"What is she on?"
My response: "The 1970's".
I wish that I had been there on that last night. Heck, I wish that I had been there on the last night at Folk City, where I once sat right in front of Allan Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky when they recited and sang their poetry and songs. I wish that I had been there the last night at Kenny's Castaway, where I once heard the funkiest jazz in the midst of tiki kitsch, or The Bottom Line, or Max's Kansas City, or the Mudd Club, or the Village Gate, or.... I'll stop now, as I'm indulging in the sins of an older man. Nostalgia becomes sentiment; sentiment becomes a longing despair; despair is not a healthy state of mind.
But I do wish that I had been in CBGB on that last night, when Patti Smith, who had been one of the first performers to stand on that rickety stage, became the last performer to do so. She sang, recited, laughed [yeah, Patti Smith laughed], and waxed nostalgic until midnight when another piece of NYC's artistic life evaporated due to the usual combination of over-regulation, ridiculous rent prices, and the mad greed of landlords.
But I do wish that I had been in CBGB on that last night, when Patti Smith, who had been one of the first performers to stand on that rickety stage, became the last performer to do so. She sang, recited, laughed [yeah, Patti Smith laughed], and waxed nostalgic until midnight when another piece of NYC's artistic life evaporated due to the usual combination of over-regulation, ridiculous rent prices, and the mad greed of landlords.
CBGB, the full, legal name of which was Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, was opened in 1973 just as rock music was being destroyed by focus group-driven commercialization and, God help us, hair bands and disco. While in its original business plan, it was to rely on the types of music that were still authentic [in other words, not as popular], the venue found it's legs right around the time that a musical counter-revolution was to begin with punk and new wave music, as first heard and presented in that Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
If I may quote from myself:
The "punk rock" movement was messy, disharmonic, sometimes violent, and wholly necessary. The great creative period in popular music that had ushered in the fantastic cultural shift that was the 1960's had been supplanted in the 1970's by the droning electro-pop of disco. Instead of Jimi at Woodstock, or even the Stones at Altamont, there was now a battalion of sequined, interchangeable, air-coiffed "singers" offering equally interchangeable, tedious, synthesized music that accompanied dance moves that made even the graceful look as if they were suffering from cranial damage.
On the other hand, punk rock was loud and as in-your-face as a bellicose Red Sox fan in a Bronx bar. If disco prepared the foundation for the metrosexual, punk was its primordial remedy.
Early punk bands were mostly English and ridiculed and attacked all sorts and forms of institutions. The most memorable of the early punk songs was the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen", which melodized:
God save the Queen She ain't no human beingCBGB's founder, Hilly Kristal, was a typical product of America Go Crazy, the New York-born son of Russian immigrants, he studied music in legitimate institutions of classical learning, but soon veered into the less-classical, eventually becoming the manager of the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, a venue that is still, fortunately, open for business. From there he gained the experience and confidence to open his own club over in the East Village on The Bowery, in the space of a former biker bar, and began to weave a portion of musical history.
The original bands were eventually replaced by those of whom no one had heard. Bands such as The Patti Smith Group, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the B-52's, Blondie, and Joan Jett and the Blackhawks would play their first performances in that dank and funky bar. The only rules for playing at CBGB is that the bands had to move their own equipment and had to play original songs. At a time when new bands got their start by suppressing their own music in order to play tedious and familiar pop, this was an invitation that would have encouraged any band to play there for free.
Actually, many of them did. Kristal could be a little tight with the money.
I was in CBGB many times in the early 1980's, including on that stage and in the green room. It is memorable in that it was one of the messiest, most toxic environments that I have ever seen. The men's room was something that should have been featured in a "slice of life" exhibit in the study of urban decay; the graffiti there and on the walls of the green room should have been preserved for future archaeologists, although it may not have revealed our culture at its best and brightest.
However, the music scene was sublime, as no one else was, in that liminal time of cultural shift, brave enough to present the chaos, noise, and shock of this new style of expression. For that alone, CBGB should have been granted landmark status. Alas....
The club closed in October of 2006, with Kristal vowing to open either across the river in New Jersey or in Las Vegas. Neither happened, as he died of lung cancer the next year. Someone, however, was prescient enough to steal the toilets from the men's room. They'll turn up one day, I'm sure. The location is now a John Varvatos fashion store and the alley behind the club where unspeakable things would happen is now a "pedestrian promenade" filled with shops that sell things no one needs at prices no one can afford. [You will never know how hard it was to type that.]
Somewhere, at the bottom of a drawer, I have a black CBGB t-shirt that I probably bought for $7.99. It now sits with artifacts that I collected at dig sites in central America, at a tor in England, or along a riverbank in tribal Ohio. More than just a fading bit of cloth, it hearkens to a time of energy and originality, the fading of which I fear may be the harbinger of the end of our particular chapter in world history. We are no longer as energetically original and our young fear the violence of change. We are no longer the people of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers! O, Pioneers!".
The awning from CBGB now has a home at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland [yay, home town], and there is a "CBGB Lounge and Bar" at Newark Airport. An interesting film about Kristal and his club was released independently in 2013, entitled "CBGB", and was absolutely destroyed by the critics, so it's hard to find.
It really doesn't matter, though. If you want the experience, play the music at home. Heck, turn it up so it's loud enough to bother the neighbors and perhaps even alert the police and, when challenged, respond with vulgarities. That way, you will have captured a part of what saved American popular music, a combination of attitude, originality, and the complete absence of surrender to the superficial.
