Simon Joyner has spent more than three decades constructing one of the most devastating bodies of songs in American underground music. His catalog is steeped in bleak, Midwestern imagery, haunted characters, and unflinching emotional honesty that has drawn praise from the likes of Beck, Gillian Welch, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, and fellow Omaha songwriter Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst.
With his most recent album, Coyote Butterfly, Joyner taps into a deeper vein of sorrow and resilience, reckoning with the loss of his son Owen, who died in August of 2022. The result is one of the most affecting albums in his career—and he’s bringing it to the stage with a six-piece band that adds weight to every cracked note, every rich musical texture, and every solemn word.
Simon Joyner & the Nervous Stars’ lineup includes Australian songwriter Leah Senior (keyboards, vocals, and percussion) and her partner Jesse Williams (guitar), both of whom accompanied Joyner during a recent tour of Australia and New Zealand. The live band also includes Mychal Marasco on drums and Phoenix-based brothers and experimental musicians Caleb (bass and vocals) and Micah Dailey (guitar, miscellaneous instruments, and tape loops).
Following the lead of Joyner’s voice and guitar, the group moves with unhurried rhythms and quiet existential resonance. Together, they’ll breathe new life into some of Coyote Butterfly’s bedrock numbers such as “The Silver Birch” and “Port of Call,” allowing the grief to unfold in real time.
If Coyote Butterfly explores a raw, open wound, songs from Joyner’s upcoming album, Tough Love, promise a more complicated take on perseverance and connection. Many of the songs from the LP in-progress are being revealed here for the first time on this tour. Both albums are intrinsically linked.
“For the kinds of tough love the album addresses, there’s the tough love that exists between citizen and government where you love the country but are struggling with its faults and are at the point of choosing to fight for it to change or maybe abandon it,” Joyner says. “There are a couple of political songs on the album dealing with the state of the country right now. There’s the tough love between siblings, and the tough love of a marriage or any romantic partnership. And of course the tough love as the term first came about, where loved ones of an addict wrestle with how to support the person they love who is struggling and sometimes resort to tactics which isolate or cut off the person struggling with the problem. There are a million little ways we all behave which could be forms of tough love, so the album is about people in various kinds of relationships behaving like humans do which is sometimes good but not always.”
Recently, Joyner & the Nervous Stars released a 7-inch and a CD featuring Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Velvet Underground covers to raise money to help offset the cost of taking a six-piece band on the road.
The group will also play various songs from throughout Joyner’s career, all elevated to the full-bodied sound that a six-piece band affords. Joyner’s songs have always balanced poetry and brutal realism, but there’s a new weight in the air this time—a sense that the personal and political grief he’s singing about is inescapable, but not insurmountable. These songs don’t offer resolution. They offer endurance, and in this moment, that might be exactly what the world needs.
After Words and Gardens Of… play Independent Distilling Company on Sat., Sept. 6.Free. All Ages. 7-10 p.m. 547 E College Ave, Decatur.
Atlanta’s mid-’80s hardcore staple Neon Christ played its final show in February of 1986. One day later, drummer Jimmy Demer, bass player Danny Lankford, and vocalist Randy DuTeau reconvened as Gardens Of… It was a new and ineffable post-punk outfit that thrived in the outer limits of punk and metal’s diffuse influence on underground and popular culture—well before the term “alternative” entered the canon.
“We never called it that,” Demer says. “We listened to a lot of Stooges and Black Sabbath at the time.”
Demer moved to guitar while Lankford remained on bass. Drummers and vocalists came and went. “We had lots of lineup changes and were never that great, but we played with the intensity of people who were sure they were great,” Demer adds.
Gardens Of… recorded one demo tape, but nothing was properly released. The group called it quits in ’89. Still, their presence on the local scene resonated—channeling punk and hardcore’s scorched earth ethos inward, transforming a confrontational sound into equal parts menace, groove, and rock ‘n’ roll. Their jagged, hypnotic sound peeled away the last layers of hardcore orthodoxy.
