Nooooooooo!!!!

Heaven or Las Vegas?

www.guardian.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Laura Barton on what the closure of the world's most famous punk-rock club, CBGB's, says about the state of New York's live music scene.

Friday July 08 2005

The walls used to drip. The crowd used to jostle and sweat.

On stage, Joey Ramone would strut and swagger through the barest of sets. This was CBGB's, mid-1970s, in its lean and thrusting prime, when punk rock was music's indigestible gristle, igniting the dirty backstreets and underground clubs of New York and London. Now CBGB's, the most famous punk club in history, is set to close.

The crude-sounding abbreviations of CBGB/OMFUG have long intrigued the masses. The wholesome explanation is: Country Bluegrass Blues/Other Music for Uplifting Gormandisers. Though Hilly Kristal, founder of the club, intended CBGB's to be a home for bluegrass and folk - indeed, its initial performances boasted acts such as the Con Fullum Band, Elly Greenberg and the Wretched Refuse String Band - it soon became the habitat of the squally experimental bands of the hour. Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and, most famously, the Ramones formed an almost umbilical link with the club.

CBGB's opened in December 1973. In a decade grown fat on Jethro Tull, it offered a cadaverous, alley-cat cool, its bands playing sets that weighed in at a skinny 15 minutes. The club skulked on the edge of New York's seamiest side, an area of the city that is only now beginning to buckle under the forces of regeneration and fashion. Visit today in daylight hours and you'll find the usual row of bar-proppers hunched over early beers, shelves of CBGB-branded merchandise and walls thick with graffiti, stickers and dirt. Outside, patrons of the homeless shelter next door clutter about on the pavement.

It is the homeless shelter that has perhaps been the undoing of CBGB's. The Bowery Residents' Committee runs the building and is CBGB's landlord, and the relationship between the two has been tempestuous, largely owing to the club's flagrant contravention of health and safety regulations and a somewhat blase attitude to rent payment. Next month, the club's lease is up, and the BRC wants to raise the rent to something more appropriate for a district in the pink of regeneration - a sum rumoured to be double the current amount, and certainly enough to make Kristal splutter.

So, now that all the Save CBGB's campaigns have been waged and the club's threats to up sticks to Las Vegas shrugged off, it looks as though CBGB's role in the New York live scene is finally over. It has been some while, however, since CBGB's was right at the throb of the New York scene, and its closure comes amid wider suspicion that the city's - or, more particularly, Manhattan's - live music scene is dwindling away. Indeed, much of it has relocated to the more fashionable and remote quarters of Williamsburg, leaving the city to the fat cats and the tourists. Some even argue that the nation's West Coast scene is today more vibrant than that of New York.

Some claim the end of CBGB's is overdue, and that its continued existence has been symptomatic of a current flabbiness in punk rock; that punk, once the great exhorter of annihilation, of ripping up and starting again, has reached an age where it can grow attached to its family heirlooms. Would it really be fitting to shift CBGB's to Vegas, to pickle and preserve it as one of America's great cultural artefacts, as a place where tourists can take time out from the casinos and Celine Dion concerts to visit this freakshow museum of sorts and buy their branded punk-rock memorabilia?

Far better, perhaps, to hope CBGB's dies before it gets old.