ATLRetro

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

Spring is here, all you Retro lovelies! So, leave the frigid cold behind, lose the layers and come out and play! Retro Atlanta has all the rockin’ good times you’ve been craving, from revved up rockabilly, honky-tonk, 70s rock n roll and everything in between!  And as always, we’ve got all the blues and jazz you could ever want! So, don’t be square and live la vida Retro!

Monday, March 24

Get funky and groove on down to Café 290 every second and fourth Monday of the month for a taste of Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’  Boogie on down to the Northside Tavern and spend an evening with Lola at her famous Monday Night Northside Jam! Get down and dirty with Barrelhouse Bob Page at Blind Willie’s! And blues it up at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack  for an extra helping of the blues with The Pork Bellys and some finger lickin’ BBQ!
 
Tuesday, March 25

Shimmy on down to the Red Light Café for a Burlesque Battle of the Babes! Get saucy and spend the evening with Sadie Hawkins at her Last Pasties Standing event accompanied by some rockin’ blues and Southern rock! Boogie on down to The Star Bar and get groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ Quasi Mandisco every other Tuesday! Take a trip to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for a night of folksy tunes with Sailing to Denver! Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint gets bluesy with the Bob Page Trio! Stomp on down to Big Tex for a night with Moira Nelligan & The Dixie Jigs and their old-fashioned Americana! Or boogie on down to Darwin’s Burgers & Blues in Marietta for a taste of Bill Sheffield’s acoustic roots and blues! Jam it up with Joe Gransden and his jazz jam session at Twain’s in Decatur every Tuesday at 9 pm. Timo Arthur rocks out country blues style at Blind Willie’s! The Entertainment Crackers gets bluesy with their folksy Americana sounds at the Northside Tavern.  It’s serendipity at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern at their screening of Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE(1993) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm! And get trippy in outer space with Andrei Tarkovsky’s, SOLARIS (1972) at the Midtown Art Cinema at 7 pm!

Wednesday, March 26

Honky-tonk on down to Smith’s Olde Bar because it’s a hootenanny and a half tonight as they deliver their Slim Chicken Honky-tonk Extravaganza with the stompin’ and boogyin’ tunes of Atomic Boogie, Kool Kat Caroline Engel & The Ramblers, Whiskey Belt and Big Boss Man! Rock on down to The Star Bar for a night of raunchy rock n roll with The Johnny Rebs, The Dirty Magazines and Madre Padre! Get a taste of some Americana, pop and Appalachian rhythms at Eddie’s Atticwith Cicada Rhythm’s CD release and Loves It! Beverly ‘Guitar’ Watkins gets down and dirty blues-style at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint! Frankly my dears, we do give a damn, so make your way to the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum and join Atlanta History Center’s Party with the Past event, celebrating the 75^th Anniversary of GONE WITH THE WIND and let Sue Verhoef give you the scoop on the 1939 World Premier! Get your fill of some rockin’ blues with The Cazanovas at Blind Willie’s! Stomp on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack ‘cause it’s a flood of rockin’ blues and funk with The Georgia Flood! Or make your way to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! It’s Ladies Night at Johnny’s Hideaway which plays hits from Sinatra to Madonna for a generally mature crowd.  And ‘You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss’, at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern as they screen Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE(1993) during their Happily Ever After series’ matinee screening at 11:30 am!

Thursday, March 27

It’s Bluegrass Thursday at the Red Light Café, so stomp on down and get your fill of City Mouse, Caleb Warren & The Perfect Gentlemen, Kristina Murray and Reverend Hylton & The Devil’s Hands! It’s an old-timey retro revival at Smith’s Olde Bar as Big Daddy Love and The Jugtime Ragband raise an Appalachian and Dixieland ruckus! Get your dancin’ shoes on and spend an evening, jumpin’ and wailin’ Big Easy-style with Aaron Neville and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band as they celebrate the roots of jazz and New Orleans at the Cobb Energy Center! The Randy Chapman Trio gets bluesy at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs! Stagger on over to Noni’s Bar & Deli for their Bitter Heroes event featuring DJ Brian Parris as he gets charmingly morose with a little New-Wave, The Smiths and The Cure! Make your way to the Crimson Moon Café for The Tom & Julie Show featuring tributes to tunes from the 60s to the 90s every Thursday! The Northside Tavern gets rockin’ with a little Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings! Get your boogie on at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, as Chickenshack featuring Eddie Tigner, delivers some honky-tonk blues or stomp on down to Blind Willie’s for a little Americana and blues with Heather Luttrell & the Possumden! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at their Blues Jam hosted by The Cazanovas! Hula on down to Trader Vic’s for a couple Mai Tais and get toasty with the steamy island funk of The Volcanauts with Tracey Wolfe! And it’s your last chance to get fated at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern as they screen Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm!

Friday, March 28

The Star Bar gets post-punk and psychedelic with Abby Gogo, Georges Bataille Battle Cry, Shepherds and Sheeba Darwin! The Elliott Street Pub delivers a night of avant-garde Zappa/Mr. Bungle-style with Opposite Box! It’s a night of Americana at Eddie’s Attic with The Black Lillies and Josh Oliver! Or boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month! Rock on down to Smith’s Olde Bar for The Free Byrds, The Dirty Doors and Scene of the Crime! It’s a night of retro rock at the Drunken Unicorn with Swank Sinatra, The Hungry Ears, BearKnuckle and Hot Wives! Groove on down to Big Tex for Gr8ful Dude & Frenz! Rock out roots style with Cody Marlowe & The Dead Flowers, Back City Woods and Young America at Vinyl! Get psychedelic at Hottie Hawgs BBQ with Swami Gone Bananas! Suzy Bogguss pays tribute to Merle Haggard at the Red Clay Theater!  The Caroline Aiken Band with special guest, Greg Hester, delivers a night of rootsy blues and jazz at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs! Slink on down to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! Get your salsa, soul and martini fix at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Martinis and IMAX event with the Orquesta MaCuba that’ll have you cha-cha’ing under the dinosaurs! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues delivers a night of down and dirty blues with Leonard Blush!  Sandra Hall delivers some bluesy tunes at Blind Willie’s with the Shadows! Get funky at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack with the Swamp Funk Quartet! Spend the night with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr at The Strand Theater as they screen Walter Lang’s presentation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s classic musical, THE KING & I (1956) at 8:00 pm, with a live organ pops variety show at 7:30 pm! ICON 80s Music Video Dance Night invades Famous Pub, with their special John Hughes’ Soundtrack Edition! And as always, Time-Warp it up and get naughty with some uber musically-inclined transsexual aliens at The Plaza Theater as they continue their tradition of screening THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Saturday, March 29

Bend over and squeal like a pig because it’s Bacon Fest 2014 at the Masquerade’s Music Park at 1 pm! Leave the kiddies at home because it’s a porkin’ party for the 21+ crowd filled with rockin’ music, carnival games, booze and all things piggy!  The rockin’ musical and entertainment line-up features the Timblerig Circus, the sultry geeky teasers that are Blast Off Burlesque, a rockin’ street marching band, The Seed & Feed Marching Abominable, The Dirt Poets, Jesse & The Great Perhaps, The Fingerin’ Bros., The Soggy Top Boys and so much more!  So, rock on down to the Masquerade and get your fill of pork-galore and a rockin’ bacon-y good time!

It’s‘A Night of Furry Fury’ at The Star Bar as they benefit Paws Atlanta with a rockin’ musical line-up of Bigfoot, Bad Friend, Dusty Booze & The Baby Haters, the Night Terrors, Kool Kat Aileen Loy with Till Someone Loses and Eye and Artificial Kid, with an early 6pm show featuring Sodajerk!  Rev on over to The Pointe in Conyers to catch Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt & the Psycho-DeVilles delivering a night of rockin’ psychobilly that’ll have you dancin’ all night long! Swing on down to the Elliott Street Pub and get a taste of Jacob Deaton! Get a taste of some delta blues and soul at Vinyl with Nathan Angelo, Matrimony and Steve Means! Bluebilly Grit delivers a night of Americana and bluegrass at the Crimson Moon Café! The Bitteroots rock out with some soul at Big Tex! Bela Fleck and his wife Abigail Washburn bluegrass it up at the Rialto Center for the Arts! Or stomp on down to Stone Mountain Village for their 5^th Annual Blue Grassroots Music and Arts Festival for two days of old-time music, arts, crafts and folk dancing in celebration of the City of Stone Mountain’s 175^th Anniversary! Hot Sauce & Honey get funky and old-school in rockin’ Burlesque-style at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs! The Kerry Hill Band gets bluesy at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack while The Nighthawks deliver a night of rockin’ roots and blues at Blind Willie’s! Victor Wainwright has the blues at Darwin’s Burgers & Blues and you won’t want to miss Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck firing up his rockin’ blues at Northside Tavern! Take a hilarious trip with King Arthur and his knights as they embark on a trek for the Grail at The Strand Theater as they screen MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) at 8 pm with a pre-show variety pops show at 7:30 pm!  And as always, DJ Romeo Cologne transforms the sensationally seedy Clermont Lounge into a ’70s disco/funk inferno late into the wee hours of the night.

Sunday, March 30

Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs delivers their Gypsy Jazz Brunch offering up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday! Greg Trooper and Brandon Reeves deliver a little Memphis soul, Greenwich Village folk and Nashville twang at Eddie’s Attic! Mang pays a rockin’ tribute to Ween at Smith’s Olde Bar! Jez Graham and friends deliver a night of jazz, rock and blues at The Family Dog! Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint gets funky, New Orleans-style with The Mar-Tans! And slither on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for some rockin’ blues with Snakelegs!

Ongoing

New American Shakespeare Tavern presents ‘Romeo & Juliet’ until March 30^th! (LAST CHANCE!)

The Star Bar gets groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ QuasiMandisco every other Tuesday!

Steve’s Live Music’s Gypsy Jazz Brunch offers up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!

Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month

The Plaza Theater Time-Warps it up as they screen, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Every first and third Mondays are Big Band Nights at Café 290, featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-piece orchestra playing jazz and swing standards in the tradition of The Glen Miller Orchestra and other legendary groups.  Second and fourth Mondays are Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’

Every first Wednesday is the Graveyard Tavern’s Graveyard Swing Night, featuring the swingin’ jazz and boogie-woogie sounds of the Savoy Kings!

If you have a suggestion for a future event that should be included in This Week in Retro Atlanta or see something we missed, please email us at atlretro@gmail.com.

Lola LeSoleil. Photo credit: Your Mojo by Jojo.

The Southern Fried Burlesque Festival is back for its fourth sizzling year March 20-23, bringing the best performers from all over the world to Atlanta for a weekend full of burlesque classes, panels and performances  at the Wyndham Atlanta Galleria.  Founded and presented by Syrens of the South Productions, it’s not just bringing a high standard of burlesque entertainment to the city but also getting Southern performers noticed on the national scene.

One of these is Lola LeSoleil, who won the crown of Southern Fried Festival Queen 2013 in last year’s pageant competition. Lola will be giving a special farewell performance on Saturday night before this year’s queen receives her crown, but in the last year, she’s come a long way, baby. It’s our royal pleasure therefore to declare her Kool Kat of the Week and find out more about what she’s been up, her plans for the future and what she’s looking forward to the most about Southern Fried 2014!

How did you get started in burlesque? 

In 2001, my mom and I went to Las Vegas. While there we saw Gladys Knight, Charo– in all of her “Coochi-Coochi” glory – and the signature JUBILEE show at Bally’s. JUBILEE is the quintessential glamorous Las Vegas floor show  – huge feather headdresses; elegant, statuesque ladies dripping in rhinestones; and lighted staircases. I was in love and realized come hell or high water, I needed a big feathery headdress. And sequins. And rhinestones.

