Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

When the Fireside Bowl stopped doing punk shows, Chicago's all-ages scene lost its home - this room replaced it. Reggies Rock Club at 2109 South State Street is the concert half of Robby Glick's South Loop complex, a 400-capacity room opened on 8 September 2007 that made all-ages booking its founding policy rather than an occasional concession. The club shares the converted auto-repair building with Reggies Music Joint, the second-floor Record Breakers record store and a rooftop beer garden, an ecosystem grown from Glick's 20 years running the record shop whose free in-store shows outgrew their aisles. The room itself is deliberately close-up: old Chicago brick and steel backdropped by murals from local graffiti artists, a balcony wrapping the floor, and a stage low enough that the club's in-your-face billing is literal. Critics have ranked it among the city's best live rooms, and The Guardian included it in its top ten Chicago venues. Bookings lean innovative and heavy - punk, metal, indie, hip-hop, jam and electronic - with a history that runs from the Tragically Hip, Alkaline Trio and Gaslight Anthem to the Dillinger Escape Plan, Screeching Weasel and Carl Palmer, plus the Bananna's Comedy Shack stand-up nights sharing the building. Touring bands get treated conspicuously well for a club this size - dressing rooms with showers, laundry in the building, and a kitchen next door - details that have kept the routing sheets full since the venue's first year. The State Street corner is now a fixture of the near South Side circuit: two stages under one roof most nights, the Green Line a block away, and the complex's own buses ferrying fans to and from the stadiums it shares the neighbourhood with. The city approval process took Glick two years before the doors opened - long enough that the club arrived fully formed, and its first seasons already read like the schedule of a venue twice its age.