In 2020, Southern Living magazine dubbed it one of the “South’s Best Bars,” and it’s known for its signature cocktails and handcrafted bitters. Bouncer Arianna Petersen, a recent biochemical engineering grad, checks IDs and vaccination cards at the door and waxes poetic about how the spirit of rock and roll joins employees and customers in a kind of transcendent haze.įinally, more than a mile west of downtown in the Normaltown neighborhood, we enter Matt McFerron’s The Old Pal, a cocktail bar that the UGA graduate opened in 2013 far from the khaki line. It remains the pulsing heart of Athens’ live music scene. Next, we walk to the renowned 40 Watt Club, the music venue and bar that helped launch punk and alternative rock movements as the main performance space for homegrown Athens bands like R.E.M. Here, Harrison Smith, a lifelong Athenian, checks IDs, nods to the music and frets over the fate of the city’s independent music scene. We begin at Nowhere Bar, a dive with more than 40 years in business, populated by dartboards, six tired pool tables and a nightly lineup of emerging musicians. Locals refer to an invisible boundary along Lumpkin Street in downtown Athens as the “khaki line”-east of that, closer to campus, college bars and their khaki-clad clientele control the vibe.įor this installment of Punch’s “A Night at the Door,” we talked to the gatekeepers at three bars west of the khaki line, who don’t draw their customers primarily from college campuses.
A key player in the development of alternative rock and new wave music, this college town’s music scene remains a central attraction, with more than a dozen live music venues scattered across the downtown area.īut in a town where nearly three out of every 10 residents are University of Georgia students, the downtown scene-about 80 bars within a square mile-is dominated by collegians. and The B-52s achieved international acclaim.
Athens, Georgia, took its place on the world stage in the 1970s and ’80s when homegrown music acts like R.E.M.
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