It took a few more years before I saw a few burlesque shows in Atlanta – Big City Burlesque, Dames Aflame – and realized this art was in my city! I just needed a way in. After detouring to pole dance class and a one-off burlesque choreography class, I attended a Blast Off Burlesque show with a friend who introduced me to Talloolah Love -at the time of Syrens of the South [Read our Kool Kat profile of Talloolah here]. They offered a burlesque class series. I couldn’t get my butt to class fast enough.

Lola LeSoieil. Photo credit: Derek Jackson

Is there a story behind the name Lola LeSoleil?

Burlesque names can be a challenge. I wanted a name to reflect my abundant energy and honored who I am, but also paid tribute to beauty icons I grew up with. LeSoleil is my heat, my sun. Lola was for Lola Falana who was a black actress and entertainer in the 1970s, and who also appeared on THE MUPPET SHOW.

Who are a few of your role models in burlesque, both classic and from the burlesque revival, and why?

To be honest, Carol Burnett was my first comedic variety role model. She was silly, endearing, dynamic and versatile. I didn’t really know conventional burlesque tease artists until I started taking classes and began  research. Toni Elling and Jean Idelle are two special ladies whom I’m delighted to have met, and their lives as entertainers resonate with me and I have immense respect for them. Contemporary artists share my Gen X/Y perspective on balancing art and work and creativity. It’d take more space than I have here to name them, but suffice to say I’m delighted to have perfomed with and for revivalists whose opinions mean a lot to me.

A few years ago, you were interviewed about being an African American performer in the burlesque revival. Traditionally there haven’t been as many but at least on Atlanta stages, I’ve been seeing more. Can you talk a little about why this has been so and do you see a change or not?

Having more faces that look like mine in the burlesque revival I believe comes down to exposure to the art, and a desire to participate. The burlesque community in Atlanta is welcoming and supportive of everyone’s artistic journey. The change is gradual, and what I’ve seen is encouraging!

Lola LeSoleil. Photo Credit: Marc Turnley

What did winning the Miss Southern Fried Burlesque crown mean to you, and how has it affected your career over the past year? 

The joke of my winning Southern Fried Burlesque Queen was that my third time was the charm. I competed in 2011 and 2012 winning awards, but not the BIG one. Turns out there were a lot of people who were excited to see a nerdy/fandom-inspired act win a burlesque pageant title. I had the opportunity to be invited to perform in cities I may otherwise not have. It’s been a damn fine year!

Without giving away any big spoilers, can you give us a little tease about your farewell performance?

If I told you, I’d have to exterminate you.

Are you teaching any classes at SFBF?

In year’s past I’ve taught, but this year at SFBF, you’ll see me volunteering and being a student because I heartily believe there’s always room to improve as an artist. And I like helping.

What else are you looking forward to personally about SFBF?

I am really excited to have my Beginning Burlesque Choreography class perform in the Newcomer’s Showcase on Thursday night! And of course, I’m abuzz to see friends I’ve met at other festivals and shows come in to town for a gigantic glittery weekend! It’s like the start of “Burlesque Summer Camp” season.

What’s next for you?

I’m fortunate to be performing at the first Nerdlesque Festival in New York in a few weeks, and I’m opening my travel horizons to other festivals and events outside the South. Windy City [Burlesque Fest], here I come! I’m really looking forward to teaching more at  The Atlanta School of Burlesque.

Anything else you’d like to tell ATLRetro readers about Lola LeSoleil?

Follow your strengths as a performer, but don’t limit yourself. Take all the classes. Learn anything/everything and don’t allow yourself to stagnate. As long as you have breath in your body, you can improve.

To read ATLRetro’s preview of the Fourth Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Festival, click here.

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

‘This Week’ in Retro Atlanta is scorchin’ with Kool Kats galore and all the rockin’ good times you’ve been cravin’!  So, come on out and see what we’ve got on the Retro menu for you!

Monday, March 17

Get lucky Retro-style tonight because it’s St. Patty’s Day! For a night of punk rock goodness, stagger on down to The Music Room for their Bill Murray Appreciation Day/St. Patty’s Day event, featuring a raucous musical line-up of the Salts, Ganges Phalanges, Blue Tower and Awkward Sounds! Or get your rockin’ roots and folk fix at Smith’s Olde Bar with Floodwood, Donna Hopkins and Jeff Mosier!  Swing on by Big Band Night featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-member orchestra at Café 290 every first and third Monday of the month. Boogie on down to the Northside Tavern and spend an evening with Lola at her famous Monday Night Northside Jam! And blues it up at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack  for an extra helping of the blues with The Pork Bellys and some finger lickin’ BBQ!

Tuesday, March 18

Get vintage with the vivacious vixens from both sides of the Mason Dixon as The Mason Dixie Burlesque Tour invades the Red Light Café! It’ll be a rowdy ruckus with a smokin’ line-up of sultry performances by Deanna Danger, Ula Uberbusen, Hazel Honeysuckle, Porcelain and Atlanta’s own blazin’ aerialist and fire-performer, Sadie Hawkins! Get a taste of some country punk and polka-billy at Smith’s Olde Bar with A Pony Named Olga and Prem Midha! Get folksy at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs with The Night Travelers and Jason Bailey, followed by the mesmerizing  ‘kaleidophrenic cabaret’ of Crystal Bright & The Silver Hands! It’s a night of Appalachian folk, rockabilly and bluegrass at Eddie’s Attic with Waller, Battlefield Collective and City Mouse! Blind Willie’s delivers a night of soul and rock n roll with The Holidays! Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint gets rockin’ with the Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings! Stomp on down to Big Tex for a night with Moira Nelligan & The Dixie Jigs and their old-fashioned Americana! Or boogie on down to Darwin’s Burgers & Blues in Marietta for a taste of Bill Sheffield’s acoustic roots and blues! Jam it up with Joe Gransden and his jazz jam session at Twain’s in Decatur every Tuesday at 9 pm. The Entertainment Crackers gets bluesy with their folksy Americana sounds at the Northside Tavern.  Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden light up the screen at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Billy Wilder’s classic, SABRINA (1954) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm! And catch Francis Truffaut’s French New Wave classic, 400 BLOWS (1959) at the Midtown Art Cinema!

Wednesday, March 19

Get satirical at Emory Cinematheque’s screening of Olivier Assayas’ film-within-a-film, IRMA VEP (1996) and his pictorial view of the contemporary French film industry during their Global French Cinema series at Emory’s White Hall! Variety Playhouse delivers a night of late 70s British rock with The Straits, featuring original members of Dire Straits and performing their greatest hits! Skank on down to Smith’s Olde Bar as they dish out a night of Ska, reggae and surf rock with Arden Park Roots, Beauregard & the Downright and Mario Diaz & the Steady Vibes! Noah Gunderson dishes out his brand of folk, described as having the darkness of Tom Waits with the lyrical angst of Neil Young at Eddie’s Attic with two shows, 8 pm and 10 pm! Or for something a little more traditional, get folksy at the Red Clay Theater with The Stray Birds! Get jazzy at the Elliott Street Pub with Frank Barham! Lola delivers some rockin’ blues at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint! Stomp on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack ‘cause it’s a flood of rockin’ blues and funk with The Georgia Flood! Or make your way to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! It’s Ladies Night at Johnny’s Hideaway which plays hits from Sinatra to Madonna for a generally mature crowd.  And find out who the chauffer’s daughter picks at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Billy Wilder’s classic romantic comedy, SABRINA (1954) during their Happily Ever After series’ matinee screening at 11:30 am!

Thursday, March 20

Shimmy on down and get a taste of some saucy burlesque and cabaret from around the world with Kool Kat Katherine Lashe and her Syrens of the South as they bring you the 4^th Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Fest at the Wyndham Atlanta Galleria! It’s a glorious four-day event that promises bawdy burlesque performances, variety shows, vaudeville, workshops and a vendor’s room with all things pin-up and retro!  Headlining performances by the Queen of Burlesque, Miss Exotic World 2008, Angie Pontani; King of Burlesque, Mr. Exotic World 2013, Ray Gunn; Burlesque legend, Penny Starr, Sr.; Penny Starr, Jr,; Ms. Southern Fried 2013, Lola LeSoleil (Keep your eyes peeled for Lola’s Kool Kat interview!); regional starlet, Kool Kat Ursula Undress and emceed by Cora Vette! Tonight’s events include a CockTail hour and the newcomer’s showcase! So, come on down and get teased with the best of ‘em!

Stomp on down to the Red Light Café for a little bluegrass with Mercer & Johnson! Stagger on over to Noni’s Bar & Deli for their Bitter Heroes event featuring DJ Brian Parris as he gets charmingly morose with a little New-Wave, The Smiths and The Cure! Make your way to the Crimson Moon Café for The Tom & Julie Show featuring tributes to tunes from the 60s to the 90s every Thursday! The Northside Tavern gets rockin’ with a little Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings! Get your boogie on at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, as Chickenshack featuring Eddie Tigner, delivers some honky-tonk blues or head down to Blind Willie’s for a taste of Sweet Betty & the Shadows! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at their Blues Jam hosted by The Cazanovas! Terminal West gets bluegrassin’ with Greensky Bluegrass and Larry Keel! It’s a night of bloody beehives and B-movie babes at Mary’s as the GLITZ girls present their Invasion of the Super Gunts drag variety show!   Hula on down to Trader Vic’s for a couple MaiTais and some rockin’ island tunes! And it’s your last chance to catch Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden light up the big screen at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Billy Wilder’s classic film, SABRINA (1954) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm!

Friday, March 21

Get tantalized and teased because it’s night 2 of the 4^th Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Fest with the Free Range Burlesque Spectacular featuring sultry Burlesque from around the world! Don’t be chicken and get out and get Retro shimmy-style! Get your garage-rock revival with a tinge of 50s and 60s rockabilly fix at The Star Bar tonight with The Fleshtones, Tiger! Tiger! and debuting Black Linen! Swing on by the Red Light Café for a night of Steampunk and swing during the Atlanta Speakeasy ElectroSwing dance night with DJ Doctor Q! Or rev on down for a rockabilly throw down at the Diesel Filling Station for Kool Kat Rev. Andy’s Rockabilly Ruckus event, that’ll have you dancin’ the night away to tunes from Elvis to Brian Setzer to the Nekromantix! ICON 80s Music Video Dance Night invades Famous Pub, with tunes from The Cure to Madonna!

The Moody Blues bring their Timeless Flight Tour to The Fox! Marcia Ball delivers 30 years of ruckus raisin’ with her southern boogie and roadhouse blues at the Variety Playhouse! Stomp on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for a night with Heather Luttrell & the Possumden and Billie in the Woods! Or for some soul-soaked Americana, make your way to the Red Clay Theater and get a taste of Julianna Finch and the Neil Cribbs Band! Get funky at 529 with Heavy Chevy! Or groove on down to Terminal West for a night with Dumpstaphunk and Funk You! Big Swig’s roadhouse blues and honky-tonk takes over Hottie Hawgs BBQ!  Get jazzy at the High Museum with Karla Harris! Matt Wauchope gets bluesy at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint! Get the blues at Northside Tavern with Stoney Brooks! It’s salsa dance night at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Martinis and IMAX event with the Salsambo Dance Studio that’ll have you cha-cha’ing under the dinosaurs! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty with the Mike Lowry Band!  Francine Reed delivers some bluesy tunes at Blind Willie’s with the Shadows! Stomp on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for a rockin’ night with the BooHoo Ramblers! Come on down to the Dekalb History Center from 6-8 pm for their free Annual Meeting & Silent Auction, locally catered and bid on all sorts of cool items for the vintage lover in you, donated for the silent auction by local businesses, so do  your part and help support historical preservation! And as always, Time-Warp it up and get naughty with some uber musically-inclined transsexual aliens at The Plaza Theater as they continue their tradition of screening THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Saturday, March 22

Shimmy on down for night 3 of the 4^th Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Fest because tonight it gets Hot! Hot! Hot! with the Southern Scorcher Showcase, featuring Kool Kat Ursula Undress and so many more! Stomp on down to the Northside Tavern ‘cause it’s the 2014 Chicken Raid, promising 2 rockin’ days of blues and roots honoring the life and music of Atlanta bluesman, Frank Edwards, with food catered by Fat Matt’s Rib Shack and a rockin’ musical line-up, including Albert White, Beverly ‘Guitar’ Watkins, Sweet Betty, Billy George & Mo’Lightnin’, Chicken & Pigs, Lola, Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck, Little G Weevil, The Breeze Kings and so much more! So, come on out and pay your dues with the best of ‘em!

