Description: Plus 1 Atlanta is a 214-page, full-color love letter to the city I’ve called home for over half my life. Spanning the years 1962 to 2003, the flyers, posters, handbills, ticket stubs, and other junk that make up this book show a city ahead of its time - Henry H. Owings.

Verdict: In what is an incredible flashback insight into both a concert going journey along with the visual memorabilia from those very same days to help aid the readers enjoyment, among the venues documented here within the mighty array of pages of Plus 1 Atlanta are I Defy, the Duke Tire Company Warehouse, PJ’s Nest, 688, the Metroplex, the International Ballroom, the Great Southeast Music Hall and Richards, The Point and the White Dot, TV Dinner, the Nitery, the Celebrity Club, C. W. Shaw’s, the Bistro, Whisk ’a Go-Go, Jennings Rose Room, Bedrock Café … and then there are the places you’ve never heard of!

Author and collator Henry H. Owings has also included a handy two-page index listing the addresses of all of the venues, should you not quite recall their locations, or better still, wish to check them out today (should they still be standing, of course).

But lest we forget about the bands and artists that Owings took the time to go see, to breathe in their collective musical air, for along with a formidable line up of musical talent to behold here, what really stands out are the genuine, and some times artistically created on a dime early show posters and listings for some of Georgia’s finest.

And that list includes but is most definitely not the whole sum of the bands and artists such as: the Black Crowes, the Hampton Grease Band, Ru Paul and the U-Hauls, Mastodon, et al.

Oh, and there’s also unearthed material meticulously scanned from the likes of the Brains, the Fans, Darryl Rhoades and the Hahavishnu Orchestra, Thermos Greenwood, EQT, Nasty Bucks, the Razor Boys, Keith and the Satellites (later to become the Georgia Satellites), Baby and the Pacifiers, Glenn Phillips, the Restraints, and man oh man, so many others that it practically boggles the mind!

Indeed, and with material culled from over 300 individual collections (and even a few from the author’s own personal garbage, thank you very much, kind sir), Plus 1 Atlanta is a beastly group effort, and it shows.

Along with a foreword by David Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), an introduction by publisher Henry H. Owings himself, and an afterword by Bill Kelliher of Mastodon, the book features essays from some of Atlanta’s finest and bravest.

In closing, Plus 1 Atlanta is the kind of book that you wish, as an average concert goer for the past 30+ years or as a journalist sent to view shows for a living (hence the Plus 1 of the title), that you yourself had thought of putting together for your own keepsake memories!

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