Now, 36 years later, Gardens Of… is back with a new lineup, new songs, and a more refined disposition.
During their original run, they shared stages with the Rollins Band, Social Distortion, Die Kreuzen, Bl’ast, Suicidal Tendencies, and like minded locals including Sabotortoise (who later became Melts), funk punk band Follow For Now, Mr. Crowes Garden (early Black Crowes), and No Walls featuring their former Neon Christ bandmate William Duvall, later of Alice In Chains. They also played with another DuVall band called the Final Offering, which featured Mike Dean of Corrosion of Conformity.
Gardens Of… also opened for Washington D.C. stalwarts Fugazi’s first Atlanta show at the First Existentialist Congregation in Candler Park, on June 4, 1988, along with After Words. After Words’ self-titled LP was released by Amanda MacKaye and Eli Janney’s Sammich Records in 1989. At the time, After Words were the only band from outside of Washington D.C. to receive distribution through Dischord Records.
“There were a couple dozen people there,” Demer says. “We had no idea what to expect from Fugazi. It was before they had released any music, and of course our minds were blown.”
Fast forward to the COVID era, and Demer was at home writing songs inspired by his early heroes. “It was time to get Gardens Of… together again to play this punk-metal stuff,” Demer says.
Lankford was in, and Brent Addison returned to drums. “He was the best of the four-five drummers we had back in the day,” Demer says. “We brazenly poached him from After Words.”
Vocalist Emily Lawson joined under unusual circumstances. At a karaoke party, Lankford and his wife Shelley heard her singing songs by Nine Inch Nails, Blondie, Prince, Beastie Boys, M.I.A., and the likes. “She sounded good and projected confidence,” Lankford says. “I invited her to sing in my basement—more informal, maybe less intimidating.”
Lawson had never played in a band, but revealed a powerhouse voice in new Gardens Of… numbers such as “Do It For the Kids,” featuring the lyrics: “Do it for believers squatting in abandoned factories / Do it for the cold case / Do it for its own majesty / For DRI and MDC / Do it for the ceremony / Do it for the summer sun / Do it, do it, do it for free.”
It’s a hard reset for a veteran act from a bygone era with nothing to prove. “We’re all better players now,” Demer says. “I had time during the pandemic to broaden my abilities as a guitar player and writer. The songs don’t sound like Dio or Black Flag, but they stand on their own nevertheless.”
Three years in the making, Total Peace’s self-titled debut album comes out of the gate strong with volume and urgency. What began as a neighborly chat between Michelle Williams and Matt Cherry during the peak of COVID isolation turned into a full-fledged band grounded in old school human interaction and no-frills songwriting.
Cherry is best known for slinging layered and complex guitar parts in the psychedelic post rock outfit Maserati. Here, he trades his effects pedals for a bass and a microphone. His voice is heavy, tuneful, and raw in songs such as “Taped Up,” “Trance,” and “Slipped.” It’s a bold pivot that calls to mind the ramped up energy of Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and the introspective back-and-forth between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd throughout Television’s Marquee Moon—all driven by the sheer exuberance of the Stooges’Self-titled LP. The riffs are bold and the rhythms are undeniable, reveling in the power of repetition.
Guitarists Williams and Craig Gates and drummer Greg Stevens round out the lineup with a compelling synergy. Stevens and Williams share roots in Atlanta’s early aughts indie rock band Red Level 11. Their chemistry grounds the record’s driving pulse, as they thrive on stripped-down dynamics—no synths and no nonsense.
There is no concept at work here per se, but Cherry says, “Michelle and I are neighbors in Inman Park. She has a bunch of historical documents about people and events on our street in the 1910s and 1920s that we thought were interesting. Several of the songs are loosely about those things. Other songs,” he goes on to says,” “are about different topics ranging from fictional characters to various midlife crises and dark thoughts.”