Kool Kat Phil Stair and Grim Rooster honky-tonk it up at the Sweetwater Bar & Grill in Deluth! Stagger on over to Famous Pub for the Blackout Classic Goth & Industrial Dance Night and get your underground, dark 80s and synthpop fix! Crosby, Stills & Nash invade The Fox while Cosmic Charlie delivers a night of Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd at their Dark Side of the Dead Event at the Variety Playhouse! David Gans (The Grateful Dead Hour) delivers a night of country blues and finger pickin’ with the Rumpke Mountain Boys at the Red Light Café! The madness and absurdity that is, Kool Kat Colonel Bruce Hampton slings over 50 years worth of his funky, jazz-infused rhythm with CBDB and Voodoo Visionary at Smith’s Olde Bar!  Put on those dancin’ shoes and get ready for a night of retro rock, Motown, funk, Big Band and more at The Basement for Electric Western’s Keep on Movin’ Rock and Soul Dance Party! It’s the 2^nd Annual Blues Piano Duel at Darwin’s Burgers & Blues with 3 generations of blues pianists; Matthew Wauchope, Bob Page and Eddie Tigner! Rock out at the Drunken Unicorn with the retro rock of Shade Tree Philosophy, Sleep the Owls and Johnny! Bad Touch! Pay tribute to The Doors at The Family Dog with the Dirty Doors! Big Tex rocks out with The Rainmen! Michelle Malone delivers 2 shows worth (7 and 9:30 pm) of her folksy, rockin’ blues at Eddie’s Attic! Stomp on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for Chicken & Pigs! Blind Willie’s gets bluesy with HouseRocker Johnson & the Shadows!  Fat Matt’s Rib Shack offers up a hoppin’ plate of some rockin’ BBQ and blues with the Larry Griffith Band! And as always, DJ Romeo Cologne transforms the sensationally seedy Clermont Lounge into a ’70s disco/funk inferno late into the wee hours of the night.

Sunday, March 23

It’s day two and your last chance to catch a rockin’ blues-filled day at the 2014 Chicken Raid at Northside Tavern! It’s your last chance to get sultry at the 4^th Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Fest!  Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs delivers their Gypsy Jazz Brunch offering up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday! And get a second helping of the Bonaventure Quartet at The Family Dog at 7 pm! The Decatur Bluegrass Association dishes up some foot stompin’ bluegrass at Big Tex’s Bluegrass Brunch! Slither on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for some rockin’ blues with Snakelegs! And Steve Earl and Shawn Colvin deliver a night of rockin’ blues at Atlanta Symphony Hall!

Ongoing

New American Shakespeare Tavern presents ‘Romeo & Juliet’ until March 30^th!

The Star Bar gets groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ QuasiMandisco every other Tuesday!

Steve’s Live Music’s Gypsy Jazz Brunch offers up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!

Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month

The Plaza Theater Time-Warps it up as they screen, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Every first and third Mondays are Big Band Nights at Café 290, featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-piece orchestra playing jazz and swing standards in the tradition of The Glen Miller Orchestra and other legendary groups.  Second and fourth Mondays are Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’

Every first Wednesday is the Graveyard Tavern’s Graveyard Swing Night, featuring the swingin’ jazz and boogie-woogie sounds of the Savoy Kings!

If you have a suggestion for a future event that should be included in This Week in Retro Atlanta or see something we missed, please email us at atlretro@gmail.com.

Feathers and fringe and rhinestones, oh my! Founded and presented by Syrens of the South Productions, The Fourth Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Festival brings the best performers from all over the world to Atlanta Thurs. March 20-Sun. March 23 for a weekend full of burlesque classes, panels and performances  at the Wyndham Atlanta Galleria.

This year, the festival kicks off with the Just Hatched Newcomers Showcase Thursday night highlighting newer performers like Melody Magpie, May Hemmer, Duchess Dakini, as well as local Atlanta performers Roula Roulette, Nina Charrise, and some student group performances from classes at The Atlanta School of Burlesque.

Friday Night brings The Free Range Burlesque International Showcase, featuring performances by Burlesque Legend Penny Starr Sr. and her granddaughter Penny Starr Jr., and headlined by Queen of Burlesque 2008, Angie Pontani, and King of Burlesque 2013 Ray Gunn, as well as other amazing performers from all over the world!

Saturday night, get ready for the main event: The Southern Fried Burlesque Pageant has performers competing for Best Group, Variety, and the Southern Fried Burlesque King and Queen!  The Pageant will also include a farewell performance by the 3rd Southern Fried Burlesque Queen, Lola Le Soleil!

After the awards ceremony Saturday night, let your hair down at the Southern Scorcher Showcase with performers from all over the Southeast, like Robotica and the Professor, Dee Flowered, Violet Vixxxen, and headlined by Ursula Undress!

The Southern Fried Burlesque Festival also features lectures, events and classes Friday through Sunday for all interest and skill levels. Whether you are a history buff, into crafting costumes, want to learn the basics, or finetune your performance, this festival will have activities for all levels and aspects of burlesque. Learn entirely from seasoned burlesque performers, teachers, and legends, and leave the festival with all the tools you need to be the next Burlesque Aficionado! Don’t worry guys – all genders are welcome to attend classes!

Burlesque is the art of the striptease, with a focus on the tease.  Performers occasionally strip to pasties, but there is no nudity in any festival productions. This festival is dedicated to the preservation of an art form that has become an international movement.

For advance tickets to Fourth Annual Southern Fried Burlesque Festival events or the whole weekend, click here. 

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

You may be wary of the Ides of March, but we promise you’ll have a rockin’ good time in Retro Atlanta this week! We’ve got a goodie bag full of swell Kool Kats on top of all the vintage shenanigans you’ve been craving! So, get off that couch and live le vida Retro!

Monday, March 10

If Monday’s got you down, Retro Atlanta has the cure! For a night of raunchy garage revival and old-school punk, rock on down to the Masquerade for The Orwells, Twin Peaks and The Silver Palms! Or rawk on down to 529 for Dino’s Boys’ LP release party with Paint Fumes, The Brothers Gross and Draw Blood! For something a little unique and nostalgic, catch Kool Kat Jeffrey Butzer and the Bicycle Eaters along with Bear’s Den at The Earl!  Blind Willie’s gets rootsy with Brandon Reeves! Get funky and groove on down to Café 290 every second and fourth Monday of the month for a taste of Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’ Boogie on down to the Northside Tavern and spend an evening with Lola at her famous Monday Night Northside Jam! And blues it up at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack  for an extra helping of the blues with The Pork Bellys and some finger lickin’ BBQ!

Tuesday, March 11

Get tortured at The Plaza Theater as Splatter Cinema gets super gruesome at their presentation of David Cronenberg’s bizarre science-fiction and horror-filled flick, VIDEODROME (1983) at 9:30, and don’t forget to come early for some chilling lobby shenanigans and classic horror trailers!  Or for something a little lighter and a whole lot more seductive, shimmy on down to the Red Light Café for Kool Kat Katherine Lashe and her Syrens of the South’s Tease Tuesday: March of Madness Edition, featuring a spicy evening with the fiery Ruby Redmayne and so much more! You can’t beat 10 acts for 10 bucks, so, come on and get teased with a little burlesque, a little Vaudeville, a whole lotta variety and everything saucy and tasty!

Rock out and drink alone with George Thorogood & The Destroyers as they deliver 40 years worth of rockin’ blues along with Fifth on the Floor at Center Stage! Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires up his rockin’ blues at Blind Willie’s! Or get roots n’ bluesy at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint tonight with the Bob Page Trio! M.O.T.O delivers a rockin’ night with their 80s garage punk along with The Selfish Lovers at a special early show (8 pm) at The Star Bar followed by a rockin’ disco inferno with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ Quasi Mandisco!  Or get you’re your 60s neo-tropical pop folk fix at Eddie’s Attic with Adron and Faye Webster! Stomp on down to Big Tex for a night with Moira Nelligan & The Dixie Jigs and their old-fashioned Americana! Or boogie on down to Darwin’s Burgers & Blues in Marietta for a taste of Bill Sheffield’s acoustic roots and blues! Jam it up with Joe Gransden and his jazz jam session at Twain’s in Decatur every Tuesday at 9 pm. The Entertainment Crackers gets bluesy with their folksy Americana sounds at the Northside Tavern.  Drag out those shoulder-padded suits, fluff your hair and get ambitious 80s-style at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Mike Nichols’, WORKING GIRL (1988) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm! And for all you pretty girls and bad boys, all you need is a girl and a gun at the Midtown Art Cinema’s screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), film noir at its sexiest!

Wednesday, March 12

Rock on down to The Earl for some avant-garde blues and psychedelic post-rock with The Locksmyth, England in 1819 and Absence of Ocean!  The Dirty Bourbon River Show will douse you in their New Orleans Gypsy Brass Circus Rock tonight at The Star Bar! Or for a night filled with surf rock and some high-energy ‘mosh pit polka’, cha-cha on down to Smith’s Olde Bar for Brave Combo! 529 rocks out Cramps-style at their Air Wolves CD release party along with the punk rockin’ Hip to Death and The Fire Tonight! Get soaked in rockin’ folk tinged with R&B at Eddie’s Attic with The Shadowboxers, Daniel Dewitt and Faye Webster!  Blind Willie’s gets bluesy with a dash of jazz and southern soul with Kool Kat Scott Glazer & his Mojo Dojo!   Big Tex’s Widespread Wednesday event has some bluegrass and reggae blues with Escape Vehicle!  Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint gets rockin’ with the Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings. Stomp on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack ‘cause it’s a flood of rockin’ blues and funk with The Georgia Flood! Or make your way to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! It’s Ladies Night at Johnny’s Hideaway which plays hits from Sinatra to Madonna for a generally mature crowd.  Get to work with Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Mike Nichols’, WORKING GIRL (1988) during their Happily Ever After series’ matinee screening at 11:30 am!

Thursday, March 13

It’s a night of sex, drugs and bluegrass at the Red Light Café tonight with Grits & Soul, the BorderHop Trio (BorderHop Five) and Good Natured Children! Get dreamy and rock out with some blues and folk at Smith’s Olde Bar with The Stacktone Slims, Back on the Freakout and Rented Mule! Eddie’s Attic delivers a night of bluegrass and Americana with the Barry Waldrep Band and Sweetwater Road! The Earl rocks out with a little folk and psychedlia with Ben Trickey, Madeline and Montanus (Long Shadows)!  If you have a mischievous taste for some seething Scandinavian 90s heavy metal, rock on out to the Masquerade  for a Finnish fest of rock with  Children of Bodom along with Death Angel and Tyr! Stagger on over to Noni’s Bar & Deli for their Bitter Heroes event featuring DJ Brian Parris as he gets charmingly morose with a little New-Wave, The Smiths and The Cure! Make your way to the Crimson Moon Café for The Tom & Julie Show featuring tributes to tunes from the 60s to the 90s every Thursday! The Northside Tavern gets rockin’ with a little Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings! Get your boogie on at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, as Chickenshack featuring Eddie Tigner, delivers some honky-tonk blues or head down to Blind Willie’s for a blues-filled night with Tommy Brown & the Shadows! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at their Blues Jam hosted by The Cazanovas! Get a taste of some New Orleans funk with The Mar-Tans and a side of finger lickin’ BBQ at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint! Donna Hopkins dishes out her rockin’ soul at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs! Get your boogie on at Mary’s, as the East Atlanta venue gets funky with their weekly Disco in the Village.   Hula on down to Trader Vic’s for a couple MaiTais and some rockin’ island tunes! And it’s your last chance to get ambitious 80s-style at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Mike Nichols’, WORKING GIRL (1988) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm!

