Redirected: Editor's Note

February 2013

Steve Fennessy — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:00:00 GMT

As I write this, four days before the Falcons host the Seahawks in the playoffs, the Super Bowl picture is still fuzzy. The only thing I know for sure (besides that Beyoncé will show a lot of leg at halftime) is that the game will be played at the Superdome in New Orleans. For the seventh time.

Here’s another thing: The Superdome is old. It opened in 1975; only seven other active NFL venues were built before then. The Georgia Dome, which opened in 1992 and has hosted two Super Bowls, is actually one of the NFL’s newer stadiums, though far from the league’s prettiest. Sunk five stories into the ground, with little in the way of windows, the Georgia Dome gives the impression of the world’s largest bunker, hermetically sealed from life on the outside. (Not unlike the Superdome, actually.)

But when it comes to watching the Falcons play, the Dome holds up, inasmuch as any roofed stadium can hold up in one of the most temperate regions of the country. The sight lines are good, the seats relatively comfortable. Yes, the food remains lousy, the beer selection is behind the times, and the tailgate experience is just sad, but those things have nothing to do with the Dome itself. Indeed, just six years ago, Falcons owner Arthur Blank and the Georgia World Congress Center Authority poured more than $50 million into stadium renovations—overhauling suites, adding two huge video screens, replacing seats, and repainting the outside. (This was not just noblesse oblige: As part of his $28 million share of the bill, Blank and the Falcons got a bigger cut of advertising and suite sales.) “Anything you can see, touch, or feel is brand new,” a Falcons vice president said at the time.

So naturally it’s time to blow the thing up. In this month's issue, Charles Bethea explores the ramifications of a new stadium, which appears a fait accompli at this point. One question, though, remains unanswered: What precisely is wrong with the stadium we have now? On 790 The Zone, Blank said the Dome does not have a “birthright” to the other events it hosts, such as the SEC Championship. But the SEC seems perfectly happy. “The Georgia Dome has been terrific for us,” the commissioner said last December. Conventions remain a huge business; in January more than 60,000 young Christians came to the Georgia Dome for Passion 2013. The Dome is a quick walk from MARTA. That’s no small thing: Up to 20 percent of Falcons fans and 60 percent of Dome workers get there by MARTA. By every definition of the word, the Georgia Dome works.

And yet, evidently, it does not. Arthur Blank wants a new stadium. He, along with the NFL, will bear the lion’s share of the $1 billion cost, a portion of which he says he’ll pass on to season ticket holders in the form of personal seat licenses. The PSL route is itself questionable: Atlanta is a fickle city that’s produced exactly one championship in something like 150 seasons of professional sports. Asking longtime fans to pony up $1,000 or $10,000 or more simply for the privilege of doing what they’ve been doing for years—buying season tickets to support a team that, as of early January, has never brought home a Lombardi trophy—seems risky at best, presumptuous at worst.

I should say I’m a season ticket holder, so I’ve got some skin in this game. I’m not sure what I’d pay to reserve the right to keep buying my forty-yard-line seats, way up near the roof. Especially when the seats I have—in the stadium that’s here—are perfectly adequate. In notices I get from the team, I’m thanked often for “supporting your Atlanta Falcons.”

Mine? How do you figure?

January 2013

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:56:00 GMT

This month's editor's note was not written by Steve Fennessy.

“How Southern are we?” was the question posed on the cover of our November 2012 special issue on Atlanta’s Southern culture and identity. Now there’s an answer: “Southern-ish.”

At least according to the 5,000-plus people who took the online version of our “How Southern Are You?” quiz between November 1 and December 1. Collectively they scored an average 35.79 out of a possible 159, putting them in a bracket clarified thusly: “Southern-ish. We suspect you were born to Yankee parents who moved South. You have absorbed some culture through assimilation. We are proud. But as the saying goes: Just because a cat has kittens in the oven, it don’t make them biscuits.”

Granted, the quiz—which tabulated pork and collard consumption, familiarity with minor characters in Gone with the Wind, knowledge of gospel hymns and country ballads, predilection toward seersucker, SEC fanaticism, and other markers of Southern heritage—is scientific-ish at best. But still.

While just 1 percent of the respondents snagged the top ranking of “Southern Born and Bred,” we did get an answer to the second question on our cover: “Should we even care?” That would be a resounding “Yes!” Quiz takers took to Facebook and Twitter to challenge their friends and family, as well as argue about our scoring mechanism.

