There’s no shortage of venues in North America. Virtually any market of 100,000 people has at least one viable venue, and they’re all seeking content. In fact, it’s an accepted fact that there are more places to play than there are artists to play them.
Yet Mike Luba, former manager and former partner in S2BN with Michael Cohl, is out there looking for “weird places to play” in his role as producer for Mumford & Sons’ Gentlemen of the Road tour, now in its second year. And he has found a cool one: the 90-year-old Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens. Mumford & Sons, along with the Vaccines and Bear’s Den, will open the newly renovated venue on Aug. 28.
“Growing up on Long Island, I was aware of the legend of the place,” Luba says, “so in my file of strange places to try to do concerts, it was always at the top of the list. My timing was great, because the [tennis] club just voted to not sell off the property and convert it to condominiums. So they were stuck with this simultaneous piece of crap and priceless gem.”
Beyond its history with the U.S. Open (which moved to a larger venue in Flushing in 1978), Forest Hills has a sterling history in music. The Beatles and Barbra Streisand played there in 1964; the Rolling Stones did so in 1966, as well as Bob Dylan, who performed his first full electric concert there; and in ’67 Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees and was legendarily booed offstage. The same thing happened when the Doors opened for Simon & Garfunkel.
Yet the stadium has sat dormant for years, though not as decrepit as most people thought. “There was an urban myth that it had been borderline condemned, and it turns out that the actual guts of the place were great,” Luba says. “We went in and did a bunch of structural concrete and steel updating, and the stadium should be in the best shape it’s been since it was built.”
Luba and “a buddy of mine from high school, just a dude who loves music and loves tennis” formed West Side Tennis Club Events, which funded the approximately $2 million renovation. Given Mumford & Sons’ affinity for playing “weird places,” they were the perfect act to reopen the venue. Bowery Presents came in as promoter, Front Gate (ticketer for Gentlemen of the Road) put the show on sale, and 120,000 requests came in for the 17,000 available tickets. That’s a sellout.
Luba’s new company will manage and operate live events at the venue, and while Bowery is involved in the first show, Luba says it’s open to other promoters, and West Side Tennis Club Events could also promote. Luba says the response from agents and promoters has been very positive.
In his role with Mumford & Sons, Luba says he goes around the world looking for small towns that have never had “real concerts,” and ends up staging mini-festivals that attract 30,000-40,000 people for two days. Generally, these are small markets, like Simcoe, Ontario; Troy, Ohio; and Guthrie, Okla., and the venues rarely show up on route books. “Sometimes bands want to play in different places,” says Luba, who notes that weird places can be challenging in terms of logistics. That said, fans like it when bands “create a different environment from 60 other shows at places people are used to going to.”