Friday, March 14

Atlanta is the Kat’s meow tonight with Kool Kats galore! Throw on your boots and honky-tonk on down to The Star Bar for Kool Kat Cletis Reid & His City Cousins throwin’ one hell of a boot stompin’ CD Release party along with Julea & Her Dear Johns (keep your eyes peeled for Julea’s Kool Kat interview this week!) and the Blacktop Rockets! Or rev on over to The Alamo in Newnan to catch Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt & the Psycho-DeVilles delivering a night of rockin’ psychobilly that’ll have you dancin’ all night long! Kool Kat Ruby Velle & the Soulphonics dish out some Georgia soul and 50s/60s R&B with a side of Factory’s doo-wop at The Earl! And you won’t want to miss our BFF blogger Kool Kat Jonathan Williams’ Wrestling with Pop Culture 3^rd Anniversary Party at Famous Pub! Don’t miss all the wrastlin’ shenanigans with Kool Kat Shane Morton, a.k.a. Prof. Morte,  Atlanta’s ghost host with the most, as he gets in the ring with the Kentucky Wolfman!  Monstrosity Championship Wrestling delivers a night of classic monsters vs. wrestlers, with terrifying tunes by Kool Kats Ryan Howard, Derek Obscura and Jamie Robertson of the Casket Creatures waking you from the dead with their horror punk from the unknown! So, come on out for a horrific night of monsters, rockin’ tunes and wrastlin’!

Release your inner zombie at Legend Café during their Bloody Gold Event! It’s a St. Patty’s Day party with a heavy tinge of zombie, so, rock on down and get your zombified leprechaun fix!  Smith’s Olde Bar delivers a rockin’ night with The Last Waltz Ensemble, the Glen Pridgen Band and Adam Klein & the Wild Fires! Stomp on down to Terminal West for a bluegrass hootenanny with The Infamous Stringdusters and Fruition! Fatback Deluxe delivers a blues-filled night at Hottie Hawgs BBQ!  It’s a night of blues and soul at the Variety Playhouse with veteran bluesman, Tinsley Ellis and Diane Durrett! Rock out blues and Americana-style with two live recordings at Eddie’s Attic with Delta Moon at 7pm and 9:30 pm! Get swanky at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Martinis and IMAX event with Bogey & the Viceroy’s old-school rock n roll, while boogying under the dinosaurs! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at Billy George & Mo’ Lightnin’s CD Release Party!  Blues on down to Blind Willie’s for a night with Houserocker Johnson & the Shadows or rock on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for a taste of the Rockaholics! Get jazzy at Elliott Street Pub with the Wasted Potential Brass Band! And as always, Time-Warp it up and get naughty with some uber musically-inclined transsexual aliens at The Plaza Theater as they continue their tradition of screening THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Saturday, March 15

Hey kiddies! It’s G.I. Joe’s 50^th Anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than surround yourself with pop culture’s favorite toys! Make your way to the Marriott Century Hotel for the G.I. Joe/Great Atlanta Toy Convention! The two-day toy extravaganza includes 200 new and classic dealer tables, celebrity guests including comic book artist, Tom Feister and C. Martin Croker, Animation Director at Cartoon Network, panels and a car show featuring the Batmobile, The General Lee and so much more!

Get your St. Patty’s Day party fix at the Masquerade at their 2^nd Annual Shamrock Music Fest being held in the music park with a musical lineup paying tribute to Journey, U2, Van Halen, The Blues Brothers and the Rolling Stones!  Big Tex celebrates the arrival of spring with their 3^rd Annual Spring Block Party featuring a musical lineup of the Codey Bearden Band, Ralph Roddenbery, the High Strung Stringband, The Bluefields, Dangermuffin and Copious Jones!  Or rev on down to Douglasville to catch Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt with the Psycho-DeVilles at the Irish Bred Pub! The Family Dog gets funky with The Deep Fried Five’s rockin’ disco! Get old-fashioned at the High Museum’s Culture Shock event featuring the tunes of The Muleskinner MacQueen Trio along with Heather Luttrell & the Possumden!  The Red Light Café dishes out some rockin’ soul with Diane Durrett and Melissa ‘Junebug’ Massey!  Or make your way to the Variety Playhouse for Roxie Watson’s CD Release Party delivering a night of old-country, rockabilly and bluegrass with Jamie Lynn Vessells! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets bluesy, Americana-style with EG Kight! Takenobu gets honkytonkin’ with a cello at The Earl with a little retro-revival of Casper & the Cookies and Virginia Plane’s 80’s alt rock inspired tunes! Get your Irish pride on at Eddie’s Attic as they deliver a night of Celtic Americana from the 80s with The Buddy O’Reilly Band! Fat Matt’s Rib Shack offers up a hoppin’ plate of some rockin’ BBQ and blues with Little G Weevil! And as always, DJ Romeo Cologne transforms the sensationally seedy Clermont Lounge into a ’70s disco/funk inferno late into the wee hours of the night.

Sunday, March 16

It’s day two and your last chance to catch the G.I. Joe/Great Atlanta Toy Convention! It’s a toy extravaganza for the kiddie in all of us, so come on down and celebrate G.I. Joe and all the classic toys of your childhood! Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs offers up a jazzy plate of Big Band Atlanta during their Jazz Brunch at 12:30!  In the Wheelhouse dishes up some country and bluegrass at Big Tex’s Bluegrass Brunch! Slither on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for some rockin’ blues with Snakelegs! Get leathered up and rock on down to the Masquerade for a night with the ‘original OC punk surf power trio’ Agent Orange, along with Burns Like Fire and The El Caminos!  And get psychedelic at the Tabernacle with Bob Weir, guitarist for Grateful Dead, and his band Ratdog dishing out some Grateful Dead tunes along with some Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry covers!

Ongoing

The Atlanta Opera’s presentation of ‘Faust’ at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center gets wicked through March 16^th!  (LAST CHANCE!)

Georgia Ensemble Theater presents Simon Levy’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of the love, obsession and the roarin’ 20s, ‘The Great Gatsby’, through March 16 (LAST CHANCE!)

New American Shakespeare Tavern presents ‘Romeo & Juliet’ until March 30^th!

The Star Bar gets groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ QuasiMandisco every other Tuesday!

Steve’s Live Music’s Gypsy Jazz Brunch offers up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!

Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month

The Plaza Theater Time-Warps it up as they screen, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Every first and third Mondays are Big Band Nights at Café 290, featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-piece orchestra playing jazz and swing standards in the tradition of The Glen Miller Orchestra and other legendary groups.  Second and fourth Mondays are Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’

Every first Wednesday is the Graveyard Tavern’s Graveyard Swing Night, featuring the swingin’ jazz and boogie-woogie sounds of the Savoy Kings!

If you have a suggestion for a future event that should be included in This Week in Retro Atlanta or see something we missed, please email us at atlretro@gmail.com.

Splatter Cinema presents VIDEODROME (1983); Dir. David Cronenberg; Starring James Woods, Deborah Harry and Jack Creley; Tuesday, March 11 @ 9:30 p.m. (photos and merch booth open @ 9:00 p.m.); Plaza Theatre; Trailer here.

By Aleck Bennett
Contributing Writer

It’s one of those great instances when a bloody, nightmarish horror flick gives you something important to chew on afterwards. Splatter Cinema is back at the Plaza Theatre to take a mind-bending trip into the head of David Cronenberg with what may be his best film to date, VIDEODROME!

I’ve got something I want to play for you.

There are horror movies, and there are horror movies. And then, there are David Cronenberg movies. Easily one of the most facile writers/directors in blending the highbrow and lowbrow, his films typically explore themes and concepts that appeal to the art film crowd while simultaneously delivering the kind of gut-level shocks and bloody special effects that made his movies a mainstay in the pages of FANGORIA. And while other films of his may have appealed to broader audiences and been more financially successful, or even dealt with headier concepts (like the nature of humanity itself in THE FLY), nothing compares to his masterpiece, VIDEODROME.

I’m looking for something that will break through. Something tough.
–Max Renn

It’s 1983 Toronto, and Max Renn needs new programming for his TV station, channel 83 or CIVIC-TV. (“CIVIC-TV: the one you take to bed with you!”) His associate Harlan, who runs the station’s pirate satellite receiver and descrambles international broadcast feeds, calls Max down to his office to show him a curious new program seemingly originating out of Malaysia: Videodrome. It’s nothing but brutal violence. No plot. No story. And if it’s faked, it’s very realistically done. But it also carries a strange mind-control signal, and Max soon finds himself hallucinating wildly and caught in a war between the two parties who want control of Videodrome.

The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.
–Professor Brian O’Blivion

Central to the plot of the movie are the philosophical statements of Professor Brian O’Blivion, one of the co-creators of Videodrome. Based upon Marshall McLuhan (whom Cronenberg had studied under at university), his in-film theories about the extension of “the screen” as a new part of how we view the world take the film far beyond just a tale of good and evil and into an examination of how we process what we expose ourselves to. In the Professor’s view, television is integral to functioning as a society, and his daughter extends this theorizing into the brick-and-mortar world by running the Cathode Ray Mission, devoted to allowing the city’s homeless to watch TV in order to better acclimate them to the world we live in. They’re not only showing their flock what the world is like, but the reality that the rest of the world is embracing so that they can better fit in. Ultimately, the Professor’s philosophy comes down to a central question: who is programming the signal you’re tuning into? Are you passively allowing others to create your reality, or are you seizing autonomy and programming it yourself?

I think we live in overstimulated times. We crave stimulation for its own sake. We gorge ourselves on it. We always want more, whether it’s tactile, emotional or sexual. And I think that’s bad.
–Nicki Brand

If there is a single criticism I have of Cronenberg’s questioning, it is that it’s possibly too naïve. I think he raises numerous issues that have real relevance to our contemporary media fascination, but he didn’t (and quite probably couldn’t) have predicted the extent to which the screen has come to dominate our lives. I mean, how long has it been since you’ve looked away from the screen on which you are reading this article? How long will it be before you look at another screen—a TV, your phone, your tablet, your laptop? How much screen time do you log in at your job? And, further, what is your emotional relationship with those screens? How many friends do you have whom you only contact through the screen? How many acquaintances have you made via Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr that you have never physically met? Are those people—and the feelings you have for them—any less real because they seem to only exist in pixels and sets of ones and zeroes? How much of your reality is dictated by the screen you are looking at right now? And, back to Cronenberg’s question, who is in control of what you are seeing?

But why would anybody watch it? Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?
–Barry Convex

In the world of the film, control of the Videodrome signal is in the hands of Barry Convex, head of Spectacular Optical (“We make inexpensive glasses for the third world and missile guidance systems for NATO. We also make Videodrome, Max.”). Covex wants to toughen up North America by ridding it of the kind of degenerate low-lifes who would get off on a show like Videodrome. And it’s between the idealistic O’Blivion (who believes that the Videodrome signal can be used to create a new, direct relationship between video and our bodies) and the fascistic Convex that Renn finds himself, his programming being rewritten by both sides. From the film’s start, Max’s programming and re-programming results in violent hallucinations. We, the viewers, are never entirely sure if what we’re seeing is objective reality or Max’s imagined reality brought on by video feed. But as O’Blivion states, there is no real difference. Reality is entirely subjective, and our perceptions dictate what our reality consists of. (And, anyway, the ultimate irony is that there is no objective reality we are viewing—we are watching an imagined scenario enacted by James Woods, Debbie Harry, et al. and directed by David Cronenberg. Note how many frames we see within the film, informing us that what we are watching is constantly being framed by unseen hands.)

This film is the first of a Cronenberg trilogy that wrestles with the questions of addiction, the subjective nature of “reality” and whether the distinction between the real and imagined makes any difference. In this film, the addiction is to the screen. The other two films are NAKED LUNCH (in which William Lee’s submission to addiction and descent into drug-induced hedonism in the Interzone blur the lines between fantasy and reality) and EXISTENZ (which basically transposes the storyline of VIDEODROME into the immersive world of video games). Clearly, the issues of releasing control of your own programming to outside sources and who is ultimately responsible for crafting your own reality loom large in Cronenberg’s artistic output.

