Fifty years ago, a dive bar in New York’s East Village started to attract attention as a new hub for rock music. Initially, this was a whisper conveyed in a handful of small-circulation music magazines. Then, celebrated musicians, record label executives, hip journalists and photographers, followed by the influencers of that era, began making a beeline for 315 Bowery, the home of CBGB.
Inside, an array of young, unknown artists were making music that would change rock’s sound and look, attitude and aesthetic. These outsiders created a template for punk, spoken word, powerpop, new wave, no wave, mutant funk, hardcore and so much more besides.
Despite closing its doors two decades ago, CBGB remains a totemic venue in the history of modern music. Now the venue’s heyday is being marked with a four-CD box set that celebrates an era when New York City was cheap to live in, and artistic rather than commercial.
The CBGB story centres on Hillel “Hilly” Kristal. Born in New York in 1931 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Kristal served as a marine, sang in folk clubs and then booked artists for the Village Vanguard jazz club, before opening Hilly’s, a Greenwich Village bar featuring live gigs. After neighbours’ complaints about “loud music” forced the venue to close in 1969, he leased 315 Bowery, reasoning no one would complain about noise on New York’s “skid row” – his next-door neighbour, the Palace Hotel, mainly catered to homeless people.
Calling the bar Hilly’s on the Bowery, Kristal started by promoting underground jazz concerts, but a motorcycle gang made Hilly’s their Bowery base, scaring off the jazz crowd. Renaming the venue CBGB & OMFUG on 10 December 1973, Kristal envisioned his bar as a roots music venue, its name an acronym for Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers. Not that Kristal actively pursued this vision, as he was happy to host any musicians who drew a crowd.
In early 1974, fledgling rock band Television – led by Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell – requested to play the venue. Despite being initially unimpressed by their stark, angular sound, Kristal gave them a Sunday night residency. For their third gig, Patti Smith and her guitarist/producer Lenny Kaye were in the audience.
“That night, Patti and I went to see [concert movie] Ladies & Gentlemen: the Rolling Stones, then took a cab to the Bowery and saw Television,” says Kaye. “It was a changing-of-the-guard moment. Soon we also had a residency at CBGB and, for an epic six weeks, we shared sets with Television. This allowed both bands to develop their ideas and sound – a laboratory of sorts. At the time there were so few places for bands playing original material in New York, so CBGB became a locus of art and energy.”
As more bands played CBGB – Kristal booking them based on the dictum “original music only” – a scene began taking shape. Ramones’ CBGB debut on 16 August 1974 found their look – ripped jeans, leather jackets – and fast, sharp songs already in place. After they finished, Kristal told Joey Ramone: “No one is going to like you guys, but I’ll have you back.” Blondie debuted a couple of months later. Patti Smith, with Kaye in her band, played in February 1975. Talking Heads in June. Soon, Mink DeVille would become the house band, and the first issue of Punk magazine, published in January 1976, championed CBGB’s bands. “PUNK is coming!” the magazine’s posters proclaimed and the CBGB scene had a name.
“I always think when punk was given a definition in England that it became less of an unpredictable art,” says Kaye. “It had a very specific sound that was somewhat exclusionary to other sounds. And what I like about the ‘punk’ that came out of CBGB is its sensibility. It meant you were starting over, that you were presumptuous to be able to stand up there and say: ‘I’m going to make something new and I’m not going to shy away from it.’”
Such notables as Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, John Cale, David Bowie (with bodyguard), Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren began frequenting CBGB. Seymour and Linda Stein, themselves regular attenders, signed Ramones and Talking Heads to Sire Records. Back in London, McLaren modelled his teenage charges the Sex Pistols on CBGB mainstay Richard Hell (short, spiky hair, ripped T-shirts with slogans, Blank Generation-style anthems). The release of Ramones’ eponymous debut album on 23 April 1976 signalled an uprising and Kristal, aged 45, suddenly found himself a godfather (of sorts) for punk.
