developed a love for roots and blues music and in 1960 established the extremely influentual indie record label, Arhoolie.

As the producers of This Ain't no Mouse Music! put it, Strachwitz "traveled to plantations and prisons, roadhouses and whorehouses, churches and bayou juke joints, and returned with recordings that would revolutionize the sound of popular music."

Chris Strachwitz brought performers like Texas bluesmen Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Tejano musicians Flaco Jiménez and Lydia Mendoza, Cajun greats Michael Doucet and the Savoy Family, and Zydeco king Clifton Chenier -- and many more -- into world prominence. And, in collaboration with filmmaker Les Blank, he made the classic film Chulas Fronteras about Norteño music.

Bonnie Raitt said, "It’s impossible to look at the history of blues, Cajun and Zydeco music without looking at Chris Strachwitz’ role. He’s a monumental figure.”

Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon produced and directed This Ain’t No Mouse Music! which tells the amazing story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. The film premiered with several screenings at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin.

Jeffrey St. Clair called Mouse Music a “vivid portrait of an obsessive sonic sleuth” in which the filmmakers “take a hip-shaking stroll from New Orleans to Appalachia and right into the very DNA of rock’n’roll. In this beautifully shot film, we come face to face with the creators of indigenous music...”

“I guess I’m just a rootin’ groundhog,” Strachwitz told the Rag Radio audience. “If I can’t find musicians, I just hunt records wherever I go. I should have probably opened a detective agency.”

"I fell in love with all these different regional musics," he said, "not just with blues. New Orleans jazz was one of my first loves... and hillbilly music. There was this amazing array of extraordinarily powerful and emotional music."

Noted Musicologist Mack McCormick -- who “knew Texas, the vernacular Texas, better than any other human being” -- suggested the name “Arhoolie" for the new record company. Strachwitz' response? "Ar-what?" "Arhoolie" was a variation on a term meaning a “field holler,” sung by workers in the cotton fields. "I figured... it’s a catchy name. What the heck."

In This Ain't no Mouse Music!, Chris explains his approach to the business like this:

Most record companies, they record everything that they think is commercial. I didn’t want to record stuff I don’t like... My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is... I knew the music I liked was all over the place. Especially in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and god knows where... I don’t know why I like it so much. It’s just got some guts to it. It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It ain’t no mouse music...

About making the film with Strachwitz, Maureen Gosling said on Rag Radio, “We had the amazing experience of hanging around with him and going on the road with him and being able to be with all these people.”

Chris Simon added, “We saw a whole other side of Chris, and the passion that he brings to his work is extraordinary. Going around, knocking on strangers' doors, saying, do you know where this person lives? It’s inspiring. And I hope that that’s one of the things that young people get out of the film. If you have a vision, just do it.”

The film, which includes narration from Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Richard Thompson, and folklorist Archie Green, features a wide range of musical performance including valuable archival footage of Lightin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Big Mama Thornton, and others.

Maureen says, "We filmed a lot of things live, like the Treme Brass Band in New Orleans, Michael and David Doucet performing together, No Speed Limit, a bluegrass band in Virginia... and Santiago Jiménez, Jr. here in Texas, as well as Flaco Jiménez, and many, many others..."

And, she added, "We filmed at the Savoy family annual boucherie -- and that’s just a perfect setting for the movie because it’s just people jamming and eating and having a good time and it’s a beautiful way to see music in the context of the culture. And not just set up on a stage..."

Maureen Gosling, who graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in social anthropology and who lived in Austin in the '70s, has been a documentary filmmaker for more than 30 years. Her work has often focused on themes of people and their cultural values, music as cultural expression, and the changing gender roles of men and women.

Chris Simon, who is also a folklorist, has been an award-winning filmmaker for more than 25 years, producing independent documentaries through her Sageland Media. Gosling and Simon met while working with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Les Blank, with whom they collaborated on classic films such as Gap-Toothed Women and Burden of Dreams.

