Heavy Metal Potluck

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The aromas of barbecue chicken and lager are wafting through the air at Reggie’s 42nd Street Tavern. It’s Sunday afternoon, and this small dive bar and rock club is holding its weekly potluck to thank regular patrons and build community. A bartender brought the chicken, but I’m pretty sure it was some barfly who brought the waterlogged green beans that day-drinkers are currently heaping onto their paper plates.

The street in the bar’s name is a sleepy through-road on the periphery of one of the city’s most untrendy commercial strips. Some of the regulars are just normies who like the unpretentious atmosphere. But on most Friday and Saturday nights, bearded, shaggy metalheads slosh Pabst Blue Ribbon on each other as they take spins around the mosh pit, while punks hit vape pens at the picnic tables outside. And on Sundays, some of these same scruffy rockers file back in for the free food and a second helping of camaraderie and beer. 

Wilmington, it turns out, has an unusually rich culture of heavy music. Though only North Carolina’s eighth-most populous city, it has produced at least a dozen metal, punk, and hard rock bands that have toured nationally, and half of them internationally. Weedeater, ASG, Sourvein, and He Is Legend are some of the better-known names, but they represent only a fraction of the total output. And for two decades now, Reggie’s 42nd Street Tavern has been a home base and incubator. 

“Every venue other than Reggie’s had this air about it, like there’s rules that you have to follow, and you have to make sure you don’t fuck this up,” said Victor Marriott, a veteran of the scene. “And at Reggie’s, it was like a party. You’re just gonna go play at the party.” 

Something in the Water

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Wilmington’s heavy music scene was born, but it came of age in the late 1990s as Weedeater and Sourvein played a new Southern-tinged version of “sludge”—a down-tuned, plodding mixture of doom metal and hardcore punk.

Around the same time, guitarist and vocalist Kirk Fisher, the itinerant frontman of sludge act Buzzoven, moved to town. Buzzoven had recently been booted from the prominent metal label Roadrunner Records, and an exodus of its supporting cast ensued. So Fisher, who is originally from Charlotte, recruited a fresh crop of musicians in his new home. The three bands put Wilmington on the sludge map.

After the turn of the millennium, new groups started showing up like cockroaches following a summer rain. These included Gollum (experimental death metal), He Is Legend (metalcore screamo), and ASG (stoner-rock-surf-punk). And, of course, there was more sludge. 

“At Reggie’s, it was like a party. You’re just gonna go play at the party.”

Victor Marriott, veteran of the Wilmington metal scene

But why Wilmington, which is mostly known as a sleepy tourist town?

Several musicians floated plausible theories: the presence of UNC Wilmington; the large surfing and skateboarding countercultures, which tend to bring alternative rock genres in their wake; and the since-shuttered venue The Mad Monk, which attracted nationally touring bands during the heyday of MTV’s Headbangers Ball.

That variety is key: the wide range of venues in Wilmington meant there was a spot for any kind of show, no matter how popular or totally unknown a band might be. Bessie’s, Lucky’s, and The Soapbox all created metalhead microcommunities. An earlier iteration of Reggie’s was the smallest of them all. “It was just, like, a tiny little back room,” Marriott said. “It was like playing in your grandmother’s basement.”

Marriott’s first band, Beer Wolf, put on some of their earliest shows at Reggie’s around 2006, back when the floor was covered—surely to the horror of county health inspectors—in carpet. This was the era of the unruly rock parties Marriott had spoken of earlier, which were more anarchic (and, probably, dangerous) than would have been allowed at Wilmington’s larger venues.

“The ceiling was always dripping something onto the carpet, creating a fucking vomit smell,” Marriott recalled as we chatted at one of Reggie’s high-top tables. “Which, I’m sure, actual vomit was part of that.”

To be clear, Reggie’s no longer smells like puke. (The hungry patrons hovering over the aluminum trays of warm food near the entrance are proof of that.) The mephitic carpet was removed. Walls were pushed back. The floor in front of the stage was expanded, and more professional sound systems were added.

This investment to make the venue better for musicians stems mostly from the fact that it is run by musicians. Reggie’s co-owner Matt Hearn played guitar and sang in a now-defunct punk band White Tiger and the Bed of Roses. The other co-owner, Chuck Krueger, is the vocalist of the legendary local quintet Thunderlip, which bangs out high-octane rock that’s equal parts Iggy Pop and Iron Maiden.

Krueger joined his high school friend Hearn to run Reggie’s in 2009 after Thunderlip’s touring days slowed down. “I think us being musicians gave us credibility,” he said

Thunderlip doesn’t perform often these days—they put together a reunion show every year or two—but when they do, they pack the house, having built a reputation for sexy swagger and passionate energy. In 2011, Wilmington StarNews reporter Brian Tucker witnessed Krueger sing a New Year’s Eve set while wrapped up in plugged-in holiday lights. “He nearly electrocuted himself, but by show’s end he was inviting the crowd onstage for the set’s last song,” Tucker wrote. 

Krueger remembers those years as a kind of heyday for heavy music in Wilmington. “People used to joke it’s something in the water,” Krueger wrote to me. “I can’t explain it, but it was special.”