Recorded live at Maze Studios in Reynoldstown with engineer Ben Etter (Erasure, Washed Out, Nikki and the Phantom Callers) and mastered by Joel Hatstat (Bambara, We Vs. the Shark, Liz Durrett), this self-titled debut leans into its compact and hook-laden energy. “Tom Talbot,” “Mold Blue” and “Be Free” dance on a tightrope between post-punk tension and anthemic release. There’s a visceral joy in cranking it up for the sake of catharsis, and Total Peace hits like a welcome jolt of electricity.
David J—co-founder of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets—returns to Avondale Estates for a solo appearance supporting his new poetry collection, titled Rhapsody, Threnody, and Prayer, while playing music from his elegiac new LP, The Mother Tree.
It’s a seated, BYOB affair taking place in a small studio setting, that finds the legendary bass player marking a new and vulnerable chapter in his career. Both David J’s new book and album are tributes to his late mother, Joan Nancy Haskins, each one reflecting on decades of introspection, artistry, and grief processed through the lenses of music and verse. Over five atmospheric tracks, The Mother Tree conjures soundscapes for his poetry to drift through—at once dramatic and meditative, full of memory and emotional ballast.
Mike Lynn (left), Lisa King, and Jeff Calder. Photo courtesy The Hot Place
The Hot Place opens the show. The long-running psychedelic darkwave group led by vocalist and bass player Lisa King and Swimming Pool Q’s guitarist Jeff Calder. Rounded out by Mike Lynn (Betty’s Not a Vitamin), the trio will offer stripped-down interpretations of songs from their 2023 self-titled album. Expect acoustic arrangements that lean into the band’s more ethereal inflections, with King also sharing selections from her own poetry collection Dark Queens and Their Quarry.
David J
The connection between David J and the Hot Place runs deep. The two have toured together playing living room gigs throughout the Southeast, and their creative paths have intersected on multiple projects over the years. This performance promises to continue that synergy in a setting designed for careful listening and thoughtful reflection.
Advance tickets are $50, and are required. There will be no tickets sold at the door, and seating is limited. Doors open at 7 p.m. All-ages are welcomed with accompaniment. Respect the neighbors and don’t park in the adjacent driveway.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider donating to RadATL. Venmo to @Chad-Radford-6 or click on the PayPal link below.
There is quiet power that comes from embracing the subtle nuances, the unheard dimensions of sound that arise when crafting analog textures and drones that fall in the gray areas between musical improvisation and composition. Kelsey Wilson, Alexander, and Hot Trash will dive headlong into this kind of delicate intensity at Railroad Earth on Thursday, May 29.
Hot Trash, finds longtime friends and collaborators Bill Taft and Brian Halloran of W8ing4UFOs, pushing further into realms of abstraction. Using heavy effects to draw out the natural tones of cello and guitar, the duo lets the ghosts of Smoke and Hubcap City echo through a loose and highly personal framework that allows for breath and spontaneous combustion. Some songs have lyrics, some do not.
Alexander. Photo courtesy David Shapiro.
Alexander is the stage name used by New Haven, Connecticut guitar player David Shapiro—an understated yet technically dazzling presence whose work bridges the line between American Primitive guitar and a broader, more introspective drone-folk sensibility. Shapiro’s fingerstyle technique is steeped in the traditions of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, yet his voice is his own—attuned to the spectral edges of memory and movement. Shapiro’s performances unfold like meditations with gravity and grace, each note a stone dropped in still water.
Kelsey Wilson
Bringing the evening to a close, Kelsey Wilson crafts immersive, slow-burning soundscapes built from cassette loops, field recordings, and improvisation. Drawing a throughline from William Basinski’s decaying ambiance to the lo-fi texture worship of early Belong and Concern, Wilson’s set promises to be thick with atmosphere—disintegrating, reassembling, and hovering just out of reach.
$10. Thurs., May 29. Music starts at 8 p.m. Railroad Earth, 1467 Old Oxford Rd. N.E.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider donating to RadATL. Venmo to @Chad-Radford-6 or click on the PayPal link below.
