Two stages at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics
The 1996 Summer Olympics opened in Atlanta on 19 July and closed on 4 August. The fortnight marked a hundred years since the first modern Games, in Athens, and the city had cleared downtown lots for Centennial Olympic Park: 22 acres that Billy Payne, who ran the Atlanta committee, wanted as a gathering place during the events and as something that would outlast them. While the Games were on, the park held sponsor exhibits, pin trading, medal presentations and entertainment.
The outdoor stage in the park is easy to pick out of pictures from that month. The arch over it reads AT&T Global Olympic Village. A photograph Don Ramey Logan took on 30 July shows the rig in daylight: white tents, a painted truss, a wide green screen and a crowd against the barrier.
A second photograph of the same stage puts a performer on that screen, a guitar across him, a bright patterned shirt. Logan identifies the musician as Carlos Santana. There is no set list printed on the frame. What the frame does show is the scale of the plaza. The sponsor's name is part of the building, and the player is large enough to read from the back of the audience. The file on Wikimedia Commons was uploaded years later; the stage itself, with that arch and those tents, belonged to the 1996 Games.
Across from the park, the Baptist Tabernacle on Luckie Street had been sold in October 1994 to investors counting on the Olympics. By the opening weekend the old church was a House of Blues. The first act, on 19 and 20 July, was the Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd, James Belushi and John Goodman. Acts through that Olympic run included James Brown, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Atlanta Journal's concert listings during the Games also named Tito Puente and His Latin Jazz All-Stars and Celia Cruz. Bob Dylan played the last two nights, 3 and 4 August.
Logan's photograph from 1 August is inside that room. A pipe organ covers the wall behind the players, the House of Blues heart hangs over the horns, and a singer in white is out front of the band. The photographer identifies the group as Puente's. Puente was the bandleader and the timbale player, called El Rey de los Timbales, so the person nearest the microphone is not automatically him. The picture is the gig, not a portrait. Commons records the date as 1 August 1996; a later Photoshop export is why the file's own clock says 2023.
Broadcasts stayed with the cauldron and the finish lines. The other Atlanta of those two weeks was a video wall in the park and a church running a nightclub calendar. Dylan's second show fell on 4 August, the day the Games ended. The House of Blues did not keep the building. The room later reopened as the Tabernacle, which is what it is now.