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CBGB

CBGB

315 Bowery, New York, NY 10003

PLACE TYPE
Bar Hangout Music Venue

– CBGB had been around since 1969 in an earlier incarnation, Hilly’s on the Bowery, which was named after owner Hilly Kristal; in late 1973, he changed the name to Country, BlueGrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers—which was shortened to CBGB-OMFUG.

Stories

Lance Loud and Kristian Hoffman Move to New York

People

Having been obsessed with the Andy Warhol scene since he was an adolescent, Lance Loud was already an avid Velvet Underground fan. The two friends ducked out one night and saw them play in Los Angeles, which best friend Kristian Hoffman counted as one of the greatest concerts of his life. “I wasn’t prepared for seeing them,” he said. “Lou Reed came out and he was pretending he was going to hit you in the head with his guitar. He would swing it like an ax right in between the heads of people in the audience. For me, it was eye opening and exciting.” Loud and Hoffman formed a band during high school and eventually moved to New York—where Loud became reacquainted with Warhol and formed a punk group that regularly played CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. “Lance was one of the most curious and terrific kids around,” recalled Warhol, “and I always told him that he had the best band around, called the Mumps.” Loud, in turn, described Warhol as “the greatest father figure . . . [of ] that generation,” noting that, “He was always parental.” The New York economy had crashed, so the rents were low enough for the two friends to put down roots in the city and live on next to nothing. “That’s why these landlords were desperate to rent an apartment to anybody,” Hoffman said, “because why else would a landlord rent an apartment to unemployed seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids?”

From Chapter 23 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Rhys Chatham Discovers the Ramones

People

Rhys Chatham also played a role in the convergence of underground rock and experimental music. This connection began when he was talking to his composer friend Peter Gordon, who asked, “Have you ever in your life been to a rock concert?” No, the twenty-four-year-old replied. Gordon laughed and told him about a great neighborhood club where a cool local band was playing, and asked him to go. “So this was me in 1976,” he said, “the band was the Ramones, the place was CBGB’s.” Chatham had never seen or heard anything like it, and it was utterly romantic to him. “The music was complex,” he said, perhaps the only time “complex” was used to describe the Ramones—a group best known for its short, fast, and sweet bubblepunk songs. “I was playing one chord, and they were playing three, but I felt something in common with that music.” He got an electric guitar and began developing a new compositional style that led to his first major breakthrough, “Guitar Trio.” Informed by both classical minimalism and punk rock, Chatham’s landmark instrumental piece carved out a hypnotic, dissonant template that influenced 1980s post-punk groups such as Sonic Youth.

From Chapter 27 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Richard Hell Dives Into Music

People

Like Patti Smith, Richard Hell transitioned into rock after spending time in the underground poetry scene, where he learned a useful DIY skill set. “I had become completely acclimated to that culture of doing it yourself as a writer in the world of street poets,” he said, “so when I started doing music it felt familiar.” Hell was a bit nervous about having no previous musical experience, but Tom Verlaine assured him that the bass was an easy instrument to learn, and the two friends began rehearsing in Verlaine’s apartment. “At the same time I started working on lyrics and melodies to some guitar compositions he’d got going that he hadn’t worked up words for,” Hell recalled. “The idea was that he’d sing his lyrics and I’d sing mine, and eventually I’d write music, too. I had the name for the group: the Neon Boys.” Hell and Verlaine wanted to strip rock ’n’ roll down to its essential core, doing away with the showbiz theatricality of the glam bands and jettisoning the kind of excesses that dominated 1970s corporate rock. Looking to flesh out their lineup, they placed an ad in the Village Voice classifieds section: “Narcissistic rhythm guitarist wanted—minimal talent okay.” Blondie’s Chris Stein auditioned, but wasn’t a good fit, and Dee Dee Ramone also tried out even though he couldn’t play guitar. Hell and Verlaine never found the right musician for the Neon Boys, and in 1974 the fledgling group hooked up with guitarist Richard Lloyd, morphed into Television, and began playing regularly at CBGB.

From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Television’s Early Shows

People

Television’s first gig was at an art house cinema on 122 West Forty-Fourth Street. They rented the Townhouse Theater, charged two dollars admission, and advertised the show by posting flyers around Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Reflecting the multimedia experimentation that permeated downtown, the group’s first show mixed live video, broadcast television, and rock ’n’ roll. “My idea for ramping up our presentation was to place four or five televisions onstage,” Richard Hell recalled. “During our performance each was tuned to a different channel, while one of them was hooked up to the Portapak of the video guy who’d been taping our rehearsals. He roamed the theater shooting our act as we played, as well as the audience, and that stream was fed to one of the monitors onstage, too.” Hell also helped define Television’s early visual style, wearing ripped T‑shirts held together by safety pins and, in one case, a shirt with “Please Kill Me” handwritten on the front (a cheeky and somewhat brave thing to wear downtown in the crime-ridden 1970s). Soon after their Townhouse show, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd asked Hilly Kristal if they could play at CBGB, but the owner declined because he wasn’t interested in booking rock bands. They returned with their manager, Terry Ork, who suggested that Television play on the bar’s worst night—Sunday—and guaranteed that all their friends would make the bar’s cash registers ring. It was music to Hilly’s ears.

From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The New York Rock Scene Shifts to CBGB on the Bowery

People

“The people that were at Club 82,” Clem Burke said, “Lenny Kaye, Joey Ramone, Tommy Ramone, myself, Gary Valentine, Debbie and Chris, Johnny Thunders—essentially, everybody took their platforms off, cut their hair, walked around the corner, and wound up at CBGB. That’s basically what happened, because everyone was living in the neighborhood. It literally was around the corner from CBGB.” Hilly Kristal didn’t change his Bowery bar’s name until late 1973, but it’s not as if he did any significant renovations when it became CBGB. “It was pretty much the same when it was called Hilly’s,” Suicide’s Alan Vega recalled. “The bathrooms were already horrific, even before it was renamed CBGB.” After Marion Cowings’s band Dance broke up following the Mercer Arts Center collapse, he was in a band named Squeeze that occasionally played at CBGB. He recalled that Hilly’s dogs used to run loose and defecate on the floor, so people had to watch where they stepped. “He was like a wild Bowery guy,” Cowings said, “just wild and dirty. At that time the Bowery was the Bowery. There were lots of bombed-out buildings and fleabag hotels, and lots of people sleeping on the street.”

From Chapter 30 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Early Punk Documented on Public Access Television

People

While working at Manhattan Cable’s public access channel, Paul Dougherty met a woman named Pat Ivers, and they soon began taking their young coworkers to CBGB. “It was our great fortune to see one of the first Talking Heads shows, opening for the Ramones,” Paul said. “So it was a eureka, epiphany moment for myself and everyone else. We began videotaping later that summer, during the CBGB Festival of Unsigned Bands.” Without that video footage of Blondie, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads, and many other bands shot by the Metropolis Video collective, punk’s ephemeral early years would exist only in faded memories. Ivers and Dougherty had the public access department’s blessing to take out an entire remote studio, which helped raise the production values. “So instead of just going with a couple of Portapaks, we had the switcher, the mixer, and the cameras,” Dougherty said. “The first time we did it, we lit it and got pretty good sound, but it got a lot better.” After he moved away, Ivers plowed forward with her motley video crew, irregularly showing their live footage in late 1975 as part of a public access show called Rock from CBGB’s. “A place like CB’s was revolutionary and perfect for capturing the energy of this new scene,” Ivers said. “The intimacy of getting right up in the faces of these musicians telegraphed the intimacy of the room, where the border between musician and fan was quite porous. Also, the DIY methodology of the scene was in its DNA, so for me, being able to document the scene was an important contribution to the community, which I very much felt a part of.”

