When I ask Mark Weglarz, proprietor of Metal Haven, when he decided to shut down his store—not only one of Chicago’s most singular music retailers but probably one of the best heavy-metal record shops in the world—he pauses for a moment. Then he says: 7 PM on October 13.
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Weglarz seems remarkably sanguine about the situation. Metal Haven is so clearly a labor of love for him that I’d expect him to be crushed—instead he’s cracking jokes about the imminent death of a business he founded in 1999 and has subsidized since 2002 with a downtown job running what he calls a “little Kinko’s within an office.” But though he can laugh, lovers of metal are mourning, not just in Chicago but far afield.
Metal Haven’s expertly curated inventory is a treasure trove for serious metalheads—and has almost zero to offer anyone else. The shop’s stock of current releases contains basically nothing by mainstream crossover artists, unless you count the 2009 album Babylon by W.A.S.P.—the group that earned lasting notoriety when their 1984 single “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” appeared on the Parents Music Resource Center’s “Filthy Fifteen” list. Weglarz carries records by bands that have crossover audiences in the indie scene—Mastodon, Isis, High on Fire—but the great majority of the music on offer is by acts much weirder, uglier, or more obscure. Metal Haven favorites like Portal, Lord Foul, and Toxic Holocaust reside on the outermost branches of metal’s taxonomical tree—a tree on which even the biggest subgenres have intimidating names (“grind,” “thrash”) and some of the less familiar ones don’t sound like types of music at all (“blackened crust”).
Even if you hate metal you should be sorry that Metal Haven is closing. Few record stores anywhere, to say nothing of Chicago, can claim to be just as fanatically obsessive as their most rabid customers. They’ve always been rare. Now they’re in real danger of extinction.
