Books That Rock: ‘This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB’ — From Country Roots To Television & The Ramones (Excerpt)

For music history buffs with a predilection for NYC’s heady cultural explosion of the 1970s and ’80s, there may be no better book on the planet than Roman Kozak’s “This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB” (1988, Trouser Press). This deep dive into the ur-punk rock dive chronicles the birth of the Lower East Side epoch featuring primary source interviews, including: CBGB founder Hilly Kristal, The Ramone’s Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Blondie’s Chris Stein, Talking Heads’ David Byrne and Chris Frantz, Television’s Richard Lloyd and Richard Hell and Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye among many others.

Out of print for decades, this newly updated edition of “This Ain’t No Disco” includes a new foreword by Frantz , 12 pages of photographs by Ebet Roberts and a new section on the club’s closing in 2006 when it unceremoniously, and rather symbolically, became an upscale John Varvatos boutique. (Pick this book at www.trouserpressbooks.com, Amazon and all eBook platforms.) Here, Pollstar has excerpted portions of the first two chapters detailing CBGB’s beginnings as a country music bar founded by Hilly Kristal, the dive’s conversion to a rock club led by Television and their manager Terry Ork and the Ramones’ CBGBs tenure abetted by Blondie’s Chris Stein and Debbie Harry.

“I opened CBGB because I thought country music was going to become the big thing. And it did, though not here.”

— Hilly Kristal, CBGBs Founder

CHAPTER ONE:
…Hilly Kristal had already found another neighborhood more receptive to his ideas. Back in 1969 he had gotten together $20,000 (too much, he says) and bought a derelict bar on the Bowery, right next door to the Palace Hotel, one of the city’s more notorious flophouses. During the last year, while he was struggling to keep Hilly’s alive on 13th Street he had shut down his downscale Hilly’s on the Bowery. But in December 1973, after he and his former wife and current business associate Karen renegotiated the lease, they opened CBGB-OMFUG in the same location as Hilly’s on the Bowery. The initials stood for “country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers.” Surely in this neighborhood nobody would complain about country music…

The Bowery, where Hilly was embarking on his new enterprise, was a dangerous place. One of the oldest thoroughfares in New York City, the original mail route to Boston in colonial times and home of some of the new world’s first millionaires, the Bowery had fallen on rough times since the Revolutionary War, when occupying British troops were billeted along what was then called Bowry Lane. An entertainment district of saloons, whorehouses, cockfighting and ratfighting pits, girlie shows and pawnshops sprang up to service and entertain these troops. Though the Redcoats left when independence came, there were sailors, native New Yorkers and immigrants who happily took their place for the next hundred years. Running from Manhattan’s Chinatown and downtown business district to the tenement Lower East Side, the Bowery became the center of New York lowlife entertainment. Like Times Square now, it was the brightly lit place to go for illicit pleasures. For rich and poor alike, the area was sin city.

…In keeping with his country motif, Hilly tried something new: country at sunrise. Hilly says, “Originally at CBGB we tried to promote it as a morning country nightclub. I thought it was a horrible idea, but I had a public relations man at the time who wanted to do it. So, we invited all the local television programs to see us having country music in the morning while we served big country breakfasts. It started at six or seven in the morning with live country music and the news crews initially all came in. We kept it going for about a month, but I got very tired since we were also open at night. It didn’t prove a thing. Country music was a good idea; it just didn’t work out. There were just not enough groups to be able to do country consistently. So gradually we started putting in different things.”

CHAPTER TWO
Television Goes Live
Though Hilly was ready to play rock in principle, it took the band Television to make him take the big step. Remembers Richard Lloyd, guitarist for Television: “We were rehearsing in Chinatown and we were there for years and years. Terry Ork was our patron because he did some artwork for Andy Warhol and he made some money from that and he had this enormous loft. We were playing here and there and advertising and getting quotes, and we realized that we needed a place to call our home, a place to play once a week.

“One day Tom [Verlaine] came and he said, ‘I saw this fucking hick, like up on a stepladder — he’s opening a bar, calling it CB or something, GB. Do you want to go up there and we’ll talk the guy into letting us play?’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So, after rehearsal, we walked up and Hilly was outside standing on a stepladder, putting up the awning. We called him down and he came in with us. I bought a drink and I think Tommy had one of his rare white Russians. We said, ‘What are you calling the place? Are you going to have live music?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I’m calling it country, bluegrass and blues and other music for “undernourished” gourmandizers.’ That’s what OMFUG is. Anyway, he asked, ‘Do you play country?’ We said, ‘Yeah, we play country.’ He said, ‘Do you play blues and bluegrass?’ We said, ‘We play blues, bluegrass, anything you want, we’ll play it.’ And he said, ‘Alright,’ and penciled us in for the Sunday.

