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Gormandizer, Uplifted

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posted 08/30/2007

Better to Burn

Hilly Kristal was Googling, and re-Googling, the name of his club. "See, now it says [number] matches," he said to the woman sitting across from him. He tapped the screen a couple times, let his finger slide down.

This was October 29th, 2006, two weeks after Patti Smith and her band and her guests and a room full-to-bursting with well-wishers stopped by for one last stomp on consecrated ground. Places have power. If you don't believe that, then you've never gotten close to the bathrooms at CBGB's.

The awning had been removed before that show had ended - just after the news conference and before some souvenir-hound could grab it; someone had already spray painted "CBGB's Forever" behind its frame. The white steel shudders pulled down on either side of the door had been markered up with quotes and curses and slogans and band names, a thin impersonation of the walls inside. Now those walls - thirty-plus years of graff/scratch/sticker/signaturiti - were on their way to Nevada, along with the stage, the bar, the dressing rooms, the toilets. There were moving blankets stacked up out front, furniture dollies leaning against the building. The door was open. I walked in.

"Hilly was like, ‘What kinda music do you play?'" Richard Lloyd. He and Tom Verlaine had been looking for a place their band might get regular gigs, find a following. Television. "We said, ‘Well, what does CBGB-OMFUG stand for?' He said, ‘Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.' So we said, ‘Oh, yeah, we play a little of that, a little rock, a little country, a little blues, a little bluegrass..."

"I thought the band was terrible," Kristal remembered.

The woman asked me not to take any pictures, but there really wasn't anything to take pictures of. The whole shape of the club had been carted out, already, and what was left was an empty, long room. Some junk, some dangling wires. An electric drill was going, somewhere. Gone.

I didn't know Hilly Kristal. There was no reason I would have. I saw him, occasionally, when I went to his club. I heard what everyone else who didn't know him heard, that some bands weren't happy with this or that, dismissive complaints that he'd squandered opportunities and let a once-proud legacy lapse, that he'd faded from club-runner and band manager to museum shop curator. But thirty-three years is nothing to sneeze at, in this town, in that industry. It's not as if the music didn't change, over that time, or like CB's hadn't had more than one wave of success.

The same people who are worried about legacies are really worried about George Washington Slept Here bullshit; they look down their noses at the Colin Farrells of the world wearing the club T, but they're made of the exact same stuff. Sure, everyone can rattle off the All-Stars - and I will, again, in a second - but those six bands didn't play every set 365 days a year for however long you think The Golden Age lasted. One of the most amazing things about CBGB was that its first major band was one the club owner thought was terrible. And that band got a weekly slot. CBGB's was a place you could get up on stage even if you sucked. Good Jesus, that's important.

So after looking at all the nothing that was left, last October, I shook Kristal's hand and thanked him for letting us use his place for all those years. And then said something lame, like, "So, Vegas, huh?"

"Downtown," he grumbled. "Not on the strip. Downtown Las Vegas." A long pause and then: "Maybe we'll be back."

Which got me thinking. If you know your myths and religions and whatnot, you know that the desert is where the hero goes to find enlightenment. There's some fasting and some really nifty hallucinations, then he staggers out crazypowerful, changes the world. So what if a year or two passes and suddenly there's this amazing thing happening out of Nevada? These kids - who just needed someplace to hide from the neon and the all-U-can-eats, and someone willing to let them be terrible for a bit - come together and save the fucking Rock and Roll Music all over again! Wouldn't that be swell?!

It's not going to happen here! We don't need it! WE NEED LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS.

Hilly Kristal died Tuesday. Lung cancer. He was 75.

They're all in there, too many of them. That's Patti Smith at the end of that last night, with Lenny Kaye (of course) and the rest of her band, and with Richard Lloyd (who is hopefully recovering, hopes and prayers go his way).

Handsome Dick Manitoba says goodbye.

Some words from Bad Brains.

Patti Smith: "When he fell asleep, we never had to be quiet."

A good excuse to feel guilty about enjoying a serious wallow through bootlegs and YouTube clips. I'll keep it to a minimum, maybe.

Take it Dee Dee! All recorded in the house that Hilly ran. Predictable, perhaps, but worthy. The Dead Boys have slowly become one of my favorite groups, and that intro is priceless. And this version of "Psycho Killer" is so clean and sharp that I suspect its source is a lie. But I'm willing to lie to myself, too.

The quality on these is abysmal, but I'm just sort of happy they exist. Taped during a four-day stand in the club during May of 1978 - I know, it looks about 3,000 years old - these are those Dead Boys (whom Hilly managed), holding a benefit for their knifed-almost-to-death drummer Johnny Blitz (see pages 314-323 of Please Kill Me). That's John Belushi on drums in the second song in the first clip; Divine joins them for a Dolls cover in the second.

Something I stumbled over a while ago. It's not from CBGB's, it's from an AIDS benefit at Coney Island High. Ronnie Spector and Joey Ramone doing Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory." And yeah, it's a bummer that "Be My Baby" gets cut off.