Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1184230
6 4 M A C O N M A G A Z I N E . C O M A P R I L / M AY 2 0 1 9 are Southern rock fans but might not ordinarily attend an orchestral performance. After all, he has worked tirelessly at building an audience of music aficionados who trust him and eagerly anticipate his next creative offering. Now, our challenge as a city is to figure out how to build and sustain that kind of audience across the board for our working musicians in every genre. "Do I think it is awesome as hell that Little Richard and the Allman Brothers are from here or did their thing here? Yes, 100 percent, absolutely! There's no denying how cool and culturally significant that is," Hanson said wistfully from his perch outside a coffee shop downtown. "But I feel like a lot of things about the Allman Brothers get missed and aren't applied to musicians today. At the time, those were some weird cats! These long-haired hippie dope- smokin' dudes rolled into sleepy ole Macon, Georgia, and we gave them a chance. For whatever reason, that doesn't really happen now. We talk and talk and talk and talk about it all day long – the term I use is fetishization. Our musical history is fetishized. "There's so much music here – I don't mean only literal bands, I mean the leaves that roll down Walnut Street in the fall, or the traffic on Poplar Street. There's life here. People need to stop and listen. We have all this beauty around us, all the time." " There's life here. People need to stop and listen. We have all this beauty around us, all the time." -DENNY HANSON