What are you waiting for, lover? Let’s perform. Let’s open those neural floodgates.
–Nicki Brand

Legend has it that Cronenberg was inspired to make this film after a viewing of Joe D’Amato’s infamous 1977 sexploitation flick EMANUELLE IN AMERICA. The film contains a snippet of an 8mm torture loop that leads journalist Emanuelle to uncover an international snuff film ring. The seemingly incongruous inclusion of this brutal footage in what was billed as a Big Sexy Movie (the matter is introduced and dropped at the tail end of the picture with no real justification) led Cronenberg to explore that juxtaposition in VIDEODROME. And while it may be easy to see the film as a criticism of the media’s exploitation of sex and violence to entice viewers, Cronenberg is more complex than that. He doesn’t really take a stand for or against it. While our hero Max Renn glibly defends his TV station’s programming as catharsis for viewers who can’t turn to the real world to vent their subconscious (interesting, given that the Videodrome signal breaks down the barrier between TV and the “real“ world and unleashes that catharsis across what becomes a false boundary), he is also depicted as a total sleaze, so it’s hard to take his explanation at face value.

But Cronenberg himself, outside of the film, has long used a potent mix of eroticism and brutality as the materials with which he crafts his films. Whether it’s the murderous hedonism of SHIVERS, porn star Marilyn Chambers spreading violent madness in RABID or the car accident fetishism of CRASH, Cronenberg has long embraced the taboo duo of sex and violence in his work. So it’s not a blanket condemnation of the raw materials he’s engaging in, but a criticism of intent. In the film, witnessing extreme violence makes the viewer more open to receiving the Videodrome signal, and thus easier for Convex’s team to control or subdue. Cronenberg isn’t asking the viewer to eschew the primal pleasure that comes from viewing sex and violence, but to question why it’s being presented; to, again, seize autonomy and control your programming.

So, yeah. This is a heavy flick. Deals with some weighty issues. But it’s also wildly entertaining. VIDEODROME handles its subject matter with a fair dose of wit and satire. While it’s ultimately a grim parable, James Woods’ high-energy performance rockets the movie along at a brisk pace. With an actor even a slight bit more leaden than Woods, the film would slow to a crawl and collapse under its own weight. Debbie Harry as Nicki Brand delivers a memorable performance that would never lead you to believe that she was a relative newcomer to acting. It’s one of the few believable “rock star-to-actor” transitions you’ll see. Cronenberg effectively captures the scenes of S&M between Woods and Harry with the right combination of disturbing frankness and eroticism, while Rick Baker’s effects work ratchets up the film’s increasingly surreal tone. (Never before has a TV cabinet been more sexual!) Some of the film’s visuals—particularly the flesh-gun that Woods’ hand becomes—evoke the nightmarish visions of H.R. Giger. It is one of the few movies that would play just as well at MOMA or in some grindhouse theater of years gone by. It’s a masterpiece from one of the cinema’s most accomplished directors. It is not to be missed.

But be careful. It bites.

Long live the new flesh.

Aleck Bennett is a writer, blogger, pug warden, pop culture enthusiast, raconteur and bon vivant from the greater Atlanta area. Visit his blog at doctorsardonicus.wordpress.com

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

Emory Cinematheque offers art-house films to the masses! They’re available to the critics, film-students and all film-lovers alike! Their retro-tastic line-up of critically-acclaimed films, all screened in 35mm, is available free to the public every Wednesday night during each semester’s series.  Their Spring 2014 ‘Global French Cinema’ series runs through April 23 with all films being screened in room 208 of Emory’s White Hall at 7:30 pm, almost every Wednesday.  ATLRetro caught up with Dr. Matthew Bernstein, Chair of Emory’s Film and Media Department as well as Dr. Charlie Michael, Professor in the French and Italian Language Department at Emory and curator of the series, to discuss their love of French cinema and its profound international influence on filmmakers worldwide throughout the history of cinema.  Let Emory Cinematheque quench your thirst for all things retro, French and cinema-tastic!  

“The reach of (Jean) Renoir’s films was enormous,” Bernstein explains and was one of the reasons why Jean Renoir’s LA GRANDE ILLUSION/GRAND ILLUSION (1937) was the screening that kicked off the series. Given that the focus is French films in a global setting, it made absolute sense. Bernstein further went on to share a tidbit of film trivia: “Twentieth Century-Fox wanted to remake it with John Ford directing. Ford rightly demurred, saying it could not be replicated.” And rightly so! Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece, dubbed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels as “Cinematic Public Enemy No.1” was released on the eve of World War II, not only showcasing Renoir’s humanity but also touching on the harsh realities of nationalism, classism and anti-Semitism. The epic was one of the first prison escape movies, leading the way for a plethora of replicas attempting to reach the same peak, visually and emotionally.  The film proved so inspirational that even Orson Welles said that it would be one of two he would take with him, “on the ark” (Dick Cavett interviews Orson Welles, July 27, 1970).  American film lovers and critics alike agreed with the enormity and significance of Renoir’s work of art, when it became the first foreign-language film nominated for Best Film at the 1938 Academy Awards. 

“I think the 1960s New Wave probably still holds the mantle as the most influential movement in French filmmaking history,” notes Michael. Thus their next choice was an easy one, as Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most prominent members of the movement.  Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU/PIERROT THE MADMAN (1965) was touted as an apex in the French New Wave and considered Godard’s last ‘frolic’ before delving into his more radically political cinema. Godard dubs his protagonists as “the last romantic couple,” their love being the last shard of humanness left among the clouds of chaos that surrounds them. This tactic has been replicated time and time again in many modern films. Renata Adler, of the New York Times, described Godard’s chaotic and drastic hero as one whom, “ultimately wraps his head in dynamite and blows himself to bits,” but added that, “it is in part a delicate, sentimental love story.” (New York Times, January 1969)

Renior, Truffaut and Godard seem to be the usual suspects at most French cinematic events.  Michael notes, “The insertion of the word ‘global’ in front of the word ‘French’ in the title of the series is meant as a gentle push back against the sorts of common assumptions we have about foreign films.”  His goal was to redirect assumptions that French filmmakers only created their art in France. That couldn’t be more true when thinking about Ousmane Sembene’s first feature-length film, LA NOIRE DE/THE BLACK GIRL (1966).  Senbene has been dubbed the “Father of African Film” and this film in particular was the first Sub-Saharan African film made by an African filmmaker to receive international attention.  It’s the tale of a young Senegalese woman who abandons her home in Senegal to work for a wealthy French couple in France.  This film gracefully touches on history at its most repulsive – colonialism, racism and post-colonial identity – through the eyes of its heroine.

“French cinema and American cinema have a long, long, love-hate relationship,” says Michael, with regards to film as art and film as entertainment.  “Ever since the Lumieres and Edison, the two traditions have been inspiring each other and measuring themselves against one another,” he adds.  This dynamic can be seen clearly during their screening of  LA NUIT AMERICAINE (AMERICAN NIGHT)/DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), French New Wave alum Francois Truffaut’s dark comedy about filmmaking and his slight jab at the artificiality of American-style studio films. The film’s title speaks volumes regarding the director’s disregard for the artificial and the manufactured. Truffaut’s film within a film, not only spotlights the personal and chaotic lives of filmmakers over a short period of time and all the mishaps that go along with creating a film, but he also brings into question whether films, the end products, are more important than the lives of those who create them. 

“France’s youngest, flashiest and most visually-inventive of Jean-Luc Godard’s heirs”, Leos Carax,  makes his appearance with his second film, MAUVAIS SANG (“Bad Blood”)/THE NIGHT IS YOUNG (1986). Michael’s post-modern pick for the series, it will take you on the darkly-tinged 1980s journey of a French bad boy who falls for a beautifully tragic and very unavailable American girl. The film aims to “re-incorporates the post-modern slickness of US advertising,” while exposing the cinematic game of ping-pong that has been played between the US and France since the beginning of the art form. Carax’s film screams modern ’80s melodrama and has a film score including music from David Bowie. Still at the same time, the director pulls from his cinematic forefathers’ influence, as Richard Brody of the New Yorker explains, “with an emotional world akin to that of Godard’s early films, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to his later ones, and a magical sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau, Carax allegorizes the burden of young genius in a world of mighty patriarchs who aren’t budging.” (Richard Brody, New Yorker, December 2013)

As much as French filmmakers enjoy taking a cunning jab at their American counterparts, from time-to-time they also enjoy a nice, swift kick to the rear with regards to their own industry. This can be seen in Olivier Assayas’ satire, IRMA VEP (1996) and his pictorial view of the contemporary French film industry.  Assayas’ film-within-a film technique, previously used by Truffaut and his other filmmaking forefathers, lays the framework that unfolds the beautifully tragic life of a filmmaker, well past his prime,, attempting to revive his career in an industry that has blown past him, by remaking and  modernizing Louis Feuillade’s classic silent film, LES VAMPIRES (1915).  Assayas, through his satire of the current French industry, was able to get back to his roots, or as Manohla Dargis of LA Weekly puts it beautifully, “There’s not a false note in IRMA VEP, not one wasted image, nor one superfluous move of the camera. [Assayas discovered] a native cinema as querulous, alive and magical as [French cinema] was, once upon a time.” 

The series then sends the viewer on a journey to Tunisia with the screening of Abdel Kechiche’s LA GRAINE ET LE MULET/THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (COUS-COUS) (2007).  From the director of 2013’s BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR, this film follows an aging and displaced immigrant and his family trying to begin life anew by opening a family-run restaurant.  Kechiche touches on the universal theme of what to do next when life throws you a curve ball.  In this case, Kechiche’s hero takes that curve ball and attempts to turn it into a thriving restaurant and new life for him and his family. 

Directed by Agnes Varda, lifetime filmmaker and French New Wave alum, LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE/THE GLEANERS AND I (2000) was included in this series because it, “speaks out against our global problem with consumption and waste,” Michael says. The documentary is shot completely with her hand-held digital camera in a  total abandonment of the usual high-end equipment. That personal element, she said, took her back to the early short films she shot in 1957 and 1958. She told Melissa Anderson of Cineaste Magazine during a 2001 interview: “I felt free at that time. With the new digital camera, I felt I could film myself, get involved as a filmmaker.” Varda’s documentary follows the lives of various kinds of gleaners throughout the French countryside. (M. Anderson, Cineaste Magazine, 2001)

The series then crosses the Atlantic to Canada and Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play by the same name, INCENDIES (2010). This movie takes the viewer on a nonlinear trek through time, using a dead mother’s flashbacks between present-day Quebec and 1970’s Lebanon as a pair of twins try to untangle the mystery of their mother’s life and the lack of their father in their own.  M. O’Sullivan of the Washington Post describes Villeneuve’s film as, “A horror movie, a love story and a mystery, each thread of which is so expertly interwoven into the larger narrative that it is impossible to separate any one strand from the other.” (M. O’Sullivan Film Review, May 2011)

The French aren’t always so sophisticated, artsy and stuck-up, as proven with the series’ next film. Michel Hazanavicius’ parody, OSS 117: CAIRE LE NID D’ESPIONS/OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES (2006), represents a layer of French cinema rarely seen when offering up such a series.  Kudos to Michael for throwing this one in! OSS 117 spoofs ’50s and ’60s spy films, following the exploits of a French secret agent in 1955 Cairo. Curt Holman, Creative Loafing noted that, “CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES looks like a perfect artifact from half a century ago, but its political satire smells brand new.” (Curt Holman, Film Review, June 2008)  Hazanavicius is better known for his throwback to the ’20s retro-style film, THE ARTIST (2011), which won five Academy Awards.

