placements at Forest Hills, Finn said, was a full-circle thing. “When I first heard about the Replacements, I was playing tennis at a club my parents belonged to, the Interlachen Country Club in Minneapolis. This kid asked me who my favorite band was and I said the Ramones. He said, ‘If you like the Ramones, you’ve got to check out the Replacements.’ And then years later I’m in a band opening up for the Replacements at a tennis stadium.” Finn loved taking the subway to the gig, and hanging out in the Rose Garden, a lit- tle fenced-in area adjacent to the stadium where the fans used to relax and have sand- wiches between matches. “It’s quite a bit nicer than a rock club,” he said. “The things you associate with tennis were transferred to a rock show.” Luba says musicians love playing Forest Hills—among them, Van Morrison, the Al- abama Shakes, Drake and Lil Wayne, and the Replacements, so far—which you might take as another promoter’s line that’s also probably true. Musicians, the good ones, have always appreciated their history. Luba is carrying on the tradition of diverse line- ups, and bringing back acts that played For- est Hills years ago. “Last year, getting the Who ticked one off the box,” he says. This summer he’s bettered himself, returning Paul Simon, and the biggest headliner yet for the revamped stadium, the man who gave the most famous concert at Forest Hills, fifty-one years ago: Dylan. In New York in the dog days of August there sometimes comes a cold snap, a sudden jolting intimation of winter. Marty Bell not- ed it in his account of the ’74 Open: “In just one day, the August heat had become No- vember cold. It was as if the tournament had made a sudden shift to Iceland.” The same freakish weather descended on the city on
Aug. 28, 1965, when Bob Dylan and his band performed at Forest Hills. Here’s bassist Harvey Brooks recounting the night: “It was kind of cool, windy, you know, and like from my point of view, I’m standing on stage, it’s dark, and at that time the audience was back”—Brooks is referring to the unusual setup at Forest Hills then, the huge space between the performers on stage and the audience in the stands, because the court was left empty to protect the grass— “so we were playing to this audience that were way back, that we couldn’t really see.”
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