CBGB's: Leaves Home

Glad to see you
Go go go
Goodbye

Glad to see you
Go go go
Goodbye

Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye


The Ramones,
"Glad to See You Go"


Sunday night was the last evening of live music at CBGB's. The New York Times has mucho plenty coverage, and there's more here, here, and here. It's a relief to have it over with, though. The club hasn't produced any significant music in more than twenty years and, while memories are nice, this several-month-long sendoff has assumed an aura of positively bourgeois sentimentality. Patti Smith called the closing "a symptom of the empty new prosperity of our city" -- but, for the last few years, I've found the CBGB t-shirts that have been so popular among NYU students and other young residents of the recent, upwardly-mobile Downtown to be a far more emblematic symptom of such "prosperity." With each day I find myself a little more skeptical that a genuine counterculture has ever existed in postwar America, but I suppose that, for a few years in the 1970s, at least, CBGB's represented the idea that something good could come of not fitting into a conformist and increasingly prefabricated society. Not a revolution, certainly -- in fact it was the beginning of a new brand of conformism -- but for a little while, it seems, there was a flicker of hope.

So, as Lester Bangs once said of John Lennon: Good-bye, baby, and amen.


P.S. Richard Hell is looking forward to a CBGB's afterlife in Vegas. ("CBGB’s is going to be dismantled and reconstructed as an exhibit in Las Vegas, like Elvis. I like that. A lot. I really hope it happens as intended.") In a way, I suppose, the punk rock uniform -- leather jacket, tattoos, ripped jeans, piercings, optional mohawk -- already has an ersatz, mask-like quality that is reminiscent of the Elvis-impersonator. Perhaps one day the people who dress like this will be called punk rock impersonators...