Best of ATL 2019!

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  string(17211) "Back in the early 1970s, Jimbo Livaditis played youth baseball at Bagley Park (since renamed Frankie Allen Park) in the Garden Hills neighborhood in Buckhead. With some frequency, on the way home after a game or practice, the parents of Livaditis and his preteen teammates would take their Little Leaguers to the nearby Zesto for an ice cream treat or milkshake.

Cooling down in the summer, sipping chocolaty goodness through a straw or licking melted vanilla cream from the runnels of a crunchy sugar cone, a boy could easily slip into a daydream about hitting a grand slam to win the World Series or building a skyscraper in downtown Atlanta next to that new hotel with the blue-domed flying saucer on top. In Jimbo’s case, the idle musing took a different tack.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘One day, I hope this is mine,’” Livaditis says in a phone interview with CL. The young baseballer wearing the syrup-stained jersey had good reason to consider such an unusual prospect. His father, John Livaditis, owned the joint.

As a matter of fact, at the time, “Big John” Livaditis, a hard-working, entrepreneurial, first-generation son of Greek immigrants, owned multiple Zestos in Atlanta, including the city’s first — a walk-up, ice-cream-only stand — which opened in 1949. Later that same year, just a few years out of the Army, where he competed as a Golden Gloves boxer, Livaditis accepted a proposal from a tree grower and started selling Christmas trees in the parking lot on Peachtree Street at Brookwood Station. Thus was established Big John’s Christmas Trees, which helped fill the revenue gap during the holiday season when the demand for cold desserts tapered off.

“Dad always put in an incredible amount of hours,” Livaditis recalls. “A lot of times, we went to visit him after the game because he wasn’t able to attend, since he was working.”

By the mid-1980s, Big John was lording over a fiefdom of 10 metro Atlanta Zestos. In 1988, he retired, bequeathing the restaurant and Christmas tree businesses to sons Lee and (younger by eight years) Jimbo. Seven years later, Big John passed away. For the next three decades, the Livaditis brothers carried on, riding demographic tides and dallying with commercial developments by closing some Zestos, opening new stores and refurbishing others while tweaking the menu to accommodate the public’s trending palate.

In 2019, Zesto Atlanta President and CEO Jimbo Livaditis is presiding over a year-long celebration of a 70-year-old family enterprise. His wife, Leigh Ann, serves as company vice president and director of marketing and communications. The couple’s children work in one capacity or another for Big John’s Christmas Trees. Eldest son John is also involved with Zesto operations while finishing up college at Kennesaw State University. Lucas attends the University of South Carolina, and Anastasia is a senior at North Atlanta High School. Sadly, Lee is not around to raise a celebratory Nut Brown Crown with the family. Three years ago, he succumbed to lung cancer at age 66.

“It was a sudden, traumatizing and multilayered loss,” says Livaditis. “I no longer have my older brother’s advice to lean on or daily presence to cherish. I’ve had a crash course in wearing many more hats than I was used to. I’m still getting on my feet in some areas.”

Currently, the Livaditises operate four metro area Zestos: Buckhead, East Atlanta, Forest Park and Little Five Points (a fifth location, an independent franchise in Tyrone, is owned by a sister-in-law). Big John’s Christmas Trees, which peaked around the turn of the millennia at 22 locations, now stands at nine lots.

The family’s abiding commitment to the cause has been shared by a number of Zesto employees. Delores Slaughter, general manager of the Buckhead Zesto, has been with the company 41 years. East Atlanta GM Jimmy Koulouris has been clocking in for 45 years and counting. Two recently retired store managers, Pete Giannakopoulos and his brother Tommy, were Greek immigrants originally sponsored by Big John in the 1950s; their sister-in-law, Theoni Giannakopoulos, works at the Little Five Points Zesto.

“Our long-term employees know their customers and the customers know them, which adds to the authenticity of the Zesto experience,” says Leigh Ann. “You can’t easily create relationships and experiences like that in a branded business model.”

The original Zesto venture was spawned in 1945 by Rockford, Illinois-based Taylor Freezer Corporation, which manufactured a soft-serve ice cream machine called the Zest-O-Mat. Conceived as a competitor of Dairy Queen, the first Zesto stores were only equipped to serve ice cream. By the time Big John Livaditis opened his franchise in Atlanta, Zestos could be found in 46 states.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, America’s head-over-heels, pedal-to-the-metal love affair with automobiles, drive-ins, and fast food fueled the fortunes of Zesto and its rivals, which competed for customers by expanding their sweet and cool dessert menus with warm, savory fare. In 1959, Zesto introduced a double-patty hamburger originally named “Fat Boy,” which was renamed two years later when Shoney’s objected to the resemblance to the company’s signature “Big Boy” sandwich. Consequently, Big John held a contest, which was won by a Georgia Tech student who submitted Chubby Decker, with a nod to the contemporaneous rock ‘n’ roll star, as the two-tiered burger’s new moniker.

Then came the foot-long hot dog, which, based on innumerable unscientific surveys, is an incomplete construction without chili, if not slaw. “In the ’60s, my father had a Greek buddy in Pennsylvania named Gus,” says Livaditis. “He ran a chain called Coney Island, which offered a special chili dog. His success inspired my dad to perfect the chili recipe we still use today.”

Hand-cut onion rings, French fries, and fried chicken became staple menu items. Over the years, at various times and locations, Zesto customers could order a pizza burger, roast beef sandwich, grilled and toasted cheese sandwiches, and pork tenderloin. “There’s even a fish dog — two fish sticks on a foot-long bun with coleslaw and tartar sauce — which is on the ‘secret menu,’” Livaditis confides.

Recently, the influx of Hispanic and Latino residents across metro Atlanta neighborhoods spurred the addition of burritos, tacos, quesadillas, and nachos to the menu at several Zesto locations. For 2019, a Spicy 70th Steakburger with bacon and Palmetto Cheese was introduced. Currently, the kitchen lab is putting the final tweaks on a mango milkshake. “It’s been a labor of love,” Livaditis says. “We want to get it just right using nothing artificial, just pure ingredients, fresh mangos with the right color, texture, and bite.”

Then as now, in acknowledgement of the restaurant’s Southern roots, fried livers and gizzards can be ordered at select Zesto locations. “I’ve been known to stop in and sample the livers and gizzards to make sure they’re up to our standards,” Livaditis says, with a chuckle.

Celebrity sightings and associations are features of the Zesto Atlanta legacy. Pro basketball Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, who led the New York Knicks to two National Basketball Association championships (1970 and ’73), played high school sports at Atlanta’s David Tobias Howard High School. In a 2018 biography produced by MSG Networks, Frazier visits the Zesto on Ponce de Leon (now a Cook Out) where he did a stint as a “curb boy” when the restaurant only offered walk-up or dine-in-your-car service. During the segment Frazier reminisces with his former supervisors, the Giannakopoulos brothers.

Then there was the time (in 1979) a WSB-TV news reporter corralled Colonel Sanders at the defunct Zesto at Pershing Point after the goateed ambassador of Kentucky Fried Chicken was spotted enjoying one of his guilty pleasures, a Zesto milkshake.

More recently, people are still laughing at the “kids meal” scene from the first season (2016) of Donald Glover’s television series “Atlanta,” which was filmed at the East Atlanta Zesto. Cee Lo Green, Lil Yachty, and Shawn Reis (“Flash Gordon,” “Smallville”) have been spotted chilling at Zesto. One day, Livaditis and his three children were eating lunch at the Piedmont Road Zesto when they looked over and discovered they were dining with Carolina Panthers star quarterback Cam Newton (presumably during the off-season).

So, what’s the secret to Zesto's enduring allure and success?

“It’s hard to pin down, but part of it is a combination of nostalgia and relevance,” says Leigh Ann. “If you can maintain that nostalgic ‘Gee, this place is cool!’ factor, that’s great. But you also have to stay relevant by tapping into social media, updating the menu, and doing promotions that attract younger people.”

Livaditis adds: “We were laughing the other night. When Dad started Zesto, he wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to create something 1950s-ish because it’s trendy.’ He was just working with what was available. There is something compelling about the design of the drive-in and the feeling it generates, which has been glamorized by movies. But there is also an element of genuine authenticity, which you can’t force; it’s either present or it’s not.”

Seventy years down the road, thanks to a family’s work ethic and aspirational spirit, Zesto Atlanta stands as a worthy representative of the all-American drive-in food destination, as well as a cultural touchstone near and dear to the hearts, if not the digestive tracts, of the city’s inhabitants.

!!More than a place to eat
In researching this story, writer Doug DeLoach solicited memories of Zesto adventures from Atlanta stalwarts and friends. A selection of these recollections, mostly unedited follow. Others may be found on creativeloafing.com.

Patricia Doyle O’Connor
The day of my divorce, I was on my way home from signing papers and pretty broken. I walked into the Ponce (Zesto) location and had lunch. Looking up from my booth, I noticed a man running toward the front door, which faced the old Sears building, two Atlanta cops on his heels. When he hit the door, he jumped up on the first table to try to avoid the police who were getting their tear-gas canisters out. They chased him as he jumped from table to table in full run. I sorta ducked and covered my fries from the dirt flying. I couldn’t decide who to trip — them or him — so I just sheltered my food. When I did finally look up, nobody was left in the store, not a cook or waiter or customer — just me and a huge cloud of tear gas, which I didn’t feel until much later, in the shower for some reason. I continued eating alone.

Faylynn Owen
I was a regular at the Little Five Points location for a sweet tea after big nights. I loved their tea. I stumbled down there one morning/afternoon and got my tea. I made it out the door only to realize my magic elixir tasted like bad socks. I returned to the good-natured laughing of the staff, who knew exactly what happened. Someone new had made the tea. They then offered me my second choice, a cherry coke. Kudos to the staff.

Dave Chamberlain
One hot July day in 1979, my brother Tim and I were tooling along in his red VW bug on North Highland Avenue when we stopped at the red light at Ponce de Leon Avenue. The car in front of us had a sunroof, and we watched the driver make a valiant attempt to lob a bag through it and into a roadside garbage can. The shot, of course, was off by several feet and the bag landed rather close to our car. Feeling some ire at witnessing brazen littering, I leapt from the car to grab it and put it into the garbage receptacle when I noticed the telltale classic red-striped Zesto packaging. My brother hollered for me to just dump the damn bag and get the hell back in the car. I did, bag in hand. Peering inside, I exclaimed, “It’s a Zesto bag with a Chubby Decker! Uneaten!” Now, since Zesto makes the very finest of hangover recovery foods, and since the Chubby Decker is the apex hamburger invention on the planet, I was loathe to toss the bag and its tempting contents. I gazed adoringly at the burger as my brother intoned, “Dave, don’t do it.” Brushing off his plea, I devoured that perfect burger between Virginia Highlands and Midtown without concern for microbial attack. While my brother threatened to race to Grady Hospital as a precautionary measure, I enjoyed every bite. Such is the stuff of daft youth and my high regard for Zesto cuisine. Would I do it again? Never, ever, ever!

Katy Graves
I ran into Hosea Williams in the Zesto on Ponce way back in the day. He was in his trademark overalls, and he was really nice.

Gail Harris
I introduced myself to Hosea Williams at the Zesto on Moreland, had gone to high school with his son Andre.

Kahle Davis
I was walking to the Zesto in Little Five Points to get some soft-serve when I noticed a woman pooping on one of the walls. I turned around and went back to work.

Bill Nittler
Our new house had a very similar address to the Zesto on Ponce: same number, different Ponce (Ave. vs. Mnr.), and at one point UPS started delivering us all kinds of restaurant stuff. Coffee filters, straws, mop heads, adding-machine tape, etc. UPS eventually came and picked it all up after nagging from us and the restaurant. Sadder, when Cook Out moved in, they proceeded to put our address on their website, so we got a whole bunch more stuff, which they never came to get.

Ginger Shyrock
There was a certain female group in the ’80s whose initiation was to drink a bottle of Jägermeister and piss in the Little Five Points Zesto parking lot. They called themselves the Hellcats and, while the initiation was mostly a joke, a couple of them actually did it. I was an honorary member, as I didn’t do such things.

Spencer L. Kirkpatrick
Zesto at Confederate and Moreland avenues (East Atlanta location): I had a heated exchange with (the) cooks regarding long hair — lots of shit talk but no blows — a true standoff. Would have been 1966.

Mark Michaelson
Back in the mid-’60s, we would meet at the Zesto in Buckhead and get in our hopped-up cars and race down Roswell Road all the way to the river with radios loud. Lucky we’re all still standing. One of the cars was a ’62 Vette with a fuel-injected 327. Another one was one of my folks’ rides after we’d “fixed it up.”

Janet Smith and her sister, Priscilla Smith
Janet: Buying fried chicken livers back in the day.
Priscilla: Back in a month or so ago.
Janet: I had no idea they were still on the menu.
Priscilla: I always coveted the faded Brown Crown sign behind the counter in Little 5. Been gone a few years. In 1961 (?), all the kids on Clairmont Circle were excited because they were going to open one at North Decatur, across the street from the Colonial Store, and they had FOOT-LONG HOT DOGS!

Amy Linton
I was at the Little Five Points Zesto with my high school/college boyfriend. He was a musician/songwriter and when people would panhandle, he would see if he could get a song out of them instead of giving them any money. Occasionally, it put me in sketchy situations. One guy approached us in Zesto and started talking him up and then told me to put my hand out. My boyfriend insisted I do it and, not wanting to anger anyone, I put it out, palm up. “Not like you takin’ from me!” he yelled. I turned my hand over, and he tried to get my grandmother’s wedding band, which I always wore, off my hand. Hurt my hand and my boyfriend didn’t even try to defend me. I rarely go there now, but always think of that when I do!

Kent Worley
(The East Atlanta location) was my Zesto. We would stop there for pregame fulfillment before going to the Starlight Drive-In. I was a big fan of the foot-long chili slaw dog. The trick was getting a Nut Brown Crown home for my wife’s late-night munchies before it melted.

Steve Gorman
A large Fellini’s Special (Little Five Points) in 1987 was worth about six Zesto milkshakes, if memory serves. Not that we lowly employees would have bartered pizzas for shakes or anything.

