Nov. 6, 1971: Concert promoter Steve Goldstein

 

      A return visit to the charming little stone cottage in the woods of northern Amherst for a sequel to the story about a band a few weeks earlier, in which a member of that band makes a cameo appearance: 

Nov. 6, 1971 

Promotion a Hassle

But Worth It 

        Buffalo’s newest and youngest rock concert promoter slouches kinda sideways behind his sunglasses, looking about as disheveled as his living room.

        Steve Goldstein didn’t even get his full five hours of sleep last night. Closed his father’s club – The Yellow Monkey – at 4 a.m. and some guy comes by at dawn to borrow a shotgun to go hunting.

        Strewn with tickets, posters and handbills, this idyllic stone cottage in the north Amherst woods is promotion headquarters for the show Steve’s Ironspur Music is bringing to Memorial Auditorium this coming Monday night.

        And so the afternoon parades before his heavy-lidded eyes – errand-goers, friends, associates inching cautiously around each other in the long, narrow driveway while in the background WPHD plays softly through four-foot-high speakers as Steve listens for his commercials.

* * *

THIS WAS easy compared to the rest of the week. The major group in the five-band program – Deep Purple, the people who did “Hush Hush” – had canceled out the day before the tickets were supposed to go on sale.

        “I think I hit the floor and bounced about five times,” Steve says. “Their vocalist, Ian Gillan, came down with hepatitis. Then I get a call that Buddy Miles is out, too. He had water on the knee.

        “I got on the phone, looking around, shopping, and it was really slim for November 8th. Three or four choices of anything that really meant anything.

        “It came down to taking Ike and Tina Turner with Curtis Mayfield or John Mayall, Spirit and Crazy Horse. We would have had to pitch Ike and Tina at a different audience than we’d planned for the original show, a whole different promotion, so we took Mayall.”

* * *

HE HAD the new lineup for the Aud in one day, but it was a different story in Toronto, where Deep Purple was supposed to play the day after they notified him.

        Toronto kids have been ripped off by promoters so often that Steve was afraid they’d tear up the hall if he put in a substitute group on such short notice. So he just canceled it, refunded the tickets, lost his front money and gave up the bottle of tequila he thought he’d won when the show sold out.

        There wasn’t much time to linger over the disaster. He had to get to Syracuse and Rochester to oversee shows there. “I don’t go to any concerts but my own,” he says, “and then I’m nervous, running around, pulling out my hair.”

* * *

GLENN SKADAN of Magic Ring, the rock band managed by Steve, arrives and begins to work on the tickets, crossing out bands which won’t be there.

        “It really hurts to cross out our own name,” Glenn says. To satisfy booking agents and fill the bill, Steve had to drop them from the show.

        The little living room keeps filling up with people. Jeff Hoffman of Hoffman Printing bringing in the posters (“Really clean-looking, don’t you think?”). Toronto contact Howie Schwartz, a CHUM production man (commercials and jingles) who grew up in Kenmore. Nancy Frankel, who’s with Howie. Ironspur assistant Jim Pappas. A bunch of kids who leave in Steve’s two cars to tack up posters and hand out handbills.

* * *

STEVE started working on the Nov. 8 show in mid-September, right after his first production – the successful “Afternoon of Music” that stretched way into the night at UB’s Rotary Field.

        “I wanted to follow it up with an evening of music,” he says. “Something with four or five groups at a reasonable price for the kids. Something that would come out to about a dollar a group.”

        After seeing which halls were available and when, he started checking out the agents and saw that Deep Purple was routed through the area.

* * *

NOW THAT everything’s been arranged and rearranged, Steve still can’t let himself relax. There are tickets to be sold, commercials to be monitored, details to be checked. And what if Mayall gets sick? Or somebody breaks up?

        A big gamble it is. A promoter may lay out $10,000 for a show just to set it up. Renting the hall, advertising, half the fee in advance for the acts, insurance and bonds, security, ushers, sound and special-effect lighting, limousines and even refreshments for the performers.

