🔒Staying Power: New book chronicles Toad’s Place, the New Haven nightclub that’s survived for decades and drew Springsteen, Dylan and the Stones

How has Toad’s Place — Connecticut’s long-running nightclub — survived six decades of changing musical tastes, a fluctuating industry, roller-coaster economies and even a once-in-a-century pandemic?

Now entering its 46th year, “Toad’s” — its casual moniker — has consistently attracted generation after generation of music lovers, not to mention thousands of acts, from bands just starting out to legends such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Billy Joel and David Bowie.

A new, anecdote-filled book — “The Legendary Toad’s Place” — chronicles the club as it faced challenges from superstar negotiations, management conflicts, Yale’s expansion and the COVID crisis.

Written by the club’s longtime owner Brian Phelps and former New Haven Register columnist Randall Beach, the book looks back at Toad’s dramas — on- and off-stage — and reveals the perils of the entertainment business.

The York Street club began in 1975 as a casual, collegiate restaurant. But as that business struggled, one of the three young owners, Mike Spoerndle, decided to transform Toad’s into a place for young people to dance, drink and listen to music. (The drinking age in the state in the 1970s was 18 before it inched back to 21 in the 1980s.) Spoerndle bought out his partners in 1976, brought in live music and transformed the place into a full-fledged nightspot.

Business built slowly at first but by the late 1970s the club found its groove.

“We played all types of music,” said the New Haven-born Phelps who has been with Toad’s since 1976 and quickly became its manager, then later partner of the club with Spoerndle. As Spoerndle’s personal addictions became problematic for the business, Phelps became sole owner in the late 1990s.

Dance parties key

But the platinum acts weren’t the foundation of Toad’s financial stability.

“The dance parties were the big money-makers for Toad’s,” said Beach. “They realized they didn’t have to have a band every night and they would make more money from the college crowd that would dance and drink to a DJ playing records. That really kept the place going.”

What the big-name acts did do was gain the club its national reputation. Toad’s was able to woo them through a partnership with major concert promoter Jim Koplik, whose associations with the music industry and touring bands brought in waves of musical legends, contemporary hit-makers and soon-to-be stars.

The acts included Talking Heads, Bo Diddley, Count Basie, Muddy Waters, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Bolton, Huey Lewis, Herbie Hancock, Pat Benatar, Ice Cube, Joe Cocker, Patti Smith, U2, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Kinks, B-52s, Bon Jovi, The Ramones, Tom Waits and hundreds of others (the full list of acts takes up 29 pages in the book).

Bruce Springsteen came to jam after a show at the New Haven Coliseum. Billy Joel recorded a live album at the club. Bob Dylan played for more than four hours. The surprise gig by The Rolling Stones in 1989 prior to its first stadium tour in eight years made world headlines.

But not all business moves were successful. Efforts to duplicate Toad’s formula elsewhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s were busts. A club in Waterbury closed after a few years, as did a venture in Richmond, Virginia.

The Waterbury location was too close to the New Haven market, said Phelps; in Virginia there weren’t enough acts going through the area and the dance parties never took off.

Starting in the ‘90s, Toad’s faced growing competition for big names from Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos; the College Street Music Hall in downtown New Haven also upped the booking ante; and with the destruction of the New Haven Coliseum in 2007, there would no longer be major acts swinging by the club for a late-night jam after their arena shows.

Despite the long list of stars who played at the club, there were a few that slipped away because of contract negotiations, such as Madonna and Nirvana.

“We could have had Kurt Cobain. We were bidding $750 … then told he would go for $1,500. They might have dropped it to $1,250, but nobody knew them then — they hadn’t gotten big yet. But we said, ‘Nah, let’s forget it,’ so it slipped through our fingers.”

The Yale dynamic

Phelps said Toad’s has had a mixed relationship with Yale. (Old Blue’s traditional watering hole, Mory’s, is next door to Toad’s.)

Over the decades, students from all colleges went to Toad’s to party, sometimes too heartily, to college administrators’ dismay. Professors would also frequent the club. (Current Yale President Peter Salovey performed at Toad’s with a group of other academics in a band called “The Professors of Bluegrass.”)

Toad’s almost lost its club location to Yale’s expansion plans in the 1980s.

When the building’s owners back then decided to sell the property, Yale made an offer hundreds of thousands of dollars above the $1 million city assessment, said Phelps. But its original lease contract allowed Toad’s to match Yale’s offer — which it did, after a quiet hustle to secure bank loans and private funding.

“Yale was outmaneuvered,” said Beach.

The latest threats to the club’s survival came during the pandemic when the two-story building — with a 750-person capacity in its main space — temporarily closed its doors in March 2020, due to COVID.

It reopened in August of last year but still faces uncertainty as new strains of the virus emerge. It weathered the 17-month shutdown, said Phelps, thanks to its cash reserves and $1.5 million in federal and state loans and grants.

After spending a lifetime in the business, the 67-year-old Phelps said he has no plans to sell the club anytime soon, though he acknowledges that inevitability, noting his children are not in the entertainment industry.