The letters on the awning were never a joke. CBGB stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues. The club opened at 315 Bowery on December 10, 1973, built to book exactly that.
The Bowery wasn't the strip of hotels and condos it is today. In 1973 it was skid row, lined with flophouses and men sleeping in doorways. A club booking banjo pickers down there was already a strange bet before a single band walked in.
Hilly Kristal opened it with his ex-wife, Karen. The full name painted on the awning was CBGB and OMFUG: Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers. A gormandizer eats too much. That was Kristal's own joke about people who consume music the same way, and it's the one piece of the name that actually stuck. Most retellings still misspell that last word "Gourmandizers." The awning read Gormandizers, exactly the way Kristal meant it.
The plan was country, bluegrass, blues and poetry readings on the Bowery.
What Actually Walked In
The Ramones and Blondie showed up instead. So did Talking Heads, who had formed at the Rhode Island School of Design before anyone in the band had set foot on the Bowery. Patti Smith came right behind them. Within a couple of years, the room built for banjos was the birthplace of American punk, and none of the bands that made it famous had much to do with the three genres painted on the sign.
The room earned its own mythology along the way. The bathroom and the graffiti-scrawled walls got almost as famous as the bands that played there. By the time it closed, those walls were caked in decades of show flyers and stickers, layered thick enough to work as a rough timeline of who had passed through.
Kristal never changed the awning. For thirty-three years, the most important punk club in the country advertised itself as a country bar. Nobody ever bothered to fix it.
The Last Night
CBGB closed on October 15, 2006, after Kristal lost a long rent fight with the building's landlord, the Bowery Residents' Committee, a nonprofit that ran homeless services out of the same building. Patti Smith played the final show. She didn't rush it. Past one in the morning, she closed with "Elegie" and read out the names of musicians who had died.
The space didn't stay empty for long. A John Varvatos store moved in two years later, in 2008, and kept a stretch of the original graffiti-covered wall visible behind glass, like a display case for something that used to just be the bathroom line.
Thirty-three years after it opened for country music.
One More Thing
Four months before CBGB opened its doors, a sixteen-year-old named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. She needed money for school clothes. Her brother ran the turntables. His name was Clive Campbell, better known today as DJ Kool Herc, often called hip hop's founding father for what happened behind those turntables that night. That party is recognized as the birth of hip hop.
August 1973 in the Bronx. December 1973 on the Bowery. New York invented two entire genres in the same year, in two rooms, four months apart, and nobody in either one knew what they were starting.
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