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WINSTON-SALEM — It’s a sweltering Sunday afternoon in mid–July, and Ziggy’s looks like an airplane hangar and feels like an oven.

Owner Jay Stephens checks the progress as his old club awaits its rebirth in a new home.

“It rained 3 inches here Friday, and all the water came in all the doors back there that weren’t sealed,” he says. “And our landscaping — we were moving dirt every day. We ended up with a mudslide 10 feet into the building.”

But the mud has been shoveled out, the stage is in place and the construction crew will come back in force on Monday, working furiously to get the club ready for its grand reopening, originally scheduled for Friday.

But as of Tuesday night, Ziggy’s won’t be opening this weekend.

The club made the announcement Tuesday night on its Facebook page stating that the club will not open for at least two weeks “due to unforeseen circumstances. ... We have run into several problems and setbacks including the biggest and most concerning-our leader, Jay Stephens, being admitted to the ICU.”

According to Charles Womack, one of Ziggy’s investors, Stephens wasn’t feeling well at work on Monday and went home early that afternoon with a fever.

On Tuesday morning, Stephens’ fever had worsened, and he was admitted to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, where doctors determined that he had a severe urinary tract infection. He remained in intensive care as of press time.

Womack said that Friday night’s grand opening show and Saturday’s Mother’s Finest performance will be rescheduled in that order, but that the Sunday Island Reggae Fest has been canceled and will not be rescheduled.

Gillian Welch (Aug. 4), Dawes (Aug. 10) and Jamey Johnson (Aug. 11) will be held at the Millennium Center and still will take place there on those dates, regardless of whether Ziggy’s has opened by that point. Other shows are in the process of being rescheduled at other venues. Check Ziggy's Facebook page or website for additional updates and information on ticket refunds.

For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Ziggy’s was the Triad’s primary showplace for live music. But in 2007, Stephens sold the club on Baity Street to Wake Forest University. Its new location will reopen at 821 N. Trade St. in Winston-Salem.

During its 27 year history, Ziggy’s helped launch the careers of bands that would go on to sell out coliseums, such as the Dave Matthews Band, Phish and Hootie and the Blowfish. It also hosted a genre-busting array of music legends, from Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and Bo Diddley to Burning Spear, Public Enemy, Warren Zevon and Kenny Chesney.

“It really was just a clubhouse,” says Ed Bumgardner, a fixture in the Winston-Salem music scene for decades, who performed at Ziggy’s many times and wrote about shows there as a longtime critic for the Winston-Salem Journal. “It wasn’t like a nightclub. It was a clubhouse, and sort of a (expletive) hole. But it was a great (expletive) hole! It had character, it had vibe, it had everything you wanted. It was all hand–built by all (Jay Stephens’) hippie pals.”

The new Ziggy’s, by contrast, is a six-figure project designed by architects and built by an established construction company. Stephens partnered with investors Charles Womack and Brad McCauley of “Yes Weekly” to resurrect Ziggy’s.

“I needed to raise about $100,000 from private investment in order to open this place up,” Stephens says. “I’d already gotten a deal going with Ninth Street Properties and their architectural division and knew that we were gonna build this building. I just didn’t have enough personal cash to build what I’ve built here.”

The main room will hold 1,000 people — 250 more than the former location — and feature a wrap-around balcony and private VIP suites.

A separate “family-oriented” tavern upstairs, scheduled to be open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week, will hold 220 people, feature more intimate performances and offer a prepared food menu — something the old club never had.

“I could have done a littler club, rented a place that had already been a club before, but I wanted to come back with a boom,” Stephens says.

The original Ziggy’s started as a small bar in an old house on Deacon Boulevard, established in the early 1970s as the White Horse Pub by Wake Forest University alumnus John “Ziggy” Ziglinski, according to Ziggy’s website. The building was moved to Baity Street in 1988, with Stephens buying it in 1991 and adding a semi-enclosed amphitheater out back with a series of terraced wooden decks where the audience stood. It had electric fans for hot nights and space heaters and tarps to block the cold wind on cooler nights, but it was never fully enclosed.

