Death of Punk, thirty years later

A sad note from the other end of the pop-music spectrum: less than a year after the close of his downtown New York club, CBGB, its owner, Hilly Kristal, has died at the un-rock’n’roll age of 75 (but still too soon, of course). Intending to start a very different kind of club (the initials stand for “Country, Blue-Grass, Blues), he inadvertantly backed into a role of (poorly-paid) impressario and godfather to the NYC punk scene, nurturing bands like Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, and Sonic Youth (whose “Daydream Nation” I’m going to see performed in its entirety this weekend in London), not to mention literally thousands of others no one’s ever heard of. I only made it there a couple of times during my not-at-all errant youth, but it’s jarring to see the thousands of people all around sporting there CBGB t-shirts everywhere from London to Barcelona, not that any of the money paid for them ever made it back to the club itself when it needed it.