From Chapter 31 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Early CBGB Scene

People

Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye noted that the early CBGB scene was quite small. “It was the same twenty-five or thirty-five people in the audience,” he said, “and you would get up onstage and play, and then go offstage and hang out and watch your friends play. Everybody had a sense of the destination, but the fact that this destination was so improbable allowed you to develop at your own speed.” Doorwoman Roberta Bayley also recalled that CBGB was practically deserted in the beginning, noting that only people they didn’t know ended up paying the two dollar cover. “1975 was the best year,” said Paul Zone, who would soon join his brothers as the lead singer for the Fast. “It really was, because no one was signed and everyone was there. Every single night you could see the main characters.” The bands sounded quite different from one another but were united by a sense of spirit and discovery. “We weren’t competing with each other,” Chris Stein said. “Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones—we all shared equipment and had each other’s backs for the first year, when everything was starting to come together.” Debbie Harry acknowledged that there was certainly some animosity between certain people, “but in a pinch, if you asked nicely, you could borrow an amp.”

From Chapter 31 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Stillettoes Morph Into Blondie

People

The Stilettoes played their first gig at CBGB on May 5, 1974, then did a half dozen shows at the club supporting Television. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein then formed a new group, Angel and the Snake, which played only once under that name before settling on Blondie for a string of CBGB shows with the Ramones. Between 1973 and 1975, the band was constantly in flux, changing names and reshuffling members (sisters Tish and Snooky were backup singers in another lineup before they cofounded Manic Panic, an East Village boutique that became best known for its brand of hair dye). Sometimes their original drummer Billy O’Connor would lose consciousness during their sets, though not for the typical rock ’n’ roll reasons—it was because of anxiety—so Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan occasionally sat in with them. “Everybody liked Blondie,” photographer Roberta Bayley said, “and they were definitely a key part of the scene. But their band wasn’t totally respected because when it would start to come together, then a member would leave, or they would have a different name.”

From Chapter 31 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Pat Loud Hangs with Hibiscus and Jackie Curtis

People

Pat Loud took a job in publishing in 1974 and followed her son out to New York, where she opened her small Upper West Side apartment to Lance and his friends. “She’s the most marvelous mother,” Kristian Hoffman said. “I mean, I really think of her as my other mother. She takes care of us all the time, to this day. So when she met Lance’s colorful panoply of insane artsy friends, she would just invite them into her house for dinner without prejudice. They had a little kitchen about the size of a California closet, and she made all of this magic happen in that room.” Pat also used to drop by CBGB and other downtown venues to see her son’s band play. “The Mumps were on the bill when she went to see Television,” Roberta Bayley said, “when Richard Hell was in the band. I remember Richard dedicated a song to her from the stage, which was nice. I also remember Lance’s mother invited Richard and I to an Oscar party at her apartment. I think she was just culturally open to different things and seeing what was going on, and really supportive of her son and his friends.” Despite Pat Loud’s initial dislike of the Jackie Curtis play Vain Victory, the two eventually became very good friends; Pat even contributed to Curtis’s drag wardrobe after taking revenge on her cheating husband. “One of his mistresses owned a clothing shop in Montecito,” she said. “I went over to that clothing shop and I bought everything that fit me—which was a lot of stuff. I put it on a bill, and they let me walk out with all of these clothes.” Having no desire to keep them, Pat donated the expensive fashions to the Off-Off-Broadway star (“I gave Jackie lots of stuff,” she recalled). Lance Loud was also good friends with Hibiscus, who often came over to Pat’s place for dinner. “That’s why there’s pictures of me there having dinner with Jackie Curtis,” Hoffman said. “Holly Woodlawn was there. Hibiscus was there. You would think having all those crazy people there would be kind of like an art salon,” Hoffman said, “but it was more like Pat cooking a delicious meal for love birds that had wet wings and they were lost. It was a place to go to get warm and have a good meal with someone who is completely accepting and loving.”

