Goodbye, CBGB

Can you say that it's the end of an era when the era was actually over quite some time ago? Punk rock shrine CBGB, the jewel of the Bowery, has lost its lease. The last show was Sunday night, with the Patti Smith Group (plus Flea and Richard Lloyd) bidding the place goodbye. Earlier in the week, the stage had seen returns from Bad Brains, the Dictators, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. But it's been a very long time since the club was an active launching pad for groups, sounds, or scenes.

But that doesn't matter, because CBGB was what it was, and at its prime, it was the focal point of New York punk, which reached its feelers into the world and influenced rock music forever. Yet in another sense, it still is what it was: a dive bar in a seedy part of the city that welcomed bands that didn't always have other places to play. If the cutting edge has moved on to other sites, that's hardly CBGB's fault. Hilly Kristal opened the club not quite thirty-three years ago. It was in its infancy when Television, the Ramones, the pre-Blondie Stilettos, and Talking Heads (among very many others) started to play. Kristal was open to the new sounds, but they didn't seem to be what he had in mind when he started up: the club's full name is CBGB & OMFUG, which stands for Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers. Punk would fit firmly in the "Other Music" category. Rock archivist and producer (as well as guitarist for Patti Smith) Lenny Kaye had a nice remembrance last month in the Village Voice, but Smith herself may have provided the most appropriate eulogy from the stage during the going away party, as quoted by Jon Pareles:

"Kids, they’ll find some other club," Ms. Smith insisted during her set. They’ll find a place, she continued, "that nobody wants, and you got one guy who believes in you, and you just do your thing. And anybody can do that, anywhere in the world, any time."

But don't be too sad. The CBGB Website is still a going concern, and it promises that the club will reopen soon (the odds-on money says Kristal will soon be relocating it to Las Vegas). The CBGB store remains open in the Bowery and will soon move to Broadway and Bond to become CBGB Fashion (it goes without saying that the online store remains available. And as of this writing, CBGB has 53,448 friends at MySpace.

When it comes down to it, CBGB isn't really going anywhere. Like all of us, Hilly Kristal needs to evolve to move forward. Perhaps Legs McNeil had the most prescient view of the future:

I always said Hilly should go to Vegas. Girls with augmented breasts playing Joey Ramone slot machines. It would become an institution.