Remembering Island Park's Action House, Long Island's legendary rock club

If you ever saw a band called The Illusion at The Action House in Island Park and wondered about that girl sitting onstage, it could have been Kaye Arnzen of Oceanside. On a given night, Arnzen recalled, she might hitch a ride to the club with a biker in the Aliens gang, then breeze past the doorman with her fake ID. And if her favorite band was playing, the 17-year-old had another routine.

"When The Illusion would do ‘Happy Together,’ I came up on the stage and sat next to the organist," Arnzen, 73, now an office assistant living in White Plains, explained. Though other girls followed suit, Arnzen said, "I started this thing."

That was more than 50 years ago, but Long Islanders still remember The Action House, one of the region’s most popular and influential nightclubs. Located a short walk south of the Island Park railroad station at 50 Austin Blvd. — though advertisements sometimes placed it at 50 Broadway — The Action House helped launch such memorable local bands as The Vagrants, The Hassles (featuring a young Billy Joel) and the Vanilla Fudge. But it also drew national acts like The Byrds, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Sly and the Family Stones and The Doors. Successive generations would remember the club by changing names, including Rock Pile in the ‘70s, Speaks in the late '70s and  ‘80s and Industry in the ‘90s, though none matched the impact of the original Action House.

"They’re part of the fabric of Long Island," local concert promoter Jim Faith, who in his early teens saw the Young Rascals at the Action House, said. "In the bigger picture, combining all the names of the venues, they had a lot of major stars."

A CAVERNOUS CLUB

In the early 1960s, the venue was known as the Shell House, which hosted urbane pop acts such as Johnny Mathis and former Duke Ellington vocalist Al Hibbler, according to Setlist.fm. A group of four partners, including Phil Basile and Al "Chubby" Guarino bought the club, according to The New York Times, and on April 2, 1966, a legal notice appeared in Newsday that a liquor license had been granted to The Action House.

Those who were regulars as The Action House describe it as a typical concert venue, albeit a large one by suburban standards, with two stages and a legal capacity of 900. Photographs from the era depict a vast parking lot in the front. "Cavernous" and "impersonal" is how a young writer described the club in a 1969 Newsday article.

"It had a bar towards the front and a seating area in the back where the tables were," Kevin Kellett, 78, a retired Nassau County Police detective from Westbury who caught several shows there, recalled. "They had a large open floor area where most people were at. You could stand and watch the show."

PACKING THE CROWDS IN

The Action House literally packed them in. On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1966, just before The Young Rascals were about to play, the Hempstead Town Buildings Commissioner showed up at 11 p.m. with four men from his department and eight police officers. As patrons exited through a turnstile, the Commissioner’s men counted 1,653 — roughly 750 people over the legal limit. (Basile disputed that number on the spot.)

"They wanted to see everybody’s ID and I was underage," Barbara Bernstein of Long Beach recalled of that chaotic night. "I was kind of freaking out." Bernstein, now 77 and a retired social worker living in Northern California, added that she got lucky: The cops never bothered to check her.

THE 'CREAM OF THE CROP' PLAYED THERE

As the music of the ‘60s shifted from Beatlesque pop to psychedelic rock, The Action House kept pace. A concertgoer could have caught The Byrds on two nights in June 1966. The next year saw Moby Grape, Vanilla Fudge and Cream. In 1968, the venue hosted The Yardbirds, Sly and The Family Stone, Blue Cheer and The MC5.

"It was like the cream of the crop playing at The Action House," Tony Krasinski, drummer for club favorites Denny Belline & The Rich Kids, from the North Shore, said. "It was never so many fights or anything," Krasinski, 81, added. "People came for the music."

One mind-boggling event supposedly took place at the Action House on Dec. 4, 1966. Called the Freakout Happening and sponsored by the underground publication Night Beat, it boasted a lineup of counterculture icons The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, The Mothers of Invention, satirical rockers The Fugs and local favorites The Vagrants, among others. Scott Muni, a popular FM radio disc jockey, and Clay Cole, host of a local teen television show, were both billed as emcees. Did it actually happen? Photographs found online place Warhol and some of his entourage at the event, but attendees could not be found and Vagrants bassist Larry West Weinstein wasn’t entirely positive his band played at the show.

THE DOORS' LEGENDARY '67 SHOW

Another legendary concert at The Action House came from The Doors in the summer of 1967. To support the release of their eponymous debut album, the band crisscrossed the country a number of times, playing the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, Gazzari’s in Los Angeles and Ondine in New York City. Starting June 12, The Doors began a three-week residency at Steve Paul’s The Scene in Manhattan but, according to lore, Paul closed the club temporarily to attend the Monterey Pop Festival, which ran June 16-18. The Doors were booked into the Action House for June 16 and 17.

At what might have been the first show, Kellett, the retired detective, arrived early to a nearly empty venue and had drinks with a friend at a table. "And we notice out of the corner of our eyes, this guy walks up to the bar, and he's dressed head to toe with black leather, and he had long curly hair," Kellett recalled. The man not yet famous as Jim Morrison radiated a powerful negative energy, according to Kellet, and proceeded to gulp down what looked like a single half-pint glass of whiskey.

