Early designs for Bob Dylan’s 2016 Appearance at Forest Hlls Stadium. bill sullivan
Cohen, Janis Joplin, the Band, and the 5th Dimension. In the summer of ’67, the Mon - kees performed with Jimi Hendrix opening. The show has acquired a degree of infamy because during the preceding tour dates, the Monkees’ teenybopper fans had booed Hen - drix, or actually chanted “Davy!” during his set, which is the same thing, and by the time Hendrix got to Forest Hills he’d had enough. He flipped off the audience, walked off stage, and quit the tour the next day. That’s the thing you notice about Forest Hills when you dig into the history: Con - certs there were charged, or else they pop up in the culture in strange ways. The Rolling Stones played Forest Hills in ’66. Four de - cades later, the event featured in an episode of Mad Men, when Don and Harry Crane go on a fruitless mission to Queens to sign up the Stones for a Heinz Beans jingle. Hang - ing backstage in his pointy tie and stiff Bryl- creemed hair, Don gets talking to a young female Mick enthusiast, the generation gap hanging between them like a yawning crater. Another Forest Hills show that still comes up is Simon & Garfunkel, who played two gigs on a July weekend in 1970. They were neighborhood boys, graduates of Forest Hills High, so the show was a homecoming. “Only U.S.A. Appearance This Season!” the poster touts. It turned out to be an ending. Their partnership fraying, the duo broke up right after. Setting aside the later reunions, Forest Hills was the last Simon & Garfunkel concert. Weirdly, it could happen again, forty-six years later. This time with Simon alone. In a recent interview with The New York Times , the 74-year-old said he saw himself “coming towards the end” of his musical life. “It’s an act of courage to let go,” Simon said, using deathbed language. “I’m going to see what happens if I let go. Then I’m going to see, who am I?” He’s been on tour supporting his latest
(and last?) album. He sometimes sleeps fif- teen hours to recover, and requires off days to rest his voice. The final dates of the tour were June 30 and July 1—at Forest Hills.
“It’s a magic place.” Mike Luba is standing on a metal stage, looking out at center court and the stadi- um that surrounds it like a massive concrete horseshoe. A tall, 40ish man who brokers million-dollar business deals, Luba dresses like a roadie: ball cap, work boots, loose dark pants, and a short-sleeve black T-shirt over a long-sleeve white T-shirt. Since he and his business partner, Jon McMillan, began pro- moting concerts at Forest Hills in 2013, Luba has relished giving tours. You can tell he sees the place as his giant sandbox. “When we got here there were six-foot trees growing out of compost piles,” he says, gesturing. He describes the splintered bench- es that hadn’t been replaced in seventy years, the green paint flakes scattered like confetti, the junk stashed under the stadium by three generations of club maintenance crews. “The paradox of this place,” Luba tells me, “is that it’s simultaneously a priceless gem, and when we started, it was also a com- plete dump zone.” Luba first visited in 2012, when he was working with the French band Phoenix, who were playing New York and looking for an off-the-wall venue. Luba had played tennis in high school on Long Island, and he knew about the stadium’s music and sporting his- tory. He called the pro shop and talked to Bob Ingersole, the head pro, who invited him out. This was just after the club had again voted not to sell. Luba was horrified but intrigued. He returned the next day with a structural engineer. “This looks like a com- plete bombed-out war zone with feral cats and raccoons,” the engineer told him. “But
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