“I want extra credit. I have a show dog that is a coonhound, dammit. And I have cooked and served kudzu to guests,” noted @pinkrocktopus, aka Atlantan Angela Warner, who scored 113. She posted a photograph of the men her great-great-grandfather shot for siphoning from his still. “NOW who’s Southern?” she asked. How can you argue with the progeny of a murderous moonshiner? We gave her 7 extra-credit points.

Local media types did not fare well. Creative Loafing news editor Thomas Wheatley scored just 4, while Mark Arum of WSB-TV earned 23, bested by the AJC’s Pete Corson, who racked up 35 points.

A sampling of other tweets: “I got a 69, shouldn’t I get bonus points for being born in the same hospital as Ray Charles and Paula Deen?” asked @markmcl88. “83 points. My Louisiana mother will be so proud,” bragged @sandden. “Eeek! Only 4 points and I’ve lived here for 8 years! You can take the girl out of Jersey . . .” wryly observed @robinnphoto, while @allisonyoung crowed, “I am still, very happily, a Damn Yankee.”

Okay, so everyone cares, just not all in the same way.

Southern Scores
5,016
Number of readers who took our “How Southern Are You?” quiz online between November 1 and December 1, 2012

45
Percentage who trace Southern roots at least five generations

48
Survey respondents named Jim Bob

37
Percentage who didn’t know what potlikker is

49
Percentage with UGA stickers on their vehicles

51
Percentage who can’t recognize a camellia when they see one

35
Percentage who attended Vacation Bible School

154
Highest score. This respondent inherited Grandma’s quilt, cast-iron skillet, Bible, silver, and sweet potato pie recipe.

-27
Lowest score. Yup, that’s a minus. This respondent doesn’t even eat bacon, let alone drink sweet tea.

Want to know where you fall on our Southernness meter? Take the quiz at atlantamagazine.com/southern

December 2012

Steve Fennessy — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, Julie Wolfe, a reporter from 11Alive, came to our office to discuss the future of magazines. Word had just come down that Newsweek would shutter its print edition early next year, and so it seemed like a good time to take the temperature of local titles like ours. Julie didn’t find any Pollyannas around here. You’d have to be crazy, I told her, not to worry about the future of print magazines, and of journalism in general. A generation is coming of age who grew up with the Internet—and with it, the expectation that content should be free. “Free,” of course, has never been a sustainable business model, so the so-called legacy media (newspapers and print magazines) are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle by walling off online content, charging for digital subscriptions, and creating extras for our websites and tablet editions.

Here at Atlanta magazine, we’re doing all of those things (Check out our blogs! Download our dining app! Buy this issue on iTunes!), but we’re also keeping our attention on the date that brought us to this dance: the publication that shows up in your mailbox once a month. After all, it’s the magazine—a collection of long stories, short interviews, authoritative reviews, vivid photos, lush ads—that is still the most complete representation of what the Atlanta magazine brand is all about. It’s the magazine to which readers turn, month after month, to see their city reflected back at them. And it’s this last point, I think, that gives me the greatest hope for magazines, and especially city magazines like the one you’re reading. We are bombarded with facts every day—every minute, to be more precise—but lost in that avalanche of news alerts and tweets and aggregations and hundred-word briefs is a sense of Truth, with a capital T. Simply knowing more stuff doesn’t mean much without trying to figure out what it all means. Which leaves magazines uniquely positioned in this attention deficit disorder age to explain not just what’s happening, but why.

To predict what the magazine business will look like in twenty years, or even in ten, is a fool’s errand. Things are changing too fast. The physical pages you’re turning here may only be digital pages in a decade. But one thing I’m sure won’t change is the appetite for good stories, told well. All of which is a rather roundabout way to direct you to Tony Rehagen’s gut-wrenching account of how a split-second decision can change everything. Thanks for reading.

November 2012

Steve Fennessy — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:54:00 GMT

If you flip through the pages of this issue, you will come across names and terms that evoke the South in all of its beauty and contradictions: Hog jowl. Biscuits. Kennesaw Mountain. Henry Grady. Jim Crow. Bow ties. Cotillion. Porches. Gun. Murder. Flannery O’Connor. Alice Walker. Guilt. God. Gossip. Grave. Gothic. Football. Potlikker.

You will not see the name Randy Newman, though that may have been an oversight. Almost forty years ago, Newman wrote a song called “Rednecks,” which hilariously pointed out the hypocrisy of white Northerners who failed to acknowledge their own racism while they sat in judgment of the South’s. I knew the song before I moved to Atlanta from New York a dozen years ago, but I didn’t really understand it until I’d lived here awhile. Which is to say, it took me moving to the South to learn about the North.

Here’s a for instance: When I took American history in high school twenty-five years ago, we learned what I imagine most students do about the seminal battles of the civil rights movement: Bull Connor, the Birmingham bombings, the forced integration of Central High School in Little Rock. What I was never taught—what I’m embarrassed to say I just learned—was that barely a month before President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, William and Daisy Myers and their children became the first black family to move into a planned community of 60,000 people. Where was this suburb? Not outside Atlanta, or Memphis, or Charlotte. It was outside Philadelphia, a place called Levittown. The Myers family was greeted by a mob hurling rocks, unfurling a Confederate flag, and burning a cross. The governor called in state troopers.

Here’s another: While we learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott and the march to Selma, I don’t recall studying King’s Chicago campaign, when he and the SCLC protested segregated schools and slum housing. After an August 1966 march in Chicago that was met with rocks and bricks, King said, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

So why do we remember Little Rock but not Levittown? Montgomery but not Chicago? Matthew Lassiter, who grew up in Atlanta and is now a history professor at the University of Michigan, asks this question in a collection of essays titled The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. The conventional wisdom is that the 1964 Civil Rights Act pivoted the South irreversibly toward Republicans. This thinking makes the South a monolith, and ignores not only the racial diversity of its electorate, but the fact that a third of so-called Southerners weren’t even born here. “The ‘Southern strategy’ thesis is popular and ubiquitous precisely because it reduces a complex phenomenon of national political transformation to another familiar story of Southern white backlash,” Lassiter writes. What’s more, it conveniently allows the North to ignore the skeletons in its own closet. And so even when civil rights controversies erupt in the North, they’re often described by evoking Southern comparisons. Resisting school desegregation in Boston, for example, would have made it the “Little Rock of the North.” History really is written by the winners.

Over the past months, as we’ve discussed the notion of Southern identity in a city like Atlanta, I’ve had many revelations. That I need to dress better. That I need to plant a bigger garden. And that what I don’t know about this place I call home could fill the Georgia Dome. Maybe that’s the first step toward understanding it.

October 2012

Steve Fennessy — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:59:00 GMT

At least once a week I get a pitch from a freelance writer who wants to do a travel piece for us. This is typical:

“Dear Steve, I just returned from a wonderful five-day trip to [insert exotic destination] and thought it would make a great travel story for your magazine!”

Okay, I’m listening, though exclamation point probably not necessary.

“As you might know, Delta recently began daily nonstop flights from Atlanta to [insert exotic destination], so it’s of great interest to your readers.”

You’re probably right. Our surveys show our readers love to travel, especially when it’s just a quick flight from Hartsfield-Jackson. Keep going.

“I know times are tough for magazines, so I wanted you to know that there’d be no expense to you other than my assignment fee.”

You mean you don’t want us to reimburse your flight? Your hotel? Not even your meals?

“My trip was part of a special outing designed for a select group of travel writers, and sponsored by the [insert name of hotel] at [insert exotic destination]. We were able to try all the activities, from parasailing to a hot stone massage in the newly renovated spa that’s made of a special Mayan brick. I even burned my—”

Where’s the “delete” button? Ah, there it is.

Travel writing, I’ve come to realize, is one of the last great boondoggles of journalism. Fewer and fewer publications have the budgets to fund trips, so they rely instead on PR companies, airlines, chambers of commerce, and resorts to invite journalists to their destinations for a few days, all expenses paid. After they’re wined, dined, and suitably sunburnt, the writers are flown home (sometimes first class!), where they shop their experiences to whatever newspaper or magazine or website will run them.

So what’s the problem with this? Two come to mind. First, how can we know that the resort’s employees are treating journalists—obviously on assignment—the same way they treat a regular traveler? The truth is, we can’t. The writer’s experience is altered—let’s be honest, enhanced—by the recognition of what he does. And here’s the second problem: If I’m getting a five-day trip to a swank resort completely free of charge, what are the odds I’ll say something negative about my experience, even if there’s something justifiably bad to say? If I call it like I see it, this gravy train of free trips could come screeching to a halt, and then I’ll be like every other schmuck, having to actually pay for my vacations.

