Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

David Bowie played a room above a pool hall in Atlanta's first strip mall. Smith's Olde Bar at 1578 Piedmont Avenue NE has run since 1993 in a 1920s commercial strip in Piedmont Heights - the city's oldest shopping centre, built by the Taylor family, whose descendants still owned it when founders Dan Nolen and Mike Reeves moved in. The founders came seasoned: Nolen and Reeves had run the Cotton Club and the Point, and their combined careers touched James Brown, Gregg Allman, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Widespread Panic before Smith's ever opened its doors. The upstairs Music Room - now named for the late Mike Reeves - holds about 300 and has hosted a staggering alumni list on the way up: John Mayer, Kings of Leon, Zac Brown Band, Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs, Janelle Monae, Collective Soul and Bowie's famously intimate 1995 club date. The operation runs 500-plus ticketed shows a year across two stages - the 100-capacity Atlanta Room downstairs handles songwriter nights and local bills - above a full restaurant, game room and patio that keep the building working all day. The venue survived its existential test in 2015-16, when the property went to auction and a vacate notice flew; a new lease deal with an Atlanta developer kept the stages lit, a civic save covered like breaking news by the local press. Thirty years in, a Smith's booking remains an Atlanta rite of passage - the mid-size rung every local act climbs between open mics and the Tabernacle, in a strip mall that predates amplification. The Music Room's pool-hall-turned-listening-room bones give it the low ceiling and close walls performers cite when they call it a favourite Atlanta stop, and the kitchen's wings-and-burgers menu plus the game room downstairs keep the building a neighbourhood bar first - the identity the founders insisted on from day one.