CBGB Brings Down the Curtain With Nostalgia and One Last Night of Rock

From the New York Times, by Ben Sisario:

She had played there many times over the last three decade, but last night, before making her last appearance there, Patti Smith made sure to snap a picture of CBGB.

“I’m sentimental,” she said as she stood on the Bowery and pointed an antique Polaroid toward the club’s ragged, soiled awning, and a mob of photographers and reporters gathered around her.

Last night was the last concert at CBGB, the famously crumbling rock club that has been in continuous, loud operation since December 1973, serving as the casual headquarters and dank incubator for some of New York’s most revered groups — Ms. Smith’s, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Sonic Youth — as well as thousands more whose blares left less of a mark on history but whose graffiti and concert fliers might still remain on its walls.

After a protracted real estate battle with its landlord, a nonprofit organization that aids the homeless, CBGB agreed late last year to leave its home at 313 and 315 Bowery at the end of this month. And Ms. Smith’s words outside the club, where her group was playing, encapsulated the feelings shared by fans around the city and around the world: CBGB is both the scrappy symbol of rock’s promise and a temple that no one wanted to see go.

“CBGB is a state of mind,” she said from the stage in a short preshow set for the news media whose highlight was a medley of Ramones songs.

“There’s new kids with new ideas all over the world,” she added. “They’ll make their own places — it doesn’t matter whether it’s here or wherever it is.”

Crowds had been lined up outside since early yesterday morning for a chance to see Ms. Smith and bid farewell to the club, in an event that was carefully orchestrated to maximize media coverage. Television news vans were parked on the Bowery as fans with pink hair, leather jackets and — the most popular fashion statement of the night — multicolored CBGB T-shirts (but not necessarily tickets) waited to be let in and Ms. Smith’s band played a short set for the assembled press.

Curiosity about the club’s last night was mingled with harsh feelings about its fate.

“It’s the cultural rape of New York City that this place is being pushed out,” said John Nikolai, a black-clad 36-year-old photographer from Staten Island whose tie read “I quit.”

Added Ms. Smith outside the club, “It’s a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city.”

Ms. Smith was CBGB’s last booking as well as one of its first. In the 1970’s, she was the oracular poet laureate of the punk scene, and her seven-week residency in 1975 is still regarded by connoisseurs as the club’s finest moment. With an open booking policy, its founder, Hilly Kristal, nurtured New York rock’s greatest generation, and in turn those groups made CBGB one of the few rock clubs known by name around the world.

“When we first started there was no place we could play, so we ended up on the Bowery,” said Tom Erdelyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, the group’s first drummer and only surviving original member. “It ended up a perfect match.”

It has been a long and painful denouement for CBGB. After settling in 2001 with its landlord, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, over more than $300,000 in back rent, Mr. Kristal, a plucky, gray-bearded 75-year-old, landed back in court last year. The committee, which has an annual budget of $32 million and operates 18 shelters and other facilities throughout the city, said the club owed an additional $75,000 in unpaid rent increases.

Celebrities including David Byrne of Talking Heads and Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and “The Sopranos” lined up to help mediate, but an agreement was never reached. Last December, three months after the club’s 12-year lease had expired, it agreed, at the prodding of Justice Carol R. Edmead of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, to finally close.

Muzzy Rosenblatt, the executive director of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, has said that a new tenant has been found for the space. Both Mr. Kristal and the committee also say that CBGB’s accounts have been settled and that there are no outstanding debts.

CBGB (its full name was CBGB & OMFUG, for Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) is the latest and highest-profile rock club to vanish from Lower Manhattan in recent years as rents and other expenses have continued to skyrocket. Last year the Bottom Line closed over a debt of $185,000 to its landlord, New York University, and Fez and the Luna Lounge shut down because of development. The Continental, another ragged temple of punk on Third Avenue in the East Village, quit live music last month. Other clubs have sprouted up in Manhattan, but the center of gravity of the city’s club scene has gradually been shifting to Brooklyn.

Mr. Kristal is looking as far as Las Vegas. With the help of the mayor’s office there, he has been inspecting spaces in that city’s Fremont East district, a zone that the city intends to make into “a walkable live entertainment area like Bourbon Street or Beale Street,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.

The office of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg helped find a new space in New York but the space it offered, on Essex Street on the Lower East Side, would have taken a prohibitive $5 million to prepare for use, Mr. Kristal said. Calls to the mayor’s office for comment were not returned late last week.

“I’d love to have the place here,” Mr. Kristal said. “If not here, then I’d love to have it in Vegas. I’m going to keep it active no matter what.”