Nicholas and Peter Furgiuele are men of few words. For 23 years the closely-knit Atlanta-born brothers and songwriters have let their music do the talking for them. They first recorded together under the name A Fir-Ju Well in 2002. Years later, in 2007, they rebranded as Gringo Star and have carried on ever since, navigating shifting cultural tides, changing musical trends, and seemingly endless lineup shuffles with the kind of determination that comes from shared musical instincts, experiences, and D.N.A.—call it brotherly love.
Gringo Star’s latest album, Sweethearts, trades indie-rock grit for a 1950’s pop shimmer, weaving together soft-focus textures that imbue their signature blend of garage rock and psychedelia with a new and introspective depth. The album’s first two singles, “Blood Moon” and “I Sleep to Dream,” highlight a musical evolution in progress, each one floating in reverb, harmonies, and instantly familiar melodies wrapped around love stories. The songs shapeshift with dreamlike grace, expanding upon elements of both nostalgia and innovation, carrying the band into new terrain.
“We didn’t set out to make a record with any kind of underlying theme, but all the songs told these love stories, and the sound evolved as we went along,” says singer and guitar player Nicholas Furgiuele. “There is an underlying theme to it all, but I wouldn’t know how to explain it,” he goes on to say while offering that if anyone does hear a coherent concept at work throughout the album, it’s something that wrote itself.
“I have always been into the idea that music is open to interpretation, and what it means to me might mean something completely different to anyone else who’s hearing it and putting it all together in their head,” he adds.
Sweethearts is Gringo Star’s eighth full-length album, and their first with the Grand Rapids-based dizzybird Records. It’s also their second post-pandemic offering, recorded between 2023 and 2024, expanding upon the murky sound and vision of 2023’s On And One And Gone. Its songs take shape as surreal nods to simpler times in American life, channeling equal parts dreamy reverie and swirling self-reflection, filtered through a lens of vintage melancholy.
“We wanted to make a record that felt good, you know? Something that felt like remembering love,” Furgiuele says. “But at the same time, there’s a sadness in that memory. It’s not all sunny.”
Familial tendencies are also behind Nick and Peter’s penchant for a 1950s sound as well. From the 1940s-1975, their maternal grandfather, Ed “Dr. Jive” Mendel, was a DJ for WGBA-AM in Columbus, GA. He was also a chitlin’ circuit promoter, and record label owner who earned a couple of gold records for a duo he managed, Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson. Sam Cooke, Soul Stirrers, Otis Redding, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, the Shirelles, Little Stevie wonder, and Jackie Wilson were also among his associates.
“He died before my parents got together so we never knew him,” Nick says. “But my grandma’s photo albums were all filled with pictures of them with James Brown, Jackie Wilson, being around all of this music and all of these images of our grandparents was for sure an influence on what we do with Gringo Star.”
But an aura of peaceful optimism is the album’s guiding light. “Blood Moon” takes shape as a waltzing lullaby where layered vocal harmonies and languid guitars remain suspended in sensual ether.
One song, “Some Things Don’t Change,” was originally written for Nick and Peter’s first band, the King Street Blues Band, circa 1995 when they were in 9th and 7th grades respectively, while living for several years in Boone, N.C.
The band was named after downtown Boone’s main thoroughfare. “Some Things Don’t Change” was originally penned by their bandmate John Fulkerson, but it had never been properly recorded. For Sweethearts, Nick and Peter took what they remembered of the song, retooled it and wrote some new lyrics here and there.
“I kind of don’t remember what the original song sounded like, and it never really had any kind of arrangements,” Nick says.
The idea to revisit the song came when Nick realized he was unconsciously noodling the bass lines between other songs when the group was on stage. “I don’t know why it got stuck in my head, but it did, and so we gave it a whole new treatment—a whole new life.”
“Some Things Don’t Change,” as it appears on Sweethearts, is now one of the more sophisticated numbers that takes shape amid the tracklist. Still, the album remains deceptively simple, unraveling to reveal miniature worlds thriving inside lush turns of phrases, baroque instrumentation, and emotionally intense shading.
