In the summer of 1995 I moved to Athens, GA after graduating from Emory. Athens was cheap, not just the living but also the live shows. But it didn't start there (what's "it"?). It started in Atlanta, perhaps in 1993, but most likely in 1994. "It" was something I kept hearing, something that was already getting transmitted over long distances (spatial, temporal), something I couldn't grasp, and for that very reason something I could not let go. And then it became something that I looked for, that would force me out of my room at around 11pm on a Friday or even a Tuesday, something that then (in Atlanta at that point) I found sometimes at the Point, but more often at a little place called Dottie's.
Dottie's (or rather Lenny's, as it changed names a few years back) closed in 2010, and the building was just leveled in December 2013. The photo above seems to make it present again, but to me it's unrecognizable, in part because it was always so dark when I was there, but more importantly because Dottie's for me is a memory that is stuck in the mid-90s and cannot be noiselessly projected into my own time, right now. When I think of Dottie's, I hear noise, not just guitar noise and distortion, but the unintentional noise of bad transmission, the noise of something not quite coming through. a bad recording.
After moving to Athens in June 1995, I sometimes went back to Dottie's in Atlanta, now with a backpack, and inside my backpack was my old tape recorder (ok, it wasn't really mine; I borrowed it from my employer at the time). It was as if I already knew that the present -- the very presence of the present -- was already slipping away into nostalgia. That was the sound I heard, the sound of something that was not fully present, the nostalgia of the present as it passes away. And this is what I hear now, when I capture this song from one of those tapes back then. Here's the band B.O.B. when they played Dottie's on July 19, 1995, sometime after 11:30pm. "Raise Electric."
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