From SNL to 'Wilmstock': Remembering Dave Matthews Band's crazy Wilmington airport concert

On May 30, The Dave Matthews Band is scheduled to step on stage in front of a Wilmington audience for the first time in nearly three decades.

Tickets to that concert at Live Oak Bank Pavilion, and to a second show on May 31, go on sale Feb. 17, with various pre-sales starting Feb. 14. Ticket prices have not been revealed, but safe to say they'll be higher than the $20 or so fans paid to see Matthews − along with two other bands, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and Boxing Ghandis − back on April 16, 1995, as part of a day-long outdoor concert called Easterfest held at the Wilmington International Airport, on the site taken up in recent years by the Cape Fear Fair & Expo.

Since that show, the closest Wilmington has gotten to seeing Dave Matthews was when The Dave Matthews Tribute Band played the old Downtown Sundown concert series back in 2016.

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The 1995 concert pre-sold 7,000 tickets and an estimated 9,000 people attended Easterfest, which is about 2,000 more than the capacity of Wilmington's largest current venue, Live Oak Bank Pavilion. It's nearly double that of UNCW's Trask Coliseum, where the biggest touring acts played in Wilmington at that time.

These days, the 1995 airport concert is largely forgotten. But it stands out as proof that Wilmington has long had an appetite and an audience for live music, even if it's only been in recent years that either one has begun to be regularly satisfied.

Alecia Mitchell of Wilmington, who used to own Wilmington music venue The Whiskey and works these days at downtown bar The Duck & Dive, was there in the thick of Matthews' airport concert, which came less than 24 hours after the band made its national debut of sorts on "Saturday Night Live."

"I worked that show," Mitchell wrote in a Facebook message. "For some reason they only had four bars set up, one in each corner (of the field). We couldn’t sell beer fast enough ... It was hot and chaotic! And fun."

These days, DMB, as the band is known, is a two-time Grammy-winning act with more than a dozen studio albums to its credit. Matthews, who hails from Virginia by way of South Africa, is known for combining rock, pop, folk, country, jazz and world music styles into a jammy blend on such hit songs as "What Would You Say" and "Crash Into Me." (The band is scheduled to release its latest album, "Walk Around the Moon," May 19.)

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Then, however, DMB had just begun its ascent into the musical stratosphere and had only two albums under its belt: 1993's "Remember Two Things" and 1994's major label debut, "Under the Table and Dreaming." The band built its fan base with small-scale regional shows in the early 1990s, including multiple concerts in Wilmington at late, lamented rock club The Mad Monk.

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Mad Monk owner Charlie Maultsby, who died in 2019, was the main organizer of Matthews' airport show. Maultsby started the Mad Monk in the 1980s, and by the early '90s he was bringing (then-on-the-rise) acts like Hootie and the Blowfish, Marilyn Manson, Pantera and many others to town.

But The Monk only had a capacity of, at most, about 1,000 people.

The airport gig "was part of Charlie's concept of where he could do bigger, outdoor shows," said Leonard Rollins, who used to work at the old School Kids Records on South Kerr Avenue, which partnered with The Monk in various ways. "It was a huge deal."

"Every two months at The Monk it'd be The Dave Matthews Band, then two months later it'd be Hootie," Rollins added, noting how DMB grew a fan base in Wilmington. "They kind of blew up after that gig on SNL."

Meanwhile, Maultsby had been cultivating a music-loving Wilmington audience for years. But instead of driving two hours up I-40 to see big concerts at Walnut Creek Amphitheater near Raleigh, which had opened a few years earlier, this time all the fans seemingly showed up at the airport to see Dave Matthews on an unseasonably warm Easter Sunday in Wilmington.

"It was almost as if Charlie Maultsby had picked up the entirety (of Wrightsville Beach) between the piers and dropped it at the airport," said Billy Mellon, who today owns downtown restaurant manna but then wrote for Juice, a Wilmington music magazine largely devoted to promoting bands that played The Monk. "It was basically a big beach party with great musical talent."

Writing in the StarNews, former reporter Kara Chiles called the concert "Wilmstock" and witnessed long lines for beers and bathrooms. ("Some concert goers chose to answer nature's call through a chain link fence rather than wait," she noted.)

As the scent of "illegal substances ... floated on the breeze," Matthews greeted the crowd with an acknowledgement of the hot spring day, saying, "Hello, summertime."

Chiles deemed it a "workmanlike show that neither bombed nor astounded," and said "the sound system didn't do justice" to what she called "a routine performance ... garbling some of the musical twists that make the band unique."

Less-than-enthusiastic concert reviews aside, the show almost didn't happen at all. Rollins said the concert had been scheduled for the previous weekend but got rained out. The following Saturday was a no-go because of the "Saturday Night Live" gig, but Maultsby somehow worked out a deal for the band to come straight from New York on Sunday morning.

Chuck Denson was a Wilmington radio DJ for the old Surf 107 FM, which helped promote the airport concert.

"I interviewed (DMB) on the air. Had a really good time," Denson said. "I wish I still had that interview. It's on an old reel-to-reel tape somewhere."

Understandably after the late-night SNL gig, the band was "kinda tired," Denson said, "but they still did a great job."

"I don't know if it's because who I was," Denson said, "But they were genuinely nice people. (Legendary DMB drummer) Carter Beauford for sure was. Some people you know they're being nice because of who you are, but with him, he was just a genuinely nice guy."

When the concert was all said and done, Denson recalls, "Charlie was pleased," which is something the famously combative Maultsby often wasn't.

But what could have been the start of something big didn't really pan out in the long run, at least not immediately.

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"The music scene was kind of at a turning point then," Denson said. "If things had gone right, it would've ushered in a whole new era of bands coming to Wilmington."

As it turned out, a whole new era for music for Wilmington would have to wait about a quarter century, with the advent of Greenfield Lake Amphitheater and, more recently, Live Oak Bank Pavilion.

"It was a colossal deal that Charlie was able to get (Matthews) and that show together, we were all very excited," Mitchell said, adding that about a year later, the House of Blues (now part of the Live Nation conglomerate) announced plans to open in North Myrtle Beach.

"That basically destroyed the Monk," Mitchell said.

The House of Blues was able to pay bands more money than Maultsby could while also dictating that bands who wanted to play HoB couldn't play anywhere else in a 100-mile radius, a radius that included Wilmington.

About a year after Matthews' airport concert in 1996, The Mad Monk closed down for good.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: The Dave Matthews Band's legendary 1995 Wilmington airport concert