The club’s interior — a narrow corridor with a bar to the right, the stage to the back, stalactites of grime dangling from the ceiling and miles of ancient posters and graffiti all around — is almost as cherished as its music.

“It’s like it’s grown its own barnacles,” said Lenny Kaye, Ms. Smith’s guitarist and a longtime rock critic and historian. “You couldn’t replicate the décor in a million years, and dismantling all those layers of archaeology of music in the club is a daunting task.”

The club’s architectural history stretches back much further than the Ramones era. Marci Reaven, the managing director of City Lore, a nonprofit arts group in Manhattan that studied CBGB in a joint project with the Municipal Arts Society, said it is a rare example of the Bowery’s long past as an entertainment mecca.

“When you get beyond the layers of interior decoration that is CBGB,” she said, “the architecture of the structure probably evokes the 19th and early 20th century years of the Bowery better than any other building on the strip that we know of.”

Mr. Kristal said he planned to preserve as much of the interior as possible and transport it to a new club, wherever that might be.

But CBGB’s symbolic legacy may far outweigh the value of its graffiti and its notorious urinals.

“When I go into a rock club in Helsinki or London or Des Moines, it feels like CBGB to me there,” Mr. Kaye said. “The message from this tiny little Bowery bar has gone around the world. It has authenticated the rock experience wherever it has landed.”

Clcik here for more including a photo slide show and 3:30 minute documentary baout the closing.

From the New York Post, by Mary Huhn:

HEY HO, LET’S GO

October 14, 2006 -- It’s time to say gabba gabba goodbye to CBGB.

The seedy Bowery club, which opened more than 30 years ago, will shut its doors forever after a performance tomorrow by Patti Smith, who was part of the mid-’70s punk-rock scene that started it all.

On Monday, founder Hilly Kristal, who’s 75 and battling cancer, will ship the famous urinals, bars, stage and walls to Las Vegas, where he’ll likely open up a club in 2008.

The Dictators, who played alongside groups such as the Ramones, Blondie and Television, will perform tonight. The final show will be broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio at 9 p.m.

Here, musicians remember the club - and the man who made it all possible.

Tell Us What You Think:
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Andy Shernoff, the Dictators: In the mid-’70s, the city was falling apart, the music business was boring and overblown. It was the era of hippie rock and pretentious orchestral rock bands doing 20-minute drum solos. Richard Lloyd, Television: We had no place to play because we only played original music and you could only get a gig once every three months. What we really needed was a dive.

In early 1974, [Television’s] Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and I went to the Bowery and saw Hilly on a stepladder putting up a sign.

We told him we play original rock ’n’ roll. Hilly said, "I’m not having anything to do with rock." But we said, "we have all sorts of influences. It’s not rock like you think of rock."

He said, "I don’t know."

Shernoff: CBGB’s was on the Bowery, which was seriously dangerous - full of flophouses, bums and addicts. No record company execs would dare go down there, so bands playing two sets a night Thursday, Friday and Saturday could get their act together away from the glare of A&R men.

Lloyd: A few days later our manager, Terry Ork, asked Hilly, "Let us have a Sunday, your worse night, and I’ll guarantee your bar receipts will be better than your best nights, because everyone I’ll invite is an alcoholic." We made our nut, so he invited us back.

Shernoff: Rock ’n’ roll itself was only about 20 years old, so it was still possible to get mileage out of the same three chords.

There was a musical vacuum and CBGB’s filled it because it was the only club where you could play "original" music rather than "covers."

Lloyd: It was difficult to get people to come to the club. It was under a flophouse. One night, wine and urine were dripping onto my microphone, which began shooting sparks and I had to share a mike with Richard Hell. Hilly’s salukis were on the stage and they weren’t housebroken.

Patti Smith: The first time I was there, it was Easter 1974. I went with Lenny Kaye to see Television and eight or nine people were there. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. They were obviously kin.

Lenny Kaye: Patti Smith and I attended the premiere of "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones" at the Zeigfeld on Easter Sunday in 1974. We went to see Television that Sunday night to see what was happening. I knew Richard Lloyd and Patti knew Richard Hell. Watching their psycho-drama unfold on stage, we decided to come back the following Sunday.

Smith: I was interested in the poetical and political aspects of rock ’n’ roll and I wanted to reclaim it in a time when rock ’n’ roll was commercial and stadium-ized.

I wasn’t a big hanger-outer. I was just really happy we had a place to work. New York didn’t have any rock clubs.