* * *

“I HAVE a little checklist,” Steve says. “Basically, if you get on the phone, you can have the whole thing arranged in a day.

        “You really become a phone freak in this business. My long distance bill must be $300 or $400 a month. During this Deep Purple crisis, I had two New York agents on the phone, plus they were in the middle of a conference call.”

* * *

“AT UB,” Steve says, “it was incredible. The show would be on, then it would be off. There were insurance and security problems. When it started to drizzle, there was only one stage covered. I was sopping wet and tired.

        “But the whole hassle was worth the feeling it got. Seeing 10,000 people sticking around in the rain at 11 at night watching a show I produced. You get a good feeling. You feel like you’ve created something.”

* * *

AFTER ALL the program changes, advance payments, advertising, phone calls and rushing around, Ironspur Music this week canceled the Nov. 8 evening of music in Memorial Auditorium. The final blow came Tuesday – word that the group Colusseum had broken up.

        “The agent had no other acts we wanted for that night,” Ironspur associate Jim Pappas explained, “and we didn’t have time to untangle the contracts and go somewhere to find another act.

        “We wanted to put on a good show, not something mediocre,” he added. “We lost all our promotion money and the deposit on the Aud, but we didn’t want to take a chance.”

        Delays in getting tickets on sale also made a difference. Outlets were refunding the nearly 1,000 sold while Steve and Jim turned to their next Buffalo efforts – The Doors Nov. 18 in the Peace Bridge Center and Rod Stewart with The Faces Dec. 16 in the Aud. 

The box/sidebar:

Couldn’t Settle for Less 

        Steve Goldstein’s ultimate dream is to have his own concert hall. But right now he’d settle for permission to put a show into Kleinhans Music Hall. The management won’t let him.

        “‘We only use reputable promoters,’ they told me,” he relates. “‘How reputable can you get?’ I asked them. ‘My father’s been in business in this city for 30 years.’”

        He didn’t even mention his grandfather – the late Harry Altman – the man who ran the Town Casino and the Glen Casino in Williamsville.

        Steve’s father, David Goldstein, converted the Glen Casino into a dance hall called The Inferno in the early ‘60s. When it burned in 1968, he opened Gilligan’s in Cheektowaga, closing it this summer because of health.

* * *

STEVE, 23, a Williamsville High School graduate who attended the University of Akron, Ohio, and UB, has been in the business long enough so that entertainment doesn’t faze him.

        “I grew up with it at the Glen Casino,” he says. “I can’t get close to the performers. And after a show, I’m too exhausted to make the parties. All I want to do is go home and sleep for a day or two.”

        Steve got a taste for big-time promotion at Gilligan’s, booking national acts like Chicago, Joe Cocker, Johnny Winter and Canned Heat. His father’s other club, The Yellow Monkey in Amherst, uses only local bands.

* * *

ON THE SIDE, he’s helping his father set up a regional chain of Jerry Lewis movie houses – small family-style cinemas that will show G-rated films. One will be in Niagara Falls, others are proposed for North Tonawanda and Bradford, Pa.

        “Promotion is a trade,” Steve says, “like a bartender or a carpenter. It’s something you pick out and get good at. I couldn’t settle for doing local bands at The Yellow Monkey, not after doing big-time talent. I couldn’t get the fulfillment.”

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Someone writing in 2011 on a wonderfully nostalgic website called The Bars of Buffalo Photo Gallery asks: “Does anyone know where to locate Glen Casino owner’s grandson Steve Goldstein?”

        A reply a few days later says, “Steve Goldstein is alive and well. … All the Goldsteins moved to the Phoenix area many years ago.”

        A posting on the Williamsville High School Class of 1966 Facebook page confirms that Steve is still in Phoenix. Our man is  one of many Steve Goldsteins there, and not to be confused with one of the younger ones, who is an award-winning interviewer on KJZZ.

        BTW: That Doors concert was an early date in the tour by the remaining members of the group following the death of Jim Morrison in July.