We live somewhere now in post neo-classic proto pre-post punk rock land. Everything is derivative, but there's more of it, and sometimes it makes you tap your toes on the morning commute. Always there in the DNA is the strange and wonderful cluster of gene markers known roughly to scientists as "New York punk." Others call it the Johnny Thunders mutation. Whatever it is, it's a historic part of our musical evolution, a marker on a place where music changed - and it changed best here.
Clearly, one of places in the long dual ribbon of DNA bears the name CBGB. A dark pestilent hole that attracted talent: that's the elevator speech. CB's closes tomorrow, but it's all so anti-climatic. All the youngsters wearing the iconic black t-shirts under their Gap jackets is testimony to a lasting rock brand - one that Hilly Kristal and his advisor's apparently hope to keep alive in Las Vegas and along the byways of cyber-commerce.
My buddy Brendan has a must-read elegy to CBGB on his blog today - here's a taste:
It's true, CBGBs as an entity started to "think who it was" in its old age. The CBs Gallery, the record label, the angry-girl/guy-with-guitar-on-SubPop acts, the utterly ham-handed artsiness and pretense were late '90s East Village unbearable. But then CBs would surprise you with a really killer friday night lineup of old standbys or someone new who was actually worth listening to. Done as an homage to the faded letters on the awning. I won't miss CBGBs as it is today, but I will mourn the loss of the CBGBs that was a large part of my wild youth.
I spent a great deal of time in the clubs of New York City, drinking beer and generally causing trouble from the time I was about 13 years old and my brother took me to see Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers at the Mudd Club. Within 4 years I was doing gigs in second tier shitholes with a punk band I co-started called Social Insecurity.
Way, way back, Brendan and I played in the same neighborhood band - he went on to some great musical highlights; I play for my kids and in our corporate house band. Read his whole post for the history. Now we're Metro-North regulars, reading the paper on the commute, working for our kids and our families, plugging politicians, exchanging links and files like we once exchanged chord changes. We still have our stories of CB's, Max's, the Mudd Club, the Pep Lounge, Hurrah's, Danceteria, Trax, Tramps, Heat, the Ritz, the Bottom Line and other assorted dives and pit stops.
Now again, I dial up the playlist on the old, trusty iPod. There's Johnny and Walter Lure, Iggy and the Stooges, Richard Hell, Cheetah Chrome, the Ramones, Lou Reed, the Dolls, Patti Smith, the Senders, David Jo, various members of Television, Voodoo Shoes, the Damned, Stiv Bators, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the Clash, and so on.
I tap my shoes on the train and see some ghosts out the window. A bridge and tunnel boy still. As Brendan says:
I read that Hilly planned to gut and preserve CBs (even the urinals, he said) and move the pieces to Vegas where it would rise from the ashes as a CBs-themed nightclub and presumably casino.
But like an old junkie, it's been so long, and the big dogs don't live forever.
UPDATE: James Wolcott says it perfectly, with the long lens:
It never occurred to any of us then that someday the CBGB's t-shirt would be a ubiquitous cultural signifier, Richard Hell's byline would grace the op-ed page of the NY Times, the Ramones' "Hey ho/let's go" would rev up car ads, Please Kill Me would be as much a classic of oral history as Edie or Studs Terkel's books, and Deborah Harry would achieve her dye-job dream of being a Warhol superstar in a post-Warhol world.