It was a way you could get yourself together so you can go out into the world. Look at a group like the Ramones, who were so influential to younger bands and people - CBGB’s was there for them.

Hilly Kristal, founder: When Patti Smith played seven weeks in 1974, that was exciting. I was a little fatigued, but it was very gratifying. I worked around the clock. I was never bored during the ’70s.

During the ’80s, the hardcore bands came in. They were more punk than punk. Things went in many directions.

Bob Gruen, photographer: What I really liked was there was only one rule - they had to write their own songs. That made it different from other places. Bar bands used to play cover songs.

Smith: It was a shñ-ñ-ñhole. The sound was really bad. Hilly made it great because he loved us all. He was really supportive. He didn’t get a lot in return. He used to sleep on a cot in the back.

Kaye: The crowd that first year was all the other bands and their friends. The art community was very interactive .ñ.ñ. a bunch of oddities attempting to fit together.

Snooky, Sic F*cks: We knew immediately that’s where we belonged. We lived in The Bronx with our mother. We left the house with two tokens and did our makeup on the train.

Lloyd: Terry [Ork] and Television would tell Hilly who to book. That’s how Talking Heads and Blondie, the Ramones and the others at the beginning got to play there. We figured that if we got other good bands in playing original music, we would cross-pollinate our audiences. The bill would consist of two bands doing two sets apiece to diffuse the idea of who’s the headliner.

Kaye: It was nice to find a home base for music we loved. CBGB’s provided a gathering spot for disaffected musicians who were finding themselves. All these bands were somewhat experimental in their somewhat strange way.

Kristal: I love Sonic Youth and that they stuck to their guns and made it work for themselves. They played to nobody at first. People would walk out. It was strange music, but I enjoyed them.

Kaye: I remember great shows. Sonic Youth in the ’80s and hearing all that sound pour off onstage. Bad Brains, all of a sudden it got so crazy, I just leaped into that darn mosh pit. What the hell!

Gruen: The Ramones played 12 songs in 15 minutes. What the hell was that? It took a while before I could differentiate the songs.

Kaye: I remember seeing everybody there, their first time. Anytime you saw the Ramones, it was their first time.

Todd Abramson, co-owner Maxwell’s: The first show I saw was the Cramps and the Ramones in 1977. The Cramps were genuinely frightening, especially to a 14-year-old suburban kid. [Cramps singer] Lux Interior would throw a switchblade around during "Sunglasses After Dark" and Bryan Gregory would spit a lit cigarette out into the crowd. I was always afraid that cigarette would hit me in the face.

Gruen: To get to the bathroom you had to walk by the dressing room, you didn’t need a backstage pass. People would have all access. The audience would hang out with the bands, who would play and then hang out at the bar. I would take photos at Madison Square Garden and then couldn’t wait to go downtown to talk to people.

Kaye: It’s just trashy enough. You don’t worry if you knock over a table. In fact, it’s approved. You can’t be a haughty superstar there when people are walking past your dressing room on the way to the bathroom. It’s a human club and you can feel superhuman onstage.

Kristal: We clean the toilets and fumigate them every evening. We took the doors off the stalls back then because people were doing drugs in the ladies room.

Dean Wareham, Luna: The first band I saw at CBGB’s was Richard Hell and the Voidoids circa 1980, when I was a 16-year-old in high school. I was nervous - it was my first time in a rock club, and I was self-conscious anyway. I was a little frightened when I went downstairs to pee. CBGB’s was the opposite of fancy, but still the most glamorous club in the world.

Dr. Know, Bad Brains: In 1979, we played every other week for a while working our way up for about a year. At first there were theater seats in the front, but the kids tore the theater seats out one night.

Handsome Dick Manitoba, the Dictators: You didn’t have the self-consciousness that you were part of history. You were looking to get drunk, maybe pick up a girl and have fun. It was a social scene.

Pat Ivers, video documentarian: [I remember] sitting at the bar between Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group and Joey Ramone and talking about the Yankees. One snowy night Johnny Rotten showed up after the Pistols had imploded and everyone treated him like just another Joe at the bar. Really, it was the ordinariness of it that was so great.

Tish, Sic F*cks: There was a kitchen that served Hilly’s famous chili and burgers.

Dave Wakeling, English Beat: During a Brit Pop Invasion evening in the mid-’90s, I felt hopelessly old wave until the bartender recognized me pathetically trying to get a drink, and said "I know who you are" and fixed me up with a beer and a Cognac on the house. I had never felt prouder. To be known in CBGB’s was almost as good as playing there, maybe even better!

