Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers
Aaron Wolf
In December of 1973, Hilly Kristal opened a music club at 315 Bowery at Bleecker Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was christened CBGB & OMFUG, which stands for "Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers". A gormandizer is a person devoted to eating and drinking to excess. According to Kristal, it also means "a voracious eater of music” (Kristal). For the first year and a half, the club booked conventional acts that fit its name. But on March 31, 1974, it began to change its standards, transforming CBGBs into one of the most important and influential musical venues in the world. During the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, CBGBs played host to a movement that helped changed the look, sound, and aesthetic direction of both underground and popular music, as well as the face of art and popular culture. The club became the center of an underground revolution in youth culture do to the many bands it provided an outlet for, the most important and well known of those bands; the Ramones.
March 31, 1974 was the first time Television took the stage at CBGBs. Although this night is important in retrospect, it did not appear eventful at the time. The club was less than half full. Those attending were friends of the band, most of which not only didn't pay admission, but were also too poor to purchase drinks. Worse, Kristal thought the band was terrible: screechy, ear-splitting guitars and a jumble of sounds that he just didn't get. Kristal decided “never again.” A few weeks later, though, Television's manager convinced Kristal to let the band play once more, along with a new group called the Ramones. Much more than Television, the Ramones music was brash, fast, and sloppy. Eschewing musical virtuosity, they considered guitar solos self-indulgent and unnecessary.
Unfortunately, this second show mirrored the first: the club was half empty and no one paid admission or bought drinks. Television sounded less then perfect and the Ramones were a mess. Their equipment kept breaking down, they kept stopping and starting songs, and they spent most of their fifteen minute set yelling at each other. This time, however, Kristal was open to the bands returning. Both bands continued to play shows every month, improving in terms of sound and performance, and crowds eventually began to grow. Within a few months, new bands inspired by Television and the Ramones, as well as earlier groups such as The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and The Stooges, also took the stage at CBGBs, including the Patti Smith Group, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Fleshtones, and the Talking Heads. This was the start of a flood of performers of “street music”, as punk acts were initially known, and a scene around CBGBs developed.
The Patti Smith Group's first performance at the club was so well received that Kristal agreed to have them play four nights a week, two sets a night, which turned out to be a seven week stay. Because of Smith's background and notoriety, her audiences were composed of writers, artists, musicians, and other celebrities. It was an unusual crowd, ranging from punks to professors, including Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsburg, Allen Lanier from the Blue Oyster Cult, Lou Reed, John Cale, and many other important musicians.
Responding to the ever-growing crowds, Kristal organized “A Festival of the Top 40 New York Rock Bands,” as he called it, promoting it in such influential publications as the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News. The festival was a success. Major music publications around the US ran articles about the festival, the bands, and their “punk” rock, and even more press and hype followed in the UK. This increasing public recognition attracted recording company executives' interest. Patti Smith was signed to a major label, followed quickly by the Ramones and others.
The Ramones recorded and released their self-titled first album in July of 1976. They travelled to London to fuel the hype in the British press, playing to nearly three thousand people at the Roundhouse. Impressed and inspired by what they saw, many in the young audience were already in bands or would later form bands, contributing to the sound and style of punk. Before the Roundhouse show, a few members of the newly formed Sex Pistols and Joe Stummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, broke into the Ramones dressing room to meet the band. The Sex Pistols told Johnny Ramone that so far they were only rehearsing because they didn't feel that they were good enough to play in public. Johnny replied, “I hope you're coming tonight. We're lousy. We can't play. If you wait until you can play, you'll be too old to get up there. We stink, really. But it's great.” (Chean, 6) By the end of 1977, both the Sex Pistols and the Clash had released their debut LPs, which were well received, especially in the UK.
All over North America and the UK, punk bands were forming, inspired largely by the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols. Over the next few years, hundreds of bands were signed to major labels and released LPs. These records were well received by the punk community, but punk rock never took over the cultural mainstream as the record executives hoped but many in the punk community resisted. The Clash's 1979 album London Calling was the best selling punk LP of the 1970s, and it topped out at 27th on the charts.
