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Hilly Kristal
By Caleb NeelonPhoto By Peter Sutherland
Before punk rock even had a name, Hilly Kristal gave it a home. In 1973, Kristal opened a club on the Skid Row of America, New York City’s Bowery, and named it CBGB & OMFUG, one acronym for the types of the music he hoped to attract—country, bluegrass, and blues—and a second to leave things open for the unexpected: other music for uplifting gormandizers, i.e. people who wished to indulge their taste for good music. CBGB failed to attract the C, BG, and B. Instead, a more edgy crowd of musicians came looking for gigs. The term “punk rock” was a few years away – Kristal called it “street music” until then.
CBGB soon became the home of a movement, as the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Television, and the Dead Boys all came to consider the club their base. In the three decades since, hundreds of rock luminaries have passed through and played the club, along with thousands of bands that went nowhere but were given a chance nonetheless.
What made CBGB so successful at showcasing new talent was, in part, the fact that new talent could find CBGB. Kristal’s success as a club owner, as he explains, was due to “something that I don’t talk about – making ourselves accessible. Anybody could reach us right here at the door, and that’s very important. We made ourselves available to people.”
It didn’t matter that the club was located amid (and under) flophouses, and in a bad part of town: CBGB’s existence in the mid ‘70s made it a rarity and a natural focus of young bands’ attention. Disco was at its peak, the folk and coffeehouse boom of the ‘60s had died out, and rock music was geared towards arena shows heavy on spectacle. CBGB was one of the only places, even in a city as large as New York, where a regular band could play. Kristal made certain that the music at his club was the band’s own, as well. “I made them do original music. I didn’t ask them to play original music; I made them play original music. It didn’t guarantee creativity,” he recalls with a laugh, “but it’s a start!”
Kristal was born in 1931 on a farm in central New Jersey, and as a boy studied violin and opera. After a stint in the Marines, he arrived in New York, where he found work in the late ‘50s singing at Radio City Music Hall on stage with the Rockettes, as well as in the Beatnik coffeehouse folk circuit, among other gigs. In 1959, he got a job managing the Village Vanguard, which was well on its way to legendary status as a jazz club. The first acts under his tenure were Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, and he would go on to work with nearly every jazz luminary of the era. By the late ‘60s, Kristal was ready to open his own club, and after a handful of tries founded CBGB.
Despite 33 years of rock ‘n’ roll history, CBGB’s future is today uncertain at best. New York City real estate is an ugly business – ask anyone who has ever gone through the apartment-hunting process in Manhattan. Developers are well on their way to transforming the Bowery’s notorious flophouses into luxury lofts, and in the process CBGB has lost a battle for survival against, of all things, the non-profit homeless outreach organization that happens to be the club’s landlord. As much as we may hate to see CBGB in a new venue, or in Las Vegas, as has been seriously discussed, it may well happen despite the efforts of Hilly Kristal and everyone on his side of the struggle.
There are few people who have been on hand for so much of the history of 20th-century music, and it’s more remarkable still that Hilly Kristal has never been interested in cashing in on his legacy. The club never made very much money, always booked plenty of unknown acts that stayed unknown, and, at least of late, has been supported largely by T-shirt sales. It doesn’t bother Kristal. “I’m sitting here looking out on the Bowery and what it’s been for 33 years. I don’t know if it’s greed and wanting more money—and in this city people always want more—but I never did. My main purpose was to find new bands, new artists. I say ‘I,’ but it was ‘we,’ everyone here at CBGB. That’s what it’s about.”