Remembering Hempstead's Calderone Concert Hall, where Billy Joel, Aerosmith, KISS and more rocked out

In September 1976, Anna Bours, a 14-year-old from Farmingdale, piled into a car with her older brother and sister and headed to the Calderone Concert Hall to see one of her first rock concerts. Headlining were The Good Rats, one of Long Island’s most beloved acts. That show, featuring the band’s famous ritual of tossing rubber rats into the audience, turned the young Bours into a lifelong fan.

It also introduced her to the opening act, a foursome in leather jackets whose lead singer began every song by shouting: "One, two, three, four!"

"The Ramones were not known back then," says Bours, now 62. "I just remember being so thrilled to be there."

Bours is one of countless Long Islanders with lifelong memories of the Calderone Concert Hall at 145 North Franklin St. in Hempstead. Originally built as a movie palace during Hollywood’s Golden Age, the Calderone transformed into a music venue that would straddle the classic-rock ‘70s and new-wave ‘80s.

An impressive array of artists played there, from a fresh-faced Billy Joel in 1975 to a road-hardened Aerosmith in 1984. Helping boost the venue’s profile: A few blocks away was WLIR, the taste-making FM radio station, where artists stopped for interviews before playing a show that would be broadcast live on-air.

"It was an extraordinary place," says Denis McNamara, former program director for WLIR. "It was just complete synchronicity."

The Calderone's grand opening

The Calderone Theatre opened June 21, 1949, to much fanfare. "Hub Agog as $2 Million Theater Opens," Newsday reported. The night before, at a private party in the venue, village officials mingled with Edward Steichen, the acclaimed photographer, and Carl Sandburg, the Pulitzer-winning poet (and onetime film critic). The opening-night screening was "You’re My Everything," a Technicolor musical from 20th Century Fox starring Anne Baxter.

The Calderone was the crown jewel in a New York-area chain of movie houses — perhaps around 10 at the time — that was eventually run by Dr. Frank Calderone. (His father, Salvatore Calderone, launched the business in the early 1900s after emigrating from Sicily.)

Dr. Calderone was an unlikely theater owner: He earned a medical degree from New York University, served as New York City’s first deputy health commissioner and played a pivotal role in the nascent World Health Organization. (In 1986, the year before his death, Columbia University inaugurated a prize in his honor that has since gone to notable public health figures including former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci.)

Dr. Calderone’s wife, Mary, was the daughter of Steichen, the photographer (whose sister had married Sandburg). Mary Calderone was a physician in her own right who focused on sex education; she became the first female director of Planned Parenthood, in 1953.

Downtown Hempstead was bustling during the postwar years and the Calderone thrived. Karen Barlia, 72, who got one of her first jobs working in Hempstead’s A & S department store at the time, recalls an area filled with shops and restaurants. "Hempstead was this happening place," she says. "It was sort of upscale."

Sal LoCurto, who grew up in Carle Place, remembers seeing 1964’s "Mary Poppins" at the Calderone. "It was a very large movie house — and quite a nice movie house at that, architecturally."

The Calderone transforms to a music venue

The 1970s marked the beginning of Hempstead's long economic downturn. In January of 1974, Concerts East, an Island Park promotion firm headed by local legend Phil Basile, announced that it would manage the Calderone as a music venue. First, though, came an odd transitional period: Due to a contractual obligation, the Calderone had to keep showing "The Godfather Part II" while staging concerts only on weekends after midnight.

Harry Chapin played the venue in August, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the Calderone Concert Hall really got rocking. According to David Baram, then a newly minted Hofstra graduate who had joined Concerts East, the venue’s first major booking was Linda Ronstadt. Other acts that year: Hot Tuna, Electric Light Orchestra, Peter Frampton, ZZ Top, The J. Geils Band, Santana, KISS and Barry Manilow, according to setlist.fm. Comedian George Carlin was booked for Sunday, Oct. 12 — the night after he hosted the first episode of "Saturday Night Live."

Meanwhile, onetime moviegoers like LoCurto had grown into concertgoers. "It seemed like every up-and-coming, B-level band would play there, and it was great," he says. Among the acts LoCurto saw: singer-songwriter Graham Parker, prog-rock favorites Nektar and Long Island’s own Blue Öyster Cult.

Initially, tickets were purchased from Ticketron (a forerunner to Ticketmaster, which eventually bought it) at the Macy’s department store in Roosevelt Field, LoCurto recalls. Later, the Calderone installed its own Ticketron booth in the lobby. "That was cutting edge," says Baram, the onetime promoter.

'Long Island needed a place like that'

The key to the Calderone’s success, in Baram’s estimation, was its size. With roughly 2,400 seats (and a handsome second-floor balcony left over from the movie days), the Calderone was larger than a nightclub but more intimate than an arena — just right for a rising act with a growing fan base.

"Long Island needed a place like that," says Baram, now 69 and an entertainment lawyer living in Long Beach. "And we worked hard to book it."

The artists’ lounge area was bare bones at first. The dressing rooms had no direct access to the stage, so performers had to walk outside to reenter the venue. (Staffers built makeshift awnings to protect Ronstadt from the rain, Baram says.) Eventually, a proper corridor was built, and the lounge area got a working bar and a pool table.

McNamara, who had his own show on WLIR and frequently emceed the Calderone concerts, says he spent much of his time socializing with the musicians backstage. He recalls shooting pool with Patti Smith’s husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, and propping up the bar with Little Feat's Lowell George. And when English rockers the Strawbs showed up with a broken synthesizer, he says, they searched high and low for someone to fix what was then a rarefied piece of equipment.

"It took two or three days," McNamara says, "and the Strawbs were just hanging out in Hempstead. They had nowhere to go."

Russell Lian, 66, who grew up in West Islip and as a teenager began managing concessions at the Calderone, saw all sides of the musicians who played there. The Ramones once shoved six rolls of toilet paper down a toilet, Lian says, and Patti Smith spat on him when he tried to rearrange the marquee. But he also got to work the spotlight during an Etta James concert and spent a night drinking with Southern rock icon Dickey Betts after a snowstorm canceled his concert.

"Here I am, 19 years old," Lian recalls. "It was a great job."

Meat Loaf played the Calderone in 1978, riding the success of his hit album "Bat Out of Hell." Fran Wolfson, 63, who grew up in Woodmere, said she got tickets to the show because one of her high school teachers knew Meat Loaf’s songwriter, Jim Steinman (a Hewlett native). After the show, Wolfson and her group went backstage to meet Steinman and spotted Meat Loaf himself.

"He was literally laying on the floor, sucking on an oxygen mask," Wolfson says. The plus-size singer didn’t seem to be struggling, she recalls, but he was clearly preoccupied. "We sort of stepped right over him."

And then there was that Plasmatics show

In 1980, The Plasmatics brought their shock-punk act to the Calderone. It was one thing for the band’s half-naked singer, Wendy O. Williams, to chain saw an electric guitar in half, says Sal D’Addezio, a Sayville-raised concertgoer. But it was quite another for the band to blow up a Ford Mustang on stage.

"I’m gonna say about 75% of the people who attended that show had no [expletive] clue what was going on," D’Addezio, 66, says. "When the Mustang blew up, there was a fireball on the stage that went straight up, and a heat wave blast just rolls to the back of the auditorium. After that, people were stunned."

Sometime in 1977 or 1978, Baram left to work at My Father’s Place, the storied Roslyn rock club. Still, the Calderone continued to book acts that were icons in the making. In 1978 came Talking Heads, The B-52’s (both then labeled "punk"), Van Halen (touring their debut album) and a two-year-old band from Florida called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

The 1979 roster included Dire Straits, Joe Jackson, Peter Tosh (twice) and a newly hot Elvis Costello. In 1980 there were Hall & Oates (still riding the success of 1977’s "Rich Girl"), Scorpions, Judas Priest, Devo (shortly before their hit single "Whip It" was released), and a virtually unknown Def Leppard.

By the time WLIR officially shifted to a new-wave format and adopted its famous "Dare to be Different" slogan in 1982, the Calderone’s schedule was beginning to slow down. Talking Heads that year returned (for the fourth time) as a thank-you for the station’s support, according to McNamara. Massapequa’s rockabilly heroes The Stray Cats played in 1983; the Romantics came through in 1984.

McNamara says he can’t remember how or why the Calderone ultimately lost steam, but in 1985 its era came to end: The last performer was a solo Adam Ant, on Nov. 24, according to setlist.fm.

Music fades out

The following year two new promoters took over the venue, intending to stage "family oriented" shows there. By May 1992 the Calderone had reverted to a movie theater, this time a multiplex called the Village Cinema 7. Faith Baptist Church acquired the building in 1999, then sold it in March 2022 for $5 million to BOSFA Properties, a Lawrence-based real estate developer owned by Daniel Goldstein. His plan: Tear it down and build more than 200 apartments for seniors.

"The whole inside of the building is completely ruined," Goldstein says. "It had a wonderful day in its time, but the amount of money that needs to go back into the building, it doesn't make sense." After all, he adds, "Nobody goes to the movies anymore."

You can still hear some of the old Calderone concerts. At least a half-dozen bootlegs — of shows by Jackson Browne, the Jerry Garcia Band and others — are available online. To the best of McNamara's recollection, other recordings were possibly stored at the house of a WLIR staffer and destroyed in a flood.

As for the rest of the shows — well, you had to be there.

"It was a great place to see a concert," McNamara says. "When they got the sound just right in there, it was wonderful."

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman