Long-time Atlanta concert producer and Music Midtown co-creator Alex Cooley is getting back in the music business, buying Eddie's Attic with partner Dave Mattingly effective Dec. 1.
Outgoing Eddie's owner Bob Ephlin, in an e-mailed announcement Thursday morning, said: "I'm confident that Alex and Dave will do a great job taking Eddie's Attic to the next level. I believe its best days are ahead of it."
The intimate Decatur Square listening room founded by Eddie Owen has been a hotbed of mostly acoustic music for nearly two decades, an early showcase for Atlanta-polished national talents such as the Indigo Girls, Shawn Mullins and Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, who, as Sugarland, were named vocal duo of the year at the Country Music Awards on Wednesday night.
An Atlanta native, Cooley staged the first Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1969, crafting a lineup that included Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin its inaugural year, and Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers the next.
Over the decades, he's promoted concerts for hundreds of heavyweights, from Pink Floyd to Nirvana to Cher.
He founded the Electric Ballroom and Capri Ballroom in the '70s and, with partner Peter Conlon, turned Chastain Park Amphitheatre into a unique concert venue in the '80s. In the early '90s, Conlon and Cooley returned to the Capri space on Roswell Road in Buckhead and reopened the venue as the Roxy.
Next came the creation of Music Midtown in 1994; its first-year roll call boasted James Brown, Buddy Guy, Al Green and Joan Baez. The festival ended its yearly run in 2005.
Three years ago, Cooley was recruited by Atlanta businessman Charles Loudermilk to consult on a reboot of the Roxy, and last year, the spiffed-up venue, back to its original name of the Buckhead Theatre, opened. Conlon did not consult 0r partner with Cooley in the relaunch of Music Midtown this summer, and Cooley has otherwise been out of the concert promotion picture since helping get the Buckhead Theatre off the ground.
In a September interview with the AJC, Cooley, now in his early 70s, hinted at another music-related negotiation in the works, one that apparently was Eddie's. But he was adamant that whatever his next move was to be, "I do not want to work 70-hour weeks again and be glued to the phone 10, 12 hours a day."
Meanwhile, Owen, who opened the North McDonough Street club in 1992 and managed it for Ephlin in recent years, recently took over the Red Clay Theatre in downtown Duluth in north Gwinnett County. His early lineup -- under the banner Eddie Owen Presents -- has a strong Eddie's Attic flavor, with upcoming shows by Edwin McCain, Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers.
In his email, soon to be former Eddie's owner Ephlin said, "It's been my privilege to work alongside the dedicated staff at Eddie's Attic for the past 6 1/2 years. I'm extremely proud of what we've accomplished, and of our stewardship of a brand that, for almost 20 years now, has been dedicated to amplifying the magic of the artist-listener connection in an intimate listening-room setting."
Staff writer Melissa Ruggieri contributed to this report.
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