Guy Goodman
Piedmont Road location at Lindbergh Drive, eight years old, throwing my paper route on a bicycle. Would get a Chubby Decker Basket for 50 cents. That came with fries, slaw, and a drink. My mum always wondered why I wasn’t hungry when I got home for dinner. Still friends with Crystal Sloan. Her dad owned all the Zestos in Atlanta: Big John Livaditis.

Mark Greenberg
Inman/Candler Park/Little Five Points: watching the sunset behind downtown through the picture window with my son Emmett, now 13. He’d get a kids’ cup and I’d get a chocolate-covered cone. Definitely, those were some great, quiet, midweek rituals! Let’s go, kiddo!

John Kelly
I melted down a ceiling tile with a mighty mole in 1992 and it stayed there all brown and bubbly until they sold out to the burger joint. -CL-"
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  string(17279) "Back in the early 1970s, Jimbo Livaditis played youth baseball at Bagley Park (since renamed Frankie Allen Park) in the Garden Hills neighborhood in Buckhead. With some frequency, on the way home after a game or practice, the parents of Livaditis and his preteen teammates would take their Little Leaguers to the nearby Zesto for an ice cream treat or milkshake.

Cooling down in the summer, sipping chocolaty goodness through a straw or licking melted vanilla cream from the runnels of a crunchy sugar cone, a boy could easily slip into a daydream about hitting a grand slam to win the World Series or building a skyscraper in downtown Atlanta next to that new hotel with the blue-domed flying saucer on top. In Jimbo’s case, the idle musing took a different tack.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘One day, I hope this is mine,’” Livaditis says in a phone interview with CL. The young baseballer wearing the syrup-stained jersey had good reason to consider such an unusual prospect. His father, John Livaditis, owned the joint.

As a matter of fact, at the time, “Big John” Livaditis, a hard-working, entrepreneurial, first-generation son of Greek immigrants, owned multiple Zestos in Atlanta, including the city’s first — a walk-up, ice-cream-only stand — which opened in 1949. Later that same year, just a few years out of the Army, where he competed as a Golden Gloves boxer, Livaditis accepted a proposal from a tree grower and started selling Christmas trees in the parking lot on Peachtree Street at Brookwood Station. Thus was established Big John’s Christmas Trees, which helped fill the revenue gap during the holiday season when the demand for cold desserts tapered off.

“Dad always put in an incredible amount of hours,” Livaditis recalls. “A lot of times, we went to visit him after the game because he wasn’t able to attend, since he was working.”

By the mid-1980s, Big John was lording over a fiefdom of 10 metro Atlanta Zestos. In 1988, he retired, bequeathing the restaurant and Christmas tree businesses to sons Lee and (younger by eight years) Jimbo. Seven years later, Big John passed away. For the next three decades, the Livaditis brothers carried on, riding demographic tides and dallying with commercial developments by closing some Zestos, opening new stores and refurbishing others while tweaking the menu to accommodate the public’s trending palate.

In 2019, Zesto Atlanta President and CEO Jimbo Livaditis is presiding over a year-long celebration of a 70-year-old family enterprise. His wife, Leigh Ann, serves as company vice president and director of marketing and communications. The couple’s children work in one capacity or another for Big John’s Christmas Trees. Eldest son John is also involved with Zesto operations while finishing up college at Kennesaw State University. Lucas attends the University of South Carolina, and Anastasia is a senior at North Atlanta High School. Sadly, Lee is not around to raise a celebratory Nut Brown Crown with the family. Three years ago, he succumbed to lung cancer at age 66.

“It was a sudden, traumatizing and multilayered loss,” says Livaditis. “I no longer have my older brother’s advice to lean on or daily presence to cherish. I’ve had a crash course in wearing many more hats than I was used to. I’m still getting on my feet in some areas.”

Currently, the Livaditises operate four metro area Zestos: Buckhead, East Atlanta, Forest Park and Little Five Points (a fifth location, an independent franchise in Tyrone, is owned by a sister-in-law). Big John’s Christmas Trees, which peaked around the turn of the millennia at 22 locations, now stands at nine lots.

The family’s abiding commitment to the cause has been shared by a number of Zesto employees. Delores Slaughter, general manager of the Buckhead Zesto, has been with the company 41 years. East Atlanta GM Jimmy Koulouris has been clocking in for 45 years and counting. Two recently retired store managers, Pete Giannakopoulos and his brother Tommy, were Greek immigrants originally sponsored by Big John in the 1950s; their sister-in-law, Theoni Giannakopoulos, works at the Little Five Points Zesto.

“Our long-term employees know their customers and the customers know them, which adds to the authenticity of the Zesto experience,” says Leigh Ann. “You can’t easily create relationships and experiences like that in a branded business model.”

The original Zesto venture was spawned in 1945 by Rockford, Illinois-based Taylor Freezer Corporation, which manufactured a soft-serve ice cream machine called the Zest-O-Mat. Conceived as a competitor of Dairy Queen, the first Zesto stores were only equipped to serve ice cream. By the time Big John Livaditis opened his franchise in Atlanta, Zestos could be found in 46 states.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, America’s head-over-heels, pedal-to-the-metal love affair with automobiles, drive-ins, and fast food fueled the fortunes of Zesto and its rivals, which competed for customers by expanding their sweet and cool dessert menus with warm, savory fare. In 1959, Zesto introduced a double-patty hamburger originally named “Fat Boy,” which was renamed two years later when Shoney’s objected to the resemblance to the company’s signature “Big Boy” sandwich. Consequently, Big John held a contest, which was won by a Georgia Tech student who submitted Chubby Decker, with a nod to the contemporaneous rock ‘n’ roll star, as the two-tiered burger’s new moniker.

Then came the foot-long hot dog, which, based on innumerable unscientific surveys, is an incomplete construction without chili, if not slaw. “In the ’60s, my father had a Greek buddy in Pennsylvania named Gus,” says Livaditis. “He ran a chain called Coney Island, which offered a special chili dog. His success inspired my dad to perfect the chili recipe we still use today.”

Hand-cut onion rings, French fries, and fried chicken became staple menu items. Over the years, at various times and locations, Zesto customers could order a pizza burger, roast beef sandwich, grilled and toasted cheese sandwiches, and pork tenderloin. “There’s even a fish dog — two fish sticks on a foot-long bun with coleslaw and tartar sauce — which is on the ‘secret menu,’” Livaditis confides.

Recently, the influx of Hispanic and Latino residents across metro Atlanta neighborhoods spurred the addition of burritos, tacos, quesadillas, and nachos to the menu at several Zesto locations. For 2019, a Spicy 70th Steakburger with bacon and Palmetto Cheese was introduced. Currently, the kitchen lab is putting the final tweaks on a mango milkshake. “It’s been a labor of love,” Livaditis says. “We want to get it just right using nothing artificial, just pure ingredients, fresh mangos with the right color, texture, and bite.”

Then as now, in acknowledgement of the restaurant’s Southern roots, fried livers and gizzards can be ordered at select Zesto locations. “I’ve been known to stop in and sample the livers and gizzards to make sure they’re up to our standards,” Livaditis says, with a chuckle.

Celebrity sightings and associations are features of the Zesto Atlanta legacy. Pro basketball Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, who led the New York Knicks to two National Basketball Association championships (1970 and ’73), played high school sports at Atlanta’s David Tobias Howard High School. In a 2018 biography produced by MSG Networks, Frazier visits the Zesto on Ponce de Leon (now a Cook Out) where he did a stint as a “curb boy” when the restaurant only offered walk-up or dine-in-your-car service. During the segment Frazier reminisces with his former supervisors, the Giannakopoulos brothers.

Then there was the time (in 1979) a WSB-TV news reporter corralled Colonel Sanders at the defunct Zesto at Pershing Point after the goateed ambassador of Kentucky Fried Chicken was spotted enjoying one of his guilty pleasures, a Zesto milkshake.

More recently, people are still laughing at the “kids meal” scene from the first season (2016) of Donald Glover’s television series “Atlanta,” which was filmed at the East Atlanta Zesto. Cee Lo Green, Lil Yachty, and Shawn Reis (“Flash Gordon,” “Smallville”) have been spotted chilling at Zesto. One day, Livaditis and his three children were eating lunch at the Piedmont Road Zesto when they looked over and discovered they were dining with Carolina Panthers star quarterback Cam Newton (presumably during the off-season).

So, what’s the secret to Zesto's enduring allure and success?

“It’s hard to pin down, but part of it is a combination of nostalgia and relevance,” says Leigh Ann. “If you can maintain that nostalgic ‘Gee, this place is cool!’ factor, that’s great. But you also have to stay relevant by tapping into social media, updating the menu, and doing promotions that attract younger people.”

Livaditis adds: “We were laughing the other night. When Dad started Zesto, he wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to create something 1950s-ish because it’s trendy.’ He was just working with what was available. There is something compelling about the design of the drive-in and the feeling it generates, which has been glamorized by movies. But there is also an element of genuine authenticity, which you can’t force; it’s either present or it’s not.”

Seventy years down the road, thanks to a family’s work ethic and aspirational spirit, Zesto Atlanta stands as a worthy representative of the all-American drive-in food destination, as well as a cultural touchstone near and dear to the hearts, if not the digestive tracts, of the city’s inhabitants.

!!More than a place to eat
In researching this story, writer Doug DeLoach solicited memories of Zesto adventures from Atlanta stalwarts and friends. A selection of these recollections, mostly unedited follow. Others may be found on creativeloafing.com.

__Patricia Doyle O’Connor__
The day of my divorce, I was on my way home from signing papers and pretty broken. I walked into the Ponce (Zesto) location and had lunch. Looking up from my booth, I noticed a man running toward the front door, which faced the old Sears building, two Atlanta cops on his heels. When he hit the door, he jumped up on the first table to try to avoid the police who were getting their tear-gas canisters out. They chased him as he jumped from table to table in full run. I sorta ducked and covered my fries from the dirt flying. I couldn’t decide who to trip — them or him — so I just sheltered my food. When I did finally look up, nobody was left in the store, not a cook or waiter or customer — just me and a huge cloud of tear gas, which I didn’t feel until much later, in the shower for some reason. I continued eating alone.

__Faylynn Owen__
I was a regular at the Little Five Points location for a sweet tea after big nights. I loved their tea. I stumbled down there one morning/afternoon and got my tea. I made it out the door only to realize my magic elixir tasted like bad socks. I returned to the good-natured laughing of the staff, who knew exactly what happened. Someone new had made the tea. They then offered me my second choice, a cherry coke. Kudos to the staff.

__Dave Chamberlain__
One hot July day in 1979, my brother Tim and I were tooling along in his red VW bug on North Highland Avenue when we stopped at the red light at Ponce de Leon Avenue. The car in front of us had a sunroof, and we watched the driver make a valiant attempt to lob a bag through it and into a roadside garbage can. The shot, of course, was off by several feet and the bag landed rather close to our car. Feeling some ire at witnessing brazen littering, I leapt from the car to grab it and put it into the garbage receptacle when I noticed the telltale classic red-striped Zesto packaging. My brother hollered for me to just dump the damn bag and get the hell back in the car. I did, bag in hand. Peering inside, I exclaimed, “It’s a Zesto bag with a Chubby Decker! Uneaten!” Now, since Zesto makes the very finest of hangover recovery foods, and since the Chubby Decker is the apex hamburger invention on the planet, I was loathe to toss the bag and its tempting contents. I gazed adoringly at the burger as my brother intoned, “Dave, don’t do it.” Brushing off his plea, I devoured that perfect burger between Virginia Highlands and Midtown without concern for microbial attack. While my brother threatened to race to Grady Hospital as a precautionary measure, I enjoyed every bite. Such is the stuff of daft youth and my high regard for Zesto cuisine. Would I do it again? Never, ever, ever!

__Katy Graves__
I ran into Hosea Williams in the Zesto on Ponce way back in the day. He was in his trademark overalls, and he was really nice.

__Gail Harris__
I introduced myself to Hosea Williams at the Zesto on Moreland, had gone to high school with his son Andre.

__Kahle Davis__
I was walking to the Zesto in Little Five Points to get some soft-serve when I noticed a woman pooping on one of the walls. I turned around and went back to work.

__Bill Nittler__
Our new house had a very similar address to the Zesto on Ponce: same number, different Ponce (Ave. vs. Mnr.), and at one point UPS started delivering us all kinds of restaurant stuff. Coffee filters, straws, mop heads, adding-machine tape, etc. UPS eventually came and picked it all up after nagging from us and the restaurant. Sadder, when Cook Out moved in, they proceeded to put our address on their website, so we got a whole bunch more stuff, which they never came to get.

__Ginger Shyrock__
There was a certain female group in the ’80s whose initiation was to drink a bottle of Jägermeister and piss in the Little Five Points Zesto parking lot. They called themselves the Hellcats and, while the initiation was mostly a joke, a couple of them actually did it. I was an honorary member, as I didn’t do such things.

__Spencer L. Kirkpatrick__
Zesto at Confederate and Moreland avenues (East Atlanta location): I had a heated exchange with (the) cooks regarding long hair — lots of shit talk but no blows — a true standoff. Would have been 1966.

__Mark Michaelson__
Back in the mid-’60s, we would meet at the Zesto in Buckhead and get in our hopped-up cars and race down Roswell Road all the way to the river with radios loud. Lucky we’re all still standing. One of the cars was a ’62 Vette with a fuel-injected 327. Another one was one of my folks’ rides after we’d “fixed it up.”

__Janet Smith and her sister, Priscilla Smith__
Janet: Buying fried chicken livers back in the day.
Priscilla: Back in a month or so ago.
Janet: I had no idea they were still on the menu.
Priscilla: I always coveted the faded Brown Crown sign behind the counter in Little 5. Been gone a few years. In 1961 (?), all the kids on Clairmont Circle were excited because they were going to open one at North Decatur, across the street from the Colonial Store, and they had FOOT-LONG HOT DOGS!

