Currently there’s a hipster secondhand clothing store called 2nd Street at 1057 Ponce de Leon Ave., in Atlanta, close to Plaza Theatre and across Cleburne Terrace from The Majestic:
From 1977 to 1993, Atlanta’s regional record chain was Turtle’s Records and Tapes. And the place that is now 2nd Street wasn’t just a Turtle’s, it was the Turtle’s where most indie bands held meet & greets. I met Nitzer Ebb at this store, for example.
I also met Lone Justice’s lead singer Maria McKee at this store, just as she was launching her solo career.
She arrived, perhaps the highest person in metro Atlanta at that moment. I remember looking at her thinking “My God, woman… you have access to weed the likes of which I cannot even imagine.”
So she clumsily (and… highly? is that a word?) said hello to the 40-ish people there. She talked about her debut album for a bit, then answered a few questions. A Turtle’s employee then put a stool out for her and her assistant handed her an acoustic guitar.
She was wearing this HUGE silver ring! It was long – almost as long as the finger it rested on.
She played a song, then during the next one she started strumming the guitar really hard. The ring flew off her finger and hit a guy in the face, just above his left eye.
It was hilarious to me, because it happened almost exactly like the “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!” scene from Dodgeball. I don’t know if the ring was that heavy, or that she was strumming the guitar with that much force, or it if just hit the poor guy’s skull perfectly, because you could hear the ring THUMP against his skull over McKee.
So I started laughing. It was a perfectly scripted unscripted moment. And McKee laughed, too… she laughed her ass off at first, but regained her composure when she saw that the guy was actually bleeding. Not a lot of blood, mind you… but enough for McKee to say “Holy shit! Are you OK, man?”
Someone found the ring and gave it back to McKee, who gave it to her assistant “for safekeeping”. An employee found some paper napkins in a drawer somewhere and gave them to the guy to stop the bleeding.
And I got a silly story I’m still telling 37 years later! It’s terrible, but it really was funny watching that guy react to getting hit with the ring!