Gringo Star. Photo by Francis Furgiuele.
Since recording Gringo Star’s 2008 debut album, All Y’all, produced by Ben H. Allen III (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Gnarls Barkley), the group’s body of work has existed outside of easy classification. But they have always been interested in stirring hot-blooded emotional meditation into their work. Nick, working alongside his brother Peter on bass, guitar player and vocalist Josh Longino, and drummer Mario Colangelo the group has carved out a one-of-a-kind cosmic rock sound. Surf-inflected riffs and distant rhythms in the instrumental song “Girl,” and a traipsing cover of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ 1966 hit “Li’l Red Riding Hood” underscore the album’s surreal, dream-like essence.
On stage, instruments get swapped. Roles shift. There’s an elastic energy to the way the group performs—egalitarian and impulsive—and this live dynamic carries over into Sweethearts, careening movements from the janggling exuberance of “Count the Ways” to the wall-of-sound that binds “A Lonely One.” Each number offers a distinct postcard from a dream-world version of the past. A sense of longing underpins the whole affair—an ache for connection in a time when disconnection is the norm.
“In a world where division has become a rallying cry, we wanted to make something that reminds people of what connects us,” Peter says. “We wanted to get back to that raw emotion—love, heartbreak, joy, sadness. All of it.”
It’s easy to forget, in the churn of modern music, how rare it is for a band to last this long, all the while continuing to evolve. Gringo Star is one of those rare groups that has never stopped pushing forward, even when the rest of the world shut down, and even when doing so meant carving their own path outside of whatever music scene was in vogue at the time.
They’ve toured relentlessly over the years, sharing stages with the Zombies, Cat Power, Weezer guitarist Brian Bell’s band the Relationship, Best Coast, and Shannon and the Clams. Their sound has zigzagged across records like a living document of who they were at a given moment.
But what is, perhaps, most remarkable is the way the band has retained its identity while allowing each record to bloom in its own way, bringing their songs to life, and turning raw ideas into something that is quite cinematic.
Sweethearts sits comfortably out of time, reverent of the past but not beholden to it. The songs invite listeners to slow down, and to feel things deeply.
Nick and Peter may not be chasing any zeitgeist, but they are staying true to a vision that’s lasted nearly three decades without growing stale. With Sweethearts, they’ve added a rich new chapter to an already impressive catalog—one that lingers long after the needle lifts. And maybe that’s the real trick to Gringo Star’s longevity. The group doesn’t just survive. It resonates beyond words.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider donating to RadATL. Venmo to @Chad-Radford-6 or click on the PayPal link below.
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Record Plug Magazine.
Shane Parish: Solo at Cafe Oto (Red Eft Records). Cover photo by Petra Cvelbar.
Shane Parish has unveiled details for an evocative new album, titled Solo at Café OTO, due out July 1, via his own label, Red Eft Records.
Captured live in London on November 14, 2023, the album showcases Parish in full exploratory mode, performing an instrumental fingerstyle electric guitar set drawn from a deep well of British and American folk traditions. The performance took place during a sold-out evening of solo sets the night before Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet appearance at the London Jazz Festival.
The album’s first single, a rendition of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch’s “Sycamore Trees,” from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, sets the tone for a dark, drifting, and emotionally resonant album. Parish also leans into the melancholy and mysticism of folk ballads by Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, and John Jacob Niles, reinterpreting them with his own idiosyncratic voice and a minimalist rig: just a Fender Squier Telecaster plugged directly into the house amp. It’s the same guitar he used for 4 Guitars Live at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht the night before—a gift from Bill Orcutt, passed down when Parish joined the four-guitar ensemble.
