CBGB's closes. Punk is dead. You are old.

[2muchcoffeeman]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/10/13/cbgb.closure.ap/index.html

Patti Smith will play the last show.

 

[NoOneLikesUs]

Should've closed it in the 80s.

 

[Huggy]

Isn't it reopening in Vegas? I seem to remember reading that. If true, that, more than anything else, signifies the death of punk.

 

[shockey]

a sad day indeed. i saw blondie, the ramones and talking heads there in the '70s. good times. :'( :'( :'(

 

[spnited]

I was going to start a CBGB thread myself because, seriously children, tomorrow is a sad day for rock music in this country when a place like CBGB has to close because the rent is too high.

If you're not from the NYC area or have never been there, you can't appeciate the impact this place and its owner, Hilly Krystal, had on rock music in America.
Maybe this will help:

http://www.cbgb.com/history1.htm


Debbie Harry is part of the show tonight, Patti Smith does the finale tomorrow and then CBs closes its doors forever. It will be totally cleaned out by Oct. 31 and Krystal says he is saving everything to open a new CBGB in Vegas on 2008.

R.I.P. CBGB...OMFUG

 

[Huggy]

I was going to start a CBGB thread myself becxause, seriously children, tomorrow is a sad day for rock music in this country when a place like CBGB has to close because the rent is too high.

If you're not from the NYC area or have never been there, you can't appeciate the impact this place and its owner, Hilly Krystal, had on rock music in America.
Maybe this will help:

http://www.cbgb.com/history1.htm


Debbie Harry is part of the show tonight, Patti Smyth does the finale tomorrow and then CBs closes its doors forever. It will be totally cleaned out by Oct. 31 and Krystal says he is saving everyting to open a new CBGB in Vegas on 2008.

R.I.P. CBGB...OMFUG

Well said, spnited. Even if you weren't in New York at that time you knew about CBGB's and Max's Kansas City because that's where some of the most exciting music being made in the US in the mid-to-late-70s came from.

Can't be too many legendary rock and roll places left. The Fillmores are long gone, even the good old El Mocambo, a legendary joint here in Toronto where everyone who was anyone (and plenty of acts who never became anything) played and the Stones recorded part of Love You Live has been gone for years.

 

[Trey Beamon]

If true, that, more than anything else, signifies the death of punk.

What? Punk is better than ever. :

 

[Trey Beamon]

****, there is nothing worse than that mass-marketed "punk" coming from a bunch of suburbia kids with guitars who do their shopping at Hot Topic. ****.

And to think Green Day's "Dookie" opened the pop-punk floodgates.

 

[sportschick]

****, there is nothing worse than that mass-marketed "punk" coming from a bunch of suburbia kids with guitars who do their shopping at Hot Topic. ****.

And to think Green Day's "Dookie" opened the pop-punk floodgates.

Hey, I shop at Hot Topic, dammit!

Good Charlotte is about as punk as Jessica Simpson. Course pop-punk has sucked for years. I can remember a girl I worked with going on and on about Sum 41 and how much she loved punk. I almost left her along the side of the interstate between Indy and the Haute as punishment for her stupidity.

I think Nirvana's as much to blame for the current state of punk as Green Day. Record companies always sign up a buncha sucky copycats when a band hits big.

 

[shockey]

green day rocks. 8) 8) 8)

 

[sportschick]

Oh, I don't blame the bands so much as I blame the damn record companies. They're the ones who control everything -- and they're the ones who foist this crap on us.

Nirvana was what it was, a very great band that stands the test of time.
Green Day also has been very good for a very long time.

Can't really blame them for the record companies not having any foresight, or not having the balls to find a new sound instead of copycatting.

I don't mean blame like I hate them or anything. I adore both Nirvana and Green Day.

It's just that their success is why the record companies went out and signed up a buncha sucky copycats.

And record companies suck donkey balls for that tactic.

 

[pallister]

Rancid.

 

[shockey]

the record companies have signed up every copycat since the beginning of time. the legit artists survive, the copycats with little-to-no talent get weeded out. that's the consumer's job. 8) 8) 8)

 

[spaceman]

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10142006/entertainment/hey_ho__let_s_go_entertainment_mary_huhn.htm


Good take in the NYPost.

Good oral history from those who were there.