From Chapter 32 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Patti Smith’s Star Rises

People

Patti Smith’s audience grew throughout her CBGB residency with Television in early 1975, which created more momentum for the scene. “That was the first time when it started to get crowded,” doorwoman Roberta Bayley said, “and I think by the end it was sold out.” This was followed by CBGB’s Festival of Unsigned Bands in the summer of 1975, which drew even more attention. “The Ramones started to get a following,” she said, “and I think the Ramones were probably the first band to really build a fan base, and packed the place. Not long before it was just thirty, forty, maybe eighty people on a good night.” The media coverage that CBGB and Smith received benefited both parties, and on May 1, 1975, Arista Records mogul Clive Davis offered her a contract. Later that month, after signing, they celebrated with a live set that aired on the local radio station, WBAI, which she revered for its lack of formatting constraints (a freedom that complemented her approach to music, both aesthetically and ideologically). It was Smith’s first, but certainly not last, appearance on radio. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale produced the Patti Smith Group’s debut, Horses, and Robert Mapplethorpe shot the striking cover photo of her in a white men’s dress shirt and skinny tie. By this point, Smith’s band had outgrown CBGB and started to play larger venues in the city, such as the Palladium (formerly the Academy of Music).

From Chapter 32 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Ramones Get It Together

People

By the early 1970s, the future Joey Ramone began playing drums (using the name Jeffrey Starship) for the glam band Sniper, which performed at Mercer’s and Max’s Kansas City. Meanwhile, Joey’s brother Mickey Leigh joined a short-lived band with two future Ramones—John Cummings and Tommy Erdelyi—which practiced in the basement of his mother’s gallery, Art Garden. “We put the PA down there, so it had already been turned into a rehearsal place,” he said. “And when my brother got into the Ramones, of course they were all allowed to rehearse there as well.” Erdelyi encouraged Cummings to start a band, and was more of a manager figure during the Ramones’ early days. “Tommy’s role became increasingly more important and pivotal in an organizational and artistic way,” Leigh said. “Tommy really helped the whole thing gel and kind of helped it define itself.” For Craig Leon, who produced the band’s first album, the Ramones were like a performance art piece. “Tommy knew how to create this image of what they became,” Leon said. “He originally studied to be a film guy, and he saw things in that visual sense. Even though the Ramones were definitely rock ’n’ roll, they reminded me a lot of Warhol. The four of them had that deadpan Andy Warhol persona. They were, like, straight out of the New York art scene.” Joey Ramone started out as the band’s drummer until it became clear that he was a much better frontman, so Tommy took over on the drum stool. Joey, Johnny, and Tommy expanded to a quartet when another neighbor, Douglas Colvin (later Dee Dee Ramone), joined on bass, and by 1975 they were regularly playing at CBGB.

From Chapter 32 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Zone Brothers Band Together

People

For every band like the Ramones, there were dozens of CBGB acts that didn’t achieve wider acclaim, such as the Fast. Both bands shared a similar pop sensibility and emerged from unhip outer-borough neighborhoods (the Fast’s bandmates grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, while the Ramones hailed from Forest Hills, Queens). Unlike the Ramones—pretend “bruddahs” who adopted the same surnames—the Fast actually were brothers: Paul, Mandy, and Miki Zone. Together, they became a ubiquitous presence on the downtown scene, spanning the glam, punk, and post-punk eras. “We were a working-class family,” Paul Zone said, “but I can’t remember not having enough or not getting anything we wanted or needed. So my family could provide it if we needed an amplifier or a new guitar.” The postwar economy of abundance fueled the growth of both the suburban middle class and underground culture. Bohemians benefited from the trickle-down of the economic boom, which allowed them to live on next to nothing; a part-time job or welfare benefits could subsidize a life in the arts. And out in the suburbs, the Zones’ father could buy his kids musical instruments and other gear, even though he was a blue-collar sanitation worker. Miki played guitar from an early age, middle brother Mandy sang, and Paul tagged along and followed his older siblings’ lead. Miki obsessively bought rock magazines and gravitated to the photos of flamboyantly styled musicians, particularly late 1960s British bands like Faces and the Rolling Stones. “I always remember going to record stores with my brothers,” Paul recalled, “and picking up the covers where the members looked somewhat different than everyone else.”