This Ain't No Mouse Music! on Rag Radio
Video by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Friday, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 5: Anti-violence activists John Woods and Claire Wilson James about the issue of guns in schools and on college campuses.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : A Conversation With Austin Chronicle Editor and SXSW Co-Founder Louis Black

Austin Chronicle editor and South by Southwest co-founder Louis Black in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 1, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black,
co-founder of South by Southwest

"It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin." -- Louis Black

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2013

Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black -- co-founder of the massive South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences -- was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 1, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Louis Black here:


Louis Black is the editor of The Austin Chronicle, Austin’s major weekly newspaper, which he co-founded with Nick Barbaro in 1981. In 1987 Black co-founded South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences, along with Barbaro and Roland Swenson.

SXSW Music is the largest music festival and music industry event in the world; SXSW Interactive is arguably the largest event of its kind in the world; and SXSW Film has become one of the preeminent film festivals in the country. And there's a new educational component (SXSWedu) that "supports innovations in learning for education practitioners, industry leaders and policy maker."

(This year's SXSW takes place between March 8 and March 17, 2013, at the Austin Convention Center and all over Austin, Texas.)

On Rag Radio, Louis Black talked about his personal history growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey. ("I had dyslexia, I had attention issues, all kinds of authority issues. I was a disaster as a student.") So he became a film geek. At about 12 he became best friends with Leonard Maltin -- who would grow up to be one of the nation's most honored film critics -- “and we began to go into New York City after school and all-day Saturdays to watch films -- to museum screenings, we’d go to the film societies... We saw tons of movies."

"We weren’t really auteur freaks or international film fans," he said. "We would see lots of B movies, lots of cartoons... When we were 15, Len and I met Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge where he was filming the film, Film." Film was written by the legendary Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who was standing nearby at the time. Black and Maltin were thrilled to meet Keaton but had no idea who Beckett was.

Thanks to Maltin's connections, Black ended up studying film in graduate school at the University of Texas. "I had been watching movies all my live, I had an enormous amount of knowledge," and suddenly he was not only a star student, but he had found his calling. Black received an MFA from UT-Austin, with a concentration in film studies, in 1980. And he would soon find himself at the epicenter of Austin's big-time cultural explosion.

Louis Black was a founding board member of the Austin Film Society, and the board's first president, and, along with then Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith, co-founded the Texas Film Hall of Fame in 2001. He executive produced the documentary Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, by Margaret Brown, and was an associate producer on Brown’s documentary, The Order of Myths, which won a Peabody Award in 2009.

Black executive produced the DVD release of the late Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1968 film which had long been thought lost and that Robert Redford cites as inspiration for starting the Sundance Institute.

Louis Black and Thorne Dreyer.
Photo by Tracey Schulz.

Black says that the Austin Chronicle, with a circulation close to 450,000, can no longer legitimately be called an "alternative" publication ("KOOP radio is 'alternative,'" he said), but is a weekly newspaper featuring local news reporting and extensive cultural coverage -- and with a "definite point of view." The Chronicle has played a big role in Austin's evolution as a cultural hub. "Austin’s a unique place and a very special place," Black told the Rag Radio audience, "and certainly we’ve contributed to that, and we’ve benefited enormously from that."

When they started South by Southwest, Black said, they thought they'd have a "nice regional event, a little gathering in Austin for a couple of days, with workshops and panels and hearing some music… and we’d end it with a softball game and a barbeque." Well, "it was regional for the first year or two," he added, "but then it became national and then international. And then, under Roland Swenson's leadership, we added film, we added interactive, and now we’ve added an education component. And it mirrors Austin. The event is just a multiplier for what goes on in Austin all year round. It’s really succeeded."

And has it succeeded! As the UT alumni mag Alcalde put it in its March/April 2011 issue:

From its modest beginnings as a regional music conference in 1987, South by Southwest has ballooned into a multimedia powerhouse. Its music, film, and interactive-media conferences attract tens of thousands, turning Austin into the center of the cultural universe for one week every March.

