Various – CBGB – A New York City Soundtrack
CBGB mythology tends to calcify around the same five names – Television, Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads – the pantheon that debuted within fifteen months of each other between 1974 and 1975. Some I love (Ramones, Suicide, The Cramps), and some I’d happily never hear again (Talking Heads, Patti Smith). But the thing this Cherry Red box set reminds you almost accidentally, is that even the acts I can’t stand were outsiders first. They were weirdos with tribes, and CBGB was the one room in New York where those tribes could gather without being laughed out of the building. Jimmy Destri wasn’t being poetic when he said, “CBGB was a place for the dirty people.”
Grumpy old Hilly Kristal didn’t build a scene; he accidentally left the door open. In December 1973, he changed the name of his roots‑music bar from Hilly’s to CBGB & OMFUG and switched to booking “mostly rock bands” despite not liking half of them. His reaction to the Ramones says it all: “No-one is going to like you guys, but I’ll have you back.” There’s your mythology – not genius, not vision, just complete indifference.
The big names are here because they have to be – CBGB is shorthand for them now, and Cherry Red knows how to sell a clamshell box. But the real story is in the shadows, in the bands who never got the record deals, never outgrew the Bowery, never became T‑shirt logos. The ones who stayed weird. The ones who sounded like they were playing for an audience of six, and five of them were in the band.
You hear it immediately on Disc One. The Dictators open with their eternal teenage‑delinquent smirk, but it’s the Harlots of 42nd Street and Magic Tramps – two S&M‑themed glam casualties – who remind you that CBGB wasn’t born punk; it was born sleazy. These bands weren’t proto‑anything; they were avant-taste and post-rejection. The Brats, City Lights, The Hounds, and Erasers all sound like they’re playing for their own tiny tribes, not for history, which was precisely the case. Stuart’s Hammer’s live track is pure Bowery chaos, the kind of performance where you can just about hear the room ordering drinks with their backs turned. The Planets’ unreleased cut feels like a band that existed for exactly one night and one hangover. Milk ’N’ Cookies bring listless handclaps and bubblegum desperation; Just Water sound like they’re trying to write an earnest hit while trying to hold the ceiling up above them and rats nip at their tattered shoes. Mumps bring a camp bolshy stomp and a dance craze that lasted the length of one song; Testors bring proto‑hardcore nihilism, whilst The Senders drag bar‑band R&B through a puddle of piss. Tuff Darts sound like they mugged Status Quo.
Disc Two is where the real freaks start crawling out. Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’ still terrifies, a testament to a band that called themselves punk back when it was treated as a homophobic slur. Tidal waves of glass ashtrays (and in Scotland, an axe) couldn’t deter them. Pure Hell – one of the first Black punk bands – tear through ‘I Feel Bad’ like they’re trying to burn down the genre. Helen Wheels snarls through ‘Room To Rage’, despite it sounding like it was recorded on a turnip; Mars drag you into the no‑wave basement where rhythm goes to die, metal-legged centipedes Riverdancing over the guitar strings with a gun pointed to their heads. Yet, in this seemingly untamable environment, there were still acts like Mink DeVille, with singer Willy DeVille‘s garbage can balladeering somehow sounding dangerous, love songs with a tendency to mug you.
The Heat is one of many bands featured through which the spirit of Bowie floats like a glam poltergeist; The Stilettos, Debbie Harry‘s pre-Blondie band, have elements of rat-tailed cabaret and Shangri-La finger-wagging, beautifully messy. Also on the lighter side are The Paley Brothers bubblegum goblins seemingly appearing at the venue for a dare. New York Ni**ers‘ ‘Just Like Dresden’ has, unsurprisingly, the subtlety of a brick through your face. The Laughing Dogs have a power pop engine so powerful that singer Ronny Carle sounds like he’s trying to sing the whole song in one breath. Great to see Shrapnel included, the pre-Monster Magnet outfit of Dave Wyndorf, also featuring Daniel Rey, collaborator with The Ramones, L7 and many others. Peroxide, who sound like they’ve been huffing hairspray and drinking toilet duck, have an endearingly childish, “Fuck off oldies” schtick, which would sound rubbish if sung by a British band but works perfectly here.