__Amy Linton__
I was at the Little Five Points Zesto with my high school/college boyfriend. He was a musician/songwriter and when people would panhandle, he would see if he could get a song out of them instead of giving them any money. Occasionally, it put me in sketchy situations. One guy approached us in Zesto and started talking him up and then told me to put my hand out. My boyfriend insisted I do it and, not wanting to anger anyone, I put it out, palm up. “Not like you takin’ from me!” he yelled. I turned my hand over, and he tried to get my grandmother’s wedding band, which I always wore, off my hand. Hurt my hand and my boyfriend didn’t even try to defend me. I rarely go there now, but always think of that when I do!

__Kent Worley__
(The East Atlanta location) was my Zesto. We would stop there for pregame fulfillment before going to the Starlight Drive-In. I was a big fan of the foot-long chili slaw dog. The trick was getting a Nut Brown Crown home for my wife’s late-night munchies before it melted.

__Steve Gorman__
A large Fellini’s Special (Little Five Points) in 1987 was worth about six Zesto milkshakes, if memory serves. Not that we lowly employees would have bartered pizzas for shakes or anything.

__Guy Goodman__
Piedmont Road location at Lindbergh Drive, eight years old, throwing my paper route on a bicycle. Would get a Chubby Decker Basket for 50 cents. That came with fries, slaw, and a drink. My mum always wondered why I wasn’t hungry when I got home for dinner. Still friends with Crystal Sloan. Her dad owned all the Zestos in Atlanta: Big John Livaditis.

__Mark Greenberg__
Inman/Candler Park/Little Five Points: watching the sunset behind downtown through the picture window with my son Emmett, now 13. He’d get a kids’ cup and I’d get a chocolate-covered cone. Definitely, those were some great, quiet, midweek rituals! Let’s go, kiddo!

__John Kelly__
I melted down a ceiling tile with a mighty mole in 1992 and it stayed there all brown and bubbly until they sold out to the burger joint. -CL-"
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  string(18181) " Photo 5 Zesto Piedmont Ca 1962 Credit Zesto Atlanta Copy Vers 3  2019-09-03T19:56:46+00:00 Photo_5_Zesto_Piedmont_ca_1962_credit_Zesto_Atlanta_copy_vers_3.jpg    I worked at the Sears on Ponce De Leon in the '70s.........The Zesto on Ponce was a regular lunch spot for me......loved it The Greek Salad—I used to get it at the Ponce location, all the time! 
Fries and banana milkshakes, always, both at the Piedmont Zesto’s and the Ponce Zesto’s! atlanta little 5 points creative loafing zesto\'s Zesto Atlanta’s family affair marks a milestone of sweet and savory service Photo 5 Zesto Piedmont Ca 1962 Credit Zesto Atlanta Copy Vers 3   2019-09-03T19:17:28+00:00  70 and Counting chad.radford Chad Radford Doug DeLoach  2019-09-03T19:17:28+00:00 Back in the early 1970s, Jimbo Livaditis played youth baseball at Bagley Park (since renamed Frankie Allen Park) in the Garden Hills neighborhood in Buckhead. With some frequency, on the way home after a game or practice, the parents of Livaditis and his preteen teammates would take their Little Leaguers to the nearby Zesto for an ice cream treat or milkshake.

Cooling down in the summer, sipping chocolaty goodness through a straw or licking melted vanilla cream from the runnels of a crunchy sugar cone, a boy could easily slip into a daydream about hitting a grand slam to win the World Series or building a skyscraper in downtown Atlanta next to that new hotel with the blue-domed flying saucer on top. In Jimbo’s case, the idle musing took a different tack.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘One day, I hope this is mine,’” Livaditis says in a phone interview with CL. The young baseballer wearing the syrup-stained jersey had good reason to consider such an unusual prospect. His father, John Livaditis, owned the joint.

As a matter of fact, at the time, “Big John” Livaditis, a hard-working, entrepreneurial, first-generation son of Greek immigrants, owned multiple Zestos in Atlanta, including the city’s first — a walk-up, ice-cream-only stand — which opened in 1949. Later that same year, just a few years out of the Army, where he competed as a Golden Gloves boxer, Livaditis accepted a proposal from a tree grower and started selling Christmas trees in the parking lot on Peachtree Street at Brookwood Station. Thus was established Big John’s Christmas Trees, which helped fill the revenue gap during the holiday season when the demand for cold desserts tapered off.

“Dad always put in an incredible amount of hours,” Livaditis recalls. “A lot of times, we went to visit him after the game because he wasn’t able to attend, since he was working.”

By the mid-1980s, Big John was lording over a fiefdom of 10 metro Atlanta Zestos. In 1988, he retired, bequeathing the restaurant and Christmas tree businesses to sons Lee and (younger by eight years) Jimbo. Seven years later, Big John passed away. For the next three decades, the Livaditis brothers carried on, riding demographic tides and dallying with commercial developments by closing some Zestos, opening new stores and refurbishing others while tweaking the menu to accommodate the public’s trending palate.

In 2019, Zesto Atlanta President and CEO Jimbo Livaditis is presiding over a year-long celebration of a 70-year-old family enterprise. His wife, Leigh Ann, serves as company vice president and director of marketing and communications. The couple’s children work in one capacity or another for Big John’s Christmas Trees. Eldest son John is also involved with Zesto operations while finishing up college at Kennesaw State University. Lucas attends the University of South Carolina, and Anastasia is a senior at North Atlanta High School. Sadly, Lee is not around to raise a celebratory Nut Brown Crown with the family. Three years ago, he succumbed to lung cancer at age 66.

“It was a sudden, traumatizing and multilayered loss,” says Livaditis. “I no longer have my older brother’s advice to lean on or daily presence to cherish. I’ve had a crash course in wearing many more hats than I was used to. I’m still getting on my feet in some areas.”

Currently, the Livaditises operate four metro area Zestos: Buckhead, East Atlanta, Forest Park and Little Five Points (a fifth location, an independent franchise in Tyrone, is owned by a sister-in-law). Big John’s Christmas Trees, which peaked around the turn of the millennia at 22 locations, now stands at nine lots.

The family’s abiding commitment to the cause has been shared by a number of Zesto employees. Delores Slaughter, general manager of the Buckhead Zesto, has been with the company 41 years. East Atlanta GM Jimmy Koulouris has been clocking in for 45 years and counting. Two recently retired store managers, Pete Giannakopoulos and his brother Tommy, were Greek immigrants originally sponsored by Big John in the 1950s; their sister-in-law, Theoni Giannakopoulos, works at the Little Five Points Zesto.

“Our long-term employees know their customers and the customers know them, which adds to the authenticity of the Zesto experience,” says Leigh Ann. “You can’t easily create relationships and experiences like that in a branded business model.”

The original Zesto venture was spawned in 1945 by Rockford, Illinois-based Taylor Freezer Corporation, which manufactured a soft-serve ice cream machine called the Zest-O-Mat. Conceived as a competitor of Dairy Queen, the first Zesto stores were only equipped to serve ice cream. By the time Big John Livaditis opened his franchise in Atlanta, Zestos could be found in 46 states.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, America’s head-over-heels, pedal-to-the-metal love affair with automobiles, drive-ins, and fast food fueled the fortunes of Zesto and its rivals, which competed for customers by expanding their sweet and cool dessert menus with warm, savory fare. In 1959, Zesto introduced a double-patty hamburger originally named “Fat Boy,” which was renamed two years later when Shoney’s objected to the resemblance to the company’s signature “Big Boy” sandwich. Consequently, Big John held a contest, which was won by a Georgia Tech student who submitted Chubby Decker, with a nod to the contemporaneous rock ‘n’ roll star, as the two-tiered burger’s new moniker.

Then came the foot-long hot dog, which, based on innumerable unscientific surveys, is an incomplete construction without chili, if not slaw. “In the ’60s, my father had a Greek buddy in Pennsylvania named Gus,” says Livaditis. “He ran a chain called Coney Island, which offered a special chili dog. His success inspired my dad to perfect the chili recipe we still use today.”

Hand-cut onion rings, French fries, and fried chicken became staple menu items. Over the years, at various times and locations, Zesto customers could order a pizza burger, roast beef sandwich, grilled and toasted cheese sandwiches, and pork tenderloin. “There’s even a fish dog — two fish sticks on a foot-long bun with coleslaw and tartar sauce — which is on the ‘secret menu,’” Livaditis confides.

Recently, the influx of Hispanic and Latino residents across metro Atlanta neighborhoods spurred the addition of burritos, tacos, quesadillas, and nachos to the menu at several Zesto locations. For 2019, a Spicy 70th Steakburger with bacon and Palmetto Cheese was introduced. Currently, the kitchen lab is putting the final tweaks on a mango milkshake. “It’s been a labor of love,” Livaditis says. “We want to get it just right using nothing artificial, just pure ingredients, fresh mangos with the right color, texture, and bite.”

Then as now, in acknowledgement of the restaurant’s Southern roots, fried livers and gizzards can be ordered at select Zesto locations. “I’ve been known to stop in and sample the livers and gizzards to make sure they’re up to our standards,” Livaditis says, with a chuckle.

Celebrity sightings and associations are features of the Zesto Atlanta legacy. Pro basketball Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, who led the New York Knicks to two National Basketball Association championships (1970 and ’73), played high school sports at Atlanta’s David Tobias Howard High School. In a 2018 biography produced by MSG Networks, Frazier visits the Zesto on Ponce de Leon (now a Cook Out) where he did a stint as a “curb boy” when the restaurant only offered walk-up or dine-in-your-car service. During the segment Frazier reminisces with his former supervisors, the Giannakopoulos brothers.

Then there was the time (in 1979) a WSB-TV news reporter corralled Colonel Sanders at the defunct Zesto at Pershing Point after the goateed ambassador of Kentucky Fried Chicken was spotted enjoying one of his guilty pleasures, a Zesto milkshake.

More recently, people are still laughing at the “kids meal” scene from the first season (2016) of Donald Glover’s television series “Atlanta,” which was filmed at the East Atlanta Zesto. Cee Lo Green, Lil Yachty, and Shawn Reis (“Flash Gordon,” “Smallville”) have been spotted chilling at Zesto. One day, Livaditis and his three children were eating lunch at the Piedmont Road Zesto when they looked over and discovered they were dining with Carolina Panthers star quarterback Cam Newton (presumably during the off-season).

So, what’s the secret to Zesto's enduring allure and success?

“It’s hard to pin down, but part of it is a combination of nostalgia and relevance,” says Leigh Ann. “If you can maintain that nostalgic ‘Gee, this place is cool!’ factor, that’s great. But you also have to stay relevant by tapping into social media, updating the menu, and doing promotions that attract younger people.”

Livaditis adds: “We were laughing the other night. When Dad started Zesto, he wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to create something 1950s-ish because it’s trendy.’ He was just working with what was available. There is something compelling about the design of the drive-in and the feeling it generates, which has been glamorized by movies. But there is also an element of genuine authenticity, which you can’t force; it’s either present or it’s not.”

Seventy years down the road, thanks to a family’s work ethic and aspirational spirit, Zesto Atlanta stands as a worthy representative of the all-American drive-in food destination, as well as a cultural touchstone near and dear to the hearts, if not the digestive tracts, of the city’s inhabitants.

!!More than a place to eat
In researching this story, writer Doug DeLoach solicited memories of Zesto adventures from Atlanta stalwarts and friends. A selection of these recollections, mostly unedited follow. Others may be found on creativeloafing.com.

Patricia Doyle O’Connor
The day of my divorce, I was on my way home from signing papers and pretty broken. I walked into the Ponce (Zesto) location and had lunch. Looking up from my booth, I noticed a man running toward the front door, which faced the old Sears building, two Atlanta cops on his heels. When he hit the door, he jumped up on the first table to try to avoid the police who were getting their tear-gas canisters out. They chased him as he jumped from table to table in full run. I sorta ducked and covered my fries from the dirt flying. I couldn’t decide who to trip — them or him — so I just sheltered my food. When I did finally look up, nobody was left in the store, not a cook or waiter or customer — just me and a huge cloud of tear gas, which I didn’t feel until much later, in the shower for some reason. I continued eating alone.

Faylynn Owen
I was a regular at the Little Five Points location for a sweet tea after big nights. I loved their tea. I stumbled down there one morning/afternoon and got my tea. I made it out the door only to realize my magic elixir tasted like bad socks. I returned to the good-natured laughing of the staff, who knew exactly what happened. Someone new had made the tea. They then offered me my second choice, a cherry coke. Kudos to the staff.

Dave Chamberlain
One hot July day in 1979, my brother Tim and I were tooling along in his red VW bug on North Highland Avenue when we stopped at the red light at Ponce de Leon Avenue. The car in front of us had a sunroof, and we watched the driver make a valiant attempt to lob a bag through it and into a roadside garbage can. The shot, of course, was off by several feet and the bag landed rather close to our car. Feeling some ire at witnessing brazen littering, I leapt from the car to grab it and put it into the garbage receptacle when I noticed the telltale classic red-striped Zesto packaging. My brother hollered for me to just dump the damn bag and get the hell back in the car. I did, bag in hand. Peering inside, I exclaimed, “It’s a Zesto bag with a Chubby Decker! Uneaten!” Now, since Zesto makes the very finest of hangover recovery foods, and since the Chubby Decker is the apex hamburger invention on the planet, I was loathe to toss the bag and its tempting contents. I gazed adoringly at the burger as my brother intoned, “Dave, don’t do it.” Brushing off his plea, I devoured that perfect burger between Virginia Highlands and Midtown without concern for microbial attack. While my brother threatened to race to Grady Hospital as a precautionary measure, I enjoyed every bite. Such is the stuff of daft youth and my high regard for Zesto cuisine. Would I do it again? Never, ever, ever!

Katy Graves
I ran into Hosea Williams in the Zesto on Ponce way back in the day. He was in his trademark overalls, and he was really nice.

Gail Harris
I introduced myself to Hosea Williams at the Zesto on Moreland, had gone to high school with his son Andre.

Kahle Davis
I was walking to the Zesto in Little Five Points to get some soft-serve when I noticed a woman pooping on one of the walls. I turned around and went back to work.