Whatever you’re doing, South by Southwest is the place to show it off. Johnny Cash launched his big comeback at South by Southwest in 1994. More recently, Norah Jones started building buzz there before she won all her Grammy Awards. Newly launched Twitter saw tweets per day more than triple at the 2007 interactive conference. And Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which won [the 2010] best-picture Oscar, was the talk of the 2009 film festival.

At last year's music festival, Bruce Springsteen provided a memorable keynote address and electrifying showcase performances, heading a stellar cast of artists, from world-renowned to (as yet) little-known, and this year's bill includes Dave Grohl, Stevie Nicks, and Green Day. There will be more than 20,000 registered participants and many thousands more will come into Austin for the related musical events involving more than 2,000 bands performing at easily a hundred venues. The film festival will offer screenings of more than 150 films.

SXSW Interactive is "probably the biggest event of its kind in the world, and now has hundreds of speakers," Black says. More than 25,000 attended last year's Interactive gathering and a substantial increase is expected this year. "With Interactive you can just feel the energy sizzling," Black says. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The brainpower that assembles in Austin is overwhelming. Everywhere you look there are smart people discussing smart ideas."

And the film festival is now "one of the most highly-regarded film festivals in the world." Austin is widely-known as the "live music capital of the world," with thousands of active musicians. But it has also become a major independent film center, home to filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and Mike Judge.

According to Black, "There’s more creative people in Austin now. More artists and musicians and filmmakers making a living in Austin or living in Austin and having their work seen around the world. It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin."

"And the special thing about the creative scene in Austin," he said, is that it's "a completely culturally-integrated community. When you go to New York, the documentary filmmakers don’t hang out with the theatrical filmmakers who don’t hang out with the animators. In Austin all those filmmakers do, and people with a lot of different political stripes do: poets hang out with filmmakers who hang out with novelists who hang out with artists."

And, host Dreyer added, "everybody hangs out with the musicians."

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!
Friday, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Rock Journalist Margaret Moser and Film Actor Sonny Carl Davis

Margaret Moser and Sonny Carl Davis with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, left, at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Friday, March 2, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio:
Margaret Moser and Sonny Carl Davis discuss
the film, Roadie, and the Austin cultural scene

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012

Rock journalist Margaret Moser and film actor Sonny Carl Davis were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio, Friday, March 2, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP-FM.

They discussed the making of the classic 1980 Alan Rudolph movie Roadie, which was partly filmed in Austin and which starred Meat Loaf, who is a 2012 inductee into the Texas Music Hall of Fame. They also talked about the upcoming Austin Music Awards, which Moser directs; the 2012 South by Southwest music, film, and interactive festival; and the thriving Austin music and film scenes.

You can listen to the show here.

Music Writer Margaret Moser and Film Actor Sonny Carl Davis
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, March 2, 2012

An "unabashed former groupie," award-winning rock journalist Margaret Moser is a senior editor and staff writer for the Austin Chronicle, and is also the author of three books including The Edge Guide to Austin and Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things.

Moser has been a commentator for NPR and has written for Sony Records and MOJO magazine. She has served on the Austin Music Commission, is currently on the Board of the Texas Music Hall of Fame, founded the South Texas Popular Culture Center in San Antonio, and directs the Chronicle’s annual Austin Music Awards show during South by Southwest.

Sonny Carl Davis is a film actor, a musician, and a screenwriter. He played a redneck entrepreneur in Texas filmmaker Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match and played memorable roles in Last Night at the Alamo and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He also had featured parts in Thelma and Louise, Melvin and Howard, and Roadie, and a supporting role in Red Headed Stranger with Willie Nelson. Sonny was also a founding member in 1968 of Austin’s legendary Uranium Savages, a theatrical rock group that played Austin’s venerable 60s-70s rock venues.

Both Sonny Davis and Margaret Moser were involved in the production of Roadie, which was written by Austinites Big Boy Medlin and Michael Ventura, with Davis playing a featured role in the film. Roadie, which was filmed in Austin, Los Angeles, and New York, starred Meat Loaf and featured Art Carney, as well as musicians like Blondie, Alice Cooper, Hank Williams, Jr., Roy Orbison, Alvin Crow, Asleep at the Wheel, and the late Soul Train host, Don Cornelius.

Davis and Moser hosted a special screening of the film on March 5 at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. Meat Loaf is being inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame on March 8 at ACL Live at the Moody Theater in Austin.

South by Southwest, with keynote speaker Bruce Springsteen, takes place in Austin, March 9-March 18; and the Austin Music Awards, featuring performances by Tex-Mex great Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns, blues musicians Carolyn Wonderland and Ruthie Foster, and a special Christopher Cross reunion, is on March 14 at the Austin Music Hall.

This episode of Rag Radio was produced during KOOP's spring membership drive; fundraising pitches, underwriting announcements, and recorded music have not been edited out of the podcast.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

March 9, 2012: Singer-songwriter & author Bobby Bridger on the lasting impact of Native-American culture on American society.
March 16, 2012: Journalist and labor activist David Bacon on how U.S. policies fueled Mexico's great migration.

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Rag Radio : The Occupy Movement and Activism in Austin

Occupy activists in the studios of KOOP-FM, Austin, February 24, 2012. From left, Richard Bowden, Joe Cooper, Mo McMorrow, Nate Cowan, Brian J. Overman, Lucian Villaseñor, and Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio:
Representatives of the Occupy movement
discuss activist projects in Austin

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / February 29, 2012

A group of Austin activists discussed the Occupy Austin movement with host Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio last Friday, February 24, 2012.
Listen to the show here.

Representatives of the Occupy Austin Movement on
Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, Friday, Feb. 24, 2012

They talked about Occupy Austin, and plans for Occupy Southby -- a series of events, including the Million Musicians March for Peace, a yearly Austin tradition -- scheduled to occur during the massive South by Southwest music, film, and interactive festival, March 9-March 18, 2012.

Representatives of Occupy UT discussed the movement on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, including plans for a Teach-In and other events scheduled for Thursday, March 1, on the UT campus. And the group also included representatives of the Legion Co-Op Coffeehouse, a soon-to-open worker-owned coffeehouse that grew out of the occupy movement in Austin.

The guests included Richard Bowden, an Austin fiddler extraordinaire, long-time peace activist, and primary organizer of the Million Musicians March for Peace, Austin's unique, musician-led, annual community peace event. Joining Bowden on the show was Austin-based singer-songwriter Mo McMorrow, who has also worked as a visual artist, actress, and stand-up comic. McMorrow and Bowden performed live during the show.

Others on the program included Joe Cooper, who has been involved in Occupy Austin since the first planning meeting in September 2011, and was present almost daily during the four months of the 24/7 occupation; and Lucian Villaseñor, a student in Mexican-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an intern with the Workers Defense Project, who is a primary organizer of Occupy UT.

Also, Nate Cowan, an organizer of the worker-owned Legion Co-Op Coffeehouse, who has been a peace activist since high school, where he started Youth Activists of Austin to fight military recruiting in schools, and who has worked full-time with Occupy Austin; and Brian J. Overman, a writer and video producer, who is also an Occupy Austin activist and a developer of the cooperative coffeehouse which organizers envision as both a "sustainable economic model and a safe space for local activists."

This episode of Rag Radio was produced during the spring membership drive of KOOP 91-7-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run community radio station; fundraising pitches, underwriting announcements, and recorded music have not been edited out of the podcast.

Image from *eddie's photostream / Flickr.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

March 2, 2012: Music writer Margaret Moser and screen actor Sonny Carl Davis on the movie, Roadie, the Austin Music Awards, and SXSW.

