To satiate the Southerners who couldn't make the trip to Woodstock the summer before, Atlanta promoter Alex Cooley hosted a festival on a raceway and adjoining pecan grove in the tiny central Georgia town of Byron. For this, the second annual event, up to 500,000 people swarmed in for the Atlanta International Pop Festival. The event provided Southerners with their last - and perhaps only - glimpse of Hendrix before his drug overdose in London two months later and gave the town of Byron something they still talk about almost 40 years later.
Joe Sia was a shooting star, a genuine, hands-down, everyone-agrees-on-this star at shooting [photographs], and his departure from this planet in 2003 at the tender age of 57 was too soon for a man of his talent. Born in the Bronx and a committed Yankees man, Joe loved music and gravitated around the Fillmore East and the flower-power youth-culture rock scene from whence he set out to capture some of the most incredible sounds of the last half-century. How could Joe capture sounds on camera film? He did it by focusing on the faces of the performers and the woozing-oozing crowd and by giving the background, whether simple or wild, the importance it deserved in defining the artist and event. Sia's entire archive consists more than a quarter of a million photographs that document almost 35 years of music genre and giants.