Bill Nittler
Our new house had a very similar address to the Zesto on Ponce: same number, different Ponce (Ave. vs. Mnr.), and at one point UPS started delivering us all kinds of restaurant stuff. Coffee filters, straws, mop heads, adding-machine tape, etc. UPS eventually came and picked it all up after nagging from us and the restaurant. Sadder, when Cook Out moved in, they proceeded to put our address on their website, so we got a whole bunch more stuff, which they never came to get.

Ginger Shyrock
There was a certain female group in the ’80s whose initiation was to drink a bottle of Jägermeister and piss in the Little Five Points Zesto parking lot. They called themselves the Hellcats and, while the initiation was mostly a joke, a couple of them actually did it. I was an honorary member, as I didn’t do such things.

Spencer L. Kirkpatrick
Zesto at Confederate and Moreland avenues (East Atlanta location): I had a heated exchange with (the) cooks regarding long hair — lots of shit talk but no blows — a true standoff. Would have been 1966.

Mark Michaelson
Back in the mid-’60s, we would meet at the Zesto in Buckhead and get in our hopped-up cars and race down Roswell Road all the way to the river with radios loud. Lucky we’re all still standing. One of the cars was a ’62 Vette with a fuel-injected 327. Another one was one of my folks’ rides after we’d “fixed it up.”

Janet Smith and her sister, Priscilla Smith
Janet: Buying fried chicken livers back in the day.
Priscilla: Back in a month or so ago.
Janet: I had no idea they were still on the menu.
Priscilla: I always coveted the faded Brown Crown sign behind the counter in Little 5. Been gone a few years. In 1961 (?), all the kids on Clairmont Circle were excited because they were going to open one at North Decatur, across the street from the Colonial Store, and they had FOOT-LONG HOT DOGS!

Amy Linton
I was at the Little Five Points Zesto with my high school/college boyfriend. He was a musician/songwriter and when people would panhandle, he would see if he could get a song out of them instead of giving them any money. Occasionally, it put me in sketchy situations. One guy approached us in Zesto and started talking him up and then told me to put my hand out. My boyfriend insisted I do it and, not wanting to anger anyone, I put it out, palm up. “Not like you takin’ from me!” he yelled. I turned my hand over, and he tried to get my grandmother’s wedding band, which I always wore, off my hand. Hurt my hand and my boyfriend didn’t even try to defend me. I rarely go there now, but always think of that when I do!

Kent Worley
(The East Atlanta location) was my Zesto. We would stop there for pregame fulfillment before going to the Starlight Drive-In. I was a big fan of the foot-long chili slaw dog. The trick was getting a Nut Brown Crown home for my wife’s late-night munchies before it melted.

Steve Gorman
A large Fellini’s Special (Little Five Points) in 1987 was worth about six Zesto milkshakes, if memory serves. Not that we lowly employees would have bartered pizzas for shakes or anything.

Guy Goodman
Piedmont Road location at Lindbergh Drive, eight years old, throwing my paper route on a bicycle. Would get a Chubby Decker Basket for 50 cents. That came with fries, slaw, and a drink. My mum always wondered why I wasn’t hungry when I got home for dinner. Still friends with Crystal Sloan. Her dad owned all the Zestos in Atlanta: Big John Livaditis.

Mark Greenberg
Inman/Candler Park/Little Five Points: watching the sunset behind downtown through the picture window with my son Emmett, now 13. He’d get a kids’ cup and I’d get a chocolate-covered cone. Definitely, those were some great, quiet, midweek rituals! Let’s go, kiddo!

John Kelly
I melted down a ceiling tile with a mighty mole in 1992 and it stayed there all brown and bubbly until they sold out to the burger joint. -CL-    Zesto Atlanta Zesto parking lot at 2439 Piedmont Road (ca. 1962) prior to its relocation down the street.  0,0,15    Zesto's Atlanta "Little 5 Points" "Creative Loafing"                        70 and Counting "
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  string(6222) "Merely a teenager when he signed up with the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, Tom Houck has been committed to the cause ever since. Now 72, the raspy-voiced activist runs weekly bus tours of Atlanta’s historic civil rights spots, encompassing buildings, schools, churches, statues, neighborhoods, and other significant places and participants in the South’s struggle for equal rights.

“We don’t follow any specific rules or script, except our love for Atlanta and its nonviolence in the civil rights movement, which I was very fortunate to be a part of,” Houck says from his perch at the front of the tour bus on a recent Saturday morning. 


“I got kicked out of high school for going to Selma (Alabama, in 1965, after Bloody Sunday) and never returned, and wound up working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta,” Houck recalls. The SCLC was founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 in reaction to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its aftermath, and the organization consisted mostly of local African American leaders such as Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Joseph Lowery who organized nonviolent protests against discrimination and, in doing so, made a place for themselves in this country’s history.

As we pass the old SCLC building on Auburn Avenue, Houck says, “The march from Selma to Montgomery and the March on Washington, those were all planned here; this is where the Albany, Georgia, movement was based; the Poor People’s Campaign was organized here.” The National Park Service has purchased the former SCLC headquarters and “hopefully will restore this building to the beauty it once had,” he continues.

“It took a lot of blood and sweat and tears to get the city integrated,” Houck acknowledges. “Atlanta was the headquarters of many of those civil rights leaders, that’s why you see so many streets and buildings named after them. Some became politicians — Andy Young became mayor of Atlanta; there is Congressman John Lewis; Hosea Williams was elected to several offices.”


Houck says he was arrested about 20 times while working as a “foot soldier” in the civil rights movement “and I got 17 stitches in my knee to prove it.” A tavern across the street from the SCLC became a refuge for him and his fellow freedom fighters. “You get thirsty when you’re out in the field getting your head beat in.”

In the middle of all this Houck was “bamboozled” into being a driver for Dr. King and his family. “Here I am, a white boy in 1966, I was 18, I had a lot more hair then and weighed about 150 pounds less. The civil rights movement was still going on, but I decided yes, yes, I would drive,” he recalls. “I drove for about nine months, but I still wanted to organize — I was a hell of a good organizer — so I went back to organizing over the housing demonstrations in Chicago, the Vietnam war, and ultimately, the Poor People’s Campaign for low-income whites, Hispanics, and Asians.” He describes the Poor People’s Campaign as a challenge for social and economic justice and dignity that is still going on today. “We had a president back then (Lyndon Johnson) who was not quite like the one we have today.” 

Houck acknowledges it was a great experience driving for King “because it put me in the center of Atlanta and of the King family. I met a lot of people through them who became my best friends, my travel agents, my doctor, and my dentist, Walter Young, Andy’s brother, who is still practicing.” 

The King family suffered more than just the tragedy of MLK’s assassination in 1968. Younger brother Alfred Daniel King was found dead the following year in a swimming pool “under mysterious circumstances,” according to Houck. Their mother, Alberta Williams King, was shot to death inside Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1974, while playing the organ. Yolanda King, their eldest child, died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 51.

Coretta Scott King, MLK’s late widow, started to plan the King Center on Auburn Avenue shortly after his death. “Today it’s headed by (King’s youngest child) Bernice Albertine King,” Houck notes. “It’s dedicated to nonviolent protest around the world — still a work in progress but it’s coming along. That’s what their goal is.” 

Houck’s tour, which begins at the King Center, also takes in the Vine City home where the King family lived and their children were raised. “The house was full of love and joy. We would play football out here with neighborhood kids and Dr. King would sometimes join us,” Houck remembers.

“It was here that Coretta got the news on April 4th of 1968, shortly after 6 o’clock, that Martin had been shot in Memphis,” Houck adds. “She got ready to go (to the Atlanta airport) and got picked up by Mayor Ivan Allen, and on the way there they discovered Martin had died. She led the same march in Memphis the next day that Martin was going to lead, nonviolently, then came back to Atlanta and played host to the world for the next three or four days. One of the last visitors to come here was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months later we know what happened to him.”

Another residence on the tour is the family home of John Wesley Dobbs, a pivotal figure in black suffrage who co-founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League, and who was instrumental in getting  mayor William Hartsfield to hire black police officers. Dobbs died in 1961 on the same day the Atlanta School System was desegregated, and his grandson, Maynard Jackson Jr., won election as the city’s first black mayor 12 years later. A giant sculpture to honor Dobbs was erected on Auburn Avenue during the 1996 Summer Olympics. 



Many of Atlanta’s most prominent civil rights leaders are buried at South-View Cemetery, where Houck’s bus stops towards the end of the three-hour tour. King himself was buried there temporarily before his crypt at the King Center was constructed. The tour also takes a drive down part of the Atlanta boulevard named after King, where Houck once had an apartment. “It’s an honor to have lived on a street named for my hero,” he says. -CL-
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“We don’t follow any specific rules or script, except our love for Atlanta and its nonviolence in the civil rights movement, which I was very fortunate to be a part of,” Houck says from his perch at the front of the tour bus on a recent Saturday morning. 

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“I got kicked out of high school for going to Selma (Alabama, in 1965, after Bloody Sunday) and never returned, and wound up working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta,” Houck recalls. The SCLC was founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 in reaction to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its aftermath, and the organization consisted mostly of local African American leaders such as Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Joseph Lowery who organized nonviolent protests against discrimination and, in doing so, made a place for themselves in this country’s history.

As we pass the old SCLC building on Auburn Avenue, Houck says, “The march from Selma to Montgomery and the March on Washington, those were all planned here; this is where the Albany, Georgia, movement was based; the Poor People’s Campaign was organized here.” The National Park Service has purchased the former SCLC headquarters and “hopefully will restore this building to the beauty it once had,” he continues.

“It took a lot of blood and sweat and tears to get the city integrated,” Houck acknowledges. “Atlanta was the headquarters of many of those civil rights leaders, that’s why you see so many streets and buildings named after them. Some became politicians — Andy Young became mayor of Atlanta; there is Congressman John Lewis; Hosea Williams was elected to several offices.”

{img fileId="22853" max="600px" stylebox="float: left; margin-right:25px;" desc="desc"}
Houck says he was arrested about 20 times while working as a “foot soldier” in the civil rights movement “and I got 17 stitches in my knee to prove it.” A tavern across the street from the SCLC became a refuge for him and his fellow freedom fighters. “You get thirsty when you’re out in the field getting your head beat in.”

In the middle of all this Houck was “bamboozled” into being a driver for Dr. King and his family. “Here I am, a white boy in 1966, I was 18, I had a lot more hair then and weighed about 150 pounds less. The civil rights movement was still going on, but I decided yes, yes, I would drive,” he recalls. “I drove for about nine months, but I still wanted to organize — I was a hell of a good organizer — so I went back to organizing over the housing demonstrations in Chicago, the Vietnam war, and ultimately, the Poor People’s Campaign for low-income whites, Hispanics, and Asians.” He describes the Poor People’s Campaign as a challenge for social and economic justice and dignity that is still going on today. “We had a president back then (Lyndon Johnson) who was not quite like the one we have today.” 

Houck acknowledges it was a great experience driving for King “because it put me in the center of Atlanta and of the King family. I met a lot of people through them who became my best friends, my travel agents, my doctor, and my dentist, Walter Young, Andy’s brother, who is still practicing.” 

The King family suffered more than just the tragedy of MLK’s assassination in 1968. Younger brother Alfred Daniel King was found dead the following year in a swimming pool “under mysterious circumstances,” according to Houck. Their mother, Alberta Williams King, was shot to death inside Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1974, while playing the organ. Yolanda King, their eldest child, died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 51.

Coretta Scott King, MLK’s late widow, started to plan the King Center on Auburn Avenue shortly after his death. “Today it’s headed by (King’s youngest child) Bernice Albertine King,” Houck notes. “It’s dedicated to nonviolent protest around the world — still a work in progress but it’s coming along. That’s what their goal is.” 

Houck’s tour, which begins at the King Center, also takes in the Vine City home where the King family lived and their children were raised. “The house was full of love and joy. We would play football out here with neighborhood kids and Dr. King would sometimes join us,” Houck remembers.

“It was here that Coretta got the news on April 4th of 1968, shortly after 6 o’clock, that Martin had been shot in Memphis,” Houck adds. “She got ready to go (to the Atlanta airport) and got picked up by Mayor Ivan Allen, and on the way there they discovered Martin had died. She led the same march in Memphis the next day that Martin was going to lead, nonviolently, then came back to Atlanta and played host to the world for the next three or four days. One of the last visitors to come here was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months later we know what happened to him.”

Another residence on the tour is the family home of John Wesley Dobbs, a pivotal figure in black suffrage who co-founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League, and who was instrumental in getting  mayor William Hartsfield to hire black police officers. Dobbs died in 1961 on the same day the Atlanta School System was desegregated, and his grandson, Maynard Jackson Jr., won election as the city’s first black mayor 12 years later. A giant sculpture to honor Dobbs was erected on Auburn Avenue during the 1996 Summer Olympics. 

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Many of Atlanta’s most prominent civil rights leaders are buried at South-View Cemetery, where Houck’s bus stops towards the end of the three-hour tour. King himself was buried there temporarily before his crypt at the King Center was constructed. The tour also takes a drive down part of the Atlanta boulevard named after King, where Houck once had an apartment. “It’s an honor to have lived on a street named for my hero,” he says. __''-CL-''__
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  string(7061) " Houck Filming PHOTO  2019-09-05T15:16:46+00:00 Houck_filming_PHOTO__.jpg    A great story on my friend and compadre Tom Houck. He lived those days in the 70s when Atlanta was becoming "the city too busy to hate," and he helped make it one of the most integrated and exciting cities in the country to be in at that time.  Thanks, Kevin Madigan, for the story, and Bravo Tom!  With his tour of Atlanta’s historic civil rights landmarks, Tom Houck recounts the key role of the city and its people in the movement Houck Filming PHOTO   2019-09-05T15:14:21+00:00  Eyewitness to history jim.harris Jim Harris Kevin C. Madigan  2019-09-05T15:14:21+00:00 Merely a teenager when he signed up with the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, Tom Houck has been committed to the cause ever since. Now 72, the raspy-voiced activist runs weekly bus tours of Atlanta’s historic civil rights spots, encompassing buildings, schools, churches, statues, neighborhoods, and other significant places and participants in the South’s struggle for equal rights.