Is this cynical of me? Maybe. But it’s why Atlanta magazine continues to travel anonymously, paying our own way. I was reminded of the importance of this policy when I went to Blackberry Farm last fall, as part of this month’s Mountain Escapes package. Had I been part of a press trip—or had they even known I was on assignment—would they have put me in the room they did? Maybe, maybe not. But when I left, with every dollar I’d spent reimbursed by my bosses (thank you, corporate overlords), I knew I could call it as I saw it. It’s a privilege that doesn’t come cheaply. Compared with the price of our credibility, though, it’s a bargain.

September 2012

Steve Fennessy — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 18:40:00 GMT

It’s 2012, so to find out what people are thinking, I don’t turn on the TV or open the daily newspaper. I log on to Twitter. I’m writing this on August 1, which is the day after metro Atlantans resoundingly turned TSPLOST into TSPLAT. Nice joke, but it’s not mine. Found it on Twitter. (Thanks, Andisheh Nouraee.) What else am I finding as I scroll through this remarkable invention? Someone named Sandy is commending Governor Nathan Deal for pledging to take a more active role in transportation planning. “A plan that works w/o my $$—Gold!” Sandy writes. Sandy, evidently, lives off the grid and rides a horse to work, sticking only to dirt paths. She also seems to think that whatever Governor Deal does, he’ll do it using something other than tax dollars. Well, I suppose prayer is free.

Here’s one from MisterAtlanta, who describes himself as the “hardest working man in #Atlanta.” At 35,000 tweets, it’s clear what his job is. “People talking about how great #Atlanta ‘could’ be, pisses me off,” he writes. “#Atlanta could be better if you took your ass back where you came from.”

Mark Toro writes: “OK, #TeaParty, you win. What are YOU going to do about traffic?” Nick Aliffi: “If you live in Atlanta, you can no longer bitch about bad traffic. We’ll just stay a backwater town.”

I can’t keep up. These are just what I saw trending in the space of a few minutes. The TSPLOST supporters are writing eulogies for Atlanta, the Tea Partiers are gloating, and the residents of South DeKalb continue to wonder when anyone will pay attention to them.

I was, at most, a reluctant TSPLOST supporter. The cynical part of me saw it as nothing more than a way for spineless politicians to wash their hands of a tough decision and instead leave it up to the voters. (I mean, what are we paying these guys for?) But as election day grew near, I started to see the vote as less a laundry list of roads and rail than a referendum on vision. As in, can we unite behind one? That we can’t—so far, anyway—is dismaying.

Meanwhile, this magazine is about to go to the printer, and I’m so distracted I haven’t even talked about the great stuff in this issue. I haven’t mentioned Bill Addison’s artery-clogging ranking of our city’s best steakhouses. I haven’t talked about the gorgeous fashion spread from Barnsley Gardens. Nor have I directed your attention to the strange tale of Ed Kramer, the DragonCon cofounder who, twelve years after his arrest on child molestation charges, still awaits trial. What else haven’t I done? I haven’t talked about the Dream, Atlanta’s WNBA franchise that is the definition of affordable family entertainment, and yet inexplicably struggles for fans. I also haven’t referred you to our review of the Optimist, one of the year’s most exciting new restaurants. (Seafood! Or, to bring it back to Twitter: “@TheOptimistATL dinner was divine!”)

All these things I haven’t done. Clearly I need to work harder. Maybe MisterAtlanta could give me a lesson.

August 2012

Steve Fennessy — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Devoting our August issue to the big ideas that will shape Atlanta’s future posed a bit of a timing problem for us. A print magazine is still beholden to a production schedule that, in the age of nanosecond news, is simply prehistoric. For instance, I’m writing this on July 3, but subscribers won’t be reading it for at least another two weeks. And the issue won’t be on the newsstand until closer to August 1. Somewhere in there—well, on July 31, specifically—voters across metro Atlanta will decide if we should pay another penny in sales tax to fund $6 billion in transportation projects across the region.

