The Death of Piano Red
At the end of “Doctor Feelgood,” the last song on Piano Red’s posthumous album, The Lost Atlanta Tapes, he shouts to the live audience, “Yeah! Yeah! Alright!” to which an enthusiastic crowd responds, “Oh yeah!” amongst loud cheers and whistles. “Don’t forget,” Piano Red continues into the microphone before bidding the crowd good night, “The Excelsior Mill is the place when you want to have a good time!” The live album was recorded in October 1984. Within a year, on July 25, 1985, Piano Red lost his battle with cancer and passed away at DeKalb General Hospital. His funeral was well-attended, and included Georgia Governor Joe Frank Harris and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. The Excelsior Mill was never the same.
Truth be told, the Excelsior Mill began to take on a different shape in the years prior to Piano Red’s death. This was largely because Michael Reeves started to retreat from his duties at the restaurant because he wanted to create a venue dedicated solely to rock, as opposed to the Excelsior Mill’s hodgepodge of a restaurant, blues and rock venue, comedy club, and sometimes even a stage theatre. Indeed, it was an excellent time for Michael to start a rock venue, as the local scene was thriving.
The Origins of the Atlanta Rock Scene
It would be remiss to discuss Atlanta rock n’ roll without first introducing Alex Cooley. During the 1960s, Cooley was a college dropout who worked as a furniture salesman. After that stint, he got fired from a pizza restaurant, before managing a separate pizza restaurant in Buckhead, named Papa’s, that was going under. In 1968, Cooley was 28 years old and living on Piedmont Avenue in Midtown placing him in the midst of Atlanta’s hippie district.[1] The heart of the district was a six-block stretch on Peachtree Street, known as the Strip, that began on 8th Street and continued until 14th. The era’s flowerchildren could walk east on any of these numbered streets and arrive at Piedmont Park, where the city’s “be-ins” and other countercultural gatherings were held.[2] Cooley lived only two blocks from the Strip and was right across the street from Piedmont Park.
In December 1968, Cooley and some friends headed south to attend the Miami Pop Festival featuring Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, Steppenwolf, and a fledgling Fleetwood Mac. As rock festivals were becoming increasingly popular at the time, Cooley wanted to create a similar event, bringing his experience in Florida back to Atlanta. He was met with pushback from band managers, typically located in New York and California, largely because Atlanta—and the South at large—was not believed to have many rock fans. The city hosted a few rock concerts during the 1960s, but these were extremely popular acts who would sellout tickets anywhere. This list includes the Beatles in the midst of 1965’s Beatlemania, as well as the Who in 1967, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1968.[3] To the “big city” managers, hosting a large rock festival in Atlanta was too much of a financial risk.[4]
This impression was understandable, as Georgia was behind the times. While local hippies may have preached peace and equality, enough people from the rest of Georgia elected Lester Maddox as Governor in 1967. Maddox was a staunch segregationist who made headlines in 1964 for taking an axe handle and chasing away a group of black people that tried to enter his restaurant, the Pickrick, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.[5] Furthermore, when Atlanta native Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Maddox did not attend the funeral, nor did he allow King’s body to lie in state.[6]
Though Maddox was from Atlanta, Atlanta largely was (and is) a liberal, progressive oasis surrounded by a predominantly conservative state. Sam Massell, who served as Mayor of Atlanta from 1970 to 1974, advocated for civil rights and even encouraged the hippie presence in Atlanta believing it to be a sign of a modern city.[7]
In the midst of this, Cooley, who was now managing a café called the Little Mermaid in Peachtree Center—a Downtown Atlanta district connected by sky bridges, largely designed by John Portman Jr.—saved his money, gathered a group of twelve partners to solicit loans, and eventually received a combined grand total of $100,000 to finance Atlanta’s First International Pop Festival. The money paid for the stage, lighting and sound materials, as well as talent such as Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin. The concert took place over the Fourth of July weekend in 1969, a month before Woodstock, at the Atlanta International Raceway in Hampton, GA. It was attended by approximately 100,000 people.