Finally, Emory Cinematheque screens Marcel Carne’s celebrated three-hour, two-part epic, LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS/CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945), set in the 1820s and 1830s Parisian theatre scene and filmed during Germany’s occupation of France during World War II.  Follow the mime, the actor, the criminal and the aristocrat as they pine over the gloriously beautiful courtesan.  During a 1990 interview with Brian Stonehill for Criterion, Carne responded to his question about the New Wave Critics’ aversion to studio films, stating that Francois Truffaut once told him, “I would give up all my films to have directed CHILDREN OF PARADISE.” (Exerpt from 1990 Criterion Audio Interview). In the original American trailer for the film, it was described as, “The French answer to GONE WITH THE WIND.”

Both Michael and Bernstein have enjoyed and continue to express gratitude for the opportunity to share their love of cinema and in particular, during this semester’s series, their love of French-language cinema.  “Frankly, it was difficult not to show more films from that period [French New Wave] in this series – but I really think there are other great stories to be told and films to be seen.  French-language filmmaking is so deep, rich and varied,” explains Michael.  Bernstein notes that, “Truffaut and Godard and their cohorts (of the French New Wave movement) reinvented film language and influenced filmmakers the world over, while inspiring the greats [Coppola, Scorsese, Paul Schrader, et al] and continuing to have a hand in the production of modern films.”

See below for a full screening schedule and make sure you make it out to Emory Cinematheque for the remainder of their Spring 2014 ‘Global French Cinema’ series!

Full Screening Schedule:

1/22/14 – ‘La Grande Illusion’ (1937) – Jean Renoir
2/05/14 – ‘Pierrot le fou’ (1965) – Jean-Luc Godard
2/12/14 – ‘La Noire de…’ (1966) – Ousmane Sembene
2/19/14 – ‘La nuit americaine’ (1973) – Francois Truffaut
2/26/14 – ‘Mauvais Sang’ (1986) – Leos Carax
3/19/14 – ‘Irma Vep’ (1996) – Olivier Assayas
3/26/14 – ‘La graine et le mulet’ (2007) – Abdel Kechiche
4/02/14 – ‘Les enfants du paradis’ – (1945) – Marcel Carne
4/09/14 – ‘Les glaneurs et la glaneuse’ (2001) – Agnes Varda
4/16/14 – ‘Incendies’ (2010) – Denis Villeneuve
4/23/14 – ‘OSS 117: Caire, le nid d’espions’ (2006) – Michel Hazanavicius

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

‘This Week’ in Retro Atlanta offers up a varied rockin’ menu of shenanigans galore! Get fat and happy with a taste of the Big Easy’s jazzy goodness! Or get wickedly horrified with maniacal musicals! We’ve got foot-stompin’ honky-tonk,  bluegrass, Americana and all the ‘billy you’ve been craving! And for those with dark little Retro hearts, we’ve got all the hard rock and dark-wave spanning decades of the morose! Don’t be square! Get out and get Retro!

Monday, March 3

Get ready for a night of rockin’ audio and visual shenanigans as Eyedrum delivers a not so gentle nod to psychedelic glam, electronica and Philip Glass with Darsombra, Easily Suede and In Sonitus Lux!  Be a Goonie and catch The Fratellis reviving some garage and blues rock at the Masquerade with Ace Reporter and The Ceremonies! Swing on by Big Band Night featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-member orchestra at Café 290 every first and third Monday of the month.  Boogie on down to the Northside Tavern and spend an evening with Lola at her famous Monday Night Northside Jam! And blues it up at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack  for an extra helping of the blues with The Pork Bellys and some finger lickin’ BBQ!

Tuesday, March 4

It’s Mardi Gras! And boy do we have some shindigs that’ll make you fat and happy tonight! Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck and the Atlanta Horns get down dirty at D.B.A. Barbeque for their Fat Tuesday celebration! Two-step on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for a night of spicy cajun’ blues and honky-tonk with Hair of the Dog at their Mardi Gras Party! Trek on down to the bayou by way of The Plaza Theater as they screen Jon McBride’s crime drama, THE BIG EASY (1987), starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, John Goodman and Ned Beatty! Or celebrate blues style at Blind Willie’s with Bob Page and his Mardi Gras Trio!

If love brings you down in real life, get your fill in your dreams! It’s Part III of Film Love’s Avant-garde Czech New-Wave affair celebrating the films of Jan Nemec, with their 35mm screening of MARTYRS OF LOVE (1967) tonight at Emory’s White Hall at 8 pm! Get a taste of Lou Reed inspired rock at Smith’s Olde Bar with a night of acoustic punk and spoken word with Hamell on Trial! Rock out to some dark-wave and post-rock, Joy Division and The Cure-inspired tunes of JoyCut, Where.Are.We and the Breathers (members of Qurious and Wowser Bowser) at The Earl! The Farewell Drifters deliver a night of 60s-inspired folk rock at Eddie’s Attic! Stomp on down to Big Tex for a night with Moira Nelligan & The Dixie Jigs and their old-fashioned Americana! Or boogie on down to Darwin’s Burgers & Blues in Marietta for a taste of Bill Sheffield’s acoustic roots and blues! Jam it up with Joe Gransden and his jazz jam session at Twain’s in Decatur every Tuesday at 9 pm. The Entertainment Crackers gets bluesy with their folksy Americana sounds at the Northside Tavern. Have an adventure with Dread Pirate Roberts at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Rob Reiner’s tale of adventure, THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm! Or for something a little more deadly and adventurous, get your martial arts fix at Midtown Art Cinema as they screen Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)!

Wednesday, March 5

Tonight’s a night of kinky Kool Kats and saucy seduction at The Brickyard as they tease with a little kink at their post- ‘Valentine’s Burlesque at the Brickyard’ event!  Celebrate love and lust with an evening of striptease, tassels and feathers with performances by aerialist Sadie Hawkins, mysterious magician Chad Sanborn, Kool Kat Talloolah Love, Meredith Greer, ‘The Chameleon Queen’, Stormy Knight, Lola Le Soleil, Tora Torrid, Kool Kat Ursual Undress, Kool Kat Fonda Lingue, Sunny Midnight, Lala Leialoah and so much more! Proceeds go to support SOJOURN (Southern Jewish Resource Network for Gender & Sexual Diversity), so shimmy on down and get saucy for a cause!

Put on your dancin’ shoes and swing on over to East Atlanta’s Graveyard Tavern for their Graveyard Swing Night, held the first Wednesday of every month, promising an evening of swingin’ jazz and jumpin’ jive, offering free lessons from Down South Swing! Smith’s Olde Bar rocks out 60s and 70s-style with NRBQ, The Rainmen and The Western Sizzlers! Stomp on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack ‘cause it’s a flood of rockin’ blues and funk with The Georgia Flood! Or make your way to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! It’s Ladies Night at Johnny’s Hideaway which plays hits from Sinatra to Madonna for a generally mature crowd.  Skip school and take a trip with a princess, a pirate and a couple of miscreants at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Rob Reiner’s tale of adventure, THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) during their Happily Ever After series’ matinee screening at 11:30 am!

Thursday, March 6

The Earl has Local H and Nobody’s Darlings in all their 90s alt-rock, grunge and indie punk glory! Or stomp on down to the Masquerade for July Talk, Wild Party and Verge of Bliss! For a little homegrown Georgia bluegrass with a touch of some rockin’ punk, stomp on down to Red Light Café for My Dixie Wrecked! Shimmy on down to the Elliot Street Pub for a night with Kool Kat Talloolah Love and all things Burlesque at Atlanta Burlesque & Cabaret Society’s March meeting! Stagger on over to Noni’s Bar & Deli for their Bitter Heroes event featuring DJ Brian Parris as he gets charmingly morose with a little New-Wave, The Smiths and The Cure! Make your way to the Crimson Moon Café for The Tom & Julie Show featuring tributes to tunes from the 60s to the 90s every Thursday! The Northside Tavern gets rockin’ with a little Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings! Get your boogie on at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, as Chickenshack featuring Eddie Tigner, delivers some honky-tonk blues! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at their Blues Jam hosted by The Cazanovas! Get your boogie on at Mary’s, as the East Atlanta venue gets funky with their weekly Disco in the Village.   Hula on down to Trader Vic’s for a couple MaiTais and some music harkening from the islands! Get a fill of blues’ history at the Atlanta Cyclorama as they screen Christine Dall’s riveting tale documenting how the blues was born and focuses on the lives of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and more in, WILD WOMEN DON’T HAVE THE BLUES (1989).  And it’s your last chance to spend the night with a romantic pirate at the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern during their screening of Rob Reiner’s tale of adventure, THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) during their Happily Ever After series’ screening at 7:30 pm!

Friday, March 7

The Conant Performing Arts Center and the Capitol City Opera Company offer up a chilling presentation on a bloody platter with Stephen Sondheim’s  maniacal musical masterpiece, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at 8 pm, terrifying through March 9!  Or get dark and psychedelic at the Variety Playhousewith the Black Lips and Deerhunter! Famous Pub has your 80s fix at their ICON: Music Video Dance Night featuring videos and music from Madonna to Duran Duran! Let’s Dance! at The Earl with the Wham Bam Bowie Band performing Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ in its entirety plus his classics from the 60s to the 80s! It’s Blaine Cartwright’s (Nashville Pussy) 50^th Birthday Bash, so rock on down to The Star Bar and celebrate with a little cowpunk and 90’s rock of Nine Pound Hammer, The Forty-Fives and introducing The Night Terrors! For a little rockin’ soul and dirty funk, blues on down to Smith’s Olde Bar for a night with Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds and Gibson Wilbanks! Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt gets acoustic and wildly solo at the Buck Creek Tavern in High Falls!  Eddie’s Attic gets toasty with the Smokin’ Novas and Cumberland Collective! It’s a Local Punk Rock Showcase in Heaven at the Masquerade with Triangle Fire, Eliminate Earth, White City, Forsaken Profits, Rotten Stitches and Values! Groove on down to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Martinis and IMAX event for a night of 60s and 70s Jamaican soul with Lloyd’s Rocksteady Review, while boogying under the dinosaurs! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets cookin’ with Biscuit Miller & The Mix while The Stooge Brothers deliver a night of down and dirty blues at Big Tex!  Rock on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for Tommy Talton (Cowboy) and Kenny Head! And as always, Time-Warp it up and get naughty with some uber musically-inclined transsexual aliens at The Plaza Theater as they continue their tradition of screening THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Saturday, March 8

Sell your soul to the Devil with The Atlanta Opera as they get wicked at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center in their presentation of ‘Faust’ with music composed by Charles Gounod, getting sinful through March 16^th!  Or rev on down to the Dixie Tavern in Marietta for some rockin’ psychobilly with Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt with the Psycho-DeVilles!  Darwin’s Burgers & Blues offers up a plate of blues and old-fashioned ragtime with Brad Vickers & His Vestapolitans! Stomp on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for a night of Americana with the Tim McDonald Band and Jimmy T & Tunetrain! For a night of retro-rockin’ garage punk, rock on down to The Star Bar for the Coathangers at their LP Release Party along with The Biters, Cousin Dan and the Zoners! Or sludge on over to The Basement and rock out with the Whores, Pretty Please and Dropout! Get some deep roots and honky-tonkin’ Americana at Smith’s Olde Bar with Willie Sugarcapps, The Grahams and Lilly Hiatt! Swing on over to Big Tex for the Kris Youman’s Band delivering a night of roots, Americana and Western swing!  Get some soul at The Family Dog with The Hollidays! Hottie Hawgs BBQ delivers a night of Chicago/Delta blues with The Breeze Kings! Fat Matt’s Rib Shack offers up a hoppin’ plate of some rockin’ BBQ and blues with Mr. Chapman’s Quarterly Review! And, it’s DJ Romeo Cologne’s 1000^th funk show at the sensationally seedy Clermont Lounge, so, get funky and boogie into his ’70s disco/funk inferno late into the wee hours of the night.