Whatever your feelings on the referendum, the results of the vote will inevitably impact some of the projects we highlight in this issue, directly or indirectly. The BeltLine comes immediately to mind: If the referendum passes, there will be money to extend the Atlanta streetcar to opposite sides of the BeltLine. But even if we vote no, the BeltLine will not die. And in fact, all of the projects that we’ve named inaugural Groundbreakers are either well on their way, or they’ve already arrived. I’m thinking about Rashid Nuri and the Truly Living Well urban farm. Every Friday afternoon for the past few weeks, I’ve driven east on Auburn Avenue and taken a left on Hilliard. As I drive up the hill, what emerges on my right is nothing short of amazing: eight-foot-high sunflowers towering over countless raised beds where cucumbers and kale and tomatoes and squash are growing, customers dropping by to purchase fresh vegetables, and children learning the pleasure and power that come from growing your own food.

I’m thinking also about Ponce City Market. When I moved to Atlanta a dozen years ago, I used to go to City Hall East occasionally, sometimes to pick up a police report, sometimes to work out at Lee Haney’s gym. If you drive past the building every day, it’s easy to forget how simply massive the place is. Now that Jamestown Properties is renovating those 2 million square feet, the project is poised to transform that neighborhood.

Truly Living Well and Ponce City Market couldn’t be more different in scope or subject, but they—and indeed, all of our Groundbreakers—share a trait that unites them: They each stand to make our city better. And that’s something that we can all get behind, no matter how you vote(d) on July 31.

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
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July 2012

Steve Fennessy — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

First, why isn’t anyone talking about the name? TSPLOST. It sounds like one of those nonsense words my two-year-old son says after he licks the icing off a cupcake. Don’t you wonder about the bureaucrats who dream up these acronyms? Seriously, where do they come up with this? It stands, by the way, for Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, which is an inexcusable euphemism for "You’ll be paying more." Supporters of the July 31 vote—which will determine whether we add another 1 percent to our sales tax to fund $6 billion worth of transportation projects—are worried about turnout, since there’s nothing else on the ballot, it’s the middle of summer, and really, wouldn’t we rather be watching the Olympics? I think there should be a second question on the ballot: "Should Georgia lawmakers henceforth be forever banned from using the word SPLOST, on pain of death?" Voters would queue for hours.

Vomitous jargon aside, we have been told this is do-or-die for the region, whose reputation as the poster child for gridlock is now fixed in the national consciousness. (Ask anyone visiting from New York. Or Chicago. Or any city with mass transit that goes where its users need to go.) The PR campaign, for and against, is now at full throttle. Proponents say the Transportation Investment Act (TIA sounds positively lyrical next to TSPLOST) is our "Big Dig" moment, to evoke Boston’s massive undertaking. Unlike the Big Dig, however, our TIA is a list of dozens of localized projects. Presumably these would add up to something transformative for our region, but unfortunately the lack of any one Big Dig–scale project (except possibly for the BeltLine) leaves the impression that the TIA is nothing more than a bunch of little pork projects. I say unfortunately because I am, despite some serious misgivings, going to vote yes on July 31.

What are the misgivings? Sierra Club came out opposed to the TIA, saying essentially that it wouldn’t do enough, that it’s too much of a hodgepodge, that there’s too much for roads, that there’s no “cohesive” vision. I find these objections absurd. We live in a metro area whose citizenry rails against big government, and yet we tolerate dozens of governments (there are sixty-nine cities in the ten-county region directly affected by this vote), gorged with politicians whose first priority is protecting their fiefdoms. Until we have some consolidated government in this region, any cohesive vision is a pipe dream. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

I’ve also heard the argument that if voters strike down the measure, gridlock may, paradoxically, improve. How? By continuing the status quo, the situation will get so bad that more of us will move closer to the city center, creating the density we so desperately need. That argument brings to mind that Vietnam expression about destroying the village in order to save it. Doing nothing and letting a sort of natural selection take hold seems, to me, to be courting disaster.

So I’ll vote yes on July 31, albeit reluctantly. Many of us will find it hard to swallow another 1 percent sales tax (a regressive tax if ever there was one), but this is a definitional moment for Atlanta. Who are we, and who do we want to be?