Parish’s 2024 release, Repertoire (Palilalia Records) featured tight arrangements of outsider standards from various musical genres—Kraftwerk’s “Europe Endless,” Alice Coltrane’s “Journey Into Satchidananda,” Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th,” John Cage’s “Totem Ancestor”—allowing their melodies and their vital essences to take on a gently glowing body via the resonating steel strings of his guitar. With Solo at Café OTO, Parish summons a raw and intuitive performance that’s closer in spirit to 2016’s Undertaker Please Drive Slow(Tzadik). Here, each melody becomes a jumping-off point for spontaneous invention, with Parish letting the songs drift, fracture, and reform as if guided by wind and water. The result is both intimate and expansive—an arresting document of a singular guitarist at the height of his expressive powers.
On Saturday, May 17, Italian composer Fabio Frizzi brings his Zombie: Composer’s Cut live score to The Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End—a rare and visceral encounter with the music of one of horror cinema’s most revered partnerships.
Known for his haunting melodies and baroque-tinged arrangements, Frizzi’s work with director Lucio Fulci defined the aesthetic of Italian giallo films throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, most famously in The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and Zombie.
This performance pairs Fulci’s 1979 film—a grim, gore-soaked masterpiece of undead terror—with a live rendition of Frizzi’s reimagined score. Originally composed with collaborators Franco Bixio and Vince Tempera, Zombie’s music blends prog, synth, and eerie atmospherics into something that feels both grandiose and uncomfortably intimate. With the Composer’s Cut, Frizzi revisits and reworks the material, building a dynamic new soundtrack performed live by his band.
Frizzi’s legacy spans decades of cinema and television, but it’s his work with Fulci that cemented his cult status. The Frizzi 2 Fulci project has taken his soundtracks to stages around the world. Now in its third iteration, the show brings Zombie to life in ways that are both faithful and revelatory.
Presented with a 4K restoration of the film, this immersive experience folds sight and sound into a ritual of dread and beauty. Whether you’re a horror fan or simply looking to be unnerved in the best way possible, Zombie: Composer’s Cut delivers pure, pulpy magic—and the most epic showdown between a shark and a zombie ever committed to film.
Zombie vs. Shark: A Scene from Lucio Fulci’s ‘Zombie’
This Saturday, May 10, NoWordsATL 4.0 takes over the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End on Sat., May 10, from 3:30-11 p.m.
This day-long festival is a celebration of instrumental, ambient, and experimental sound exploration—sans words—delivered in an environment that thrives on thick ambiance and both visceral and cerebral responses to the music.
Catch sets from an eclectic mix of forward-thinking artists, unfolding in a space that invites immersive listening. Think synth meditations, modular abstractions, steel strings, and guitar loops stretched into infinity amid light installations and projections turning the room into an ever-shifting canvas where sound and light mingle in real time.
The Harmonic Continuum is an afro-futurist, multi-instrumentalist foursome featuring Doc Calico, Billy Fields, Kenito Murray, and Kenny Web playing jazz, punk, psychedelic, and experimental rock.
Rasheeda Ali is a Grammy nominated flautist who recently stepped out from the shadow of performing alongside greats like Jeff Mills and Kebbi Williams expressing next level cosmic explorations of sound using flute, synth, and drum machines.
Shane Parish is a guitarist, composer, improviser, and leader of the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas. He’s also ¼ of Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and a renowned acoustic soloist.
Melodic Monster, featuring Ben Garden, is a psychedelic rock band that blends theatrics and effects in an unforgettable live show.
Alexandria Smith is an improviser/multimedia artist, trumpeter, and a professor of music at Georgia Tech, who has performed residencies at the Stone NYC, had feature recitals on the Future of New Trumpet (FONT) Festival West, Dartmouth’s Vaughan Recital Series, the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Baja California, and Tulane University.
Spacers blend Kraut Rock and African rhythms to psychedelic effect.
Jeffrey Bützer is a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, toy piano, guitar, electric piano, chord organs, glockenspiel, melodica, banjo, and other noise makers to create a cinematic world of sound.
The Atlanta Improvisers Orchestrais a collective of experimental artists who use classical instruments, movement, and sound in spontaneous improvised compositions. Featuring Majid Ariam, Al-Yasha Ilhaam Williams, Ben Shirley, Priscilla Smith, and an evolving cast of various other artists.
If you ever caught an earful of “Destroy All Music” on WREK-FM in the 1980s, flipped through the dog-eared pages of LowLife Magazine, or caught Glen Thrasher behind the counter at A Cappella Books, you already know: Glen didn’t just participate in Atlanta’s underground—he defined a large part of it, for a long time.
Thrasher passed away Saturday morning, May 3, leaving behind a secret legacy that pulses through every DIY show, noise set, and scribbled flyer that still dares to push Atlanta’s arts scene off the rails and into uncharted territory.
He was 66 years old.
In the early 1980s, Glen and co-host Ellen McGrail transformed “Destroy All Music” into a beacon of chaos and possibility over Georgia Tech’s 91.1 FM airwaves. No wave, free jazz, tape hiss, post-punk, and basement weirdness—nothing was too far out. The show carved space for unclassifiable sounds and stood as a lifeline for seekers and soundheads. McGrail and her partner Tony Gordon still co-host the show every Wednesday from 9-10 p.m., proliferating a testament to Thrasher’s curatorial nerve.
The Destroy All Music festivals that Glen and Ellen created gave a stage to the likes of Dirt, Lisa Suckdog, Freedom Puff, Col. Bruce Hampton, Tom Smith’s Peach of Immortality, Cake (Tracy Terrill), and Chattanooga’s Shaking Ray Levis—local and regional acts who existed outside the realm of mainstream music and culture.
LowLife Magazine issue no. 17.
From 1984 to 1992, Thrasher published LowLife, a Xeroxed, cut-and-paste document of Atlanta’s disreputable brilliance. It was more than a zine—it was a transmission from the city’s cultural underbelly. Fiction, comics, mail art, anti-authoritarian rants, interviews with skronk warriors and tape-traders—LowLife captured the friction and fire of a city in flux. Issue # 17 featured Magic Bone’s Debbey Richardson’s quiet smile on the cover, which is forever etched into the collective memory of anyone who ever scoured a punk distro table at any record show or zine fest.
Thrasher also played a role in the creation of Cat Power, playing drums behind Chan Marshall in the earliest iterations of the project. Glen once relayed that while playing music with Chan, they booked their first show, but did not yet have a name for the band. He called Chan who was working the cash register at Felini’s Pizza in Little 5 Points. Glen said, “We need to have a name, tell me something now or I’ll just make it up.” The customer waiting in line to order a slice of pizza was wearing a Cat Power Diesel trucker cap. She said to Glen, “Cat Power,” and the name stuck.
Thrasher later drifted north to New York in the ’90s before returning to Atlanta where he continued writing and working at A Cappella Books. Through it all, his compass never strayed from the outside path, and his critical wit never waivered.
I worked at A Cappella Books with Glen for years, where we spent long hours behind the counter, talking about politics, books, the music of Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, the Dog Faced Hermans, Cecil Taylor, Mary Timony, and too many others to recall. He had an encyclopedic knowledge. He could be an intellectual antagonist in one moment, and a warm and engaging companion in the next. It was all in the interest of honest debate and raging against a cultural slide into right-wing politics and modern technology dulling our collective senses. “Why be any other way,” he once laughed, and it made him a true friend and mentor.
He didn’t just know where to find the good stuff—he was the good stuff. His year-end lists were impenetrably comprehensive: a treasure map for the eternally curious. I can’t count how many records, zines, or strange new ideas I encountered because Glen had the foresight—or the infectious enthusiasm—to share them.
Glen Thrasher was a beacon, a connector, a beautiful noise in a world that too often chooses silence. Atlanta’s underground has lost one of its true architects, but his work, his spirit, and his sonic fingerprints remain etched in the grooves of every misfit creation that follows.
Rest in power, Glen. The signal carries on.
Details regarding funeral arrangements are forthcoming.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, please consider donating to RadATL. Venmo to @Chad-Radford-6 or click on the PayPal link below.
Rad/ATL 