Hey again, all. Well, after posting this question yesterday, I took it over to Facebook, and my estimable colleagues Chung Wong and Bob Egan took up the cause. In disarmingly short order, it was deduced that the venue depicted in “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts was a little club called Private’s. Oddly enough, Private’s was on the Upper East Side, at 150 East 85th Street. Not exactly the badlands of rock abandon by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. My high school was two blocks away, and my classmate Kevin Sullivan lived down the street from it. I lived eight blocks away from it.
That said, in their fleeting tenure, Private’s also played host to a number of great bands like Joe “King” Carrasco & the Crowns, the Revillos, Cyndi Lauper’s Blue Angel, Richard Lloyd from Television, a late, Frampton-less iteration of Humble Pie, and even Flaming Pablum favorites like XTC, The Stranglers and Bauhaus. The whole concept of that last trio of punky bands playing on my childhood home turf of East 85th Street completely blows my mind.
True to form, Chung and Bob were able to specifically pinpoint the corner accurately (see below).
Again, it seems so strange that this stuff was going on on the Upper East Side. Sure, the Upper West Side had Hurrah, but that doesn’t seem quite as incongruous, for whatever reason. This patch of the U.E.S. has pretty much always been sleepy and residential.
That said, maybe it’s not that far-fetched. Remember, if you might, that I posted about the fact that Lux Interior and Bryan Gregory of The Cramps worked at then-local record stories like King Karol and Musical Maze, and my brief pal Brian “Damage” Keats (Genocide/Misfits) worked at the neighborhood Crazy Eddie’s. There’s also been fleeting documentation of another club on East 86th Street called, I think, The 80s, which purportedly hosted bands like The Soft Boys and the Plasmatics, but I’ve never found much evidence to back it up.
In any case, Private’s was evidently not to last. I’m not sure when it closed — nor have I found any pictures of it — but the building that currently stands on that corner went up in 1986. I can’t picture the original corner for the life of me. But it once played host to leather-clad rocker types … in a neighborhood otherwise known for blazer-clad Catholic school kids … and Paul McCartney’s favorite pizza place.
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