Bond's International Casino

Overview

Massive 1,800-capacity Times Square nightclub opened July 1980 by co-owner Maurice Brahms in the former Bond Clothes emporium, best remembered for The Clash's 17-show May–June 1981 residency, where Grandmaster Flash and the Dead Kennedys shared the bill and an oversold ticket crisis sparked a Times Square disturbance.

The address at 1530 Broadway between West 44th and 45th Streets had layers of prior life before its disco-era incarnation. In the 1930s it operated as the International Casino, a Midtown dinner-dance club. Bond Clothes, a men's clothing chain, then occupied the space through the late 1970s. When co-owner Maurice Brahms (who had also founded Infinity disco at 653 Broadway (opened 1975, destroyed by fire 1979)) leased and converted the building, he merged the prior names: Bond International Casino. The renovated room opened in July 1980 with a 1,800-person capacity and appointments that mixed disco-era spectacle with concert-hall scale: a 'musical staircase,' fountains from the set of The Liberace Show, and a programming policy mixing regular club nights with major touring acts. Its first season drew Blue Öyster Cult, Grace Jones, Blondie, The Plasmatics, and the Dead Kennedys. The event that fixed Bond's in music history was The Clash's residency in support of Sandinista!, booked initially for eight nights beginning May 28, 1981. Promoters oversold the first shows, distributing roughly 3,500 tickets for a room with a legal capacity of roughly 1,750–1,800. On May 30, fire marshals and the New York City Building Department shut down both performances, sparking a public disturbance in Times Square as ticket-holders filled the street. The Clash's vocalist Joe Strummer publicly committed to honoring every ticket, stating the band would not leave New York until every ticket-holder saw a show; the run was extended from eight shows to seventeen, played over fifteen nights, with matinee and evening performances added. Grandmaster Flash and the Dead Kennedys served as support acts on various nights, an early major-stage pairing of hip-hop and punk that prefigured the genre's radio crossover later in the decade. The residency generated national press and is widely credited with accelerating The Clash's breakthrough in the United States. The residency has since been treated at length in histories of the band, of New York's punk scene, and of hip-hop's early commercial reach, for the Grandmaster Flash co-billing and for the band's refusal to abandon oversold ticket-holders. Bond's closed in 1982 by most accounts (its Wikipedia entry gives early 1982; some retrospectives extend it to 1983), and 1530 Broadway returned to retail use. For Maurice Brahms it was a second large club after the destruction of Infinity by fire in 1979.