From Chapter 32 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Inventing “Punk”

People

The word punk had previously been used by a handful of rock writers, such as Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and Lenny Kaye, but it hadn’t yet circulated widely as a music genre name. “Nobody in New York wanted to be called ‘punk,’ ” said Ramones producer Craig Leon. “There were no real tags except ‘New York Rock.’ ” By early to mid-1976, just after Punk began publishing—and could be purchased at CBGB’s bar—mass media outlets located in midtown began taking notice of this subculture that was brewing nearby. “I think punk,” Kristian Hoffman observed, “the name that got attached to our bands, happened because Punk magazine existed.” Punk magazine’s John Holmstrom added: “Punk rock didn’t really start with Punk magazine, but we really put it on the map. We brought media attention.” Even though some on the scene hated Punk—or at least thought it was sexist, knuckle dragging, or just plain clueless—they still hoped the magazine would write about their bands, because media coverage was hard to come by. Unfortunately, this eventually had the effect of flattening the diversity of New York’s underground rock scene, reducing punk to a one-dimensional parody of itself. “I think Punk was more about the cartoon aspects of the music,” Kaye said. “It was not a lot about the music. It was mostly a caricature of the music, which is somewhat valuable, and somewhat limiting.” The British punk band the Sex Pistols never had a Top 10 hit in the United States, but their media presence was substantial. US news outlets latched onto the sensationalistic, violent aspects of the British punk scene—which were then projected onto groups like the Ramones, much to their chagrin. This attracted boorish types who thought that being ‘punk’ was about starting fights, so most American record companies kept their distance from the scene. “Once the Sex Pistols and the British music scene embraced the word punk, it was very, very bad to have that word associated with the New York bands,” the Fast’s Paul Zone recalled. “It was hurting all of the New York artists to be called punk, because it was associated with the whole Sex Pistols fiasco.”

From Chapter 33 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Malcolm McLaren Poaches Richard Hell’s Look

People

The mass media image of punk—think: safety pins holding together ripped clothes—was the result of a transatlantic conversation that developed between the New York and London scenes. Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren started out running a London clothing store in the early 1970s with designer Vivienne Westwood, and then dipped his toes in band management during the New York Dolls’ final days. This pairing happened after McLaren and Westwood began flying to New York for fashion trade shows, where they met Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain—who had his own boutique clothing company, Truth and Soul. McLaren lived in New York when he was managing the Dolls and often went to CBGB, where he kept his eyes wide open. One person he noticed was Richard Hell, who was then playing bass in Television. “Richard had very distinct way of dressing,” Roberta Bayley recalled. “He thought it through. He was very clear on how he came to the look, the haircut, and everything. … So Malcolm went back to England and incorporated some of those things into the things Vivienne designed. I don’t think Malcolm made any particular bones about copying Richard’s look. He was a conceptualist artist, and Malcolm just liked the idea that people looked like street urchins.” One day in 1976, Chris Stein was paging through a European rock magazine and said, “Hey Richard, you’ve got to see this. There are four guys who look exactly like you!” Hell looked and saw the name Malcolm McLaren by a photo of the Sex Pistols.

From Chapter 33 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


New York Punk’s Bubblegum Roots

People

Punk’s bad boy image was codified by corporate and indie media outlets soon after the rise of the Sex Pistols. The loud-hard-fast music of the Ramones, for example, further solidified the perception of punk as music made by and for angry young men who rejected “girly” prefab pop. The punk explosion supposedly reset the cultural clock to Year Zero, but far from rejecting the musical past, many early New York punks who hung out at CBGB embraced the guilty pleasures of their youth during the Brill Building era. “Our number one main influence was the sixties,” Paul Zone said. “The Ramones, you listen to their songs and they’re complete bubblegum pop, without a doubt.” Lead singer Joey Ramone readily admitted, “We really liked bubblegum music, and we really liked the Bay City Rollers. Their song ‘Saturday Night’ had a great chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it: ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’ on ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ was our ‘Saturday Night.’ ” The Ramones wore leather biker jackets and ripped jeans and had tough scowls on their faces, but that pose was also underpinned by a Warholian irony and poppy fizz. Craig Leon noted that they embraced bubblegum and 1960s pop as “a return to the rock ’n’ roll roots. Even the manufactured stuff like the Shangri-Las was young people speaking to other young people.”

From Chapter 33 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore