Randy Tessier has spent large portions of his life as a professional musician, but the 75-year-old always had a part-time gig, too.

"I was a pot dealer. I sold marijuana—lots of it. Hundreds of pounds," he said. "And over the years, that's how I supported myself playing in a band."

Tessier reveals his side hustle in a new 12-minute documentary, Geezers: The Rocker Behind "Geezer Happy Hour".

The official name of the weekly dance party is "Ann Arbor Happy Hour at LIVE," but many of the silver-haired patrons who come to the Friday night events call it the G word. The event's nickname was revealed in "It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65," a January 12, 2023, article in The New York Times that went viral.

While Tessier is featured in the story, he's not the focus of the article. New York Times writer Joseph Bernstein rightfully focused on the sweet community that makes the happy hour such a joy for attendees.

The Geezers documentary, despite its title, focuses on bassist-guitarist Tessier's long musical life in Ann Arbor more so than the dance party.

The Radar tracks new music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week:
Maddy Ringo, Baits, Austen Nordhaus, Jeustan, deegeecee, Tongue, Diont'e Visible, and Jennifer Bloom with Mark Zhu.

This story was originally published on May 10, 2023. We're presenting it again because Third Man Records repressed Connie Converse's "How Sad, How Lonely" album on vinyl with a bonus single and fanzine.

When Elizabeth "Connie" Converse was making music in New York City during the 1950s, her peers probably thought of her as a folk artist because she played acoustic guitar and sang songs.

But a new book makes the case for her being the bridge between folk music and what would come to be known as the singer-songwriter genre in the 1960s since she wrote her own songs using personal, poetic lyrics.

To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse by Howard Fishman also documents the musician's difficult life, which may have ended with her disappearance in 1974 at age 50.

Converse moved to Ann Arbor in 1961 to be closer to her brother, Philip E. Converse, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. She worked a variety of jobs and eventually became managing editor of the U-M Institute for Social Research's Journal of Conflict Resolution. When Yale took over the publication in 1972, the intensely private Converse's life started to drift and her depression increased.

“One Track Mind” features a Washtenaw County-associated artist or band discussing a single song.

Standout Track: “With Me” from Detroit's Lorian Janine, an EMU alum and past Amplify Fellowship recipient. Her current single is like a journal entry; it explores longing for someone, revisiting a past relationship, and letting it go. For Janine, writing the song was a cathartic experience that helped her process a range of thoughts and emotions.

“I think it’s important to not ignore what you feel while you’re healing through something, no matter how embarrassing, painful, or annoying it seems,” she wrote in an email interview.

“Most of us probably want to hurry up and heal so we can move on, but that’s not how it works. Feeling all of the icky things—whether it’s jealousy, anger, regret, longing, hurt—and embracing them with honesty and humility is all part of the healing process. I hope that people listening will feel me saying, ‘Hey, I know you’re still lurking on their page, still looking at old pictures, and imagining what life would have been like with them. But you know what? That’s okay. Let yourself feel it so that you can properly heal. That feeling won’t last forever, I promise.’”

One year ago, Theatre Nova’s founding artistic director Carla Milarch traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, to see Unicorn Theatre’s production of her original play Doctor Moloch. She found that UT’s artistic director, Ernie Nolan, and she not only had great respect for each other's work but a lot of personal acquaintances in common.

“After that, we kept in touch,” Milarch said. “So at one point he reached out and said, ‘Hey, there’s this play we’re doing. We’ve got two partners on the [National New Play Network] Rolling World Premiere. Would you be interested in being the third?’ So I read it, and I loved it.”

The play in question is Tori Keenan-Zelt’s The JonBenét Game, which will be staged at Theatre Nova March 27-April 19.

Laura Hulthen Thomas confronts the uneasiness felt by the characters in her first novel, The Meaning of Fear.

Childhood fears, past fears, and new fears—the characters have them all.

Thomas is the program head of the Residential College’s creative writing program at the University of Michigan. Her novel starts in 1982 during the childhoods of Lea Johnson and Paul Rilke, which is also when their fears begin. Both go through trauma that torments them and then shadows them in adulthood. For Lea, the cause is sexual assault. For Paul, trauma appears in the form of his father.

The Radar tracks new music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week:
Supercontinent, Bunkerman, Sleep Tight Tiger, Fragile Death, Mike Green, and 14KT. 

Dick Siegel’s Snap! still resonates with people in Ann Arbor today.

Released in 1980, the singer-songwriter’s album features humorous and ironic lyrics combined with elements of Afro-Cuban, jazz, and swing music.

“I had gotten into this groove of people thinking of me as a rhythm and blues or swing thing, and it never seemed to me that was my particular expertise,” Siegel told The Ann Arbor News in a March 20, 1987, interview. “[So] I felt the way to break out of those expectations was to break out of that instrumentation.”

Snap! includes some of Siegel’s most famous songs, including “Angelo’s,” “When the Sumac Is on Fire,” and “What Would Brando Do?”.

Some of those favorites from Snap!, plus other songs from Siegel’s catalog, will be performed during the March 22 “Celebrating Dick Siegel & His Music” show at The Ark.

“One Track Mind” features a Washtenaw County artist or band discussing one song from their latest release.

Standout Track: No. 2, “Pardon My Dust,” from Annie and Rod Capps. The Chelsea couple’s latest folk album, Never Done, is about self-improvement and the lessons they've learned on their journey of personal growth.

On “Pardon My Dust,” Annie Capps sings about self-reinvention and uses construction-based metaphors to show that her work is never done. Those references come from driving back and forth to Chicago over the years. “I think this song in particular is more about how we need to be kinder to ourselves and others who are struggling with life and all the challenges and curve balls it throws us along the way. Also, those who have done any kind of therapy will understand that you have to tear down stuff to rebuild something better. Thus, the self-destruction reference. Not all self-destruction is necessarily bad if it reveals what needs fixing.”

Heidi Kumao couldn’t bring herself to delete the various voicemails of concerned Ann Arbor neighbors claiming they had spotted her lost cat, Ruben, during the pandemic lockdown.

Years later, Kumao found a new purpose for this coalition of concerned voices as the backdrop for her experimental, stop-motion animation film 35 Days, which will debut at 1:30 pm on March 28 at the Michigan Theater during this year’s Ann Arbor Film Festival, which takes place March 24-29.