I try my best not to be too terribly sentimental about things. I understand that, no matter how much we might try to stop it from happening, everything changes. I know, eventually, everything wonderful and meaningful is destroyed and replaced.
As I’ve discussed here before, though, there are certain things I find it difficult to let go of. And one of those things is CBGB, the filthy, little East Village bar where a disproportionate number of my favorite bands got their start. I’m not sure why I’m so invested in the legacy of a bar that I never even stepped foot inside of until a decade after it stopped being relevant, but I can’t help it. And, I should add, I know it wasn’t by any means a paradise, even during its heyday. But, for some reason, I’ve invested a lot of myself in the mythology of this place, where outcasts and artists came together to launch an assault against the prevailing corporate culture of the day. [The building, I think, should have been preserved at Greenfield Village, right alongside Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and the Wright brothers bicycle shop. Instead it now houses an upscale clothing store.]
I didn’t leave Georgia for New Jersey until ’78, and, by then, all of the good stuff at CBGB, which was about a 50 minute drive away from where my parents decided to move us, had pretty much already happened. Punk, by then, was evolving into something different. The bands like the Ramones, Television, and Talking Heads, all of whom would come to mean so much to me in my later adolescence, were already giving way to the next wave, led by the likes of the Sex Pistols. And that wasn’t really my scene, at least in the fourth grade. [I can still remember being glued in horror to my friend David Spivey’s television set suburban Atlanta, watching news coverage in January ’78 of the Sex Pistols arriving downtown to start their their U.S. tour. In retrospect, David and I should have hauled our ten year old asses down there and been part of history, but, at the time, I was absolutely terrified at the thought of them being just a few miles away.] But, as a kid growing up relatively isolated in rural New Jersey, this music, and the mythology of CBGB, would come to mean the world to me.
At any rate, the evolution of CBGB is something that I’ve lamented here several times in the past, marking with outrage each poorly executed step in the commoditization of this thing that I perceived to be so important. Here’s an excerpt from something I wrote a few years after the bar closed its doors in 2006, as CBGB’s “unwinding into nothingness” accelerated.
…Now, of course, Hilly is dead, as are many of the people who helped make CBGB infamous, and the bar itself is an upscale clothing store, where you can buy $165 t-shirts. I suppose the beauty of life is that it’s always evolving, and I guess that’s especially true in New York. Change happens. And that’s how a little country, bluegrass and blues dive came to be home to some of the most important artists of the late 20th century. While it breaks my heart a bit to see the whole thing unwind into nothingness like this, I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that nothing good last forever. And that’s probably for the best. All we can hope for is that, on occasion, we’re around when one of these fleeting opportunities to arise from that nothingness presents itself, and nudges us all onto a slightly different, more interesting course. And that, I think, is what happened 40 years ago in New York…
Well, apparently I hadn’t really come to terms with it after all… Today, as I was looking at this photos from the East Village Grieve, I found myself right back in the same place that I was about half a dozen years ago, when I’d first heard that Nordstrom was selling official, $100 CBGB t-shirts.
If it’s not clear from the photos, these are images of a new Target store that opened yesterday at 14th Street and Avenue A, in the East Village, not far from what CBGB once stood. As you can see, the faux, 70’s era streetscape they’ve incorporated in their design is built around a sterile, white version of the venue’s iconic awning, on which “CBGB” has been replaced by “TRGT.”
Beneath “TRGT,” as you can see above, it says “BANDS.” From what I just read on the Stereogum site, this was explained inside, where Target employees were handing out “free boxes of Target-branded Band-Aids and exercise bands.” And, continuing the theme, they also apparently had a giant fake Target-red guitar outside that you could take your photo with wile wearing a foam “rock on” hand over your own. [I think it would have been more appropriate if they’d had an inflatable Stiv Bators that you could have performed fellatio on, but what do I know.]
I don’t have anything to add. I just wanted to note it in the official record that this had happened.
In conclusion, I’ll just say this… Everything gets destroyed. The lucky ones are those who live long enough to see it happen to that which they loved.
As for the commoditization, I guess it’s just the nature of capitalism. If I were so inclined, I could see some beauty in the fact that what happened at CBGB in the mid-70s is still reverberating over 40 years later. I’m not seeing it, though. From my vantage point, they’re just stripping off the veneer, pressure-washing it with bleach, and repackaging it for a generation of mindless, professional consumers. And that makes me incredibly sad, as, to a large extent, what happened at CBGB was a direct response to the corporate influence over popular culture.