Disc Three, and The Cramps’ ‘Garbage Man’ is a manifesto for every swamp‑brained outsider who ever crawled onto that stage. Love of Life Orchestra and Polyrock cut through the Ramones-alikes and Television decipals with avant-garde minimalism and creeping electricity – the latter featuring Philip Glass. Lounge Lizards play a similar trick, gipping keyboards threatening to vomit yesterday’s burger over slutty synths. Outsets noir‑funk comes from a place only a musician raised in Guantanamo Bay and playing classical bassoon could, Ivan Julian one of a slew of African Americans on this set, a reflection of the melting pot of a city which did little to embrace race outside of venues like CBGBs. R.L. Crutchfield’s Dark Day‘s ‘Arp’s Carpet’ feels like it could have been the backing for a chase sequence in a ‘Driller Killer’ sequel, should they have a day off from shoplifting apostrophes. It wasn’t all punk, power pop and jazzy noodling – DNA were one of a handful of bands pioneering ‘No Wave’, the ultimate defiance of commercial whoredom. Phosphenes‘ ‘Asexual’, unreleased until now, has a murderous gait, though guitarist Bob Pezzola didn’t hang about and concentrated on his other band, Swans. Minor Threat rounds things up, not sounding as incendiary as you might expect, simply as they walked in such peculiar footsteps.
We’re comfortably into the 80s with Disc Four, the settling of the dust, which still harboured some very strange bugs. Bush Tetras twitch and stab their way through “Things That Go BOOM In The Night”; Human Switchboard bring a nervy frightened organ to the party, which it turns out is spiking the drinks; Disturbed Furniture, The Necessaries, and Chemicals Made From Dirt prove that the weirdest bands often had the best names. James Blood Ulmer, a South Carolina guitarist taught by Ornette Coleman, need only use his backstory as a descriptor, and even then it’s even better than you’d imagine. Talking of ‘getting what it says on the tin’, Nihilistics were led by a former morgue attendant called Ron Rancid – ‘You’re to Blame’, of course, barely lasts over a minute. Beastie Boys are still in ‘Egg Raid on Mojo’ era, and you might think that an unassuming name like Rhys Chatham heralds a softer moment of reflection before the big push towards the box set’s end, but no – we only get an edited version of ‘Drastic Classicism’, an overture for four guitars tuned to the key of H and plugged into the toaster.
God knows, it isn’t all good. Khmer Rouge are a dead seagull rotting in the garden of the poor cousin of Joy Division; China Shop jangles with no jingles, and Nona Hendryx (yes, the one from Labelle) simply doesn’t fit on a compilation even as diverse as this. Great track though, lots of Grace Jones posing and sex club chic. It’s the most political content on the set, with Bad Brains and Reagan Youth reminding you that hardcore wasn’t noise for the sake of it, but noise for anguish’s sake. Heart Attack and Outpatients bring teenage fury; Vatican Commandos bring suburban nihilism; Sonic Youth close the circle, sounding like the city’s steel beams vibrating in sympathy. Jeff & Jane Hudson revel in cold‑wave paranoia (another video nasty score in waiting); Glorious Strangers‘ ghostly skewed whispers evokes thoughts of X gurgling in the bathtub. The Ordinaires end it all with, stealing from the excellent sleeve notes, “Chamber rock with two violins, two saxes, a cello, no singer, and polyrhythmic time signatures.
By any standards, not the conclusion you’d expect, but isn’t that just the point? What you hear across these four discs is the sound of a room that didn’t care what you were supposed to be. Wrong, loud, sloppy, brilliant, derivative, transcendent, embarrassing, you were all allowed time to find your people, even if it was just a handful of oddballs. I mean, they had to be oddballs. If you came here for tooth-sucking critique, or, ye gods, success, you’d misjudged things significantly.
CBGB’s official name – Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers – was a joke no one understood and now exists purely as a pub quiz question. The people mattered more than the music; the music was nothing without the attitude; the attitude was nothing without the belief.
Daz Lawrence