 

[Trey Beamon]

the record companies have signed up every copycat since the beginning of time. the legit artists survive, the copycats with little-to-no talent get weeded out. that's the consumer's job. 8) 8) 8)

14 million Poison fans can't be wrong. :

I found this list pretty interesting...

http://www.riaa.com/gp/bestsellers/topartists.asp

 

[Dyno]

a sad day indeed. i saw blondie, the ramones and talking heads there in the '70s. good times. :'( :'( :'(

Wow. Am I jealous! I saw the Ramones something like 10 times (RIP Joey), but never got to see them at CBGB. I was only there once and never visited the legendary disgusting bathrooms. Friends of mine lived around the corner from it for years in the 90s, so I used to walk by it regularly. I am really sad about it closing.

 

[shockey]

a sad day indeed. i saw blondie, the ramones and talking heads there in the '70s. good times. :'( :'( :'(

Wow. Am I jealous! I saw the Ramones something like 10 times (RIP Joey), but never got to see them at CBGB. I was only there once and never visited the legendary disgusting bathrooms. Friends of mine lived around the corner from it for years in the 90s, so I used to walk by it regularly. I am really sad about it closing.

sure, you can be jealous. me? i'm just old. not casty/spnited old, but old nonetheless.

 

[spnited]

C'mon, Shockey, you know I'm not as old as Casty!!!

 

[shockey]

C'mon, Shockey, you know I'm not as old as Casty!!!

my apologies. you're both my elders, though, a rarity for me on this board. sorry if pairing you with casty hurts. i'd be honored. 8) 8) 8)

 

[heyabbott]

CBGB’S shuts down this weekend.

There’s not too much left to say about the character of the joint. It’s the most famous rock ’n’ roll club in the world, the most famous that there ever has been, and it’s just as famously a horrendous dump. It’s the archetypal, the ur, dim and dirty, loud, smelly and ugly nowhere little rock ’n’ roll club. There’s one not much different from it in every burg in the country.

Only, like a lot of New York, CBGB’s is more so, way more so. And of course, for three or four years in the mid-70’s, it housed the most influential cluster of bands ever to grow up — or to implicitly reject the concept of growing up — under one roof.

On practically any weekend from 1974 to 76 you could see one or more of the following groups (here listed in approximate chronological order) in the often half-empty 300-capacity club: Television, the Ramones, Suicide, the Patti Smith Group, Blondie, the Dictators, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and the Dead Boys. Not to mention some often equally terrific (or equally pathetic) groups that aren’t as well remembered, like the Miamis and the Marbles and the Erasers and the Student Teachers. Nearly all the members of these bands treated the club as a headquarters — as home. It was a private world. We dreamed it up. It flowered out of our imaginations.

How often do you get to do that? That’s what you want as a kid, and that’s what we were able to do at CBGB’s. It makes me think of that Elvis Presley quotation: “When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.” We dreamed CBGB’s into existence.

The owner of the club, Hilly Kristal, never said no. That was his genius. Though it’s dumb to use the word genius about what happened there. It was all a dream. Many of us were drunk or stoned half our waking hours, after all. The thing is, we were young there. You don’t get that back. Even children know that. They don’t want their old stuff thrown away. Everything should be kept. I regret everything I’ve ever thrown away.

CBGB’s was like a big playhouse, site of conspiracies, orgies, delirium, refuge, boredom, meanness, jealousy, kindness, but most of all youth. Things felt and done the first time are more vivid. CBGB’s is where many things were felt with that vividness. That feeling is the real identity of the club, to me. And it’s horrible, or at least seriously sad, to lose it. But then, apparently, we aren’t really going to lose it.

CBGB’s is going to be dismantled and reconstructed as an exhibit in Las Vegas, like Elvis. I like that. A lot. I really hope it happens as intended.

It’s occurred to me that Hilly’s genius passivity is something he has in common with Andy Warhol. Another trait of Warhol’s was that he fanatically tried to keep or record everything that ever happened in his vicinity, from junk mail in “time capsules” to small talk to newspaper front pages and movie star publicity shots to 24 hours of the Empire State Building.

We all know that nothing lasts. But at least we can make a cool and funny exhibit of it.

I’m serious. God likes change and a joke. God loves CBGB’s.

Richard Hell, a musician, is the author of the novel “Godlike” and the film critic for BlackBook magazine.http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/opinion/14rhell.html?_r=1&oref=slogin