The beginning of the 1980s saw an evolution in punk as the subgenre of hardcore emerged. It is characterised by a sound that is thicker, heavier, and faster than 1970s style punk rock, with short, loud, and passionate songs. Though CBGB was a hot spot for touring bands when they came through New York, the scene that kept the bar alive during the 1980s was New York's own underground hardcore scene. Every Sunday afternoon, a matinee "thrash day" show would host a handful of hardcore bands from the afternoon to dinnertime hours. For nearly a decade, this event became a hardcore institution, until Kristal cancelled the event in 1990 due to violence inside and outside in front of the club. With the cancellation of the Sunday matinee CBGBs never really regained its footing and place as a venue for groundbreaking music. It became a venue that acts would play for nostalgic merit over the next decade and a half, still occasionally hosting a few of the bands that had begun their musical careers performing there.
The start of the new millennium did not bring good fortune to CBGBs and one of the key bands to its success. On April 15, 2001, Joey Ramone passed away at age 49, the victim of lymphoma. Little more than a year after Joey's death, Dee Dee Ramone was found dead on June 5, 2002 of a heroin overdose. Johnny Ramone passed away two years later on September 15, 2004 after a long battle with cancer. Soon after, in 2005 a dispute between CBGBs and the Bowery Resident's Committee began over $91,000 in back rent. After the lease expired, the two sides reached an agreement that the club would remain open for fourteen months. On October 15, 2006 CBGBs closed its doors forever at the 315 Bowery locations. Hilly stripped the club completely taking even the walls and urinals with plans to reassemble them at a new location nearly three-thousand miles away in Las Vegas, Nevada. Soon tourists will be able to piss in the same urinal that a member of the Ramones, or Blondie, or Talking Heads might have used, while reading the tags and doodles on the wall.
The influence of the bands of CBGBs will never be forgotten forever changing popular music. Even though punk was not played on Top 40 radio and albums did not often sell outside of their general audience the influence on other bands continues today. In the early 1990s the rise of “grunge” and “alternative” saw many bands emerge into the mainstream that were directly influenced by the punk of the 1970s and 1980s. Bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, the Pixies and later Greenday and Offspring credited these bands to inspire them to form bands. Wearing Ramones of Clash t-shirts and talking about them in the press there was a renewed interest in the punk of the past.
In 2003, Rolling Stone, which many consider the definitive music magazine, published a list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The List included multiple entries from both the Clash (London Calling, No. 8/The Clash, No.77/Sandinista!, No. 404), the Ramones (Ramones, No. 33/Rocket to Russia, No. 105), and Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77, No. 290/Stop Making Sense, No. 345/More Songs About Buildings and Food, No. 382), as well as an appearance by the Sex Pistols (Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, No. 41), Patti Smith (Horses, No. 44), Television (Marquee Moon, No. 128), Blondie (Parallel Lines, No. 140), X (Los Angeles, No. 286), Black Flag (Damaged, No. 340), Buzzcocks (Singles Going Steady, No. 358), Modern Lovers (Modern Lovers, No. 381), Wire (Pink Flag, No. 410), Minutemen (Double Nickels on the Dime, No. 411), Suicide (Suicide, No. 446), Public Image Ltd. (Metal Box, No. 469), Gang of Four (Entertainment!, No. 490), and Husker Du (New Day Rising, No. 495).
A year earlier Spin published a list of the “50 Most Influential Bands” and the Ramones placed second to the Beatles while the Clash were seventh. CBGBs was not only responsible for creating a home for punk but also for hosting band like Blondie and the Talking Heads that contributed to the creation of New Wave which did, unlike punk rock, dominate the airwaves for a large part of the 1980s. These two bands enjoyed commercial success that none of the punk bands of CBGBs obtained.