Stephens promises a similar funky atmosphere at his new club.

“Same vibe, dude, same vibe,” he says. “We just have more bathrooms and a bigger space. And air conditioning and heat.”

Michael Slawter, a graphic designer in Winston-Salem, played at the former Ziggy’s with several of his bands, including Niedermeyer and The Saving Graces. His current band is a pop-punk group called Slawterhaus 5.

In the early 1990s he lived within walking distance of the club and recalls many memorable shows there, from early Ben Folds Five performances (when that band was still called Rosetta Stone) to Son Volt, Wilco, Jason and the Scorchers, and a Flaming Lips show that allegedly got shut down by the police after a few songs because the band was too loud.

Slawter welcomes the return of Ziggy’s.

“I think it’s great to have another place to play in this town,” he says. “It really has seemed to go in waves here, where we have two or three great places to play, then all of a sudden we have, like, one.”

The competition should help the local music scene rather than hurting smaller clubs such as The Garage, Slawter believes. He compares it to the situation in Chapel Hill and Carrboro where the biggest club, Cat’s Cradle, helps create a vibrant scene that boosts smaller clubs such as Local 506.

“I don’t think it’s gonna hurt anything at all,” Slawter says. “If anything, it’s gonna help. For a while there, we were a stop like Cat’s Cradle is. Do you think Cat’s Cradle hurts 506’s business? Not at all. If anything, it just keeps Chapel Hill on the map as a stop for bigger bands coming through. The only thing I guess maybe I worry about is if he’s gonna have to build up some kind of rep, or if everybody’s gonna remember what Ziggy’s was.”

Bumgardner, who is scheduled to play opening night at Ziggy’s with a new band, PLONK!, comprised of fellow North Carolina scene veterans, doesn’t think there’s any way a new club can recapture the clubhouse feel of the old Ziggy’s, but he looks forward to seeing how the new one shapes up.

“I think it’s entirely possible that it will generate a vibe of its own,” he says. “That’s what happened — that’s why the other place was special. It evolved. And with it the vibes of all the bands that played there and all the beers spilled — it had its own legend.”

One icon of the original Ziggy’s was the big multicolored sign that hung above the stage and read “Roots Rock Reggae.” Stephens is working with artist Millicent Greason at Urban Artware in Winston-Salem to create art in the same vein.

“There’s gonna be murals painted on those big walls,” Stephens says. “One’s gonna have 'Roots Rock Reggae,’ and one’s gonna have 'Support live music.’ And then all of our old original Ziggy’s art is gonna be up on the walls. A lot of signed memorabilia and so forth.”

Like everyone else involved in the project, Greason was hustling to come up with a plan to get things ready in time for the grand opening. Initial plans included a “happy sunburst” and vibrant colors with plenty of red, yellow and green to reflect the club’s reggae leanings.

“Suffice it to say we’re gonna try to make something cool happen,” she says. “And it definitely will be something that can be added to.”

Stephens plans to offer a reggae brunch starting at 10 a.m. every Sunday, with live reggae from 2 to 5 p.m.

Thursdays will be Partay!! night (“that’s P-A-R-T-A-Y, with two exclamation points”) with DJs spinning dance music starting at 9 p.m. and ladies get in free until 11 p.m..

“We’re gonna have the world’s biggest DJs come, and we’ve got some really good drink specials,” Stephens says.

The new Ziggy’s will have two VIP suites available for rent at shows with a dedicated bartender and private bathroom, and premium-priced front row “Gold Circle” seating for many national acts, he says. Ziggy’s has already announced a series of major acts including Gillian Welch, Jamey Johnson, Shawn Colvin and The Wailers.

Now, it’s just a matter of whether Ziggy’s will be ready to open in two weeks. Until then, we’ll just sit and wait.

Freelance writer Tammy Holoman contributed to this story. Contact her at tjholoman@gmail.com

Contact Eddie Huffman atehuffman@triad.rr.com