March 9, 2012: Singer-songwriter & author Bobby Bridger on the lasting impact of Native-American culture on American society.
March 16, 2012: Journalist and labor activist David Bacon on how U.S. policies fueled Mexico's great migration.

The Rag Blog

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James Retherford : Austin Street Band Festival: Marching for the Cause

The Honk!TX parade heads east down 2nd Street. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Marching for the cause:
Austin's first community street band festival

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2011

The streets belong to the people.
-- Diggers, San Francisco, 1967

See more photos, Below.

AUSTIN -- The first annual Honk!TX Fest, billed a "festival of community street hands," marched on Austin Friday through Sunday, March 11-13.

Continuing a Honk! tradition started in 2006 in Somerville, Massachusetts -- while also KEEPING AUSTIN WEIRD -- some two dozen U.S. and Canadian street bands in gala attire created mobile "liberated zones" in East Austin and the North Campus area with color, costume, cacophony, and collective spirit, carrying "messages of hope, unity, and social change." The weekend culminated on Sunday with a march from City Hall to East Austin's Pan American Park, followed by an all-day jam.

(Though not formally associated with Austin's massive South by Southwest [SXSW] festival, this event is part of hundreds of related music activities happening over the next week here in the "live music capital of the world.")

The festival was organized by Austin's Minor Mishap Marching Band, a 30-plus-member "renegade brass band" that describes itself as "Bourbon Street meets Budapest." MMMP is a truly absurdist spectacle featuring a washboard-playing Roller Derby queen, an (almost) seven-foot-tall Elvis impersonator playing bass drum, a klezmer-shredding clarinet player, dancing tubas, and assorted other freaks of musical nature. Founded two years ago by multi-instrumentalist Datri Bean, this band really kicks it!

The Minor Mishap Marching Band hosted the weekend festival and set a high bar for musicality and theatre. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Also representing Austin (by way of Brazil, sorta) was the samba-sashaying Acadêmicos da Ópera, a huge contingent of drummers and dancers bringing the sensuous rhythms of the Carnaval parade.

The out-of-town guests brought their own hit-and-run street parties also. The red-and-white-themed Extraordinary Rendition Band from Providence, Rhode Island, the green-clad March Madness Marching Band (with hula-hoop twirlers) from Lexington, Kentucky, the Hubbub Club from Graton, California, Environmental Encroachment from Chicago, and Atlanta's Seed & Feed Marching Abominable (founded in 1974) combined slapstick guerrilla street theatrics with high-energy funk, heavy metal, Eastern European, and Dixieland marching tunes.

Of special note: Seattle's ultra-tight Titanium Sporkestra, named after the ubiquitous mutant fast food eating utensil. Their logo features a red spork and sickle.

The medium was unhinged fun, but the message from all of those hard-working, fun-loving musical groups was freedom and justice, starting from each public space liberated through the act of playing and then spiraling outward, with insistent drum beat, to the rest of the world. Ya gotta love it.

Minor Mishap Marching Band will open for White Ghost Shivers at Threadgill's World Headquarters in Austin on March 26.

[Austin activist-journalist James Retherford was a founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966. A graphic designer, writer, and editor, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Atlanta's Seed & Feed Marching Abominable's "drum majorette" (left) leads the ensemble through some intricate dance steps. Right, The Titanium Sporkestra's horn section feels the funk.
Austin's Acadêmicos da Ópera sets a Carnaval mood with a spirited street samba.
The March Madness Marching Band from basketball-crazy Lexington, KY, is all about hoops.
Providence's activist Extraordinary Rendition Band marches to the beat of a different drummer.
Big Elvis and Lil Miss Hap bring it to the street with that weird Austin beat. Photos by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
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FILM / Saint Misbehavin' : The Wavy Gravy Movie

Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie, directed by Michelle Esrick was screened in Austin at SXSW.
The Saints Go Marching in Downtown Austin

Wavy Gravy's evolving persona as poet, storyteller, merry prankster, jester and clown reveals a deeply spiritual and resourceful man who has used his gifts of humor and wit in dangerously charged situations to defuse tension, prevent violence, turn the tables and achieve positive, constructive outcomes.