“We don’t follow any specific rules or script, except our love for Atlanta and its nonviolence in the civil rights movement, which I was very fortunate to be a part of,” Houck says from his perch at the front of the tour bus on a recent Saturday morning. 


“I got kicked out of high school for going to Selma (Alabama, in 1965, after Bloody Sunday) and never returned, and wound up working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta,” Houck recalls. The SCLC was founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 in reaction to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its aftermath, and the organization consisted mostly of local African American leaders such as Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Joseph Lowery who organized nonviolent protests against discrimination and, in doing so, made a place for themselves in this country’s history.

As we pass the old SCLC building on Auburn Avenue, Houck says, “The march from Selma to Montgomery and the March on Washington, those were all planned here; this is where the Albany, Georgia, movement was based; the Poor People’s Campaign was organized here.” The National Park Service has purchased the former SCLC headquarters and “hopefully will restore this building to the beauty it once had,” he continues.

“It took a lot of blood and sweat and tears to get the city integrated,” Houck acknowledges. “Atlanta was the headquarters of many of those civil rights leaders, that’s why you see so many streets and buildings named after them. Some became politicians — Andy Young became mayor of Atlanta; there is Congressman John Lewis; Hosea Williams was elected to several offices.”


Houck says he was arrested about 20 times while working as a “foot soldier” in the civil rights movement “and I got 17 stitches in my knee to prove it.” A tavern across the street from the SCLC became a refuge for him and his fellow freedom fighters. “You get thirsty when you’re out in the field getting your head beat in.”

In the middle of all this Houck was “bamboozled” into being a driver for Dr. King and his family. “Here I am, a white boy in 1966, I was 18, I had a lot more hair then and weighed about 150 pounds less. The civil rights movement was still going on, but I decided yes, yes, I would drive,” he recalls. “I drove for about nine months, but I still wanted to organize — I was a hell of a good organizer — so I went back to organizing over the housing demonstrations in Chicago, the Vietnam war, and ultimately, the Poor People’s Campaign for low-income whites, Hispanics, and Asians.” He describes the Poor People’s Campaign as a challenge for social and economic justice and dignity that is still going on today. “We had a president back then (Lyndon Johnson) who was not quite like the one we have today.” 

Houck acknowledges it was a great experience driving for King “because it put me in the center of Atlanta and of the King family. I met a lot of people through them who became my best friends, my travel agents, my doctor, and my dentist, Walter Young, Andy’s brother, who is still practicing.” 

The King family suffered more than just the tragedy of MLK’s assassination in 1968. Younger brother Alfred Daniel King was found dead the following year in a swimming pool “under mysterious circumstances,” according to Houck. Their mother, Alberta Williams King, was shot to death inside Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1974, while playing the organ. Yolanda King, their eldest child, died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 51.

Coretta Scott King, MLK’s late widow, started to plan the King Center on Auburn Avenue shortly after his death. “Today it’s headed by (King’s youngest child) Bernice Albertine King,” Houck notes. “It’s dedicated to nonviolent protest around the world — still a work in progress but it’s coming along. That’s what their goal is.” 

Houck’s tour, which begins at the King Center, also takes in the Vine City home where the King family lived and their children were raised. “The house was full of love and joy. We would play football out here with neighborhood kids and Dr. King would sometimes join us,” Houck remembers.

“It was here that Coretta got the news on April 4th of 1968, shortly after 6 o’clock, that Martin had been shot in Memphis,” Houck adds. “She got ready to go (to the Atlanta airport) and got picked up by Mayor Ivan Allen, and on the way there they discovered Martin had died. She led the same march in Memphis the next day that Martin was going to lead, nonviolently, then came back to Atlanta and played host to the world for the next three or four days. One of the last visitors to come here was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months later we know what happened to him.”

Another residence on the tour is the family home of John Wesley Dobbs, a pivotal figure in black suffrage who co-founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League, and who was instrumental in getting  mayor William Hartsfield to hire black police officers. Dobbs died in 1961 on the same day the Atlanta School System was desegregated, and his grandson, Maynard Jackson Jr., won election as the city’s first black mayor 12 years later. A giant sculpture to honor Dobbs was erected on Auburn Avenue during the 1996 Summer Olympics. 



Many of Atlanta’s most prominent civil rights leaders are buried at South-View Cemetery, where Houck’s bus stops towards the end of the three-hour tour. King himself was buried there temporarily before his crypt at the King Center was constructed. The tour also takes a drive down part of the Atlanta boulevard named after King, where Houck once had an apartment. “It’s an honor to have lived on a street named for my hero,” he says. -CL-
     Civil Rights Tour Atlanta THE GUARDIAN OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT: Tom Houck being interviewed at the Center for Civil and Human Rights.  0,0,8                           Eyewitness to history "
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  string(16136) "Looking back on a more than 50-year career in music Glenn Phillips has a fresh perspective on life. This new outlook began with a panic attack that prompted the guitarist and founding member of Atlanta’s ’60s art rock trailblazers the Hampton Grease Band to take a deep look at his relationship with his parents, bandmates, and with himself. Now, he’s penned a memoir, titled Echoes: The Hampton Grease Band, My Life, My Music and How I Stopped Having Panic Attacks. The book is accompanied by a full-length album of all new material, titled The Dark Parade, and a live DVD capturing a 2015 live show celebrating the 40th anniversary of his first solo album, Lost At Sea. These new releases offer a snapshot of three stations during Phillips’ life, bookending a musical legacy filled with emotional peaks and valleys, coming to terms with his own psychological makeup, and finding a way out of his self-made limitations. While preparing for a September 14 release show at the Red Clay Music Foundry, Phillips discussed his journey from spending his formative years with Bruce Hampton, coping with his life-long adrenaline addiction, to finally seeing the big picture in life.

Creative Loafing: When did your idea for the book start?

Glenn Phillips: When I did the Echoes CD booklet in 1990 I wrote a history of the band. That led me to doing a history on the Grease Band while everybody was still around. I interviewed everyone, which turned into the booklet that came out with the Music To Eat CD reissue. I started writing this book back then, but it has evolved over the years. It still contains the history of those bands, but it contains a lot about my personal story as well.

As I got older, I started having panic attacks whenever I went to see a doctor, which coalesced and connected everything in my mind about my long-term relationships with the people in the Grease Band, the people in my band, my relationship with my family, and how these panic attacks started. That led to me figuring out how to stop having panic attacks. When that happened everything started connecting in my mind. Most of which was already written, but now I had a different perspective on everything. There was a line going through all of my experiences I could see clearly, that I never saw before.

You weren't aware of it until you wrote it down.

When you write stuff down you see things differently. It helped me step back and see the big picture that I couldn't see before, and that's what happened with the panic attacks. Lost At Sea was my way of dealing with my father’s suicide. These panic attacks didn't start till after that happened. I didn't understand the way panic attacks work. And the more they happen, the more intense they get. What started as an aversion to getting a shot, 40 years later turned into me passing out at an eye exam, having convulsions on the floor, calling the EMT’s, and them saying to my wife, Katie, ‘Your husband is having a heart attack.’ She thinks I'm dying. They put me on an ambulance and carted me off. While I'm in the ambulance, the nurse is calling the hospital, saying ‘We're bringing in somebody for cardiac arrest.’ The EMT is looking at the results of the tests coming in and says, ‘Wait a minute, this guy's heart is stronger than mine!’

I was doing this all to myself, and I didn't understand how I got there or why it happened. When I heard Katie crying like she thought I was dying, a thought went through my head: I can never do this to her again. I started reading about panic attacks and it led me to figure out how this happened, which was growing up in a high-anxiety household with alcoholic parents. Don't get me wrong, I loved my parents, but they had issues. My father's alcoholism led to a suicide that led to my 40-year journey of panic attacks. When I made Lost At Sea was really when all this started to escalate.

This slow, gradual process of figuring it out is what I go into in the book. I found a way out and it became a driving motivator, besides wanting to tell my story and documenting this history of the Grease Band and my band. My hope is that maybe this could help someone else with the same problem.



That's something that comes up often in the book, how telling your story could help somebody else.

I started the book in 1990. So I started interviewing the Grease Band around 1989 or 1990. It was simply to document the band’s history. Once it was documented I started seeing things that I didn't fully understand or see before. With the Grease Band, I understand now that we had a common experience for lots of bands: You're coming out of your family as a teenager. You're leaving home, and there are issues that you bring with you. You create a new family and try to work these issues out, but you also project your issues without knowing it. It turns into a complicated relationship. But the overall impact is incredibly positive, despite any stumbling blocks you run into with each other. You're taking each other on this journey and enabling each other for this process of self-discovery and to lead to this point that I was able to get to much later in life. So I look at all of these experiences now, even the difficult ones, in a more positive light.

You’re releasing the book with a new album and a live DVD. Do you see your experiences in putting this book together as manifesting in these other components?

All of the music I've written, from the Hampton Grease Band through all of my albums, has been autobiographical. My solo albums have all been instrumental music, and that might not make sense to some people, but the songs are about me wrestling with these issues throughout my life. I look at all of my music as being a long musical memoir, and this new album is directly connected with all of these realizations we're talking about.

The relationships I've had with people — the bass players, Bill Rea and Mike Holbrook — one or both of them have played on every record I’ve made under my own name, with the Supreme Court, and with the Hampton Grease Band. My relationships with these two guys goes back 50 years. Bill and Mike both played on Lost At Sea. John Boissiere has played drums on my last four albums, including The Dark Parade.

So this connection with people, bands, and making music is a family experience for me. I've never seen it through the realm of business or what's the smartest thing to do businesswise. I've always been led by what feels right. My connection with these people. My whole goal when I made Lost At Sea was to make an emotionally honest record about this experience that I went through. I wanted to make records that transcended genre and styles of the time, and were about emotional honesty and living with the consequences, regardless of how popular or unpopular you are.

Your body of recorded music is largely instrumental — abstract and evocative. To juxtapose this with a book chronicling your experiences is quite a dichotomy.

When you put things into words it helps you see things more clearly. That's what music has always been for me. Even though it’s not verbal communication it is an abstract language. I may write 100 songs for each album, and I’ll go back and listen to the demo tapes. Some of them connect with something in me and I don't always know what it is. I just feel magnetically pulled towards it, the titles usually connect to it, and this process of making the song has been, for lack of a more imaginative word, therapy for me.

The title of the new album is The Dark Parade.

What I grew to understand about anxiety and panic attacks is that there is a huge chemical release. In the book I simplify things; I use adrenaline to cover a lot of things, but mainly you're talking about a huge surge of adrenaline. Think of your fight or flight button, which everybody's familiar with. The more that button gets pressed the more intense the response. So I started thinking, ‘This sounds like a chemical addiction. Can I deconstruct this process?’

Throughout my life, I have been addicted unwittingly to adrenaline. It drove lots of risk-taking behavior. I talk about things in the book, like being at Niagara Falls with the band and hopping over the fence and climbing down the falls. Without even thinking about it, I just do stuff like that. There’s a story in the book about Jeff Calder — back when Jeff was drinking, I wasn't drinking. I didn't have any excuse for getting in the car in the middle of the night and driving backwards over to Bill Rea's house.

We drove the entire way backwards, crossed North Druid Hills Road backwards in the car. Bill’s not home and I say, ‘He takes walks on the golf course at night.’ So we take the car out on the golf course. Jeff and I are driving with no headlights so we don't get caught. Jeff is speeding along and I say, ‘Slow down, you don't know where you're going.’ He says, ‘I know exactly where I'm going.’ At that point we hit a brick wall and my head goes through the windshield. This kind of behavior — this is the parade, this is the excitement of adrenaline.

The dark part is where it led. You're just doing stuff because you're getting the surge of adrenaline. So that song captures that excitement, but doesn't necessarily lead to a good place.

Have you ever talked to a therapist?

No, and I don't want this to sound negative toward anyone talking to a therapist. I have been lucky to be surrounded by close friends, and my wife Katie and I have been together since ’85. We have an incredible relationship and talk to each other about everything. So I don't want to say I haven't talked to a therapist because if I had to pay Katie as a therapist, I would owe her a lot of money. One of the things my mom told me after my dad killed himself was, ‘Your father didn't know how to talk to people. If you ever feel bad, or you don't know what's going on, talk to someone.’ And I've followed that religiously.

My mom's gone now, too, but on her deathbed she relayed to me, ‘Your father's mother killed herself the same way he did. His sister killed herself the same way she did.’ You start seeing how these patterns of behavior are passed on from one generation to the next by not talking about them. I understand now that my parents' alcoholism was anxiety self-medication. So these realizations are like buried information, and playing these songs opens up doors inside you that you don't even know you have.


You have never touched a drop of alcohol in your life?

No, and I don't want this to sound judgmental on people who drink. I consider myself an alcoholic who's never touched a drop of alcohol. I feel like the greatest gift your parents have to give you is their mistakes, if you learn from them.

I have no doubt that I would be the world's worst alcoholic if I drank. I just knew this intuitively from a young age. Both sides of my family are filled with alcoholism. This gave me an alarm bell when I was younger. I've never smoked pot! I grew up in the ’60s! I was playing all of these pop festivals, playing with the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers. I felt very much a part of what was going on. But I knew not to cross that line because it wouldn’t lead to a good place for me.

Having these realizations about your yourself and your mental makeup, does it change the way you perceive your relationships with people in the Grease Band? With Colonel Bruce?

Yes, there were lots of issues going on. Bruce was always a very funny and imaginative guy, and I am not saying this in a negative way, but he made up a lot of stuff. Harold and I weren’t particularly wild about some of the things he made up, like saying he was a songwriter when Harold and I were the songwriters. Galadrielle Allman wrote a book (Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman), and she talked to Bruce. According to the book, Bruce was the guitar player in the Hampton Grease Band — except Bruce didn't play guitar in the Hampton Grease Band. But the connection we had growing up — my relationship with Bruce started in 1963 and the Grease Band broke up in ’73. The only two people that were in the band the entire six years were myself and Bruce. So we had this really close relationship for 10 of our most formative years, from ages 13 to 23. You encountered bumps in the road, but none of that takes the place of clearing the path for each other for self-discovery. I acknowledge things in the book that happened, but those things do not diminish the importance and the value of what we gave each other.