The concert was a success, both in terms of attendance and finance. However, the hippie ethos of the Sixties criticized Cooley and his partners for making money. The team thus used the profits to offer a free concert in Piedmont Park to thank Atlanta music fans for a positive festival. It was headlined by the Grateful Dead. A second, larger Atlanta Pop Festival was held on the Fourth of July Weekend the following year that featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Allman Brothers Band, and B.B. King. Estimates of this show’s attendance are upwards of 200,000 people.[8]
Looking at the bands who played at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium, one of the city’s largest and primary concert venues of the era, there is a noticeable change after 1969. Other than the abovementioned shows with the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, music at the auditorium never got “harder” than the Beach Boys, the Turtles, or Paul Revere and the Raiders. After the First International Pop Festival, bands such as Steppenwolf, the Allman Brothers, Alice Cooper, and many others played the venue.[9]
Riding on the success of his rock festivals and the 1972 Georgia legislation lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18, Cooley operated as a concert promoter and producer in Atlanta, primarily for the Municipal Auditorium.[10] While Atlanta was previously seen by band managers as too conservative or uninterested in rock music, the city became a popular tour destination for national touring bands. Concert flyers and tickets were found around the city with three words preceding the names of major bands: “Alex Cooley Presents.” Because there were few contemporary medium-sized venues to host rock concerts in Atlanta—the options being either small bars or the mammoth Municipal Auditorium—Cooley opened his own venue in the Grand Ballroom at the Georgian Terrace Hotel in 1974. Calling it, the “Electric Ballroom,” he brought bands such as KISS, Rush, and Aerosmith to the city.[11] By the end of the 1970s, venues such as the Great Southeast Music Hall and the Omni were added as potential stops for national tours. While Atlanta had the venues, most of Georgia’s homegrown music came from Athens, the state’s largest college town.
The Excelsior Cinema and Pub
It is in this environment that Michael Reeves, a business savvy music fan, began stepping away from the Excelsior Mill to scout locations and do the logistics of owning a rock venue. Despite having several managers at the Excelsior Mill, one of the Reeves Brothers was almost always present at the restaurant. As Michael backed away, his brother Rocky had to stay more often, however he lived far away and had two children. He would thus leave the club early, while One in a Mill’s concerts began late at night and carried into the early morning. Afterwards, the staff had to remain even later to clean up after a crowd of up to 600 drunk people. As a result, Rocky considered other ways to bring entertainment in the room that required little maintenance. He landed on the idea of opening a cinema and pub.
Cinema-and-pubs were trendy in Atlanta at the time, as another business—the baroque-styled Capri Theatre—rebranded itself as the Buckhead Cinema n’ Drafthouse in the 1980s.[12] The business behind opening a cinema was simple—after the initial cost of theater equipment, such as a screen, speakers, and a popcorn machine, there are few associated costs that Home-Grown Industries had to purchase for its continued operation. To keep costs even further down, the theater mostly exhibited second-run or B films.[13] For example, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film, A Clockwork Orange, had its original wide-release in 1972, though it screened at the Excelsior Mill in January 1984.[14] Also, only a handful of employees are needed for one-screen cinemas—perhaps just a person to sell tickets; another to handle the bar, popcorn, and to run food orders upstairs; and this same pair could remain afterward to take out the trash, pick up fallen napkins or spilled drinks, and other closing activities.[15]
The Excelsior Mill announced the conversion in February 1982, and after closing for a short period, One in a Mill re-opened as “the Excelsior Cinema and Pub” on July 16, 1982. Admission was only $1—a bargain even during the 1980-1982 recession. Patrons could order drinks from a full-bar, and had food options ranging from popcorn to pizza to lobster feasts.[16] The cinema caught on and became immediately popular. Whereas the restaurant crowd upstairs remained a bit more family oriented and the previous One in a Mill crowd was diverse, the Excelsior Cinema and Pub’s clientele were mostly young hipsters.[17] By 1987, the theater’s crowd gained a reputation for being a “large, rowdy, anything-goes drafthouse audience.”[18]
Two years after the Excelsior Cinema and Pub opened, Jeffrey Watkins started the Atlanta Shakespeare Company in 1984. This was a troupe of actors who gained national coverage for casting black people as major roles in plays by William Shakespeare, as well as for taking Shakespeare’s works from traditional theatre settings, and instead performing them at bars.[19] This business model introduced audiences to Shakespeare who typically would not seek him out, giving the Bard (and the Atlanta Shakespeare Company) a wider fan base.