By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2009

This spring break week in Austin, the SXSW music, interactive and film festivals converged to make Austin an absolute epicenter of the creative arts. What a fabulous week! The city literally hummed.

My partner and I gravitated to the documentary films and took in as many of the offerings as we could at the festival. Notable among them was the premiere screening of "Saint Misbehavin', The Wavy Gravy Movie," produced and directed by Californian, Michelle Esrick. Making the film was a 10-year project for Esrick, and her commitment has achieved a first-rate visual biography of the 60's icon, interspersing recent interviews with footage from Wavy Gravy's Woodstock and Hog Farm bus tour days, including remarkable scenes from the group's trek across Europe through the Middle East and Asia in 1970.

Wavy Gravy's evolving persona as poet, storyteller, merry prankster, jester and clown reveals a deeply spiritual and resourceful man who has used his gifts of humor and wit in dangerously charged situations to defuse tension, prevent violence, turn the tables and achieve positive, constructive outcomes. Through his own stories, recollections from his closest family and friends and accompanying film vignettes that show Wavy Gravy in action, we are shown how nonviolence actually works. And, in typical Wavy Gravy fashion, he transforms even this kind of work into play. His long-time projects involve teaching children nonviolence, meditation and performance techniques (at his legendary Camp Winnarainbow in Northern California), and supplying medical services to restore vision to cataract patients in underserved parts of the world (through the SEVA Foundation he co-founded 30 years ago with several colleagues, including his wife, Jahanara Romney and his good friends, Ram Dass and Dr. Larry Brilliant, who are also featured in the film).

My partner and I attended the Saint Misbehavin' premiere on the first Saturday of the SXSW film festival and were so taken with the story that we returned for the final showing the following Saturday with a friend who was in town to visit. Wavy Gravy was present at each venue, answering questions with characteristic aplomb.

And the compassionate clown gave Austin even more. Earlier in the day of his final film showing, Wavy Gravy became the somewhat impromptu grand marshal of the Million Musician March for Peace that marked the 6th anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. Organized by the local musicians' group, Instruments for Peace, the march was a colorful, family-oriented New Orleans-style parade led by musicians through downtown Austin, past SXSW venues, beginning at the Texas state capitol and winding up at Austin's City Hall plaza for a concert where some of Austin's finest musicians performed for the marchers.

At the head of the parade, Wavy Gravy and Michelle Esrick were ensconced in a festively decorated pedicab, the perfect peace convoy, leading us in tye-dyed, bubble-blowing style.

We CodePink folks were also on hand with eye-catching fuzzy peace signs made by our own Heidi Turpin. Heidi presented Wavy Gravy with one of the multi-colored peace signs that matched his attire to a T.

I hope Michelle Esrick's fine film is distributed and reaches a wide audience. If its warm reception in Austin is an indication, the film will indeed carry the Wavy Gravy message forward: Put your good where it will do the most. Then, you will have fun doing it!

[Susan Van Haitsma also blogs as makingpeace at Statesman.com and at makingpeace.]

Aso see Thorne Dreyer : Wavy Gravy Leads Austin Musicians in March for Peace by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2009

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Thorne Dreyer : Wavy Gravy Leads Austin Musicians in March for Peace

Hippie legend Wavy Gravy leads the Million Musicians March in Austin, March 21, 2009. Photo by Mara Eurich / The Rag Blog.
Austin musicians and activists decide to be "instruments for peace." Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

"Of all the events worldwide in remembrance of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq disaster, the Million Musicians March for Peace was the only one led by musicians." -- Richard Bowden, Instruments for Peace

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2009

See gallery of photos from the Million Musicians March, by Alan Pogue and Myra Eurich, Below.

AUSTIN -- They weren’t quite a million, but they sure made some beautiful music.