The band was started with Bruce, myself, and Harold, but everybody else was also incredibly important. Mike Holbrook became the bass player. Jerry Fields, the drummer. There's no way we could have made the music we made without that entire band and the connection between all five of us. It was very connected to the relationships that we had and that we carried with us until this day. I was incredibly close with Bruce, and with Harold till he died. There were times when it was a rocky road, but nothing diminishes that. There's something you give each other that you can't get from somebody else at any other age. When you form your first band, you're all leaving home. The world's a big scary place. Nobody's got your back anymore. That band that you form when you first leave home, this one-time experience, you all have each other's back. That's invaluable.

It's how people describe going off to combat together.

Yes, so reading and writing all of this stuff, seeing the big picture, helped me process all of this. When the band split up with Harold, we went on for a couple of years and had success. That's when we went and played the Fillmore. That's when we signed to Frank Zappa’s label. But for me, in reality, the band ended when the relationship between Bruce, Harold, and myself ended — when Harold left. There's no way you can replace that. When Bruce left the band I was disappointed. In retrospect, we were about to make another album, and I am glad we didn't. It wouldn’t have been right. It would have diminished what Music To Eat was and is. Not that there wasn't anything of value there, but we were struggling to keep what we had when a major piece of it was gone.

I could go off and make Lost At Sea, start over again, and form something new. That was easier to do than trying to recapture what we had.

There’s a song on Dark Parade titled “If Only,” which feels like a Rosetta Stone for everything we’ve been talking about.

“If Only” is a reflection on my life, going through this process, writing this book, realizations, regrets. I call it “If Only” because so much of my life was driven by guilt, not being able to save my parents from their alcoholism, not being able to save my father from killing himself. My dad came and visited me literally hours before he killed himself. I had dreams about him dying. I had no idea what was going on, but I remember asking, ‘Are you okay?’ I had a dream where something happened. He said, ‘I'm fine.’ Growing up, he was very disapproving about me doing music. But he came to visit me and said, ‘You've really got it made. You're doing exactly what you want to do. Don't ever give this up.’

My dad knew he was gonna kill himself. But I didn't know that. So lots of these ‘If Only’ moments, and I look back at my life now and I realize how looking at life from that perspective contributed and led to me having these panic attacks. It's up to me as an adult to turn these negative experiences into positive experiences. My only way to deal with this now is accepting the reality that they were alcoholics. He did kill himself. This had to become something positive in my life. I had to find a way to turn this into a gift of love rather than a disappointment. -CL-

Glenn Phillips’ Book, CD, DVD release party. $18-$20 (adv). $22-$25 (day of). 6:30 p.m. (doors). Sat., Sept. 14. Red Clay Music Foundry, 3116 Main Street, Duluth."
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  string(16825) "Looking back on a more than 50-year career in music [https://glennphillips.myfreesites.net/|Glenn Phillips] has a fresh perspective on life. This new outlook began with a panic attack that prompted the guitarist and founding member of Atlanta’s ’60s art rock trailblazers the Hampton Grease Band to take a deep look at his relationship with his parents, bandmates, and with himself. Now, he’s penned a memoir, titled ''Echoes: The Hampton Grease Band, My Life, My Music and How I Stopped Having Panic Attacks''. The book is accompanied by a full-length album of all new material, titled ''The Dark Parade'', and a live DVD capturing a 2015 live show celebrating the 40th anniversary of his first solo album, ''Lost At Sea''. These new releases offer a snapshot of three stations during Phillips’ life, bookending a musical legacy filled with emotional peaks and valleys, coming to terms with his own psychological makeup, and finding a way out of his self-made limitations. While preparing for a __September 14__ release show at the Red Clay Music Foundry, Phillips discussed his journey from spending his formative years with Bruce Hampton, coping with his life-long adrenaline addiction, to finally seeing the big picture in life.

~~#000000:__''Creative Loafing'': When did your idea for the book start?__~~

__Glenn Phillips:__ When I did the ''Echoes ''CD booklet in 1990 I wrote a history of the band. That led me to doing a history on the Grease Band while everybody was still around. I interviewed everyone, which turned into the booklet that came out with the ''Music To Eat'' CD reissue. I started writing this book back then, but it has evolved over the years. It still contains the history of those bands, but it contains a lot about my personal story as well.

As I got older, I started having panic attacks whenever I went to see a doctor, which coalesced and connected everything in my mind about my long-term relationships with the people in the Grease Band, the people in my band, my relationship with my family, and how these panic attacks started. That led to me figuring out how to stop having panic attacks. When that happened everything started connecting in my mind. Most of which was already written, but now I had a different perspective on everything. There was a line going through all of my experiences I could see clearly, that I never saw before.

~~#000000:__You weren't aware of it until you wrote it down.__~~

When you write stuff down you see things differently. It helped me step back and see the big picture that I couldn't see before, and that's what happened with the panic attacks. ''Lost At Sea'' was my way of dealing with my father’s suicide. These panic attacks didn't start till after that happened. I didn't understand the way panic attacks work. And the more they happen, the more intense they get. What started as an aversion to getting a shot, 40 years later turned into me passing out at an eye exam, having convulsions on the floor, calling the EMT’s, and them saying to my wife, Katie, ‘Your husband is having a heart attack.’ She thinks I'm dying. They put me on an ambulance and carted me off. While I'm in the ambulance, the nurse is calling the hospital, saying ‘We're bringing in somebody for cardiac arrest.’ The EMT is looking at the results of the tests coming in and says, ‘Wait a minute, this guy's heart is stronger than mine!’

I was doing this all to myself, and I didn't understand how I got there or why it happened. When I heard Katie crying like she thought I was dying, a thought went through my head: I can never do this to her again. I started reading about panic attacks and it led me to figure out how this happened, which was growing up in a high-anxiety household with alcoholic parents. Don't get me wrong, I loved my parents, but they had issues. My father's alcoholism led to a suicide that led to my 40-year journey of panic attacks. When I made ''Lost At Sea'' was really when all this started to escalate.

This slow, gradual process of figuring it out is what I go into in the book. I found a way out and it became a driving motivator, besides wanting to tell my story and documenting this history of the Grease Band and my band. My hope is that maybe this could help someone else with the same problem.

{iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/3Ej7QaPfaCflfv3MrJ5ZJ3" width="640" height="80" scrolling="auto"}

~~#000000:__That's something that comes up often in the book, how telling your story could help somebody else.__~~

I started the book in 1990. So I started interviewing the Grease Band around 1989 or 1990. It was simply to document the band’s history. Once it was documented I started seeing things that I didn't fully understand or see before. With the Grease Band, I understand now that we had a common experience for lots of bands: You're coming out of your family as a teenager. You're leaving home, and there are issues that you bring with you. You create a new family and try to work these issues out, but you also project your issues without knowing it. It turns into a complicated relationship. But the overall impact is incredibly positive, despite any stumbling blocks you run into with each other. You're taking each other on this journey and enabling each other for this process of self-discovery and to lead to this point that I was able to get to much later in life. So I look at all of these experiences now, even the difficult ones, in a more positive light.

~~#000000:__You’re releasing the book with a new album and a live DVD. Do you see your experiences in putting this book together as manifesting in these other components?__~~

All of the music I've written, from the Hampton Grease Band through all of my albums, has been autobiographical. My solo albums have all been instrumental music, and that might not make sense to some people, but the songs are about me wrestling with these issues throughout my life. I look at all of my music as being a long musical memoir, and this new album is directly connected with all of these realizations we're talking about.

The relationships I've had with people — the bass players, Bill Rea and Mike Holbrook — one or both of them have played on every record I’ve made under my own name, with the Supreme Court, and with the Hampton Grease Band. My relationships with these two guys goes back 50 years. Bill and Mike both played on ''Lost At Sea''. John Boissiere has played drums on my last four albums, including ''The Dark Parade''.

So this connection with people, bands, and making music is a family experience for me. I've never seen it through the realm of business or what's the smartest thing to do businesswise. I've always been led by what feels right. My connection with these people. My whole goal when I made ''Lost At Sea'' was to make an emotionally honest record about this experience that I went through. I wanted to make records that transcended genre and styles of the time, and were about emotional honesty and living with the consequences, regardless of how popular or unpopular you are.

~~#000000:__Your body of recorded music is largely instrumental — abstract and evocative. To juxtapose this with a book chronicling your experiences is quite a dichotomy.__~~

When you put things into words it helps you see things more clearly. That's what music has always been for me. Even though it’s not verbal communication it is an abstract language. I may write 100 songs for each album, and I’ll go back and listen to the demo tapes. Some of them connect with something in me and I don't always know what it is. I just feel magnetically pulled towards it, the titles usually connect to it, and this process of making the song has been, for lack of a more imaginative word, therapy for me.

~~#000000:__The title of the new album is ''The Dark Parade''.__~~

What I grew to understand about anxiety and panic attacks is that there is a huge chemical release. In the book I simplify things; I use adrenaline to cover a lot of things, but mainly you're talking about a huge surge of adrenaline. Think of your fight or flight button, which everybody's familiar with. The more that button gets pressed the more intense the response. So I started thinking, ‘This sounds like a chemical addiction. Can I deconstruct this process?’

Throughout my life, I have been addicted unwittingly to adrenaline. It drove lots of risk-taking behavior. I talk about things in the book, like being at Niagara Falls with the band and hopping over the fence and climbing down the falls. Without even thinking about it, I just do stuff like that. There’s a story in the book about Jeff Calder — back when Jeff was drinking, I wasn't drinking. I didn't have any excuse for getting in the car in the middle of the night and driving backwards over to Bill Rea's house.

We drove the entire way backwards, crossed North Druid Hills Road backwards in the car. Bill’s not home and I say, ‘He takes walks on the golf course at night.’ So we take the car out on the golf course. Jeff and I are driving with no headlights so we don't get caught. Jeff is speeding along and I say, ‘Slow down, you don't know where you're going.’ He says, ‘I know exactly where I'm going.’ At that point we hit a brick wall and my head goes through the windshield. This kind of behavior — this is the parade, this is the excitement of adrenaline.

The dark part is where it led. You're just doing stuff because you're getting the surge of adrenaline. So that song captures that excitement, but doesn't necessarily lead to a good place.

~~#000000:__Have you ever talked to a therapist?__~~

No, and I don't want this to sound negative toward anyone talking to a therapist. I have been lucky to be surrounded by close friends, and my wife Katie and I have been together since ’85. We have an incredible relationship and talk to each other about everything. So I don't want to say I haven't talked to a therapist because if I had to pay Katie as a therapist, I would owe her a lot of money. One of the things my mom told me after my dad killed himself was, ‘Your father didn't know how to talk to people. If you ever feel bad, or you don't know what's going on, talk to someone.’ And I've followed that religiously.

My mom's gone now, too, but on her deathbed she relayed to me, ‘Your father's mother killed herself the same way he did. His sister killed herself the same way she did.’ You start seeing how these patterns of behavior are passed on from one generation to the next by not talking about them. I understand now that my parents' alcoholism was anxiety self-medication. So these realizations are like buried information, and playing these songs opens up doors inside you that you don't even know you have.

{img fileId="22635" stylebox="float: right; margin-left:15px;" width="400px" desc="MUSIC TO EAT: Glenn Phillips with the Hampton Grease Band at Piedmont Park, 1969. Photo by Bill Fibben."}
~~#000000:__You have never touched a drop of alcohol in your life?__~~

No, and I don't want this to sound judgmental on people who drink. I consider myself an alcoholic who's never touched a drop of alcohol. I feel like the greatest gift your parents have to give you is their mistakes, if you learn from them.

I have no doubt that I would be the world's worst alcoholic if I drank. I just knew this intuitively from a young age. Both sides of my family are filled with alcoholism. This gave me an alarm bell when I was younger. I've never smoked pot! I grew up in the ’60s! I was playing all of these pop festivals, playing with the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers. I felt very much a part of what was going on. But I knew not to cross that line because it wouldn’t lead to a good place for me.

__Having these realizations about your yourself and your mental makeup, does it change the way you perceive your relationships with people in the Grease Band? With Colonel Bruce?__

Yes, there were lots of issues going on. Bruce was always a very funny and imaginative guy, and I am not saying this in a negative way, but he made up a lot of stuff. Harold and I weren’t particularly wild about some of the things he made up, like saying he was a songwriter when Harold and I were the songwriters. Galadrielle Allman wrote a book (''Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman''), and she talked to Bruce. According to the book, Bruce was the guitar player in the Hampton Grease Band — except Bruce didn't play guitar in the Hampton Grease Band. But the connection we had growing up — my relationship with Bruce started in 1963 and the Grease Band broke up in ’73. The only two people that were in the band the entire six years were myself and Bruce. So we had this really close relationship for 10 of our most formative years, from ages 13 to 23. You encountered bumps in the road, but none of that takes the place of clearing the path for each other for self-discovery. I acknowledge things in the book that happened, but those things do not diminish the importance and the value of what we gave each other.

The band was started with Bruce, myself, and Harold, but everybody else was also incredibly important. Mike Holbrook became the bass player. Jerry Fields, the drummer. There's no way we could have made the music we made without that entire band and the connection between all five of us. It was very connected to the relationships that we had and that we carried with us until this day. I was incredibly close with Bruce, and with Harold till he died. There were times when it was a rocky road, but nothing diminishes that. There's something you give each other that you can't get from somebody else at any other age. When you form your first band, you're all leaving home. The world's a big scary place. Nobody's got your back anymore. That band that you form when you first leave home, this one-time experience, you all have each other's back. That's invaluable.

~~#000000:__It's how people describe going off to combat together.__~~

Yes, so reading and writing all of this stuff, seeing the big picture, helped me process all of this. When the band split up with Harold, we went on for a couple of years and had success. That's when we went and played the Fillmore. That's when we signed to Frank Zappa’s label. But for me, in reality, the band ended when the relationship between Bruce, Harold, and myself ended — when Harold left. There's no way you can replace that. When Bruce left the band I was disappointed. In retrospect, we were about to make another album, and I am glad we didn't. It wouldn’t have been right. It would have diminished what ''Music To Eat'' was and is. Not that there wasn't anything of value there, but we were struggling to keep what we had when a major piece of it was gone.

I could go off and make ''Lost At Sea'', start over again, and form something new. That was easier to do than trying to recapture what we had.

~~#000000:__There’s a song on ''Dark Parade'' titled “If Only,” which feels like a Rosetta Stone for everything we’ve been talking about.__~~

“If Only” is a reflection on my life, going through this process, writing this book, realizations, regrets. I call it “If Only” because so much of my life was driven by guilt, not being able to save my parents from their alcoholism, not being able to save my father from killing himself. My dad came and visited me literally hours before he killed himself. I had dreams about him dying. I had no idea what was going on, but I remember asking, ‘Are you okay?’ I had a dream where something happened. He said, ‘I'm fine.’ Growing up, he was very disapproving about me doing music. But he came to visit me and said, ‘You've really got it made. You're doing exactly what you want to do. Don't ever give this up.’

My dad knew he was gonna kill himself. But I didn't know that. So lots of these ‘If Only’ moments, and I look back at my life now and I realize how looking at life from that perspective contributed and led to me having these panic attacks. It's up to me as an adult to turn these negative experiences into positive experiences. My only way to deal with this now is accepting the reality that they were alcoholics. He did kill himself. This had to become something positive in my life. I had to find a way to turn this into a gift of love rather than a disappointment. -CL-

''[https://eddieowenpresents.com/events/eddie-owen-presents-glenn-phillips-band-cd-dvd-book-release-show/|Glenn Phillips’ Book, CD, DVD release party. $18-$20 (adv). $22-$25 (day of). 6:30 p.m. (doors). Sat., Sept. 14. Red Clay Music Foundry, 3116 Main Street, Duluth.]''"
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  string(16937) " Music GlennP1 1 02  2019-08-30T14:06:42+00:00 Music_GlennP1-1_02.jpg     atlanta music glenn phillips the dark parade lost at sea hampton grease band music to eat col. bruce hampton How the former Hampton Grease Band guitarist stopped having panic attacks Music GlennP1 1 02   2019-08-30T13:39:45+00:00  Glenn Phillips and ‘The Dark Parade’ chad.radford Chad Radford Chad Radford chad.radford (Chad Radford) 2019-08-30T13:39:45+00:00 Looking back on a more than 50-year career in music Glenn Phillips has a fresh perspective on life. This new outlook began with a panic attack that prompted the guitarist and founding member of Atlanta’s ’60s art rock trailblazers the Hampton Grease Band to take a deep look at his relationship with his parents, bandmates, and with himself. Now, he’s penned a memoir, titled Echoes: The Hampton Grease Band, My Life, My Music and How I Stopped Having Panic Attacks. The book is accompanied by a full-length album of all new material, titled The Dark Parade, and a live DVD capturing a 2015 live show celebrating the 40th anniversary of his first solo album, Lost At Sea. These new releases offer a snapshot of three stations during Phillips’ life, bookending a musical legacy filled with emotional peaks and valleys, coming to terms with his own psychological makeup, and finding a way out of his self-made limitations. While preparing for a September 14 release show at the Red Clay Music Foundry, Phillips discussed his journey from spending his formative years with Bruce Hampton, coping with his life-long adrenaline addiction, to finally seeing the big picture in life.

Creative Loafing: When did your idea for the book start?

Glenn Phillips: When I did the Echoes CD booklet in 1990 I wrote a history of the band. That led me to doing a history on the Grease Band while everybody was still around. I interviewed everyone, which turned into the booklet that came out with the Music To Eat CD reissue. I started writing this book back then, but it has evolved over the years. It still contains the history of those bands, but it contains a lot about my personal story as well.

As I got older, I started having panic attacks whenever I went to see a doctor, which coalesced and connected everything in my mind about my long-term relationships with the people in the Grease Band, the people in my band, my relationship with my family, and how these panic attacks started. That led to me figuring out how to stop having panic attacks. When that happened everything started connecting in my mind. Most of which was already written, but now I had a different perspective on everything. There was a line going through all of my experiences I could see clearly, that I never saw before.

You weren't aware of it until you wrote it down.

When you write stuff down you see things differently. It helped me step back and see the big picture that I couldn't see before, and that's what happened with the panic attacks. Lost At Sea was my way of dealing with my father’s suicide. These panic attacks didn't start till after that happened. I didn't understand the way panic attacks work. And the more they happen, the more intense they get. What started as an aversion to getting a shot, 40 years later turned into me passing out at an eye exam, having convulsions on the floor, calling the EMT’s, and them saying to my wife, Katie, ‘Your husband is having a heart attack.’ She thinks I'm dying. They put me on an ambulance and carted me off. While I'm in the ambulance, the nurse is calling the hospital, saying ‘We're bringing in somebody for cardiac arrest.’ The EMT is looking at the results of the tests coming in and says, ‘Wait a minute, this guy's heart is stronger than mine!’

I was doing this all to myself, and I didn't understand how I got there or why it happened. When I heard Katie crying like she thought I was dying, a thought went through my head: I can never do this to her again. I started reading about panic attacks and it led me to figure out how this happened, which was growing up in a high-anxiety household with alcoholic parents. Don't get me wrong, I loved my parents, but they had issues. My father's alcoholism led to a suicide that led to my 40-year journey of panic attacks. When I made Lost At Sea was really when all this started to escalate.

This slow, gradual process of figuring it out is what I go into in the book. I found a way out and it became a driving motivator, besides wanting to tell my story and documenting this history of the Grease Band and my band. My hope is that maybe this could help someone else with the same problem.



That's something that comes up often in the book, how telling your story could help somebody else.

I started the book in 1990. So I started interviewing the Grease Band around 1989 or 1990. It was simply to document the band’s history. Once it was documented I started seeing things that I didn't fully understand or see before. With the Grease Band, I understand now that we had a common experience for lots of bands: You're coming out of your family as a teenager. You're leaving home, and there are issues that you bring with you. You create a new family and try to work these issues out, but you also project your issues without knowing it. It turns into a complicated relationship. But the overall impact is incredibly positive, despite any stumbling blocks you run into with each other. You're taking each other on this journey and enabling each other for this process of self-discovery and to lead to this point that I was able to get to much later in life. So I look at all of these experiences now, even the difficult ones, in a more positive light.

You’re releasing the book with a new album and a live DVD. Do you see your experiences in putting this book together as manifesting in these other components?

All of the music I've written, from the Hampton Grease Band through all of my albums, has been autobiographical. My solo albums have all been instrumental music, and that might not make sense to some people, but the songs are about me wrestling with these issues throughout my life. I look at all of my music as being a long musical memoir, and this new album is directly connected with all of these realizations we're talking about.

The relationships I've had with people — the bass players, Bill Rea and Mike Holbrook — one or both of them have played on every record I’ve made under my own name, with the Supreme Court, and with the Hampton Grease Band. My relationships with these two guys goes back 50 years. Bill and Mike both played on Lost At Sea. John Boissiere has played drums on my last four albums, including The Dark Parade.

So this connection with people, bands, and making music is a family experience for me. I've never seen it through the realm of business or what's the smartest thing to do businesswise. I've always been led by what feels right. My connection with these people. My whole goal when I made Lost At Sea was to make an emotionally honest record about this experience that I went through. I wanted to make records that transcended genre and styles of the time, and were about emotional honesty and living with the consequences, regardless of how popular or unpopular you are.

Your body of recorded music is largely instrumental — abstract and evocative. To juxtapose this with a book chronicling your experiences is quite a dichotomy.

When you put things into words it helps you see things more clearly. That's what music has always been for me. Even though it’s not verbal communication it is an abstract language. I may write 100 songs for each album, and I’ll go back and listen to the demo tapes. Some of them connect with something in me and I don't always know what it is. I just feel magnetically pulled towards it, the titles usually connect to it, and this process of making the song has been, for lack of a more imaginative word, therapy for me.

The title of the new album is The Dark Parade.

What I grew to understand about anxiety and panic attacks is that there is a huge chemical release. In the book I simplify things; I use adrenaline to cover a lot of things, but mainly you're talking about a huge surge of adrenaline. Think of your fight or flight button, which everybody's familiar with. The more that button gets pressed the more intense the response. So I started thinking, ‘This sounds like a chemical addiction. Can I deconstruct this process?’

Throughout my life, I have been addicted unwittingly to adrenaline. It drove lots of risk-taking behavior. I talk about things in the book, like being at Niagara Falls with the band and hopping over the fence and climbing down the falls. Without even thinking about it, I just do stuff like that. There’s a story in the book about Jeff Calder — back when Jeff was drinking, I wasn't drinking. I didn't have any excuse for getting in the car in the middle of the night and driving backwards over to Bill Rea's house.

We drove the entire way backwards, crossed North Druid Hills Road backwards in the car. Bill’s not home and I say, ‘He takes walks on the golf course at night.’ So we take the car out on the golf course. Jeff and I are driving with no headlights so we don't get caught. Jeff is speeding along and I say, ‘Slow down, you don't know where you're going.’ He says, ‘I know exactly where I'm going.’ At that point we hit a brick wall and my head goes through the windshield. This kind of behavior — this is the parade, this is the excitement of adrenaline.

The dark part is where it led. You're just doing stuff because you're getting the surge of adrenaline. So that song captures that excitement, but doesn't necessarily lead to a good place.

Have you ever talked to a therapist?

No, and I don't want this to sound negative toward anyone talking to a therapist. I have been lucky to be surrounded by close friends, and my wife Katie and I have been together since ’85. We have an incredible relationship and talk to each other about everything. So I don't want to say I haven't talked to a therapist because if I had to pay Katie as a therapist, I would owe her a lot of money. One of the things my mom told me after my dad killed himself was, ‘Your father didn't know how to talk to people. If you ever feel bad, or you don't know what's going on, talk to someone.’ And I've followed that religiously.

My mom's gone now, too, but on her deathbed she relayed to me, ‘Your father's mother killed herself the same way he did. His sister killed herself the same way she did.’ You start seeing how these patterns of behavior are passed on from one generation to the next by not talking about them. I understand now that my parents' alcoholism was anxiety self-medication. So these realizations are like buried information, and playing these songs opens up doors inside you that you don't even know you have.


You have never touched a drop of alcohol in your life?

No, and I don't want this to sound judgmental on people who drink. I consider myself an alcoholic who's never touched a drop of alcohol. I feel like the greatest gift your parents have to give you is their mistakes, if you learn from them.

I have no doubt that I would be the world's worst alcoholic if I drank. I just knew this intuitively from a young age. Both sides of my family are filled with alcoholism. This gave me an alarm bell when I was younger. I've never smoked pot! I grew up in the ’60s! I was playing all of these pop festivals, playing with the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers. I felt very much a part of what was going on. But I knew not to cross that line because it wouldn’t lead to a good place for me.

Having these realizations about your yourself and your mental makeup, does it change the way you perceive your relationships with people in the Grease Band? With Colonel Bruce?

Yes, there were lots of issues going on. Bruce was always a very funny and imaginative guy, and I am not saying this in a negative way, but he made up a lot of stuff. Harold and I weren’t particularly wild about some of the things he made up, like saying he was a songwriter when Harold and I were the songwriters. Galadrielle Allman wrote a book (Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman), and she talked to Bruce. According to the book, Bruce was the guitar player in the Hampton Grease Band — except Bruce didn't play guitar in the Hampton Grease Band. But the connection we had growing up — my relationship with Bruce started in 1963 and the Grease Band broke up in ’73. The only two people that were in the band the entire six years were myself and Bruce. So we had this really close relationship for 10 of our most formative years, from ages 13 to 23. You encountered bumps in the road, but none of that takes the place of clearing the path for each other for self-discovery. I acknowledge things in the book that happened, but those things do not diminish the importance and the value of what we gave each other.

The band was started with Bruce, myself, and Harold, but everybody else was also incredibly important. Mike Holbrook became the bass player. Jerry Fields, the drummer. There's no way we could have made the music we made without that entire band and the connection between all five of us. It was very connected to the relationships that we had and that we carried with us until this day. I was incredibly close with Bruce, and with Harold till he died. There were times when it was a rocky road, but nothing diminishes that. There's something you give each other that you can't get from somebody else at any other age. When you form your first band, you're all leaving home. The world's a big scary place. Nobody's got your back anymore. That band that you form when you first leave home, this one-time experience, you all have each other's back. That's invaluable.

It's how people describe going off to combat together.

Yes, so reading and writing all of this stuff, seeing the big picture, helped me process all of this. When the band split up with Harold, we went on for a couple of years and had success. That's when we went and played the Fillmore. That's when we signed to Frank Zappa’s label. But for me, in reality, the band ended when the relationship between Bruce, Harold, and myself ended — when Harold left. There's no way you can replace that. When Bruce left the band I was disappointed. In retrospect, we were about to make another album, and I am glad we didn't. It wouldn’t have been right. It would have diminished what Music To Eat was and is. Not that there wasn't anything of value there, but we were struggling to keep what we had when a major piece of it was gone.

I could go off and make Lost At Sea, start over again, and form something new. That was easier to do than trying to recapture what we had.

There’s a song on Dark Parade titled “If Only,” which feels like a Rosetta Stone for everything we’ve been talking about.

“If Only” is a reflection on my life, going through this process, writing this book, realizations, regrets. I call it “If Only” because so much of my life was driven by guilt, not being able to save my parents from their alcoholism, not being able to save my father from killing himself. My dad came and visited me literally hours before he killed himself. I had dreams about him dying. I had no idea what was going on, but I remember asking, ‘Are you okay?’ I had a dream where something happened. He said, ‘I'm fine.’ Growing up, he was very disapproving about me doing music. But he came to visit me and said, ‘You've really got it made. You're doing exactly what you want to do. Don't ever give this up.’

My dad knew he was gonna kill himself. But I didn't know that. So lots of these ‘If Only’ moments, and I look back at my life now and I realize how looking at life from that perspective contributed and led to me having these panic attacks. It's up to me as an adult to turn these negative experiences into positive experiences. My only way to deal with this now is accepting the reality that they were alcoholics. He did kill himself. This had to become something positive in my life. I had to find a way to turn this into a gift of love rather than a disappointment. -CL-

Glenn Phillips’ Book, CD, DVD release party. $18-$20 (adv). $22-$25 (day of). 6:30 p.m. (doors). Sat., Sept. 14. Red Clay Music Foundry, 3116 Main Street, Duluth.    Richard Perez DRIVE ON: Glenn Phillips taking a breather after returning from a 1978 U.K. tour.  -84.145098,34.002505,1  Record review: Glenn Phillips 'At the Rainbow'  "Glenn Phillips" "The Dark Parade" "Lost at Sea" "Hampton Grease Band" "Music To Eat" Atlanta Music "Col. Bruce Hampton"                       Glenn Phillips and ‘The Dark Parade’ "
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  string(7746) "The late songwriter Harlan Howard described country music in five words, “three chords and the truth.” In his upcoming opus “Country Music,” airing this month on PBS, it takes documentary master Ken Burns and his team over 16 hours to say pretty much the same thing. Interestingly enough, the great paradox is that they are both on to something — Howard’s succinct remark sums it up, and Burns’ lengthy exploration barely covers all the bases. How so? According to the eight-part series’ script writer, Dayton Duncan, country music is everything in America, though it boils down to two essential concepts — “the song” and “the people.” The leap from these simple constructs to the grand presentation of a comprehensive history of country music was arduous, Duncan admits, frustrating at times, and incredibly enlightening regarding the nature of Americans.

“We are storytellers, and it is not meant to be an encyclopedia,” says Duncan, also the author of the accompanying book for the series. “Our story is not intended to be the final word, but rather an introduction. During the development we were all cognizant of the scope of our subject, and our goal is to prompt people to read books, visit places, and, in this case, listen to the music.” He recalls the time invested. “It has been a long process, starting with research in 2011, beginning interviews in 2012, and then gradually blocking each of the eight episodes into naturally occurring and consecutive segments. While we knew that each episode had to stand on its own, there had to be connections between each one.”

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Peer’s serendipitous discovery of Carson is established as the defining moment by the filmmakers. “This set everything in motion,” Duncan declares. “Peer found something new that people would buy, and set out looking for more. Four years later in 1927, he went to Bristol Tennessee/Virginia, and recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.”

If Carson had not been there to fill the spot, if Rodgers and the Carters had not known about Peer’s interests in old time music, they may not have shown up to Bristol, and country music may not have existed as we know it today. “That’s why we start in Atlanta. It is the critical place, and Fiddlin’ John was the reason. Not only that, but his presentation as a mountain man, a moonshiner, was contrived, since he was actually a millworker,” says Duncan. This foretold the development of the “hillbilly image,” as Carson actually worked in the Fulton Bag Mill and lived in Cabbagetown.

With Atlanta as the launching pad, “Country Music” becomes a cultural and geographical journey throughout the U.S. and beyond. Looking at the European and African roots of both musical styles and instruments, the filmmakers approached the subject with a blank slate, and let the story tell itself. Duncan notes, “We were very agnostic regarding the story, and worked hard to make sure the direction it took was not a personal preference. I look at it biologically — the evolution of country music was not a sudden thing, and not all areas changed at the same time.” Understanding and recognizing this evolution guided them, and as he points out, “We told one story at a time, recognizing that country music began as a mixture of things that grew multiple branches. There is a banquet of music. Some will like all of it, some will like some of it.”

The stories drive the documentary. The challenge in telling them was to develop a structure that would create a cohesive learning experience. Exploring personalities linked to places was a common technique. For example, the impoverished and difficult early lives of superstars such as Brenda Lee, Hank Williams, and George Jones — all of them Southerners — showed how their experiences shaped their music. Lee, an Atlanta native, features prominently throughout the series, offering insight into her childhood role, after the death of her father, as a breadwinner for the family, singing on radio and local television shows in the 1950s, which developed her confidence and persona as “Little Miss Dynamite.” Alabama native Williams suffered from the chronic pain of spina bifida, was an alcohol abuser as a teenager, and, ultimately, met his premature demise with a mix of pain pills and liquor. But Williams left a legacy of both sad and upbeat songs that are held in the highest poetic regard. Jones was the victim of an abusive, manipulative father who forced him to play in the Texas streets for money, then spent it on drink. The bitterness of his youth carried over into his own battle with alcohol, but he is still considered the greatest vocalist in country music history. As Brenda Lee says in the documentary, “George WAS a country song!”

Duncan notes the multiplicity of diverse cultural influences in the melting pot of country music as an obvious but frequently unacknowledged phenomenon. “It’s right there, in plain sight!” he exclaims. The film explores these diverse convergences with segments about the banjo, an African instrument brought over by slaves, and the fiddle and mountain music of Appalachia that came from Scotland and Ireland. “One of the original and most popular members of the Grand Old Opry was harmonica player DeFord Bailey, an African American,” Duncan points out. “Bill Monroe learned about the blues from Arnold Shultz. Lesley Riddle traveled with A.P. Carter and memorized song melodies for him. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was a massive hit. And the women — Maybelle and Sara Carter were two of the biggest and first stars of country music. Kitty Wells had the first number one country hit by a woman in the mid ’50s, and many more. Dolly Parton is one of the most successful women in the entire world.”

Prime themes throughout the documentary are the power of the song, and the relationship the fans have with both the songs and the artists. Comments by fans and historians describe how closely people relate to the words and stories of songs, and how fans see in them the realities of their own lives. The most common theme, put into words, is “They know exactly how it is for us.”

This close, symbiotic relationship between artists and fans was a factor in the success of the documentary. Duncan recalls, “The country music family of performers was very welcoming, giving us two to three hours at a time to talk through some of our concepts, and offer suggestions. But what really stands out is how they treat and are treated by the fans. There is no other genre with such a powerful positive and directly shared relationship, and so much accessibility.”



It takes Ken Burns, Julie Dunfey, and Dayton Duncan 16-plus hours to tell the story of America’s music. But, it can be summed up in a few words: The song. The people. Three chords. And the truth.

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“We are storytellers, and it is not meant to be an encyclopedia,” says Duncan, also the author of the accompanying book for the series. “Our story is not intended to be the final word, but rather an introduction. During the development we were all cognizant of the scope of our subject, and our goal is to prompt people to read books, visit places, and, in this case, listen to the music.” He recalls the time invested. “It has been a long process, starting with research in 2011, beginning interviews in 2012, and then gradually blocking each of the eight episodes into naturally occurring and consecutive segments. While we knew that each episode had to stand on its own, there had to be connections between each one.”

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Peer’s serendipitous discovery of Carson is established as the defining moment by the filmmakers. “This set everything in motion,” Duncan declares. “Peer found something new that people would buy, and set out looking for more. Four years later in 1927, he went to Bristol Tennessee/Virginia, and recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.”

If Carson had not been there to fill the spot, if Rodgers and the Carters had not known about Peer’s interests in old time music, they may not have shown up to Bristol, and country music may not have existed as we know it today. “That’s why we start in Atlanta. It is the critical place, and Fiddlin’ John was the reason. Not only that, but his presentation as a mountain man, a moonshiner, was contrived, since he was actually a millworker,” says Duncan. This foretold the development of the “hillbilly image,” as Carson actually worked in the Fulton Bag Mill and lived in Cabbagetown.

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  string(8433) " 152NassauStNW  2019-09-03T17:48:21+00:00 152NassauStNW.jpg     atlanta country music 152 nassau street jimmy buffett margaritaville ken burns As Ken Burns explains country music, it started in Atlanta 152NassauStNW   2019-09-03T17:28:20+00:00  Three chords and the truth? And then some ... chad.radford Chad Radford James Kelly jkellysc1 (James Kelly) 2019-09-03T17:28:20+00:00 The late songwriter Harlan Howard described country music in five words, “three chords and the truth.” In his upcoming opus “Country Music,” airing this month on PBS, it takes documentary master Ken Burns and his team over 16 hours to say pretty much the same thing. Interestingly enough, the great paradox is that they are both on to something — Howard’s succinct remark sums it up, and Burns’ lengthy exploration barely covers all the bases. How so? According to the eight-part series’ script writer, Dayton Duncan, country music is everything in America, though it boils down to two essential concepts — “the song” and “the people.” The leap from these simple constructs to the grand presentation of a comprehensive history of country music was arduous, Duncan admits, frustrating at times, and incredibly enlightening regarding the nature of Americans.

“We are storytellers, and it is not meant to be an encyclopedia,” says Duncan, also the author of the accompanying book for the series. “Our story is not intended to be the final word, but rather an introduction. During the development we were all cognizant of the scope of our subject, and our goal is to prompt people to read books, visit places, and, in this case, listen to the music.” He recalls the time invested. “It has been a long process, starting with research in 2011, beginning interviews in 2012, and then gradually blocking each of the eight episodes into naturally occurring and consecutive segments. While we knew that each episode had to stand on its own, there had to be connections between each one.”

Atlanta figures prominently in the first episode. The city is identified as where the “beginning” of country music took place, due to a recording session in a building downtown at 152 Nassau Street. Duncan tells the story. “In 1923 Ralph Peer came to Atlanta to record what was then called ‘race music,’ performed by African Americans for the African American market. He was also scheduled to record a fiddle player who couldn’t make it to the studio, so Fiddlin’ John Carson, one of the most popular performers of the era on radio station WSB, was suggested.” Carson’s recording, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” soon became one of the biggest-selling 78s in the nation, and according to Duncan, “the first commercially successful country record.”

Peer’s serendipitous discovery of Carson is established as the defining moment by the filmmakers. “This set everything in motion,” Duncan declares. “Peer found something new that people would buy, and set out looking for more. Four years later in 1927, he went to Bristol Tennessee/Virginia, and recorded both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.”

If Carson had not been there to fill the spot, if Rodgers and the Carters had not known about Peer’s interests in old time music, they may not have shown up to Bristol, and country music may not have existed as we know it today. “That’s why we start in Atlanta. It is the critical place, and Fiddlin’ John was the reason. Not only that, but his presentation as a mountain man, a moonshiner, was contrived, since he was actually a millworker,” says Duncan. This foretold the development of the “hillbilly image,” as Carson actually worked in the Fulton Bag Mill and lived in Cabbagetown.

With Atlanta as the launching pad, “Country Music” becomes a cultural and geographical journey throughout the U.S. and beyond. Looking at the European and African roots of both musical styles and instruments, the filmmakers approached the subject with a blank slate, and let the story tell itself. Duncan notes, “We were very agnostic regarding the story, and worked hard to make sure the direction it took was not a personal preference. I look at it biologically — the evolution of country music was not a sudden thing, and not all areas changed at the same time.” Understanding and recognizing this evolution guided them, and as he points out, “We told one story at a time, recognizing that country music began as a mixture of things that grew multiple branches. There is a banquet of music. Some will like all of it, some will like some of it.”

The stories drive the documentary. The challenge in telling them was to develop a structure that would create a cohesive learning experience. Exploring personalities linked to places was a common technique. For example, the impoverished and difficult early lives of superstars such as Brenda Lee, Hank Williams, and George Jones — all of them Southerners — showed how their experiences shaped their music. Lee, an Atlanta native, features prominently throughout the series, offering insight into her childhood role, after the death of her father, as a breadwinner for the family, singing on radio and local television shows in the 1950s, which developed her confidence and persona as “Little Miss Dynamite.” Alabama native Williams suffered from the chronic pain of spina bifida, was an alcohol abuser as a teenager, and, ultimately, met his premature demise with a mix of pain pills and liquor. But Williams left a legacy of both sad and upbeat songs that are held in the highest poetic regard. Jones was the victim of an abusive, manipulative father who forced him to play in the Texas streets for money, then spent it on drink. The bitterness of his youth carried over into his own battle with alcohol, but he is still considered the greatest vocalist in country music history. As Brenda Lee says in the documentary, “George WAS a country song!”

Duncan notes the multiplicity of diverse cultural influences in the melting pot of country music as an obvious but frequently unacknowledged phenomenon. “It’s right there, in plain sight!” he exclaims. The film explores these diverse convergences with segments about the banjo, an African instrument brought over by slaves, and the fiddle and mountain music of Appalachia that came from Scotland and Ireland. “One of the original and most popular members of the Grand Old Opry was harmonica player DeFord Bailey, an African American,” Duncan points out. “Bill Monroe learned about the blues from Arnold Shultz. Lesley Riddle traveled with A.P. Carter and memorized song melodies for him. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was a massive hit. And the women — Maybelle and Sara Carter were two of the biggest and first stars of country music. Kitty Wells had the first number one country hit by a woman in the mid ’50s, and many more. Dolly Parton is one of the most successful women in the entire world.”

Prime themes throughout the documentary are the power of the song, and the relationship the fans have with both the songs and the artists. Comments by fans and historians describe how closely people relate to the words and stories of songs, and how fans see in them the realities of their own lives. The most common theme, put into words, is “They know exactly how it is for us.”

This close, symbiotic relationship between artists and fans was a factor in the success of the documentary. Duncan recalls, “The country music family of performers was very welcoming, giving us two to three hours at a time to talk through some of our concepts, and offer suggestions. But what really stands out is how they treat and are treated by the fans. There is no other genre with such a powerful positive and directly shared relationship, and so much accessibility.”



It takes Ken Burns, Julie Dunfey, and Dayton Duncan 16-plus hours to tell the story of America’s music. But, it can be summed up in a few words: The song. The people. Three chords. And the truth.

That’s country music.    Kyle Kessler THE BIRTHPLACE OF COUNTRY MUSIC: 152 Nassau Street, where OKeh Records set up the first recording studio in the south.  0,0,13    "Country Music" "152 Nassau Street" Atlanta "Ken Burns" "Jimmy Buffett" Margaritaville                        Three chords and the truth? And then some ... "
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