A fond farewell to CBGB & OMFUG
By: Hank Kalet
The passing into history of a famous punk-rock club would seem a cultural irony.
Think about it: Punk rock was the music of the anti-establishment, a music designed specifically to tear down pomp and ceremony, a music that the critic Greil Marcus once said was a grand, shouted "No" to the world that in its grand negation created something new.
It was not a music that was expected to last.
And yet, 30-plus years after the music that became known as punk began germinating in various local scenes around the world, we are mourning the demise of a New York club that helped give rise to the movement.
As I said, it is the height of cultural irony.
The club, CBGB & OMFUG (an acronym for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers), closed its doors Sunday to a level of pomp and circumstance seemingly out of character with the music the club was famous for presenting.
Patti Smith, the legendary punk poet, played the club’s final show, backed by guitarist Richard Lloyd of the great band Television, putting on a performance that both harkened back to the club’s punk heyday and stood as its eulogy.
"Patti Smith finished the club’s final concert with her ballad ‘Elegie,’ growing teary-eyed as she read a list of dead punk-rock musicians and advocates," Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday. "But in the previous song she had worked up a galvanizing crescendo from poetry recitation to rock song to guitar-charged incantation in a medley of ‘Horses’ and ‘Gloria,’ proclaiming with a triumphant rasp, "Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But not for CBGB’s."
I have to say, I wish I was there or had gotten to the club at some point during the club’s 34-year history.
I never made it to the legendary club, though the music it presented on a nightly basis was the music that made up the soundtrack for my late teens and early 20s. Ms. Smith and Television perhaps the smartest and most poetic of the bands associated with the punk movement were regulars on the CBGB stage, as were the Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, Mink DeVille and so many other bands that helped rescue me from the inanity that was late-1970s rock radio.
I remember hearing the Deadboys brutal "Sonic Reducer," thinking that it was like nothing else out there with its rapid-heartbeat rhythm, growled shout of a vocal and a lyric that combined nihilistic defiance with Timothy Leary escapism.
It was an ugly sound, but explosive and brilliant, an underground rock classic that deserves the kind of airplay on classic rock radio usually reserved for lightweight bands like Journey.
The Deadboys shared this defiant edge with their English counterparts, but were very much a New York punk band, an American band.
New York punk was a very different animal than its English cousin. There tended to be less thrash and more of an angular sound, a more poetic style to the lyrics. Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Television’s Tom Verlaine wrote lyrics that borrowed from the French symbolists the Comte de Lautremont, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, while bands like the Contortions and James Black and the Whites (actually variations on the same band) experimented with free jazz and something called no jazz, an almost nonlinear approach that created a jagged, dispeptic sound.
The music, in general, was stripped bare and bore no resemblance to the stadium-rock bands that were making the circuit while I was in high school.
New York punk used rock’s still relatively short history as a canvas on which to experiment. It was pure irony, in the literary sense Blondie played the girl-group card, singing a sped-up, Ronette-style pop-rock, but with a tougher edge. (On the band’s first, self-titled album, lead singer Debbie Harry sings "She’s so dull, come on rip her to shreds" about the ultimate groupie in thrall to fashion.)
At the same time, it was a music that had a deep connection to the past. Bands like the Dictators wrote muscular songs that mimicked 1960s teen culture their song "(I Live for) Cars and Girls" is a classic of the punk genre as did the Ramones with their tongue-in-cheek, leather-clad New York rewrites of the Beachboys.
The effect was to undercut the various rock clichés being used. Girl-group songs tended to be written from the perspective of a girl under the spell of her guy, completely dependent on him for her identity (think of "Leader of the Pack"); Blondie sings from the perspective of petty jealousy but with a knife. The romantic, love-will-last-forever attitude, in Blondie’s hands, became an obsessive quest for momentary happiness.
"Punk-rock never promised that it was built to last," Mr. Pareles wrote Tuesday. "The songs always seemed ready to self-destruct; simple and brief, they were often just three chords and a burst of frustration or pugnacity or humor. Some of the musicians were self-destructive, too. Yet punk, as codified by the Ramones, has turned out to fulfill some perennial adolescent need, and it persisted."
And it persists in a way that so much of the music made during the same time has not ironic, to be sure, but a testament to the music those rock dropouts made.
So while CBGB’s is gone, its rebellious spirit will live on in the music.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail, or through his weblog, Channel Surfing.

