Numbers With Wings
Twenty-Two Years After It Closed, People Still Call 688 Atlanta’s Greatest Rock Club

I thought every club was like this.

If it wasn’t the first rock club I’d managed to slip into without the doorman asking my underage ass for an ID, it was definitely the one that made the deepest, most lasting impression. For a teenaged music geek waking up to the rush of exciting new bands and sounds bursting forth, it was like going to the circus. It was a world I’d only read about in things like Creem. I spent more nights there than I can remember, soaking up the music, the adventures, the wild local characters and the general urban-anarchic ambiance of the place. I’m sure many of you reading this were there, and can relate.

But every rock club was not like 688, as I eventually came to realize. Not that there weren’t or aren’t other amazing venues and ramshackle watering holes that I adore. But inevitably, they always end up getting compared to 688. The options are greater now, the local music scene is more split up into tribes, and everyone can find their comfort zone. When 688 opened its doors on May 27th, 1980, it was a shithole. It was also a magical confluence of good timing, good ideas and a void in Atlanta that begged to be filled.

And it’s a story that begs to be told. In putting together this oral history, in talking to all of these different people who worked there, played there, went there and partied there, I came to the realization that what ultimately made 688 special was that it was more like a family than a rock club – and as with every family there will be joy and tears, laughter and love and lasting feuds. I almost got the feeling, in talking to some of the closest participants in 688’s existence, that being interviewed about it was something akin to therapy. Contradictions on facts abounded, occasionally even from the same mouth.

Everyone’s got his own version of the truth. Here, as best I could piece it together, is a version of 688’s. And while it’ll give a more accurate feel of what it was like than any dubious reunion show will offer, at the end of the day, you really had to be there. With that, let’s dial the Wayback Machine to the late 1970s…

Steve May (688 co-founder and co-owner): I had been working with sound companies for years, and a couple of bands really liked what I was doing. Brick was one, they had a couple of disco hits in the mid ’70s. I started touring all over the world with some pretty big acts – Earth, Wind and Fire, Little Feat, Weather Report. Ray Parker, Jr., Prince. I either did house sound, or was production manager on the tours. That’s how I got the seed money for 688. Touring.

“[Co-founder] Sheila [Browning] and [688 bartender] Jerri [Juris] worked together at the Rusty Nail on Buford Highway. That’s how I met Sheila. We started going out, then I’d go out on the road a while. Come back and started dating again. Then I got a job at the Great Southeast Music Hall doing house sound, and she’d wait outside for me every night…Sheila grew up as a coal miner’s daughter in Mud Fork, West Virginia. Talk about depressed – oh man… Her dad died in a mining disaster when she was five. When she got out of high school, she and her friend hitchhiked down to Florida and met up with Black Oak Arkansas. They were sort of like Black Oak Arkansas’ groupies for about two years, and then they moved to Atlanta.

“[Co-founder] Tony [Evans] and I were best friends. I met Tony in 1971, I guess, when he helped open up a hair salon called Blood, Sweat & Scissors in Buckhead, over off of Pharr Road… And then in ’77 to 79, I had a rehearsal hall on Howell Mill Road that I rented out to bands. Marshall Tucker Band rehearsed there, Atlanta Rhythm Section, Mylon LeFevre. And we’d throw parties and stuff, and Tony came over and said ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a club and do this all the time?’”