When Hilly Kristal opened CBGBs in 1973 he did not plan on creating a venue that would transform music, pop culture, and transform the landscape of the Western World. He intended to host country and folk music; he had no intention of hosting a fast, aggressive rock that would alter the political landscape by both actions, words, and by bringing the underground up into the light for the public to see. It couldn’t have happened any where else or at a different time. New York was being abandoned for the suburbs and the city was decaying, leaving only those that could not afford to leave and those that were unable. Within a two-block radius of CBGBs there were six flophouses holding about two thousand men, mostly derelicts, alcoholics, drug addicts, physically impaired or mentally unstable. There were many muggers hanging around the Bowery preying on the old or incapacitated men. It was this climate that created the music, it was an outlet to express frustration and rage the false image of the American Dream created after the Second World War. It was a rejection of authority, and a voice for the youth.
At the time there were nearly no venues for live music in New York. In 1973 Max’s Kansas Club was closed and CBGBs was the only venue located in the Bowery. Rent was cheap and the surrounding buildings were mostly industrial and the people, who did live close by, didn't seem to care too much about having a little rock and roll sound seeping into their lives. It just happened that CBGBs was the right place at the right time, surrounded by a collection of frustrated youth looking for something that was their own.
Work Cited
Chean, Steven. Hey Ho Let’s Go!. New York, New York: Warner Bros. Records Inc. & Rhino Entertainment Company. 1999.
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. Writ. / Dir. Michael Gramaglia & Jim Fields. Rhino Home Video, 2005.
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Ramones: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:1gjyeay04x07~T1
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Sex Pistols: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:aq6wtr69kl2x~T1
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Clash: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:ttxuak1k5m3p~T1
Farber, Sheryl. No Thanks!. New York, New York: Rhino Publishing. 2005.
Kristal, Hilly. The History of CBGB and OHFUG by Hilly Kristal. http://cbgb.com/history1.htm
The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/ 5938174 the_rs_500_greatest_albums_of_all_time/
In December of 1973, Hilly Kristal opened a music club at 315 Bowery at Bleecker Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was christened CBGB & OMFUG, which stands for "Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers". A gormandizer is a person devoted to eating and drinking to excess. According to Kristal, it also means "a voracious eater of music” (Kristal). For the first year and a half, the club booked conventional acts that fit its name. But on March 31, 1974, it began to change its standards, transforming CBGBs into one of the most important and influential musical venues in the world. During the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, CBGBs played host to a movement that helped changed the look, sound, and aesthetic direction of both underground and popular music, as well as the face of art and popular culture. The club became the center of an underground revolution in youth culture do to the many bands it provided an outlet for, the most important and well known of those bands; the Ramones.
March 31, 1974 was the first time Television took the stage at CBGBs. Although this night is important in retrospect, it did not appear eventful at the time. The club was less than half full. Those attending were friends of the band, most of which not only didn't pay admission, but were also too poor to purchase drinks. Worse, Kristal thought the band was terrible: screechy, ear-splitting guitars and a jumble of sounds that he just didn't get. Kristal decided “never again.” A few weeks later, though, Television's manager convinced Kristal to let the band play once more, along with a new group called the Ramones. Much more than Television, the Ramones music was brash, fast, and sloppy. Eschewing musical virtuosity, they considered guitar solos self-indulgent and unnecessary.
Unfortunately, this second show mirrored the first: the club was half empty and no one paid admission or bought drinks. Television sounded less then perfect and the Ramones were a mess. Their equipment kept breaking down, they kept stopping and starting songs, and they spent most of their fifteen minute set yelling at each other. This time, however, Kristal was open to the bands returning. Both bands continued to play shows every month, improving in terms of sound and performance, and crowds eventually began to grow. Within a few months, new bands inspired by Television and the Ramones, as well as earlier groups such as The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and The Stooges, also took the stage at CBGBs, including the Patti Smith Group, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Fleshtones, and the Talking Heads. This was the start of a flood of performers of “street music”, as punk acts were initially known, and a scene around CBGBs developed.