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
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June 2012

Steve Fennessy — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I spent my late twenties working in Egypt, and on one of my trips from the U.S. back to Cairo, I packed a couple of six-gallon plastic buckets, a hydrometer, a bag of bottle caps, and a few boxes with all the fixings to brew my own beer. I was a bit nervous when I landed. Egypt in the late 1990s was, ostensibly, a dry country, although the state did operate a brewery, which produced a foul swill called Stella (no relation, not even by marriage, to Stella Artois) that came in big, green bottles. Among the expat community, rumors about the Stella plant had taken on an almost mythic status. We’d heard the taste-tester was Muslim (Islam forbids alcohol), and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Once I found a cigarette butt in a bottle, another time a tooth. I think it was human.

At the airport, the customs agent asked me to unzip my bag. He knocked on the side of the plastic bucket and looked at me quizzically. My Arabic did not include the phrase “I come bearing instruments that will deliver my countrymen from your fetid sewer water,” so I just said, “It’s for gardening.” He nodded and waved me through.

Within a few months, in our fifth-floor flat on Qambiz Street, we poured our first home brew. I think it was a pale ale—nothing too adventurous, but coming amid the privations to which we’d sadly become accustomed, it was a revelation. A deliverance, to put it in biblical terms. (We were in Egypt, after all.)

When I moved back to New York, the home-brew movement was gathering steam. But I didn’t quite get it. Amazing craft beers were everywhere. Why bother making beer when you could simply buy something that was just as good, and probably better? In Egypt home-brewing had been a necessity. In America it seemed superfluous. But then I got a job in Georgia, which at the time did not permit the sale of beer with alcohol volumes over 6 percent. It was time to brew again.

If you’re not much of a beer drinker, it may seem like increasing that limit is just a way for frat boys to get drunk faster. The truth is that when Georgia finally relaxed the limit, in 2004, it transformed the beer culture in the state. There are, as the beer lobby likes to point out, more varieties of beer than there are of wine, and the change in law not only permitted package stores to offer up something besides Budweiser and Miller Lite (I exaggerate for effect), it also allowed restaurants to make their beer lists as robust as their wine lists.

Georgia’s beer renaissance is just one aspect featured in this month’s cover package, which we see as a guide to navigating Atlanta’s wonderful and ever-evolving world of cocktails, beer, and wine. As the beer law demonstrates, it’s amazing the wonderful things that can happen when government gets out of the way.

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
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May 2012

Steve Fennessy — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

If you’ve lived in Atlanta for any length of time, you may have heard of Eddie’s Attic. If you live here and can make an F-chord on a guitar, you most likely have heard of Eddie’s Attic. If you live here, can make an F-chord on a guitar, and have subjected your family to Johnny Cash and John Prine covers to the point of imminent violence, you not only have heard of Eddie’s Attic, but you’ve been there, you’ve drunk there, and you’ve gone to bed wondering what it would be like to play there. You’ve imagined achieving, on that tiny stage in that tiny room in Decatur, in front of those 150 rapt listeners, a moment of perfect musical transcendence, when audience and performer are linked by a bridge built of nothing more than sound waves, but no less strong than if it were of iron and steel. Truly, in concert.

Or is that just me?

This month’s issue features a profile of Eddie Owen, the guy behind Eddie’s Attic. I first stumbled on the place not long after moving to Atlanta in 2000. My wife and I had heard about Eddie’s and figured we’d check it out, without knowing anything about the headliner. Turned out it was Matthew Kahler, a Georgia boy who reminded me of what James Taylor would sound like if he lived in the real world and not Martha’s Vineyard. The set was fantastic—a mix of silliness, solemnity, and catchy pop songs. When we left a few hours later, Kahler’s CD in hand, I remarked how lucky we were to have come on such a good night for music.

What I came to realize is that hearing good music at Eddie’s isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of fact. So many great local musicians have played there—and I don’t mean just superstars like John Mayer and Sugarland and the Indigo Girls, but lesser-knowns like Derek Webb and Tyler Lyle—that it’s become a sort of rite of passage for singer-songwriters in the hothouse of Atlanta’s music scene. And that’s not even accounting for the amazing national talent that graces its stage.

Last year I was invited to be a judge for the Attic’s biannual open-mic shootout, in which winners of the weekly contests face off for the top prize of $1,000. Eddie was the host. If you ever get the chance to be a judge for this event, I suggest you take it. Not only are the drinks and food on the house, but you also get a ringside seat for musicians who can’t believe their luck that they’re playing this stage. And you get to watch Eddie in action, and marvel how a little second-story room across from a Chick-fil-A could conjure so much magic, night after night after night.

Steve Fennessy is our editor.
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