We Have Sinners at Home! Lake Street - ROOTS, ROCK, & DEEP BLUES XII Music & Arts Festival Brings a Juke Joint to Minneapolis
by Angel Adaeze
Mark your calendars for Saturday, June 7, 2025! The acclaimed Lake Street Roots, Rock & Deep-Blues Festival XII is making its highly anticipated return to a block-party format, a first since the Covid-19 pandemic.
image via Hook & Ladder website
In the beating heart of South Minneapolis, where the echoes of history meet the pulse of possibility, the Firehouse Performing Arts Center’s Hook and Ladder Theater and Mission Room stands as a beacon. If the Sinners (2025) soundtrack is on repeat in your home, this is the festival for you! This June, the Roots, Rock, & Deep Blues (RRDBXII) Festival will feature a true lineup of 22 acts from across the Mississippi to 7 stages across Lake Street (between Hook & Ladder, Arbeiter Brewing, Moon Palace Books, and Du Nord Cocktail Room & Lagniappe).
The Firehouse Performing Arts Center (FPAC) celebrates its ninth year of operation, a testament to the power of authentic vision and unwavering community spirit with Founder, Chris Mozena, standing at the helm, ensuring that all of the nonprofit’s programming stays mission driven and aligned.
This festival, now a grand block takeover, had a rebellious, underground beginning with its original visionary, the late Chris Johnson. Johnson with determination to foster the spanning ranges of American subgenres that didn’t receive much airplay, including roots and deep blues music. A protector of his dream, he met pushback from sponsors. Twelve years later, his legacy proceeds him and has grown to the now sprawling block takeover and beyond. The festival with honor him this year with his family present.
Chris Mozena, Image via Hook & Ladder website
Here, Chris Mozena discusses the mission and evolution of the festival, serving the Lake Street community, and the experience of being a part of The Great Northern Festival Incubator Cohort.
Angel Adaeze: Take me back to the entry point of your involvement with the Roots, Rock, and Deep Blues festival, its inception and your connection to it.
Chris Mozena: I absolutely would love to. It’s with some amount of sadness that I have to mention that my friend, and the festival founder Chris Johnson, passed away two years ago. He influenced a whole generation of up-and-coming Minnesota and upper Midwest artists that I think were influenced by these artists that they got exposed to. Thankfully, that tradition continues today in this community with a robust scene of all sorts of genres.
It moved to the Firehouse here as a fundraising mechanism for Patrick's Cabaret originally, and now it's evolved into a fundraising mechanism for the Firehouse Performing Arts Center. A lot of people don’t know that the Firehouse Performing Arts Center is the overarching nonprofit that operates the Hook and Ladder [which] myself, and a couple of other people, helped found nine years ago when there was a low point of venues for up-and-coming and semi-established artists. We saw some of the downtown locations go away due to gentrification.
AA: How has the festival, and in turn FPAC, evolved through the past nine years?
CM: The last 5 have been spent, post George Floyd’s murder, in response to that [which has] changed us as an organization and as a people. Who we serve as a nonprofit has shifted as a result, from artist towards community for the initial response (via grocery distribution, legal aid, etc). Ultimately, we recognized that arts are a powerful mechanism to bring about change.
COVID was also happening. So our pivot was to move outside and create opportunities for people to gather, birthing the Under the Canopy series now going into its 5th year. Resulting in other festivals utilizing the grounds for their own festival.
We're a volunteer run organization and most of our board members are also artists. As a nonprofit, we operate a little differently than most venues. [For example] we are very transparent in terms of revenue generation. A longstanding principle that art is work and artists need to be paid fairly for their work.
AA: There is something so special about the arts and music scene here in Minneapolis that one doesn’t see in other major cities. Hooks and Ladder Theater, and by way FPAC, is such a staple of Lake Street. What does "pride of place" mean to you personally, and how does that manifest in how this festival is curated or celebrated?
CM: We have a bad rap and part of this Lake Street Lift funding is intended to kind of help change those perceptions about not just Lake Street, but South Minneapolis and Minneapolis as a whole. This geographic community watched in horror as the corporate interests abandoned the movement that we thought was underway in the wake of George Floyd. We saw them pay a lot of lip service firsthand. Now, five years later, seeing the pendulum swing [in the political sphere to] anti DEI … diversity equity inclusion are words that appear in our mission as core values. We just recently reasserted publicly [that] these are the principles we were founded on and we're proud about it.
AA: How do you balance creating a space that feels both like a party and a platform where artists can express something deeper, and the community can connect beyond just the music?
CM: Another inherited value for FPAC from our predecessor (Patrick's Cabaret), is a strong belief in not censoring artists. For a nonprofit, we have mission and value statements to reference. Out of [Covid] weirdness came a code of conduct, which really gave us an opportunity to focus on what kind of environment we wanna host here. It's something we take a lot of pride in today. What it means is we are a safe space for artists, as well as a community to gather and share and be in the company of one another without fear.
AA: Being a part of the Festival Incubator Cohort means growing alongside other festival producers, you’ve been doing this a long time and throw a plethora of events. What have you learned from the experience, and how has it helped shape an almost decade old festival?
CM: None of this would be possible without the funding we've received. I thought I knew everything there was to know about putting on an event like this; I wasn't very open to suggestions and seeing the forest for the trees. But having fresh sets of eyes through this experience has really helped us rethink our practices, from improving signage and guest experience to getting crucial help with our art market and building new partnerships. Learning better ways to source infrastructure, methods, and processes has been invaluable.
Simply being around other people who understand the unique pain and effort involved in throwing an event of this scope. It was the first time in four years that I realized I'd forgotten some things I thought I knew, like having contingency space in case of bad weather.
AA: What drives you to keep building this experience year after year?
CM: I get to work with people that I like and respect almost all the time. It's a rotating door of creative, exciting people with exciting ideas and exciting art to share and work to share.
I think, at the end of the day, I feel that what we do is making a difference, and if it wasn't, I probably wouldn't continue to work this hard and keep doing it.
AA: When people leave the festival, what do you hope stays with them?
CM: These days we're more interested in wowing people, I want to expose 'em to stuff they wouldn't necessarily choose to see by themselves. One in particular that I am very excited about this year is The Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band. My longer term goal is to eventually have some of that [Desert Blues] music out of Mali as part of this festival to demonstrate the origin point of these rhythms.
Groove on down to Hook and Ladder Theater & Lounge this Saturday at 2pm - 11pm. Visit Hook’s Website to purchase tickets and a free metro pass!
Learn more about the Festival Producer Incubator Cohort here.
The Great Northern Festival Incubator Program is made possible by funding from DEED and the City of Minneapolis.
Lake Street Lift projects were made possible by funding from DEED and the City of Minneapolis.