As hundreds of locals, tourists, musicians and industry types attending South by Southwest -- the massive technology, film and music fest -- packed the streets of downtown Austin Saturday afternoon, March 21, the Million Musicians March for Peace -- with hippie legend Wavy Gravy leading the way -- snaked by in a rhythmic procession, creating its own lively soundtrack as it passed.

[SXSW is the largest event of its kind in the world, focusing the attention of the music industry on Austin for several days in March. In the face of a down economy, this year’s event was a rousing success. It featured 2,000 musical acts from over 50 countries and drew hundreds of industry reps. It was highlighted by unannounced performances by Metallica, Kanye West, Devo and others.]

Marching behind a banner that said, “Be an Instrument for Peace,” more than 200 singing, chanting and dancing marchers followed a second-line type brass band from the Texas State Capitol through the busy streets of downtown Austin -- up Congress Ave. past the crowds queued up for a premiere at the Paramount Theater, then delighting the throngs along Sixth Street’s music row, and on to City Hall for a rally and concert.

Wavy Gravy, aka Hugh Romney, wore a tie-dyed peace symbol-adorned t-shirt with matching baggy pants, a sideways beanie, a red clown’s nose and a beaming smile.

Riding a yellow pedicab, he was the Grand Marshal. Gravy, of Hog Farm and Woodstock fame, was in town for SXSW, promoting a documentary about his looney life called “Saint Misbehavin’.”

Also in the parade was Jim Fouratt, New York-based activist and cultural critic who was a founder of the theatrical Sixties new left group, the Yippies.

The Million Musicians March was organized by Instruments for Peace and sponsors included MDS/Austin, Texans for Peace, CodePink Austin, Texas Labor Against the War, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and The Rag Blog.

One banner shouted “Rich Man’s War, Poor People’s Fight.” Demonstrators carried signs saying “Prosecute War Criminals” and “Truth is the First Casualty.”

According to writer and graphic designer Jim Retherford, the event, which is an Austin tradition, “may not have been as large as in some years past, but it had a wonderful energy. There were affinity groups of musicians throughout the parade and it was great to see the ethnic mix and the kids with parents and grandparents laughing and dancing together along the way.”

Jim Fouratt told The Rag Blog, “I was impressed that Austin Music Award winner Carolyn Wonderland was front and center. She warmed my heart. And I was proud to march beside Wavy Gravy. It will be artists and musicians who lead us out of the chaos.”

Wonderland, a consistent activist for peace and other issues, joined noted musicians like Guy Forsyth, Leeann Atherton and Shelley King, the first woman to be named official Texas State Musician, in the concert at City Hall.

“It was great to see all my grey-haired colleagues alongside multi-generational families, all decked out in the costumes of old Austin like it was before the high-tech incursion,” Jim Fouratt added.

The theme of this year’s Million Musician March was to oppose the continuing occupation of Iraq and it also saluted the alternative media and its role in getting out the word.

Musician Richard Bowden of Instruments for Peace, the moving force behind MMM, said, “Of all the events worldwide in remembrance of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq disaster, the Million Musicians March for Peace was the only one led by musicians.” He added, “I am so glad to be in Austin where we can do something like this.”

[Thorne Dreyer, a sixties activist and underground journalist, lives in Austin, Texas. He is a director of the New Journalism Project, a contributing editor to Next Left Notes and is co-editor of The Rag Blog.]

Carolyn Wonderland, double winner at the recent Austin Music Awards, plays for peace at Austin City Hall. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Shelley King, 2008's Texas State Musician, on the stage at MMM. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Austin's Guy Forsyth is an instrument for peace. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Demonstrator tells it like it is. Photo by Mara Eurich / The Rag Blog.
Members of Austin Against War join the MMM. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Multi-generational protest of the continuing occupation of Iraq. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Dude's another instrument for peace. Photo by Mara Eurich / The Rag Blog.
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