CBGB

Overview

The deliberately rough Bowery dive that Hilly Kristal opened on December 10, 1973, with a two-rule policy (play original material, move your own gear) and that over the next three decades housed the American punk and new-wave scene, then New York hardcore, then the post-punk and experimental acts that followed.

CBGB occupied the ground floor of the former Palace Lodging House at 315 Bowery, a space Hilly Kristal had already run as a biker dive called Hilly's on the Bowery since 1969. When he renamed and reoriented it on December 10, 1973, CBGB & OMFUG standing for 'Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers', the irony was baked in from the start: Kristal had wanted a country-and-folk room, but the Bowery's position as a cheap, unglamorous alternative to Max's Kansas City and the collapsing Mercer Arts Center pulled in exactly the underground he hadn't planned for. The club held roughly 350 people in a deliberately unfinished interior, graffiti-crusted walls, a narrow stage with no real backstage separation, an audience passageway that ran directly through the performance area, and the PA was functional rather than audiophile. Kristal's two house rules set the terms for what became a scene: bands must carry their own equipment; bands must play mostly original material. That second rule, enforced with unusual consistency, made CBGB the working rehearsal room of a generation. The punk genealogy at CBGB runs through a tight corridor of documented first nights. Television (then including Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd, and Billy Ficca) negotiated a Sunday-night slot from Kristal by promising, via their manager Terry Ork, that they would fill the bar on its worst night; their debut was March 31, 1974. Mercer Arts Center refugees (Jayne County, Suicide, the Fast, Ruby and the Rednecks, the Magic Tramps) began appearing that same spring, bringing a gender-transgressive glam lineage, County, a Stonewall-riot veteran and former Andy Warhol Factory performer, was among the first acts Hilly advertised in the Village Voice. The Ramones played their CBGB debut on August 16, 1974, and in 1974 alone logged over 70 appearances there. Blondie (then Angel and the Snake) arrived that same August. Patti Smith Group debuted February 14, 1975; Talking Heads opened for the Ramones on June 8, 1975. In April 1977, the Damned became the first British punk band to perform in America on the CBGB stage, the transatlantic circuit ran in both directions. Through the mid-1970s the club sustained a curatorial feedback loop: Kristal booked bands because the crowd they brought in was good for the bar; the bar's cash kept the lights on for bands that had nowhere else to go. In the early 1980s CBGB pivoted (without fully shedding its punk identity) into New York hardcore. The Sunday-afternoon matinee became 'thrash day': all-ages, inexpensive, an institution for bands including Bad Brains, the Beastie Boys (before their hip-hop turn), Reagan Youth, Agnostic Front, the Cro-Mags, Murphy's Law, Gorilla Biscuits, Sick of It All, and the Misfits. The matinee format made the room accessible to younger audiences who could not navigate the late-night Bowery safely; it also created a distinct subculture within the club's history, one heavily documented in hardcore photography and oral-history sources. Violence in and around the venue prompted Kristal to suspend hardcore bookings around 1990, though they returned intermittently. The room also hosted indie, no-wave, and experimental acts through the 1990s, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, and late-career returns from original CBGB figures all passed through, though by the 2000s the Bowery's demographic shift had begun to pressure the club's economics. CBGB closed on October 15, 2006, after a protracted lease dispute with its landlord, the Bowery Residents' Committee (a nonprofit housing the homeless in the building's upper floors), which raised the monthly rent to $35,000 and sued for roughly $90,000 in alleged arrears. Kristal had claimed he was never properly notified of the increase; he agreed to vacate by October 31, 2006, and the final performance (by Patti Smith, with Flea and Television's Richard Lloyd guesting) was broadcast live on Sirius Satellite Radio. Hilly Kristal died of lung cancer complications on August 28, 2007. Fashion designer John Varvatos opened a store at 315 Bowery in April 2008, preserving some of the original graffiti and playbills. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 as part of the Bowery Historic District. A CBGB Festival using the name has run since 2012, unaffiliated with the original room. The space is now a luxury retailer; Kristal's papers and related ephemera are scattered across private and institutional collections.

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