Matt Gedye

That Time I Didn’t Go To CBGBs

It wasn’t called CBGBs anymore. I’m a child of the 90s, so the CBGB hayday ended almost two decades before I was born. Nonetheless, I ventured to the Lower East Side in Manhatten. The Bowery. East Village. I had to see it for myself.

I’d known for years that the club no longer existed. But I naively thought that the area would serve as a kind of homage to the origins of American punk. In some ways it does. I passed a street sign reading “Joey Ramone Place.” Today though, CBGBs is a shop selling absurdly over-priced clothing like $1000 jackets. I probably would have gone in had it been open. It was about 10:30am. Too early for the proprietor who opened the doors at 11. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I had a teacher in high school who refused to watch The Lord of The Rings, despite a love for the story, because he didn’t want the images in his mind, conjured from reading the books many times, to be distorted by someone else’s vision. My vision of CBGB, from what I’ve read, looks very different to what I saw when I peered in through the window.

I would have loved to have been a student in New York City in the mid to late 70s, immersed in this underground music scene. In my mind I try and compare what it must have been like with Melbourne’s indie rock culture from the early 2010s. Indie music (particularly rock) of course, owes its existence to those early punk rockers and their DIY ethic. No major record labels and outlandish marketing. It’s fascinating to me to think about the CBGB era as the beginnings of punk, despite none of those early acts playing what we might think of as punk music. Over the Atlantic at the same time, Sex Pistols and The Clash were definitely punk rockers. But Television and Patti Smith had already transcended beyond punk, playing a kind of art-rock or post-punk. They were so ahead of their time.

I could have waited for the shop to open. I knew from Google searches that a single wall remains inside that old building with newspaper cutouts all over it from CBGB’s glory days. The more spiritual side of me wanted to walk inside in a fleeting attempt to feel the presence of the icons of the era who have since passed on. All founding members of The Ramones, or Tom Verlaine who only that January had transcended the physical world to join the other guitar gods in immortality. Maybe they were there and they guided me away, allowing me to preserve an untarnished memory of something I’ve never actually seen.

I went in search of a mural of Patti Smith I knew to be nearby. It had been replaced with one of KRS-One. Dejected, I started the long walk all the way back to the Upper West Side. To add insult to injury, the humidity of that warm July day had driven the temperature right up and I couldn’t escape the smell of urine. Where are people who walk their dogs in this giant, famous city supposed to take them to relieve themselves? Not everyone lives by Central Park. I hoped that explained the smell. One the other side of the road, drug addicts were hurling verbal tirades at passers by.

As I exited the area, taking a turn on a street I can’t remember the name of to find a record store I wanted to visit, I saw two others making the pilgramage to CBGBs. Two German girls, one of whom was wearing a similar Television shirt to what I was. They were too engrossed in conversation to notice. I wondered what they would think.

This was my second trip to New York, but my first since living in the US. My wife and I went in July, 2023 only 4 or so months before our son was born.

P.S What I’m doing now.