Sunday, March 9

Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs delivers their Gypsy Jazz Brunch offering up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!  Cedar Hill delivers some stompin’ bluegrass at Big Tex! For some bohemian cabaret and funky gypsy jazz, blues it on down to Vinyl for a night with Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas! Go back to the 90s for a night with Sharon Corr (The Corrs) and her celtic pop-rock at the Variety Playhouse! Slither on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for some rockin’ blues with Snakelegs or stomp on over to The Family Dog for the BooHoo Ramblers!

Ongoing

The Conant Performing Arts Center and the Capitol City Opera Company’s chilling presentation of Stephen Sondheim’s maniacal musical masterpiece, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at 8 pm, terrifies through March 9!

The Atlanta Opera’s presentation of ‘Faust’ at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center gets wicked through March 16^th!

Georgia Ensemble Theater presents Simon Levy’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of the love, obsession and the roarin’ 20s, ‘The Great Gatsby’, through March 16

New American Shakespeare Tavern presents ‘Romeo & Juliet’ until March 30^th!

The Star Bar gets groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ QuasiMandisco every other Tuesday!

Steve’s Live Music’s Gypsy Jazz Brunch offers up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!

Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month

The Plaza Theater Time-Warps it up as they screen, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Every first and third Mondays are Big Band Nights at Café 290, featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-piece orchestra playing jazz and swing standards in the tradition of The Glen Miller Orchestra and other legendary groups.  Second and fourth Mondays are Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’

Every first Wednesday is the Graveyard Tavern’s Graveyard Swing Night, featuring the swingin’ jazz and boogie-woogie sounds of the Savoy Kings!

If you have a suggestion for a future event that should be included in This Week in Retro Atlanta or see something we missed, please email us at atlretro@gmail.com.

The prototype for the Innsmouth Fogcutter mug, unglazed.

Trader Vic’s meets H.P. Lovecraft in the wonderfully weird tiki mug and accessory line of Atlanta-based Horror in Clay. Their fine-crafted ceramic green Cthulhu mugs have been raising tentacles among Lovecraft and Retro Hawaiiana fans alike, and if you’ve been to an Atlanta area con, chances are you walked away with a complimentary tentacled Pickman’s Cove cocktail stirrer. Their newest creation is the Innsmouth Fogcutter mug, which already has made its funding goal in another blockbuster Kickstarter campaign. There are plenty more stretch and social goals to unlock, and preorders are sure to be filled with all sorts of fun extras at different levels.

To find out more about the obscure origins of Horror in Clay, the Innsmouth Fogcutter, the Kickstarter campaign, and what terrifying tiki creations are down the dark road, we caught up recently with Jonathan Chaffin, mad mastermind of  the eldritch enterprise along with his lovely wife Allison.

ATLRetro: How did you personally discover H.P. Lovecraft?

Jonathan:  I wrote a term paper on Lovecraft in ’95. Pretty sure it was a combination of three things: #1  I read all the time, particularly short horror fiction – and when I don’t read I listen to audio podcasts like www.pseudopod.org. I have a particular fondness for Poe, Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, so early horror and weird tales and those who write them are an easy sell for me. Love of literature and details – check.  I think that’s why I knew the name.

#2 Do you remember the cartoon THE INHUMANOIDS?  It came on alongside  JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS and BIGFOOT AND THE MUSCLE MACHINES  on Saturday mornings. I loved that show. One of the monsters was a giant tentacled beastie from the Earth’s mantle named Tendril.  Tendril was a big shambling green thing bedecked with tentacles, and unlike most of the other toys at the time, the Inhumanoids toy line was to scale; the monsters TOWERED over the good guys.  Giant tentacle monster toy beloved and embedded in my brain – check.  That’s why I wanted to learn more about Cthulhu.

#3 When I was on a bus-tour in England, I ran out of books, so I ran into a shop to get one – and what I found was HP LOVECRAFT OMNIBUS 3: HAUNTER OF THE DARK with a giant monster snacking on people on the cover. Giant monster, giant book of horror short stories, bus tour through the land of fens and lochs – good times and a lifeline affinity for old Anglophilic HP Lovecraft.

Cthulu-Elvis, Jonathan Chaffin, and the Horror in Clay'd Cthulhu mug.

How did you and Allison get the idea to design and market a Cthulhu Tiki mug?

I’m an avid collector of, well, everything, but especially of horror movie ephemera and Tiki stuff. Allison and I had a Tiki-themed wedding and have a lot of affinity for Trader Vic’s, the Mai-Kai [in Fort Lauderdale] and theme restaurants in general. Well, the thing about collecting a lot of Tiki stuff and horror autographs and such is it needs somewhere to live. In our old apartment we had a sort of Addams Family vibe in one room that was also our dry bar – artifacts and totems and monsters, oh my!  When you are a graphic designer, everything is a design problem to be solved, so for me the process went something like: This is a Tiki bar -> Tiki bars have signature cocktails and mugs -> What kind of mug should go here?  Given that Cthulhu sleeps his death away in sunken R’yleh in the South Pacific, that seemed a fun subject for a mug.

Were you surprised by its runaway success?

Surprised by the success doesn’t begin to cover it.  I probably wouldn’t have even attempted it except for a push from my friend Pauli [Vauxhall Garden Variety Players], who basically loaned me some of the money to have a prototype made and said, “Meh. Go see what happens.”  I was told we’d probably have hundreds of them living in our basement forever, but I decided to try anyway.

Tell us about the Innsmouth Fogcutter Mug from the story to the craftsmanship behind it.

The Innsmouth Fogcutter mug started as an in-joke on the Cthulhu Tiki mug. If you look, dread Cthulhu has his own little fogcutter mug clenched in one tentacle, complete with umbrella and bendy straw. I wanted it to be a Fogcutter as an homage to Trader Vic’s Atlanta and to the long-defunct Atlanta Luau restaurant.  When the Cthulhu mug was blowing up and people were asking me what was next, I told myself I wanted to make that Fogcutter mug.

 

As mentioned, I try and create a total picture of the environment one of my mugs is from; much like a clothing line, each mug has complimentary artifacts that tell its story. I even have a “bible” like you would find for a stage play that lists facts and details I want the mug and artifacts to reference or adhere to.  The Innsmouth Fogcutter is intended to be from the Gilman House hotel, a locale made famous in Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, but also has an original backstory I created that is revealed through digital artifacts and other physical pieces – some of which are available as rewards through the Kickstarter. The back story for the Innsmouth Fogcutter has to do with expectations and changes. As you rotate the mug you realize that what looks like a creepy monster hand reaching up for a beauty on a dock is actually the beauty herself changing into a hybrid, then monstrous form. Similarly, I refer to the mug’s backstory as a romantic tragedy. Really, what else would expect from benighted, ill-reputed Innsmouth?

 

Horror in Clay's bar line including Cthulhu mugs, tentacled double jigger, bar spoons, coasters and Pickman's Cove stirrers.

The concept for the design on the mug came about because I adore practical special effects. Any werewolf transformation sequence is a special treat to me, and I wondered what a transition to a Deep One would look like. Or perhaps I just played too much Altered Beast.  Also, the final form of our Deep One on the mug is inspired by Froggacuda and Sharkoss from the ARCO Other World toy line. What can I say?! I love me some toys.

 

Production mugs are awesome things; much like a sonnet they are all the more amazing for the structural limitations imposed by the process. That said, as a collector I will always love limited editions. For this mug the wonderous Wendy Cevola will be creating a mold from the production master and then producing a very limited number of hand-retouched and glazed variations from the basic design. She has done some amazing work. You should check out her Tiki Bob series of variations

 

You’ve made your Kickstarter goal, but there are more wonders to unlock. Can you tell folks why they should still throw in some money?

 

First off, because the mug is amazing, everyone needs at least two in case they want to drink out of it more than once. Also, it’s funded, so it is going to happen, and I’ve done this before with a high rate of satisfaction, so I’m pretty sure I can do it again. Additionally, I designed way more than I needed for this Kickstarter, and if we get enough funding, we can add some neat stuff to every level and bounce some other ideas into production sooner.  Things that I think will be awesome – like a shade parasol printed with still more backstory elements, or like the Horror Infused bitters we’ve had formulated.

 

Horror in Clay doesn’t just make mugs. What are some of your other products, including those high-quality fezzes?

 

Glad you like em! An IMPORTANT note about the fezzes!  We don’t make ’em! They are the brainchild and product of Jason Rodgers and www.fezorama.com. He’s been doing this whole artist/creator thing much longer than I. His work is amazing, and I’m really pleased he was game for collaborating on a design to match the Innsmouth Fogcutter Tiki mug.  Since the story features the Esoteric Order of Dagon, I thought that having a fez as part of our Innsmouth collection was a great thing – plus I collect Fez-o-rama fezzes. We are an authorized reseller of a limited selection of Fez-o-rama designs only at conventions, as he is an authorized reseller of Horror In Clay mugs.

 

With that out of the way, we make all sorts of things, because I’m trying to make each collection tell a story using whatever makes sense.  Some things besides the mug that we’ve made that have gotten a lot of attention are our tentacled double jigger and bar spoon. People love the tentacle. Fun fact, the tentacled bar set is missing an icepick because it was used as a murder weapon. Since I have different stories to tell, I’m going to be developing different supporting artifacts to flesh out each story. The locale-based Tiki mug has been working out for us, and I have some more ideas in that vein, so I’d expect to see more of that.

 

What’s next for Horror in Clay?

 

Our next two drawing-board projects are the shade parasol and bitters to help fill in the gap while the next mug is developed. The idea for the next mug is already around. How quickly it sees life as a prototype depends on how the Kickstarter for the Innsmouth Fogcutter does. It was two years between the Cthulhu Tiki Mug and the Innsmouth Fogcutter.

 

What do you do when you aren’t crafting Horror in Clay?

 

Designing things and doing a little freelance, monitoring the media streams and watching movies. Just lately I’ve also been writing a little. I have some essays in “Monster Serials: Morbid Love Letters to Horror Cinema” from www.thecollinsporthistoricalsociety.com.  Ever more frequently I seem to be shipping orders, which is a great thing. Oh, and I love supporting my local tiki bars and theme restaurants!

 

Horror on Clay can also be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/horrorinclay and on twitter @CthulhuMug.

by Melanie Crew
Contributing Writer

Atlanta is a rockin’ inferno of all things Retro this week! Come on out and see what we’ve found for you! Get revved and rock out with some old-timey ‘billy music! Get to flappin’ with the roarin’ 20s! Or take a trip and get psychedelic! We’ve got whatever your little vintage heart desires! So, Don’t be square, get out and get Retro!

Monday, February 24

Get psychedelic at 529 with Quilt, Abby GoGo and Small Reactions! Cinefest gets retro as they screen William Greaves’ most well-known film, SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968) and his attempt to capture true reality on film, running through March 2! Get funky and groove on down to Café 290 every second and fourth Monday of the month for a taste of Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’ Blues on down to Blind Willie’s for a night of rockin’ blues with Marshall Ruffin! Boogie on down to the Northside Tavern and spend an evening with Lola at her famous Monday Night Northside Jam! And blues on down to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for a side of Dry White Toast with some finger lickin’ BBQ!
 
Tuesday, February 25

Shimmy on down to the Red Light Café for a Burlesque Battle of the Babes! Get saucy and spend the evening with Sadie Hawkins at her ‘Last Pasties Standing: The Glitter Dome’ event accompanied by some rockin’ songs from 80’s movies! Stomp on down to Big Tex for a night with Moira Nelligan & The Dixie Jigs and their old-fashioned Americana! Timo Arthur delivers his rockin’ blues at Blind Willie’s! Or boogie on down to Darwin’s Burgers & Blues in Marietta for a taste of Bill Sheffield’s acoustic roots and blues! Jam it up with Joe Gransden and his jazz jam session at Twain’s in Decatur every Tuesday at 9 pm. The Entertainment Crackers gets bluesy with their folksy Americana sounds at the Northside Tavern. Boogie on down to The Star Bar and get groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ Quasi Mandisco every other Tuesday! The Northlake Festival Movie Tavern will have you packing your bags and running off to Morocco as they screen Michael Curtiz’s classic Bogart-filled Hollywood tale, CASABLANCA (1942) during their Salute to the Oscars series’ screening at 7:30 pm! And the Center for Puppetry Arts gets really retro literary-style as they present David Simpich’s marionette-filled adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic, ‘Great Expectations’, running through March 2!