“What people don’t know about my dad is that he’d studied classical violin, sung in a choir, played folk clubs,” says Lisa Kristal Burgman. “He loved music and wanted to help musicians. That’s why he ran CBGB. And he gave the bands free advice. When Talking Heads invited him to join them on stage at their induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame it was, they said, because Dad helped expand their horizons.”
CBGB’s status meant Andy Warhol – often spotted at glitzy disco Studio 54 – could be found rubbing shoulders with rock’n’roll riffraff. Robert Frank and Robert Mapplethorpe dropped in, as did William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, while Divine and John Belushi enjoyed letting out their inner punks by jumping on stage.
This intense attention didn’t change Kristal. Photographer Gary Green’s book When Midnight Comes Around documents CBGB from 1976 to 1986 and, even in black-and-white, the photos exude grime, with surfaces covered in graffiti and overflowing ashtrays. “New York was gritty, dirty and poor in those days,” says Green. “And CBGB reflected that.” The club’s toilets were notoriously filthy; here celebrities and music executives experienced punk rock at its most elemental. “The club was bleached every morning,” says Kristal Burgman, who worked at CBGB across 1976 and 77. “It was the clientele who made it messy.”
“The bathrooms were never cleaned,” notes Kaye, laughing. “It was gross, but great.”
Rising bands now queued to play CBGB. The Damned were the first British band to do so, their 1977 performance introducing UK punk – already a media sensation – to Americans. In 1977 AC/DC and in 1978 the Police made their respective NYC debuts at CBGB; the Oz rockers’ fierce attack stunned jaded New Yorkers, while Sting and co – then unloved and unsuccessful at home – received an enthusiastic response to their 8pm and midnight sets.
Beyond the bands who would gain success, CBGB hosted thousands who never experienced fame. Kristal regularly booked four groups a night, and in the 1980s added weekend matinees where hardcore bands would play to underage audiences. Across the decades, Kristal remained seated at the entrance, answering the phone with “CB’s” and dispensing gruff advice.
“Hilly was the Buddha of the Bowery,” says Kaye. “He didn’t change things and we loved him for it. He never went upmarket. And that’s a characteristic of a great club owner: he let it happen. He just allowed the energy to find its own direction. That’s what made hanging out in the club so, so exciting – it had that air of unpredictability.”
If CBGB didn’t change, New York City did. Gentrification swept through the Bowery, ensuring bankers and boutiques moved in while the corresponding rent increases found Kristal in conflict with his landlord, who claimed he owed $90,000. It went to court and, though Kristal won, he agreed to vacate the premises when his lease ended in 2006. On 15 October 2006, Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye performed until the early hours – during the final number Smith recited a long list of names of CBGB denizens who had died across its 33-year existence. After they left the stage, Kristal locked the venue’s doors and the world’s most celebrated dive bar joined the city’s ghosts.
Kristal would soon announce he’d been offered a Las Vegas location to launch a new outpost of CBGB, but he never made it to Nevada – lung cancer claimed him on 28 August 2007. A biopic called CBGB was released in 2013 and starred Alan Rickman as Kristal and Ashley Greene as Lisa – Rickman’s in fine form as punk’s gruff mensch but the film’s script and direction are woefully lacking.
Today, CBGB lives on in the fashion line Hilly launched – selling branded clothing and jewellery made him a millionaire – and in a Brooklyn punk-themed festival. Most importantly, CBGB lives on in the music, which is celebrated on CBGB & OMFUG: A New York City Soundtrack 1975-1986, a box set drawing on the club’s halcyon years. From Television and Blondie through to Sonic Youth and Beastie Boys – alongside bands few have heard of (Nihilistics? Marbles? Peroxide?) – it’s a remarkably thorough document, with compiler Rob Tannenbaum noting he played CBGB twice, “and I can assure you the bathrooms were just as rank as they are reputed to have been … We didn’t care – we knew we were standing on sacred ground.”
CBGB & OMFUG: A New York City Soundtrack 1975-1986 is out now on Cherry Red Records.
