Before the previous location on Baity Street was bought out by Wake Forest University, the club housed up to 750 people. The new Ziggy’s to be located on the corner of 8th and Trade streets in Winston-Salem is designed to hold between 1,000 and 1,500, according to early estimates.
Stephens said he had planned to reopen the club eventually, but was just waiting for the right investors to come along while sitting on the plans for a new building that he contracted as of April of last year. Stephens had also previously refused offers to simply buy out the Ziggy’s brand outright, and in the spirit of full disclosure, a deal was finally met when YES! Weekly publisher Charles Womack and Marketing Executive Brad McCauley agreed to put up the minimum of $100,000 that Stephens required to greenlight the project.
“I’ve had several people contact me wanting to do something and they would have put me in some rundown place in Greensboro,” he said. “I knew everybody would be up for it and it would be a great idea, but I told some that I wasn’t just going to sell them my name. I told them I’d let them use my name if I’m a part of the team.”
As such, Stephens retains the title of CEO and will manage the clubs day-to-day operations as he previously did during Ziggy’s heyday and despite sharing the financial load with investors, Stephens ensures fans of the old Ziggy’s that the booking philosophy that made it such an iconic venue won’t change. The “roots – rock – reggae” sign that hung over the old stage will find a new home and the venue will continue to book heavy metal, bluegrass and everything in between.
Several venues have opened in the last three years claiming to fill the live-music void that the departure of Ziggy’s created, most recently the Aquarius Music Hall in High Point that shuttered in May after internal squabbles sunk it after six months in business.
“There have been a lot of former Ziggy’s employees and local bar owners who have claimed they were going to open ‘the new Ziggy’s’ or saying they were going to open up something like Ziggy’s,” said Womack. “But Jay Stephens is Ziggy’s and without him, his knowledge and contacts, it could never happen.”
Stephens says that inexperience in marketing and talent buying were the downfall of others, most notably the Flying Anvil, who paid a premium to attract out-of-rotation talent, though he can relate to those operating in the red. Without the safe confines of his own club, Stephens said he lost around $40,000 last summer over the course of 14 shows he promoted.
The $2 miliion project will be spearheaded by a downtown Winston- Salem development group and the club will encompass 14,000 square feet, which includes the concert venue and a tavern that will operate seven days a week exclusive of the parent housings’ live performances. The idea behind the separate tavern, Stephens believes, is to foment the club’s business plan with an admission-free alternative.
Stephens believes that not only will the return of Ziggy’s be a boon to the Winston-Salem music scene, but its new downtown location creates the possibility of intervenue collaborations, similar to the upcoming Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh and MoogFest in Asheville.
“We can put more entertainment on the streets than Greensboro now and be a bigger draw toward downtown,” Stephens said. “I have great relationships with all of those guys and the possibility of Ziggy’s, Elliot’s Revue, the Garage and the Millennium Center coming together for something is definitely there.”
