PREAMBLE: I actually started this post quite a while back, but it required a bit of legwork, and then I got sick, so I’m trying to re-visit it now, but it may not be as robust as I was once planning it to be.
POST: Options for witnessing live music of a certain stripe, in Manhattan, are in pretty paltry shape, here in 2023. I mean, sure, there are still a handful of decent clubs and a few comparatively antiseptic live-music venues, but the glory days of legendary hotspots like Brownie’s, Wetland’s Preserve, the Limelight, The Ritz, Roseland Ballroom, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Hurrah’s, Tier 3, Great Gildersleeve’s, Max’s Kansas City and – oh yes, do please wait for it – CBGB are all but sepia-toned memories of a vanished age in practically a different city.
But there is one more significant place that seems rarely invoked when folks rattle off names of celebrated rock clubs and live-music venues as I just did above. It was only open for business for about seven years and was perched on the otherwise unassuming byway of West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End Avenues.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I rarely consider this patch of the Upper West Side when I think of carnal rock n’ roll bacchanalia. My knee-jerk associations with this area conjure more of kind of Jerry Seinfeld/Woody Allen/Steve Martin/Tina Fey vibe more than anything else, but as I ventured up there, a few weekends back, several of the neighborhood’s pop-cultural hotspots did reveal themselves to me.
For a start, to the south, there was the Tower Records on the northwest corner at West 66th Street & Broadway. While arguably not as iconic as the flagship store down on East 4th & Broadway, the UWS Tower played a major role for me when I was ravenous music-consuming high schooler. It’s long gone, of course … replaced by a Raymour & Flanagan, of all things. For those who scoff, at the invocation, Woody Allen shot a scene from “Hannah & Her Sisters” in the UWS Tower, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Just a few blocks up, of course, there was the similarly inclined HMV megastore, another great music outlet that shut up shop around 1999. I’ve not as many rose-tinted memories of that place, but I was glad it was there, at the time. There’s also that statue in Verdi Square that Blue Oyster Cult posed under (worrying close to “Needle Park,” a block or two to the south in Sherman Square, immortalized in “Panic in Needle Park”). There’s also the iconic Beacon Theatre and the former site of the P&G Bar, where Joe Jackson was once photographed drinking and that fleetingly appeared in the video for “Policy of Truth” by Depeche Mode. Of course, there’s also the subway station and surrounding corners that acted as the location of the first sighting of The Baseball Furies in Walter Hill’s 1970 classic, “The Warriors.” Then, of course, a few blocks up, there’s the Ansonia, which played host to `70’s swinger club Plato’s Retreat and, a few blocks to the East, there’s the Dakota, where “Rosemary’s Baby” was filmed and where John Lennon was shot. Not too far away was also the club, Hurrah, as well. Again, there is absolutely no shortage of pop cultural reference points in this neck of town.
But if you stroll down that stretch of West 70th today, you shouldn’t expect to get a whiff of any of that sorta vibe. Right now, at 210 West 70th, which shares a wall with stately Café Luxembourg to its east (where my mom met my wife’s parents, for the first time, about twenty years ago), you’ll find a dormant space which, until recently, was an Italian restaurant called Tavolla Della Nona. Back in 2015, meanwhile, the space was a steakhouse that called itself Lincoln Square Steak. Prior to that, in 2014, it was a venture called Marka. In 2012, it was an Asian eatery called Loi. In 2009, it was a bar called the Compass Lounge. Earlier than that year, things get a little harder to research, although I did discover that in 1976, the space was a cabaret named Grand Finale, where flamboyantly jazzy piano-botherer Bobby Short once played.
But from 1966 until about 1971, it was Ungano’s. One website I came across described it like this:
Brothers Nick and Arnie Ungano opened their club in 1966—or perhaps earlier, since singer/producer Genya Ravan recalls gigging there in 1964. Rock critic Mike Jahn described the 250-capacity basement venue as "an average-size club with a big back room checked off by four mirrored pillars. The stage is along one wall. Opposite it is a small, raised gallery for the press." Ungano's closed in 1971.
According to the period-specific print ads, Ungano’s played host to a wide array of bands including no less than Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, The Kinks, The James Gang, The Grateful Dead, The Nice, Van Morrison, Mountain, NRBQ, Joe Cocker, The Amboy Dukes, John Lee Hooker, Dr. John, Badfinger and The Nazz. What really caught my attention was that it also hosted Parliament/Funkadelic, The MC5, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and The Stooges.
I first got wind of it via the widely circulated recording, Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s by the Stooges, which was captured shortly after the band had issued the greatest rock record of all goddamn time, that being their sophomore effort, Fun House. Three weeks later, meanwhile, Black Sabbath … fresh from releasing their own iconic album, Paranoid, graced the stage of Ungano’s, only to – legend has it – plug in their equipment and blow all the fuses in the building out … which, y’know, is fittingly METAL!
Anyway, romanced by the ideas of bands like the Stooges, Sabbath and the freaks in Parliament running amok in a 250-capacity club, I felt the need to go check the place out. Amazingly, even though it’s currently dormant (and, as mentioned, has been about nine-dozen concerns since its Ungano’s days), you can still get a basic feel for what the room was like. Check out my pics below.
Recent Comments