CL’s 2015 Music Issue is on the streets!
This year’s issue is all about looking at how musicians are coping with a city caught in the throes of development.
CL’s 2015 Music Issue hit the streets this morning. This year’s issue is all about looking at how musicians are coping with a city caught in the throes of development. As mentioned in this year’s eulogy for Thunderbox: “It is a city’s nature to change. The process is often brutal, but music will never die. And while musicians at Thunderbox are by no means the first residents of Old Fourth Ward to be impacted by a city in flux, their displacement is a stinging loss in an ongoing culture war.”
Sadly, while the issue was rolling off of the press, we learned that many of Thunderbox’s refugees who were shuffled over to Avatar Rehearsal Studios won’t be settling into their new digs for long. Come Sept. 1, Avatar will suffer the same fate as Thunderbox. Stay tuned for more news on this.
The problem is very real.
But more than an aching lament, this issue is a call to arms. And there are scores of musicians working hard to write the next chapter for Atlanta’s music scene. From the efforts of a handful of musicians at the Dry Cleaners in Lakewood Heights to HXV’s revived VAVLT parties at the Music Room functioning as an incubator for creativity in club music, there is plenty of room to roam around in this year’s Music Issue.
Be sure to check out our photo essay, “That was then, this is now.” I had a great time digging into bootleg recordings from the Sex Pistols’ American debut, and talking with Doreen Chochran who chaperoned Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten around the city that fateful January night in 1978.
The culture war wages on.