Rag Radio: All-Star Musical Jam with Powell St. John, Spencer Perskin, Maryann Price

Rag Radio features a special old school all-star musical jam led by ’60s icons, Powell St. John, member of the Texas Music Hall of Fame and founder of the legendary Mother Earth, and Spencer Perskin of the pioneering psychedelic blues group, Shiva’s Head Band.

Also joining host Thorne Dreyer are jazz/swing vocalist Maryann Price, a veteran of Dan Hicks and His Hot Links, the Kinks, and Asleep at the Wheel; Christy Palumbo Foster of Christy and the Plowboys;  and Shiva’s vocalist Susan Perskin. Austin poet Mariann Wizard also reads a poem written especially for the post-holiday occasion. The performance is dedicated to the late Austin singer-songwriter John Clay.

This Rag Radio musical special originally aired December 20, 2013.

Texas Music Hall of Fame singer-songwriter and musician Powell St. John performed with Janis Joplin in early ‘60s Austin. (Janis later made a hit of Powell’s song, “Bye, Bye, Baby.”) Powell founded the iconic Austin band, St. John and the Conqueroo (later just the Conqueroo), and wrote six songs for the 13th Floor Elevators’ first two albums. In the late ’60s he moved to San Francisco, where he founded the country/psychedelic/blues band, Mother Earth with Tracy Nelson. He lives in Northern California.

Classically-trained guitarist and fiddler Spencer Perskin founded the psychedelic blues group, Shiva’s Head Band, in 1967. Shiva’s served as house band at Austin’s original ’60s music hall, the Vulcan Gas Co., and was the first group to perform at the historic Armadillo World Headquarters. “Take Me to the Mountains,” produced by Perskin for Capitol Records, was the first record released nationally by an Austin band, and the band’s first royalty check provided the seed money to open the Armadillo.

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. The show’s engineer and co-producer is Tracey Schulz and the staff photographer is Roger Baker. The syndicated show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP in Austin, and is later rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Houston Pacifica’s KPFT HD-3 90.1-FM, and by KKRN, 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA — and is a featured podcast at VT. All Rag Radio podcasts can be found at the Internet Archive. Contact: ragradio@koop.org

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Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run, solar-powered community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. Visit the Rag Radio Archives.

Contact:ragradio@koop.org

www.theragblog.com/rag-radio