You thought all that was left of New York’s legendary rock club CBGB were some tourist T-shirts sold on St. Marks Place and Canal Street in Chinatown? Think again — the legendary dive bar brand that incubated artists like Television, Talking Heads, The Ramones, Blondie, Sonic Youth and Patti Smith is coming back. In the process, it reminds us that the club brands of the 1970s and 1980s remain a potent force in live music, as the industry sees shrinkage in arena gigs and small rooms once again become ascendant.
Some History
First, as to what’s left of CBGB. The original club became a fashion boutique, part of a massive gentrification of the Bowery that was long associated with alcoholic windshield cleaners and flophouses. At one time, the Bowery was someplace you never wanted to go; today, you can’t get into its hip hotels and trendy restaurants without a reservation. Like much else in Manhattan, graffiti-covered CBGB gave way to the irresistible upscaling of the city. But unlike other music venues that fell before it, it left more than just a rentable storefront behind. It turns out that the club’s founder, the late Hilly Kristal, squirreled much of the club’s interior furnishings and décor away in a warehouse across the East River in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn after he closed the club in October 2006. The iconic awning has been donated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but much of the rest of the club’s furnishings, including the tattered bar, tables and wall ornamentia are waiting — like the lost ark at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie — to be pulled out of their crates to rise once again, redolent of cigarette smoke and vomit, to delight audiences that still want to be musically sedated.
The original sound system, considered by many in that prehistoric era to be the best small-venue system around, is also still intact, including a 16-channel Soundcraft Series 2 FOH console, Ampex 16-track 2-inch recording deck, JBL monitors, Crown and Crest amps, run by an assortment of engineers, some of whom are no longer with us, including Josh Wertheimer, Jamie Gorman, Rick Roy, Charlie Martin, Luke Gonzales, Gabby Molotov, Robin Danar, Ron Ardito (RIP) and Norman Dunn (RIP).
The News
The news is that CBGB will be resuscitated as a four-day music festival this month, featuring 300 acts performing at about 30 venues city-wide, from larger stages such as the Central Park SummerStage and Webster Hall, where a hardcore punk show will be headlined by The Cro-Mags, Vision of Disorder and Sick of It All, to small clubs like the Trash Bar in Williamsburg and Living Room on the Lower East Side, not far from CBGB’s original location. There are also plans to re-open CBGB once more as a club somewhere in lower Manhattan, though no firm dates or locations have been reported.
But the larger message here is that, at a time when big-venue ticket sales continue to decline — the box office for Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S., was down 10 percent in 2010, and a slight improvement last year wasn’t enough to avoid a reported net loss of $83 million — more consumers are headed to smaller venues like clubs to hear music. Live Nation is among those betting on just that — it reinvigorated the Irving Plaza brand and bought the House of Blues chain, and AEG Live just acquired the hallowed Hammersmith Apollo venue in London.
New clubs continue to be built in markets across the country, but the value of classic brands like House of Blues and CBGB have increased as music consumers look for quality cues amid a massive tsunami of music let loose by digital production and distribution. Brands that have benefited from this trend include the Blue Note Café, Manhattan’s most iconic jazz venue, which also has outposts in Tokyo, Nagoya and Milan, and once had others in Las Vegas and Seoul, South Korea. The Bottom Line, a kind of grown-up, better-dressed cousin to CBGB a few blocks away on West 3rd St., which closed in 2006 just short of its 40th anniversary after its landlord NYU raised the rent one too many times, is also looking to come back from the dead. And co-founder Allan Pepper told me there are several possible sites in Brooklyn awaiting a bit more capital financing. Like CBGB, the Bottom Line was well-regarded for its live sound system, something Pepper says will once gain be a focus for the club.
An internecine battle between several of Kristal’s heirs that was finally resolved in 2010 illustrates how valuable these classic music marques have become, and how their value continues to increase. The New York Times reported that Kristal’s estate had originally sold the rights to the club’s brand in 2008 for $3.5 million. No prices have been reported for the most recent sale, but that and the buyback and consolidation of the rights by Kristal’s daughter almost certainly has driven the price up well beyond the 2008 figure.
As we move further into an era of a smaller, more cottage-industry music business landscape, certain club brands will take on more importance as filters between music and consumers. They acted in an auxiliary A&R function in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Paul Rothchild discovering the Doors at a show at Whisky a Go Go and signing them to Elektra is just one of the more memorable of what must be thousands of such fateful encounters, and music clubs will have a place in sorting out the massive amount of new music pouring out of spare bedrooms. That responsibility alone will help keep sound system quality a key element in any club strategy. More info at cbgb.com.