When the Doors finally appeared on stage, a clearly intoxicated Morrison hurled himself into a stack of amplifiers, slurred his way through a song or two, lit a match, watched it burn, then threw the matchbook into the audience, Kellett said. "He just walked off before they even finished," he marveled. "The whole crowd just went, ‘Whoa.’"

Meanwhile, word traveled that Basile might be connected to the mob. "I mean, it was pretty much understood," Weinstein said of Basile. "Once everybody kind of knew, then that was enough, pretty much, to keep anybody in line."

Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice got an early introduction to Basile. As he tells it, Appice showed up to the Shell House one day hoping to get paid for a recent gig there, only to find that it had been taken over by Basile and a bunch of tough-looking guys with menacing voices. "Oh my God, it’s like the Mafia took over the place," Appice, 79, recalled thinking. And Basile, who had a scarred right cheek, "looked like Al Capone," he added. Nevertheless, Basile became Vanilla Fudge’s manager and shepherded them through several albums and a Top 10 hit with their psyched-out cover of "You Keep Me Hangin’ On."

As for Guarino, Basile’s partner and doorman, he didn’t get the nickname Chubby from his size, according to Michael "Eppy" Epstein, who frequented the Action House as a teenager before opening his own famous club in Roslyn, My Father’s Place. "The reason they called him Chubby wasn’t because he was skinny, it’s because he had two snub-nosed .38s under his jacket," Epstein said.

"Let me put it this way: Henry Hill, from the ‘Goodfellas’ movie, used to hang out there," Appice said, referring to the real-life protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 classic mobster drama. "He used to come to my house and say, ‘Hey, Carmine, I got some stuff that fell off the truck!’ It would be El Dorados, Revox tape machines, fur coats. That’s how we lived."

Eventually, Basile would go on to run Concerts East, the famous regional promotional firm, according to The New York Times. He also rebranded the Action House as the Rock Pile, a venue whose earliest known concerts, in 1971, included Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, The Velvet Underground, The Allman Brothers Band, T. Rex, Badfinger and local heroes Blue Öyster Cult, according to Setlist.fm.

"The business was changing a little bit," Appice said of Basile’s decision to change the club’s name. "But it was the same thing, same stage, same everything."

FROM THE ROCK PILE TO SPEAKS

By 1976 the Rock Pile had become Speaks — short for Speakeasy, according to lore — which caught both the sunsetting of classic rock and the dawning of the 1980s. Local legends Twisted Sister played several shows there; Aerosmith, Zebra and The Specials also came through in 1980, according to Setlist.fm. Others, however, remember Speaks as primarily a dance club.

"You couldn’t have psychedelic rock into the ‘80s," explains Oceanside talent agent Mitchell Karduna, who frequented Speaks as a teenager. With multiple mirror balls, private booths, tables surrounding the dance floor, a pool table and a food court selling burgers and fries, the club did strong business, Karduna recalled, adding that admission cost anywhere from $1 to $3 while drinks ran $1.50 tops. The Trammps, Gloria Gaynor, Tavares and the Crown Heights Affair all played there, he recalled.

“You could have a couple of drinks, stay there the whole night, meet people,” Karduna, 67, said. “It was a night out, and people knew it was always going to be crowded.”

In the early 1980s, Basile was accused of giving Hill, of "Goodfellas" fame, a no-show job to help him obtain early parole from federal prison. At the trial, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato raised eyebrows by serving as a character witness for Basile, who was sentenced to five years’ probation and required to start a $250,000 fund to help parolees in need, according to the New York Daily News. D’Amato stood by his testimony even years later when Sam Donaldson grilled him about it on ABC News Primetime Live. "I knew him as a hard-working individual," D’Amato said of Basile.

AND FINALLY, INDUSTRY

Basile kept working. In 1990 he transformed Speaks into yet another zeitgeisty club, called Industry. It began as a kind of faux-Manhattan hot spot that leaned toward an all-black dress code and favored what then-manager Anthony Gentile called a "progressive dance-music crowd." It also enforced a door policy that struck patrons as arbitrary and elitist. "I guess they want to be like clubs in the city, and pick and choose," Noreen Troy, a 21-year-old Island Park resident, griped during one of the club’s first nights. "I guess after all the hype dies down and they stop that door thing, I’ll come back."

The club did drop its door policy, but struggled to find an identity. Dance group C + C Music Factory and the synth-pop duo Erasure both played there. Mondays became teen night, Thursdays were for techno-house and Fridays offered a random-sounding mix of "modern rock, slam dance music and reggae," according to a Newsday listing from 1992. As the decade shifted toward grunge and hard rock, the club booked bands like White Zombie, Melvins and Sevendust, according to Setlist.fm.

Basile died in 1996 at 61, according to public records. Though his past may have been checkered, the clubs he ran left generations of Long Islanders with lasting memories.

"We came from nothing to prominence through The Action House," Appice said. "It was a legendary club that housed a lot of talent, and a lot of talent came out of it."