Wednesday, February 26

It’s a hootenanny and a half tonight at Smith’s Olde Bar as they kick off their Slim Chicken Honky-tonk Extravaganza!  You’ll be stompin’ all night to the revved up and rockin’ tunes of Kool Kat Hot Rod Walt & the Psycho-DeVilles, Slim Wray, Buck O’ Five, Whiskey Belt and so much more! Give love a bad name and make your way to the Highland Inn Ballroom Lounge for a night of belly-laughs as Write Club Atlanta presents their  ‘Scene Missing Episode 7: Bad Love’ event, offering up a night of writing and comedy based on film where love has gone horribly wrong! Blood Drunk Records presents a night of rockin’ psychedelic punk at The Star Bar featuring the Surrogates, Doesin, Phossy Jaw and Cinema Novo! Honky-tonk on down to The Earl for Robert Ellis and T. Hardy Morris! Get Georgia on your mind and head down to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center for a night of tunes celebrating the legendary Ray Charles, during their ‘Jazz Roots’ series at 8 pm! Frank Barham gets jazzy at Churchill Grounds while The Breeze Kings deliver a night of Chicago and Delta blues at Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint! Blind Willie’s gets bluesy with a tinge of jazz and southern soul with Kool Kat Scott Glazer & his Mojo Dojo! Frankie’s Blues Mission takes you for a rockin’ blues voyage at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack! Or make your way to the Northside Tavern as Danny ‘Mudcat’ Dudeck fires it up with his rockin’ blues! It’s Ladies Night at Johnny’s Hideaway which plays hits from Sinatra to Madonna for a generally mature crowd.  Get the cure for ‘love without love’ tonight at Emory Cinematheque’s screening of Leos Carax’s MAUVAIS SANG (THE NIGHT IS YOUNG) (1986) during their Global French Cinema series at Emory’s White Hall! Here’s lookin’ at you, kid, so make your way to the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern for their screening of Michael Curtiz’s classic tale, CASABLANCA (1942) during their Salute to the Oscars series’ matinee screening at 11:30 am!

Thursday, February 27

Rock out with some honky-punk at the Dixie Tavern in Marietta with The Law Band and Kool Kat Phil Stair with Grim Rooster! It’s a retro-infused night at The Star Bar with a little reggae and punked-out ska with Beauregard & The Down Rights along with Blackfoot Gypsies, Easy Beat and Strange Planet! Stomp on down to The Earl for Shonna Tucker & Eye Candy, Bloodkin and The Higher Choir! Blues on down to Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs for a night with Andy Margolis & The Usual Suspects! Stagger on over to Noni’s Bar & Deli for their Bitter Heroes event featuring DJ Brian Parris as he gets charmingly morose with a little New-Wave, The Smiths and The Cure! Make your way to the Crimson Moon Café for The Tom & Julie Show featuring tributes to tunes from the 60s to the 90s every Thursday! Get glitzy and do the Charleston at the Georgia Ensemble Theater as they present Simon Levy’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of the love, obsession and the roarin’ 20s, ‘The Great Gatsby’, running through March 16! Or swing on down to the Elliot Street Pub for a night with Justin Chesarek and Ryan Whitehead! The Northside Tavern gets rockin’ with a little Chicago/Delta blues of The Breeze Kings while Heathter Luttrell delivers a night of rockin’ blues and Americana at Blind Willie’s! Get your boogie on at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, as Chickenshack featuring Eddie Tigner, delivers some honky-tonk blues! Darwin’s Burgers & Blues gets down and dirty at their Blues Jam hosted by The Cazanovas! Get your boogie on at Mary’s, as the East Atlanta venue gets funky with their weekly Disco in the Village. Catch a wave and boogie down beach-party style with Kool Kat Joshua Longino with Andrew & the Disapyramids while sipping a couple MaiTais at Trader Vic’s! And it’s your last chance to escape to the Northlake Festival Movie Tavern as they screen Michael Curtiz’s classic Bogart-filled Hollywood tale, CASABLANCA (1942) during their Salute to the Oscars series’ screening at 7:30 pm!

Friday, February 28

The Strand Theater gets really retro with their screening of Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor’s silent classic, SAFETY LAST! (1923) starring Harold Lloyd, accompanied by Ron Carter on the Mighty Allen Theatre Organ! Get your fill of some Avant-garde Czech New-Wave tonight, as Film Love presents part one of three screenings with Jan Nemec’s DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (1964) at Emory’s White Hall at 8 pm! Get a taste of some browngrass (“just like bluegrass, but just a little dirtier”), and stomp on down to the Red Light Café for a night with the Porch Bottom Boys and Sour Bridges! Get psychedelic at Hottie Hawgs BBQ with Swami Gone Bananas! It’s a King Cake Party at Northside Tavern, so come on out and get funky with Zydefunk! Rock on down to The Star Bar for a night of dirty rock n roll at Volume IV’s record release party, along with Kool Kat Aileen Loy with Till Someone Loses an Eye, The Baphomettes and Bully! Get old-fashioned at Big Tex with The Woodshedders and their old-school bluegrass and gypsy jazz!  Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month! Beam me up Scotty, because ‘Captain’s Log’ is back at the Village Theatre, promising a night of science-fiction inspired comedy of space-tastic proportions! Catch a glimpse of Ol’ Blue Eyes tonight as The Electromatics deliver a night of Chicago and West Coast blues and jazz standards at Churchill Grounds! For a night of Dixie blues, head on over to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for Seminole Jackson! Get your party hats on ‘cause it’s Blind Willie’s 28^th year of rockin’ the blues, so come on out and celebrate with Lazy Lester and Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne!  Rock on down to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s Martinis and IMAX event for the high-energy band, The Pack while sipping cocktails under the dinosaurs! The Rockaholics get bluesy at Darwin’s Burgers & Blues while The Rainmen rock out to some 60s and 70s rock n roll at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs! And do the Time-Warp while spicing things up with some naughty and uber musically-inclined transsexual aliens at The Plaza Theater as they continue their tradition of screening THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Saturday, March 1

You’ve got the fever, Blast Off Burlesque has the cure! Boogie on down in your snazziest platforms and polyester to The Plaza Theater for their TabooLaLa: Saturday Night Fever event! Lobby pre-party shenanigans with DJ Westwood A Go-Go begin at 9 pm! Or geek on down to Famous Pub and get infested at their Infestation 3: Halfway to DragonConevent for a night of zombies, go-go dancers and kilt-wearing lads!

It’s a Mardi Gras Party at the Drunken Unicorn with some ragtime Dixieland prohibition-era pandemonium with Blair Crimmins & The Hookers, Count M’Butu and The Mar-Tans! It’s part 2 of Film Love’s Avant-garde Czech New-Wave series, so come on out to Emory’s White Hall for Jan Nemec’s once “banned forever,” 35mm screening of his surreal dark comedy, A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND THE GUESTS (1966) at 8 pm! Get psychedelic at the Red Light Café for their Greatful Dead Night featuring gr8FLdude & frenz and Insomniac Gypsy! Get Sham-rocked with some smooth 70s and 80s tunes with Yacht Rock Schooner at Park Tavern in Piedmont Park! Or for a night of rockin’ cow punk and alt country, rock on down to The Earl for R.E.M. co-founder, Peter Buck and Alejandro Escovedo (formerly of the 70s punk group, The Nuns)! Variety Playhouse gets sloppytonkin’ with Shovels & Rope and Hurray For the Riff Raff! Jake & The Beanstalk gets funky at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs while Heathter Luttrell rocks some Americana and blues at Darwin’s Burgers & Blues! For some alt folk and outlaw old-timey country, rock on over to Smith’s Olde Bar for Annabell’s Curse, Southern Bred Co. and The Chris Massey Band in the Atlanta Room, or if you need something a little more funky, boogie upstairs with Freddy’s Finest with Kofi Burbridge, the Donna Hopkin’s Band and Sugarfoot! It’s your second chance to get your fill of The Woodshedders and their old-timey bluegrass and gypsy jazz at Big Tex! Montana Skies gets rootsy at the Crimson Moon Café! Come out and celebrate Mardi Gras-style at the Red Clay Theater with the swingin’ and ragtime band, Sweet Deat & The Revivalists with special guest Adron! Carolina & The Chocolate Drops and their string band get old-timey delivering some old-school blues and bluegrass at the Ferst Center for the Arts! Get glamorous at the Candler Field Museum in Williamson, GA at their ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ gala and dinner dance with the 20s and 30s sounds of Peachtree Jazz Edition! And, it’s DJ Romeo Cologne’s 1000^th funk show at the sensationally seedy Clermont Lounge, so, get funky and boogie into his ’70s disco/funk inferno late into the wee hours of the night.

Sunday, March 2

Get jazzy at Steve’s Live Music in Sandy Springs with Deb Bowman! Get your fill of some Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet at The Earl during their weekly hangover-friendly ‘dunch’! The Red Light Café gets bluesy early as they offer their 89.3 WRFG Benefit Concert featuring some swell blues with Francine Reed, Matt Wauchope (The Mar-Tans), the Dianne Durrett Trio, Timo Arthur, Steve “The Blues Dude” and Albert White from 1-5 pm! And come back later for some rowdy bluegrass and stompin’ Americana with the Sweet Auburn String Band, The Last Tycoon and Kristen Englenz!  The Buckhead Theater offers up a night of 90s alternative rock with Switchfoot and the Kopecky Family Band!  Get psychedelic and rock on down to the Masquerade for Led Zeppelin 2 delivering Zeppelin’s live concert experience! The Red Clay Theater dishes out some rootsy blues with Bluesman Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi, with special guest Veronika Jackson! For a taste of some classical-infused folk pop, skip on over to the Woodruff Arts Center as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra presents Pink Martini with The von Trapps! Get  criminal in the bayou at The Plaza Theater as they screen Jon McBride’s crime drama, THE BIG EASY (1987), starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, John Goodman and Ned Beatty! And make your way to Fat Matt’s Rib Shack for a taste of the blues with Tony Bryant!

Ongoing

The Center for Puppetry Arts presents David Simpich’s marionette-filled adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic, ‘Great Expectations’, through March 2!

Cinefest screens William Greaves’ most well-known film, SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968) through March 2!

Georgia Ensemble Theater presents Simon Levy’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of the love, obsession and the roarin’ 20s, ‘The Great Gatsby’, through March 16

New American Shakespeare Tavern presents ‘Romeo & Juliet’ until March 30^th!

The Star Bar gets groovy with The Funk Godfather, DJ Romeo Cologne and DJ QuasiMandisco every other Tuesday!

Steve’s Live Music’s Gypsy Jazz Brunch offers up a plate of Hot Club jamming and Parisian Swing with Kool Kool Kat Amy Pike and the Bonaventure Quartet from 12:30 to 3:30 pm every 2^nd & 4^th Sunday!

Boogie on down into Disco Hell at The Family Dog as DJ Quasi Mandisco delivers a night of classic funk, soul and disco the last Friday of every month

The Plaza Theater Time-Warps it up as they screen, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) every Friday night, featuring the live cast of Lips Down on Dixie at midnight!

Every first and third Mondays are Big Band Nights at Café 290, featuring Joe Gransden and his amazing 16-piece orchestra playing jazz and swing standards in the tradition of The Glen Miller Orchestra and other legendary groups.  Second and fourth Mondays are Bumpin the Mango, ‘The groove that makes you want to move!’

Every first Wednesday is the Graveyard Tavern’s Graveyard Swing Night, featuring the swingin’ jazz and boogie-woogie sounds of the Savoy Kings!

If you have a suggestion for a future event that should be included in This Week in Retro Atlanta or see something we missed, please email us at atlretro@gmail.com.