‘They both had character, and you can’t replicate that’

By Elmer Ploetz
(Image above: A very young Gary Zoldos with former New York Doll David Johansen, who signed the photo years later.)

When it comes to Allentown’s two lost landmarks, the Old Pink and Mulligan’s Brick Bar, Gary Zoldos has a unique perspective. 

He was DJ at Brick Bar for four years early in its run before moving to the Pink Flamingo, where he lays claim to being the first in a line of legendary DJs (Terry Sullivan, Dave Gutierrez and Eric Van Rysdam among them). With the Old Pink burning last June and now the Brick Bar, it’s been a double shot for Zoldos. 

We had a conversation yesterday (Jan. 8), in which he told some of his stories in the wake of the fires in June (the Old Pink) and Sunday (Mulligan’s Brick Bar) and ruminated a bit on the state of music and taverns. 

Zoldos started DJ-ing in South Buffalo as a 16-year-old in 1977, spinning records at a place on Seneca Street called The Doctor’s Office. A couple of years later the Brick Bar’s owner and manager liked what they heard and saw and worked out an arrangement for him to work for them, even though he didn’t have a car to get there (they provided the transportation!). And so he got to witness some of the craziness that was the late ‘70s and early ’80s from behind the glass in a DJ booth on Allen Street.

The Brick Bar had actually been a bar (legally) since 1934, according to Forgotten Buffalo, but it wasn’t until 1970 that it took on the image and identity most associate with it.

Zoldos said when he worked there the big night at the Brick Bar then was Monday, when it did oldies night: “Rock -n- Roll Mondays.” The bar was still building its clientele, but it became a place where athletes and celebs would find themselves. He remembers a bunch of the Buffalo Sabres coming in after they had just been eliminated in the playoffs telling Gil Perreault over the PA to get a very young Phil Housley – who was without acceptable ID – in the door. 

David Johansen, formerly of the New York Dolls, spun records with him until after 4 a.m. one night (after he met Johansen at the Aud, where Johansen was opening for Pat Benatar), and he recalled having to bring Steve Marriott (of Small Faces and Humble Pie) back to the club after the 5-foot-4 then-30-something rock star was turned away at the door because he looked underage. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship came, as did Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

“Jerry was kind of standing up there right near the door so he could make a quick exit, if he had to,” Zoldos said. “But the people around him were really cool to him.”

Zoldos said that part of the Brick Bar’s identity was “people didn’t just come to drink, they came to get drunk. People would even say to me, ‘I can’t come and visit you for a while. Every time I come there, I get wasted.”

It was a police-friendly establishment, he said. With the closing time for bars being 2 a.m. in Ontario, already-inebriated Canadians would come to Buffalo with its 4 a.m. closings in those times of looser border controls … and 3 a.m. brawls weren’t uncommon. 

“So there are quite often times when the off-duty policemen used to jump in to break up these fights,” Zoldos said. “Sometimes they were even in uniform and they weren’t supposed to be in there.”

The Towne Restaurant, at the corner of Elmwood and Allen, was going strong then, and Zoldos and his co-workers would frequently go there for breakfast at 5 a.m. after closing up shop. That closed in 2023 after 51 years in business, most of it as a 24-hour operation. 

Zoldos left the Brick Bar after a change in management there, and he was offered a chance to DJ next door at the Pink Flamingo (it hadn’t become “Old” yet) as it opened. 

Zoldos had befriended Mike Peters, the singer and guitarist of The Alarm, and set up an acoustic “listener appreciation night” show at Nietzche’s with a local radio station. After Peters’ set was over, they headed over to the Pink. 

“To this day, he asks me if I still go into the place that was like a Quentin Tarantino movie,” Zoldos said. “We laugh about that, but he definitely picked up right away that the place had character.” 

The Brick Bar was an entry point for a lot of suburbanites and college kids to city venues. The Pink had a different flavor. 

 “When I first started working at The Pink, that’s kind of where the freewheeling DJ style came from,” Zoldos said. “The guy that I worked for (Pink founder Mark Supples) had an eclectic music taste like I did. And, you know, nobody complained. A good song is a good song. 

“Yeah, people are in there just to drink and the bar was kind of known as the last stop for a lot of people that were out downtown. That’d be the last place they go to. And they could order the steak sandwich up until 4 in the morning or something. (It used to be the Buffalo Bar and Grill before it was the Old Pink, and actually, the steak sandwich originated with the Buffalo Bar and Grill.)”

The two places complemented each other for nearly 40 years, until last June. 

“They both had character, and you can’t replicate that,” Zoldos said. “You can’t even build it from scratch or whatever. Either you have it or you don’t, and that’s why these are really huge losses, because it’ll never be the same.”

Part of the reason the Old Pink was the “Old” one was because there was a brief attempt at opening a new Pink Flamingo at 1683 Main Street. It didn’t work. 

Zoldos takes some comfort from the fact that change is a constant, like the way the original rock music scene moved from McVan’s and the Schuper House on Niagara Street downtown to the Continental and eventually to places like Mohawk Place (which itself is now struggling) and Nietzsche’s. 

But those transitions didn’t come with the wrenching abruptness of the flames that have taken down the Old Pink and have left the Brick Bar as a set of brick walls. 

He sees hope in venues like the Buffalo Iron Works and The Caz, both of which his band, Dead Flowers, will be performing at in the near future. 

“That’s really important to me because I used to walk to that bank (where The Caz is now located) with my dad from the house I grew up in,” he said. “So to be going back to the old neighborhood and having my Rolling Stones cover band play all Rolling Stones music, which is all I listened to when I was a younger kid, is really great.” 

Zoldos said he considers the Town Ballroom and Electric City to be blessings to the national act music scene and they give him hope for the future of live music in Buffalo.

He hopes that those kind of venues can become the same kind of institutions that those bars he worked in earlier in his life eventually became.

Nietzsche’s will be holding a fundraiser for employees of Mulligan’s Brick Bar on Jan 17.