The Wilmington Kind of Heavy

If the Wilmington heavy music scene dropped off from that peak, it didn’t drop far. Throughout the 2010s, established bands continued to release albums, many of them on influential labels like Southern Lord, Spinefarm, and Relapse. New bands formed and saw their stars rise. The most notable of them was Toke, a metal trio that released two popular records and was poised for more until guitarist Tim Bryan was severely injured in a motorcycle accident in 2021, and the group disbanded out of respect.

The other two original Toke members eventually reconstituted as Bronco, with Marriott on guitar and backing vocals. Like Toke, Bronco plays an infernal mixture of the sludge, stoner, and doom metal subgenres. Marriott describes this constellation of sounds as “the Wilmington kind of heavy.” It’s a slow and distorted, bluesy, and often catchy hybrid. 

Just as we’re discussing this in the Reggie’s game room, a grizzled man in his early 50s swings open the door. Spry and wild-eyed, he is probably the most regular of Reggie’s patrons and one of the most recognizable sludge musicians on the planet: “Dixie” Dave Collins. 

Collins is the bass player and vocalist of Weedeater, the tip of the spear that is the Wilmington heavy music scene. Weedeater hasn’t released a new record since 2015, but its albums are generally considered staples of the sludge genre. Their live shows are so immersively loud that attending one is akin to a contact sport. The band tours relentlessly, and their shows stay packed.

This has resulted in a surreal kind of visibility for Reggie’s, since Collins is known to rep his favorite watering hole religiously on stage. Tens—possibly hundreds—of thousands of metalheads around the world have been sonically pummeled by the man in the Reggie’s T-shirt. 

And here he is, grinning ear to ear as he bellies up to the bar with his customary four fingers of bourbon on the rocks and starts digging into his potluck supper.

Normie Pressures

There are fewer spaces for this kind of crowd in Wilmington these days. Many venues have closed over the years, but no loss stung as much as the shuttering of The Soapbox in 2013. Most people I interviewed mentioned it as another Reggie’s-like haven for heavy music—only larger, and located right downtown on Front Street.

Many speculated grimly on the role that gentrification and municipal planning policies played in the loss. The Wilmington City Council changed the alcohol permitting process in 2010, with the goal of squeezing out places that served booze into the early morning. 

To be fair, downtown Wilmington had a well-earned reputation for violence and mayhem back then, and something needed to be done. But the city was on the verge of a population boom, and Marriott could smell the stench of money behind the policy change. “Downtown is like the window dressing of your city,” Marriott told me. “And if it’s a bunch of drunk punk rockers, it doesn’t look good for your city for investors.” Whether The Soapbox was targeted or just collateral damage, the effect was the same. It made a venue like Reggie’s into a cultural lifeline.

Marriott has also changed with the times, at least in some ways. Few musicians make a living entirely from their music, and Marriott has a wife and young son to think about. He’s worked other jobs in the past—selling bongs in a local head shop, delivering food for DoorDash—but he eventually went back to school and completed an associate’s degree in electrical systems technology last May. His pursuit of higher pay and more stability seems to have worked. Now, in addition to Bronco and the four other bands he’s in, he works a “normie” gig as an electrician.

“So much of my focus has been sucked away by my career,” Marriott said, slumped in his chair at the high-top table. “It’s just so, like, exhausting. I don’t have the mental capacity for it.”

“I think us being musicians gave us credibility.”

Chuck Kreuger, one of Reggie’s co-owners

That doesn’t mean he’s quitting any time soon. In August, Bronco opened for the Grammy-winning metal trio High on Fire. A few weeks after that, they performed at the Muddy Roots Music Festival in Cookeville, Tennessee, which is kind of like MerleFest for the underground heavy music scene. Luckily, Marriott’s day job allows him the flexibility to travel.

“Everything that I’ve done in my life is to try and be able to play music,” Marriott told me. “I’ve tried to be good at everything even that I’m not good at, so that I would be able to do the thing that I’m good at.”

Rocking On

Weedeater recently took time off touring to release their own signature effects pedal in collaboration with the popular music website Does It Doom? Guitar and bass players everywhere can now give their instruments the distinctive fuzz that has shaped what Marriott calls “the Wilmington kind of heavy.” The first run of pedals, which Collins and Weedeater guitarist Dave Shepherd signed, sold out in 48 hours.

Other local veterans plug away as well: He Is Legend has been crisscrossing the country, ASG is rumored to be working on a new album, and The Hottness, a popular metalcore quintet that disbanded around 2010, has put together a few reunion shows. 

As for the building we’re sitting in—which has fostered so much of the energy, creativity, and passion of this scene—its future feels, if not guaranteed, at least stable. One of Reggie’s strengths has always been its smallness, its proximity to the people who know what they’re getting out of it and love that thing.

At a July meeting of the city planning commission, Hearn petitioned for minor changes to the property’s zoning restrictions. A barber who rented a small shop in the building was moving out, and Reggie’s owners wanted more flexibility in who rents the space next. 

But don’t worry, Hearn told the commission. Reggie’s wouldn’t be changing.

“It will look the same,” Hearn said. “The nightclub is going to be there forever.”