The Patti Smith Group's first performance at the club was so well received that Kristal agreed to have them play four nights a week, two sets a night, which turned out to be a seven week stay. Because of Smith's background and notoriety, her audiences were composed of writers, artists, musicians, and other celebrities. It was an unusual crowd, ranging from punks to professors, including Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsburg, Allen Lanier from the Blue Oyster Cult, Lou Reed, John Cale, and many other important musicians.
Responding to the ever-growing crowds, Kristal organized “A Festival of the Top 40 New York Rock Bands,” as he called it, promoting it in such influential publications as the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News. The festival was a success. Major music publications around the US ran articles about the festival, the bands, and their “punk” rock, and even more press and hype followed in the UK. This increasing public recognition attracted recording company executives' interest. Patti Smith was signed to a major label, followed quickly by the Ramones and others.
The Ramones recorded and released their self-titled first album in July of 1976. They travelled to London to fuel the hype in the British press, playing to nearly three thousand people at the Roundhouse. Impressed and inspired by what they saw, many in the young audience were already in bands or would later form bands, contributing to the sound and style of punk. Before the Roundhouse show, a few members of the newly formed Sex Pistols and Joe Stummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, broke into the Ramones dressing room to meet the band. The Sex Pistols told Johnny Ramone that so far they were only rehearsing because they didn't feel that they were good enough to play in public. Johnny replied, “I hope you're coming tonight. We're lousy. We can't play. If you wait until you can play, you'll be too old to get up there. We stink, really. But it's great.” (Chean, 6) By the end of 1977, both the Sex Pistols and the Clash had released their debut LPs, which were well received, especially in the UK.
All over North America and the UK, punk bands were forming, inspired largely by the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols. Over the next few years, hundreds of bands were signed to major labels and released LPs. These records were well received by the punk community, but punk rock never took over the cultural mainstream as the record executives hoped but many in the punk community resisted. The Clash's 1979 album London Calling was the best selling punk LP of the 1970s, and it topped out at 27th on the charts.
The beginning of the 1980s saw an evolution in punk as the subgenre of hardcore emerged. It is characterised by a sound that is thicker, heavier, and faster than 1970s style punk rock, with short, loud, and passionate songs. Though CBGB was a hot spot for touring bands when they came through New York, the scene that kept the bar alive during the 1980s was New York's own underground hardcore scene. Every Sunday afternoon, a matinee "thrash day" show would host a handful of hardcore bands from the afternoon to dinnertime hours. For nearly a decade, this event became a hardcore institution, until Kristal cancelled the event in 1990 due to violence inside and outside in front of the club. With the cancellation of the Sunday matinee CBGBs never really regained its footing and place as a venue for groundbreaking music. It became a venue that acts would play for nostalgic merit over the next decade and a half, still occasionally hosting a few of the bands that had begun their musical careers performing there.
The start of the new millennium did not bring good fortune to CBGBs and one of the key bands to its success. On April 15, 2001, Joey Ramone passed away at age 49, the victim of lymphoma. Little more than a year after Joey's death, Dee Dee Ramone was found dead on June 5, 2002 of a heroin overdose. Johnny Ramone passed away two years later on September 15, 2004 after a long battle with cancer. Soon after, in 2005 a dispute between CBGBs and the Bowery Resident's Committee began over $91,000 in back rent. After the lease expired, the two sides reached an agreement that the club would remain open for fourteen months. On October 15, 2006 CBGBs closed its doors forever at the 315 Bowery locations. Hilly stripped the club completely taking even the walls and urinals with plans to reassemble them at a new location nearly three-thousand miles away in Las Vegas, Nevada. Soon tourists will be able to piss in the same urinal that a member of the Ramones, or Blondie, or Talking Heads might have used, while reading the tags and doodles on the wall.
The influence of the bands of CBGBs will never be forgotten forever changing popular music. Even though punk was not played on Top 40 radio and albums did not often sell outside of their general audience the influence on other bands continues today. In the early 1990s the rise of “grunge” and “alternative” saw many bands emerge into the mainstream that were directly influenced by the punk of the 1970s and 1980s. Bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, the Pixies and later Greenday and Offspring credited these bands to inspire them to form bands. Wearing Ramones of Clash t-shirts and talking about them in the press there was a renewed interest in the punk of the past.
In 2003, Rolling Stone, which many consider the definitive music magazine, published a list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The List included multiple entries from both the Clash (London Calling, No. 8/The Clash, No.77/Sandinista!, No. 404), the Ramones (Ramones, No. 33/Rocket to Russia, No. 105), and Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77, No. 290/Stop Making Sense, No. 345/More Songs About Buildings and Food, No. 382), as well as an appearance by the Sex Pistols (Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, No. 41), Patti Smith (Horses, No. 44), Television (Marquee Moon, No. 128), Blondie (Parallel Lines, No. 140), X (Los Angeles, No. 286), Black Flag (Damaged, No. 340), Buzzcocks (Singles Going Steady, No. 358), Modern Lovers (Modern Lovers, No. 381), Wire (Pink Flag, No. 410), Minutemen (Double Nickels on the Dime, No. 411), Suicide (Suicide, No. 446), Public Image Ltd. (Metal Box, No. 469), Gang of Four (Entertainment!, No. 490), and Husker Du (New Day Rising, No. 495).
A year earlier Spin published a list of the “50 Most Influential Bands” and the Ramones placed second to the Beatles while the Clash were seventh. CBGBs was not only responsible for creating a home for punk but also for hosting band like Blondie and the Talking Heads that contributed to the creation of New Wave which did, unlike punk rock, dominate the airwaves for a large part of the 1980s. These two bands enjoyed commercial success that none of the punk bands of CBGBs obtained.
When Hilly Kristal opened CBGBs in 1973 he did not plan on creating a venue that would transform music, pop culture, and transform the landscape of the Western World. He intended to host country and folk music; he had no intention of hosting a fast, aggressive rock that would alter the political landscape by both actions, words, and by bringing the underground up into the light for the public to see. It couldn’t have happened any where else or at a different time. New York was being abandoned for the suburbs and the city was decaying, leaving only those that could not afford to leave and those that were unable. Within a two-block radius of CBGBs there were six flophouses holding about two thousand men, mostly derelicts, alcoholics, drug addicts, physically impaired or mentally unstable. There were many muggers hanging around the Bowery preying on the old or incapacitated men. It was this climate that created the music, it was an outlet to express frustration and rage the false image of the American Dream created after the Second World War. It was a rejection of authority, and a voice for the youth.
At the time there were nearly no venues for live music in New York. In 1973 Max’s Kansas Club was closed and CBGBs was the only venue located in the Bowery. Rent was cheap and the surrounding buildings were mostly industrial and the people, who did live close by, didn't seem to care too much about having a little rock and roll sound seeping into their lives. It just happened that CBGBs was the right place at the right time, surrounded by a collection of frustrated youth looking for something that was their own.
Work Cited
Chean, Steven. Hey Ho Let’s Go!. New York, New York: Warner Bros. Records Inc. & Rhino Entertainment Company. 1999.
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. Writ. / Dir. Michael Gramaglia & Jim Fields. Rhino Home Video, 2005.
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Ramones: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:1gjyeay04x07~T1
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Sex Pistols: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:aq6wtr69kl2x~T1
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. The Clash: Biography. http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:ttxuak1k5m3p~T1
Farber, Sheryl. No Thanks!. New York, New York: Rhino Publishing. 2005.
Kristal, Hilly. The History of CBGB and OHFUG by Hilly Kristal. http://cbgb.com/history1.htm
The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/ 5938174 the_rs_500_greatest_albums_of_all_time/
posted by Studies in Audio Culture at 11:12 a.m.
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