Atlanta 1996

1996 was kind of a big deal in Atlanta as it was the year the Olympic Games were held in his home city.  In the mists of his memory, the Olympics overshadow any musical event.

He didn't go to Music Midtown that year.  He had been dating a new girlfriend since the autumn of 1995, a Delta flight attendant who was away at work as much as she was home (three days on and three days off). She moved in with him at the beginning of '96, and when the Music Midtown weekend rolled around, they preferred to enjoy each other's company in the solitude of home rather than immerse themselves in the crowds and the heat and the noise of the festival.

They traveled a lot, a benefit of her employment by an airline, scuba diving in South Florida or the Bahamas, weekends in New York and Boston, backpacking and dayhiking in the North Georgia and North Carolina mountains.  They occasionally went out to hear music, but not as much as they dined out or went to movies. CD shopping trips were a weekend ritual, each buying three or four discs, and when they got back home they competed over who got to hear who's purchases first.  Their tastes were different, but they usually managed to come back home with mutually agreeable selections of current rock, some jazz, some blues, maybe a soundtrack or two, and a lot of salsa and tropicalia, a taste that they'd picked up on diving trips down to Miami.  Celia Cruz and Cesaria Evora were as frequently purchased as Depeche Mode, Beck, and Bjork.

One of the songs that stands out to him from that period was from the collaboration of Brian Eno, U2, and Luciano Pavarotti known as Passengers.  The song Miss Sarajevo captured the gestalt of the times - the Balkan Wars and the Clinton presidency, as well as their own eclectic tastes in music.  

For those who are too young to remember or whose memories are short, the siege of Sarajevo stemmed from the ethnic struggle between Serb and Bosnian government forces in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs had surrounded the capital and initiated the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, lasting from April 1992 until February 1996. Sarajevo was reduced to ruins, and the citizens had no access to public transit, water, gas and electricity.  But the besieged Sarajevans stubbornly refused to be demoralized, and despite all of the horror and bloodshed around them, in 1993 they still held their annual beauty pageant, won that year by a 17-year-old blonde named Inela Nogić.  A documentary film of the event and of the seige of Saravejo contains a clip of the contestants gamely holding up a sign reading "Please don't kill us."

So for a year in which Olympics, travel, international politics, and romance overshadowed music, he offers Miss Sarajevo as his representation of 1996.