The founder of CBGB, the punk mecca, has died in New York of lung cancer. He was 75. Sad news indeed, coming after the death of post-punk impresario Tony Wilson earlier this month.
Looking more like a lumberjack than a punk rocker, with his bushy beard and ever-present flannel shirt, Mr. Kristal cut an unusual figure as the paterfamilias of the noisy downtown music scene. But for nearly 33 years his club was an incubator for generations of New York rock bands, and performing within its dank, flier-encrusted walls became a bragging right for musicians everywhere.
Thousands of bands played CBGB, from its opening in December 1973 until a dispute with its landlord forced it to close last October. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the bar became by default the headquarters for innovative local groups like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth, who in the club’s early days had few other places to play.
“There was no real venue in 1973 for people like us,” Ms. Smith said in an interview yesterday. “We didn’t fit into the cabarets or the folk clubs. Hilly wanted the people that nobody else wanted. He wanted us.”
Hillel Kristal grew up on a farm in Hightstown, N.J., and studied classical violin as a child. He moved to New York and sang in the chorus at Radio City Music Hall and managed the Village Vanguard before he opened his Bowery bar. A lifelong lover of folk music, he kept an acoustic guitar at his desk and named the club CBGB & OMFUG, an abbreviation for the kind of music he had intended to present there: “country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers.”
But there weren't many of those bands around. There was, however, punk and new wave.
Here's CBGB's history, as written by Mr. Kristal.
CBGB's closed down in the fall of 2006. Here's is my post from that time.
Here's YouTube video of Patti Smith delivering an elegy on Oct. 15, 2006, the last ever live performance at the club.
Ms. Smith had this to say about Kristal and CBGB to Rolling Stone:
Hilly dying made a flood of things come back to me. On that last night [at the club], he knew that we loved him. He stood up and we saluted him. I’m not trying to romanticize anything because in some ways it was a shithole. The sound was crappy, there was always things breaking down and glasses breaking and people vomiting and the rats scurrying around in the back, but it was our shithole and that was the greatest thing. I’ve played a lot of places and it was the only place I’ve ever played that felt like our place. He had put the community on the map. It doesn’t matter where I’ve been in the world, people have CBGBs T-shirts. It’s not just some marketing thing. CBGBs wasn’t just about Hilly or the people who played there or New York City, it represented freedom for young people. To me the name CBGBs could be a slang term at this point meaning freedom. Hilly offered us unconditional freedom.
New York magazine claims to have done the last interview with Kristal, conducted last month:
I have lung cancer and cancer of the bones. I did what I could do. I think the most important thing was keeping CBGB as it was, as long as I could, so that it gave new musicians a chance. That's the main thing. I still could do it. I think the real problem is not my physical problems but that the landlord tripled the rent. He charged $65,000 a month. I couldn't pay it. But I think I probably will open in Las Vegas, and I'll probably do something in Buenos Aires and Tokyo. I'm not going to own them, but they'll have to operate them in the same way I do. I want time for myself. Then from there, who knows.
You have to just keep going. Right now I'm in a situation where I don't have a club, but in five or ten minutes I'm having a meeting with a partner to open a CBGB in Las Vegas. It's been a very difficult thing in the last year, losing the club because of the finances. Actually, we were doing well; it's just one of the mistakes I guess I made was not caring too much about finances. I was more interested in the artistry. And trying to develop other people.
I was very healthy. I didn't think I was gonna get sick.
You have to work hard but not bury yourself in the work. You have to have passion for something you want to do. And you have to work at it. If you don't have the passion for it, I don't know. But you can't neglect making a living. And have to realize as you get older, put that money aside a little bit. Don't let your passion lead you astray. Make sure it's a pragmatic thing. Don't go crazy with lack of success. As you grow up, there are many things in life besides what you do as a living, and you have to take care of yourself. And if you have a wife and children, that's important, very important. You can float away into nowhere into space. Some do that their whole life. Otherwise you just float to nowhere.