The Rise Of Toad’s Place: How Hip Capitalism Redefined The Mainstream

Toad’s Place outlasted decades’ worth of music-club competitors in New Haven.

It also outmaneuvered Yale — and pivoted and mastered digital marketing while competitors were still addicted to print advertising.

A new book offers a look at how that happened.

In other words, Toad’s Place isn’t just a legendary club where the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, U2, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, Billy Joel, and pretty much any other prominent pop or rock act took the stage over the past 46 years. It is a business success story.

They should study this place at Yale’s and Harvard’s business schools.

They can get a start by reading a new book out, in which the business brain behind the York Street nightclub’s perseverance, Brian Phelps, tells his story.

The book, published by Globe Pequot, is called The Legendary Toad’s Place: Stories from New Haven’s Famed Music Venue. (You can find it in a local bookshop or order it here.) Journalist Randall Beach co-authored the book with Phelps.

Part of the fun of the book is leafing through the photos of Phelps over the years with stars ranging from George Thorogood to (New Haven-born and raised) Michael Bolton to Cyndi Lauper to Mick Jagger to Chick Corea to … well, you get the picture. Another part of the fun is looking through the 25-page appendix listing hundreds of the acts you spent memorable nights watching up close in the club, many of them when they were on the cusp of stardom. (My list includes Albert Collins, Bob Dylan, 999, King Sunny Ade, the Go-Go’s, Michelle Shocked, Arlo Guthrie, Jorma Kaukonen, the Roches, Steve Forbert.) There’s fun gossip about which stars got trashed, or caused a scene, or avoided a drunk-driving ticket from the cops.

The deeper story here is the club’s rise and perseverance. Toad’s was among a wave of “hip capitalist” enterprises that emerged in the mid-1970s as the Baby Boomers came into mainstream society while preserving their cultural inclinations. They made a bargain with “The Man”: Libertinism would be encouraged in American society as long as its practice fueled capitalism rather than questioned its premises (a trend foreshadowed by the 1969 “but the man can’t bust our music” ad pictured at right, which Columbia Records placed in underground weeklies). Getting wasted, hooking up, rocking out — those became bipartisan, all-American, profit-generating pursuits.

The Legendary Toad’s Place documents the decision by Mike Spoerndle, an entrepreneurial chef, to catch that wave by turning a fledgling French restaurant into Toad’s in 1975. The demand for live music was building in town and across the nation. Around the same time Toad’s launched, that demand also helped fuel the rise of New Haven’s WPLR FM and the alternative weekly New Haven Advocate, all with a counterculture bent and a revenue stream that no amount of pharmaceutical use or unexpected challenges could interrupt.

In the book, Phelps documents how he came to work at Toad’s a year later, evicting troublemakers and learning the nuts and bolts of running a club under Spoerndle’s inspirational tutelage. The book documents Spoerndle’s sad descent into drug abuse (which eventually killed him), concomitant with Phelps’s mastering of the mechanics of running what became a nationally recognized intimate live venue. He hired a skilled crew, and kept them. (Beach interviews the bouncers and schedulers and other staffers in the book.)

As the years went on, Phelps also changed with the times, launching dance parties when the college kids wanted them, welcoming R&B and rap when they went mainstream. He was an early master of social-media advertising and curated email lists to develop a new generation of return customers. The book details how he even prevented Yale from gobbling up the building and getting rid of the last independent cultural institution on the block not controlled by the university. (Some questions will forever remain a mystery — like why the lights would suddenly turn on and Blondie’s “The Tide is High” would start playing on the sound system in the middle of a show ...)

As a result, Toad’s stayed in business when other clubs ran their course. It remained independent and linked to the city when, say, WPLR sold out to a big chain and became automated, and when the New Haven Advocate sold to a corporate newspaper chain that drove it out of business. Toad’s and another resilient business from the mid-1970s, Claire’s Corner Copia, survive almost a half-century later as iconic New Haven draws the way an earlier generation of locally run enterprises — Pepe’s, Sally’s, the Shubert, Louis’ Lunch — live on. They continue to help make New Haven a fun, colorful, distinctive place.

In between the lines of The Legendary Toad’s Place is a tale of how that trajectory continually pitted the counterculture against the mainstream. Phelps regularly dined at Mory’s. (The book recalls how Cyndi Lauper broke into tears when he brought her there and the Whiffenpoofs serenaded them with ​“Time After Time.”) Spoerndle would raise hell — while he also pushed hard to gain entrance to Branford’s exclusive Pine Orchard Yacht and Country Club. By the 1990s Republican Gov. John Rowland would appear onstage at Toad’s singing ​“Mustang Sally” with his state party chair at a fundraiser, claiming the mantle of what was once outsider culture. The seekers and genre-breakers and risk-takers gravitated to Cafe 9 and found a home there.

Still, Toad’s remained in the game. Seconds before rapper Cardi B made it big, for instance, the Independent’s Samuel Hadelman spotted the connection between her and her fans at this 2017 Toad’s gig. Toad’s survived the pandemic, with the help of a nearly $1 million federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG), and is amping up the volume once more.

As the Independent’s Brian Slattery noted, ​“Toad’s survival and persistence as an independent is quite improbable. All the clubs of that generation are now gone in and around Ithaca, and even the ones in the Pioneer Valley have gone quite corporate. It’s pretty neat.”

Randall Beach, a retired reporter who covered Toad’s shows in its heyday, spoke about the book during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” You can watch the episode in the above video. Click here for a previous interview with Brian Phelps conducted by the Independent’s Brian Slattery on the nightclub’s 40th anniversary.