The company held their month-long First Annual Shakespeare Festival at the Excelsior Cinema and Pub from September 19 to October 24, 1985, bringing a repertory showing of Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing to the space. As this suspended the Excelsior Mill’s movies for over a month, the Atlanta Shakespeare Company paid Home-Grown Industries a nominal fee.[20] To promote the event, a flyer was created of William Shakespeare as “Hambo”—a mashup of the Bard dressed as Sylvester Stallone in Rambo. The troupe also frequented Manuel’s Tavern, a nearby historic bar, but by the end of the 1980s, they outgrew both locations and created their own venue in 1990. To this day, the Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse sits on Peachtree Street, and in the men’s restroom is a framed original flyer of Hambo.
Selling the Excelsior Mill
After converting One in a Mill to the Excelsior Cinema and Pub, Home-Grown Industries of Georgia continued upgrading the Excelsior Mill Restaurant. One member of the firm, Marc Weinstein, added a 540-foot strip of blue neon light to wrap around the building just below the roof, saying the building used to “look ominous at night.” In addition to this, 30 neon signs filled the long dining room of the Excelsior Mill.[21] However, Michael Reeves’ initial apprehension when purchasing the building in 1977 proved true: maintaining a building of that size and age was difficult, and materials began to break down and need repairs with frequent use.
In 1987, Michael’s dreams of owning a rock venue manifested as the Cotton Club in Midtown. Within the first few years of opening, bands such as Drivin n’ Cryin, Soundgarden, Widespread Panic, and Jane’s Addiction all took the stage at the new venue. Someone in the audience at the Jane’s Addiction show recorded the band and turned it into a bootleg CD, which became one of the rarest and most sought-after albums for diehard fans of the band. By 1988, Michael Reeves had little to do with the Excelsior Mill aside from occasionally sending bands that did not fit the bill at the Cotton Club to play for the “anything goes” hipsters in the typically available space downstairs, as cinema attendance declined by this time.[22] Because of this, 695 North Avenue featured heavy metal acts such as Danzig and Voivod even before becoming the Masquerade.[23] With Mellow Mushroom’s continued success, the maintenance of and long drive to the Excelsior Mill made less sense to Rocky. Rocky and the rest of Home-Grown Industries decided to sell the restaurant, with Mike Nicholson of the company saying, “Business was OK as a restaurant, but it’s a big place with a big mortgage—and it kind of drifted out of our control.”[24]
In June 1988, the Rothman Corporation real estate firm approached Home-Grown Industries to purchase the Excelsior Mill with the intent to turn it—as well surrounding structures—into two separate apartment buildings with a total of 441 units. Nicholson represented Home-Grown Industries for the attempted deal, but before it came to fruition there were a couple of hindrances that the parties had to address. The first was business zoning: 695 North Avenue was zoned as an industrial site, and it had to be rezoned as residential before people could live on the property.[25]
The second issue was the building’s designation by the Atlanta Urban Design Commission as a historic site back in 1981. In addition to the Excelsior Mill, 29 other Atlanta properties and neighborhoods were added to this list then as well, including the Varsity (a local drive-in restaurant that is the largest in the world). The designation did not offer any protection—it was mostly an honorary distinction of the buildings’ significance. It did, however, require the Atlanta Urban Design Commission to be notified when a property or neighborhood encountered any planned changes. Once the commission was made aware of the changes, they only had the right to review and comment on the properties, and to postpone demolition for two weeks to save any significant structures.[26]
It is not known if the Rothman Corporation wanted to demolish the entire property, but they certainly wanted to change the face of the building. This was a battle the Urban Design Commission was willing to fight. In the midst of the negotiations, rezoning procedures, and opposition from the Urban Design Commission, the Rothman Corporation backed out of the deal.[27]
The property at 695 North Avenue remained zoned as an industrial site, and Home-Grown Industries actively tried leasing the building instead of selling it, adding a stipulation that they continue to use the back building on the property as Mellow Mushroom’s commissary kitchen.[28] This was largely because Mellow Mushroom needed to produce nearly 600 pounds of dough per day.[29] The stipulation could have scared some potential lessees away, as conflicts of interest were conceivable with the property owners remaining.