Hamilton Leithauser, the Walkmen: I don’t have any sentimental feelings for it. It was pretty awful. One time [in the mid-’90s], I went to see my cousin, Walter Martin, play with Jonathan Fire*Eater. It was absolutely disgusting and everyone was really unfriendly. A couple of years later I moved to New York from D.C. and started my own band. That was the only place allowed us to play. They paid us $80.

There was some pretty nasty stuff. The toilet was like a throne on a raised concrete block in the middle of the room and no door. And there was a two-by-four across the door and someone had written "don’t s-ñ-ñ- here" on the board and someone took a s-ñ-ñ- on the two-by-four. That’s the kind of stuff I remember. It was pretty awful.

Walter Schreifels, Gorilla Biscuits: Basically I went to high school at CBGB’s. The first time I went there, in 1985, when I was 16, I was scared, so I stayed in the back by the pool table with all the other posers. Adrenaline O.D. was headlining, not that I knew anything about them except that they played a punk version of the "Masterpiece Theater" theme.

At some point during their set I locked eyes with this cute goth girl standing across from me. Next thing I know we’re making out.

Though nothing compares to that first time, I did have tons of other great times there. I played there with Gorilla Biscuits the next year.

Wareham: The last time Luna performed there was December 31, 2000. One of our fans vomited on the stage during our second song.

Kaye: CBGB’s represents the great sense of possibility. When there are four or five bands on stage every night, I know I’ll see something really unusual. Maybe after that the band swill break up. Or maybe a song becomes a classic, like "Psycho Killer" or "Sonic Reducer." You could see anything happen and it never changed. It never got too self-conscious.

Kristal: The key to finding satisfaction and success is for artists to do their own thing and not copy anybody. Artists need to be very much themselves.

Gruen: Hilly’s quite a nice guy. He was very supportive of all the acts. He was open and giving. That’s what the OMFUG was for - Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers. He would present anything unusual or interesting.

Snooky: They should be celebrating Hilly and the whole thing, not tearing it down. It should be landmarked.

Manitoba: Every good story has a beginning, middle and an end. Being in business for 30 years is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s like having a full, rich, wonderful life and dying.

Kristal: I paid $19,000 a month until last year, then $35,000. I couldn’t afford the [new rent of] $65,000. I was fighting since the winter of 2004. It was a brutal time.

Smith: It had a good run. It did what it was supposed to do - give people a venue to present new ideas. Now that type of place is global. I think of CBGB’s as a consciousness.

The kids will make a new place. They make music on computers and send it to each other. It’s up to the kids to decide how to disseminate information.

Manitoba: When I’m onstage playing CBGB’s, I won’t be sad because I’m gonna be onstage playing CBGB’s!

Next week - when I push my kid’s stroller by and I see a boarded-up place that used to be CBGB’s - that’s when my true tears will come out.

Tish: I’m definitely going to cry.

Snooky: It’s gonna be like the last episode of "Mary Tyler Moore."

Smith: I played CBGB’s for the first time with Lenny Kaye and I’ll be there the last time with Lenny. We’ve going to play as long as we can play. I’ll salute the future and remember the past - salute Blondie, the Ramones, Television, the Dead Boys, Johnny Thunders, Hilly - all those people I’ll remember. We’ll play as long as we can and see what the people want.

Kaye: CBGB’s had a longer run than most New York clubs. I’m happy to light a candle and send them on their way.

Smith: My band wasn’t the biggest or the most important. We were the first band to fill the place, so I guess we’ll be the last band to fill the place. It’s not sad. It’s life. [Long pause] The reality of it is, it’s still a s-ñ-ñ-hole.

Kaye: Next week at this time, when I walk down the Bowery and see them carting the urinals out the door, I do think we’ll have a sense of loss.

And CBGB’s will join the great musical landmarks of the mind - such as 52nd Street during the bebop era or the Peppermint Lounge. It’s great to have had a club that made such a contribution to New York culture and it’s nice we’re getting a chance to salute it before it’s replaced by a chain.

Kristal: I’ll take everything I can out of CBGB’s and put into trailers and move it across the country. I’m 75. I can be instrumental in starting a place. But I don’t want to work 12- to 14-hour days anymore. I’m sick and you have to have some sort of life.

Kaye: Forget all the history and what happened when and who’s who, it was a great place to see music. I will miss it for what it is rather than what it was.

I wanted to have a quiet reflective drink there this week but if the Bad Brains are playing I guess I’ll go and get bruised!

Kristal: I don’t know where I’ll be on Nov. 1, but I won’t be here.