The Excelsior Mill continued operating as a restaurant and had several offers, but Home-grown Industries were looking for the “right group.”[30]
[1] “Alex Cooley: How a 400-pound failed pizza maker made it really big as a Southern rock promoter,” Steve Oney, the Atlanta Constitution, February 18, 1979, SM12, SM20, SM22)
[2] “Slouching Towards Atlanta: The Influence of Churches on Atlanta’s Hippie Community,” Timothy Cole Hale, 1-2.
[3] Bands taken from Setlist.fm
[4] Oney article.
[5] Alex Cooley points this out in an interview with Patrick Edmondson of the Strip Project, found at: http://www.thestripproject.com/alex-cooley-interview/
[6] “The Georgia Governor Who Refused To Attend MLK’s Funeral,” Donnell Suggs, WABE, April 9, 2018, https://mlk.wabe.org/georgia-governor-refused-attend-mlks-funeral/, accessed May 10, 2022.
[7] Sam Massell had a complicated relationship with the city’s counterculture. On one hand, he encouraged their presence and placed a police precinct near the Strip as violent crime toward hippies increased in the area. On the other, the police presence could be seen as harassment as they made arrests for crimes such as loitering.
[8] Oney article.
[9] Band list gathered from Setlist.fm
[10] The minimum age gradually increased over the 1980s, to 19 in 1982, 20 in 1985, and back to 21 in 1986.
[11] Band list gathered from setlist.fm
[12] It later became the Coca-Coly Roxy, and currently exists at the Buckhead Theatre.
[13] Mike Reeves interview with author.
[14] “HOT SPOTS: MOVIES,” the Atlanta Constitution, January 6, 1984, 1P.
[15] Interview with author.
[16] “Is banishment from Smyrna same as Death?” Ron Hudspeth, the Atlanta Constitution, July 10, 1982, 1B.
[17] Reeves interview with author.
[18] “`Re-Animator’ a Gross Film, but Never Out of Control: Movie Review,” Eleanor Ringel, the Atlanta Constitution, January 16, 1987, P/9.
[19]“Shakespeare troupe to play at Excelsior,” Paula Crouch, the Atlanta Constitution, September 20, 1984, 4B); “ART: Theatre,” the Atlanta Constitution, September 28, 1984, 1P.; also “THEATER NOTES Stitchery of arts is fabric of `Quilted’,” Paula Crouch, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 6, 1985, B9.
[20] “Much Ado at Excelsior Mill,” Linda Sherbert, the Atlanta Journal, September 15, 1985, 1J-3J.
[21] “NEO NEON: Light, color glow bright in a revived love affair,” Catherine Fox, the Atlanta Constitution, July 17, 1983, 1H
[22] Mike Reeves interview with author.
[23] “Tix n Times,” the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 16, 1988, E6.
[24] “Mill to Masquerade, New Club Unveiled,” Eileen M. Drennen, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, September 1, 1989, E1, E4.
[25] “2 Major Apartment Projects Planned Near Sears’ Ponce De Leon Building,” Sallye Salter, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, June 25, 1988, D1.
[26] “Varsity–and Others–Now ‘Historic Places’: City List Recognizes,” Maria Saporta, the Atlanta Constitution, August 20, 1981, E10
[27] Mike Reeves interview with author.
[28] Mike Reeves interview with author.
[29] Drennen article.
[30] Mike Reeves interview with author.
Painted Black 