“Then we had four or five days to get this together, so we went around to people like Nicholas Ray, who was the director of ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ and he said, ‘You are four cats with a passion,’ and we went to Danny Fields, who was the editor of 16, and he said something like ‘These guys make me cry, they are tough as nails.’ We got together all these quotes and put a little ad in the Village Voice and we started playing at CBGB. By god, we drew enough people, and Terry Ork bought enough drinks by himself to set the place up. Hilly was making money.”

“It was Terry Ork (Television’s manager) who kept pushing me to have Television on,” adds Hilly. “He would also come up with other bands like the Ramones and the Stilettos. He would have them open for Television. They were all very crude at first and not really very good. They didn’t play their instruments that well. There really wasn’t much of a scene either. Terry Ork would put up handbills, and we would charge a dollar admission. But there weren’t many people in 1974 and 1975. It wasn’t until 1976 that the club really began to take off. But back then, with Television there was virtually no response, though Terry worked very hard at promoting them, getting the Soho News involved as well as the people he knew from the Andy Warhol and theatrical crowds. He really pulled it together. I knew folk and jazz, but rock was really foreign to me. I just knew a little bit here and there.”

“If there was no Terry Ork, there would have been no CBGB, there would have been no punk, no new wave, no Richard Hell, no Sex Pistols, no Television, no Patti Smith — well, maybe Patti Smith,” says Lloyd about the man who, ironically, did not consider music his first love. That was film, to which he has since returned. Now Ork says he is bitter about the whole scene. Lloyd explains, “He was a great patron of the arts but wasn’t up to managing a successful entity like a band. Besides, he was always so much into movies. When we finally signed for management, it was a political move. We needed it. We tried to keep him on, but it didn’t work out, so we had to let him go. He was bitter from that day on.”

…”Terry didn’t do the booking so much as he instituted the Sunday night rock concerts. I would do the bookings and he would suggest certain acts and he was usually right,” says Hilly. “He persuaded me every which way. He did those Sunday things for a period of about six months, until the fall of 1974. He brought in a lot of theater and poetry people from this area, since he lived around here and knew them all. It wasn’t really so much his bookings, but because he knew so many things about theater, films and art, and he knew all those people. He also had the energy and was very excited about the whole thing. He excited me about it. I do think it is true, the whole scene wouldn’t have happened without him.

…Thanks to Terry Ork’s invaluable input and connections and Hilly Kristal’s aggressive booking policy, shortly after Television began to play regularly at CBGB, four other bands walked through the door and got up onstage. The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Mink DeVille were among the first bands to play CBGB. There were other bands playing there as well, and certainly other bands followed them into the club, but if it weren’t for those four bands, Television and Patti Smith, ten years later CBGB would not even have been a footnote in the history of rock. These bands were virtual unknowns when they first played at the club, and they developed their talents there. By the time they left, they had created a whole new music scene centered around the scruffy little club on the Bowery.

The Ramones, who became the first of the regular CBGB bands to be signed by a major record label, were formed in the summer of 1974 by four young middle-class men who grew up in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Each one adopted the surname Ramone: Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone and Tommy Ramone. The name was taken from Paul McCartney, who Dee Dee remembers called himself Paul Ramone when the Beatles played briefly as the Silver Beatles in Hamburg. Dressed in torn jeans, T-shirts and black leather jackets, the Ramones played hard and furious rock and roll like nobody before them. It was very basic two- or three-chord stuff, but condensed and speeded up. The Ramones sounded only like the Ramones.

Among the band’s influences were the MC5, the Stooges, the Beach Boys and even the Bay City Rollers, but it was a local band that provided the real inspiration. Says Dee Dee Ramone: “What really kicked it off was seeing the New York Dolls in clubs around Manhattan. It was so inspiring to see a bunch of young people playing rock and roll that we wanted to do it, too. It took off from there. The first club we played was CBGB. Chris Stein and Deborah Harry were our friends and they got us the job there, opening up for them in 1974.”

Jim Wynbrandt of the Miamis says, “The Ramones have a lot to do with the success of the place. They take a lot of jibes about their music being so simple, but I don’t think there were many other bands that practiced harder or more consistently than they did. They just did it over and over again until they got everything just right. They would do the whole set just over and over again.”

Dee Dee Ramone: “People thought we were all organized, because how can you do stuff like that? But we would stop and argue with each other and that was for real. Sometimes I would count 1-2-3-4 and everybody would start playing a different song. Then we would stop and argue about which one was supposed to come first.”

….“I didn’t appreciate the Ramones so much because they were very, very loud,” says Hilly. “The only thing that kept it good was that they did their 40-second songs with so much energy and created such a scene with the crowd when they played that they could do their set in 17 minutes and that was it. It was enough. Everybody was satisfied with these sets. And some people were in ecstasy over them. They later went to England and started the whole thing going. All the other groups saw them and realized they could do it, too.”

“Our sets progressed from 10 minutes to 12 minutes. We did all the songs we knew,” explains Joey Ramone. “A lot of songs were very short and fast, so they just flew by. And then sometimes if a song didn’t sound right, we’d have to stop and start again or argue with each other or something like that. I don’t remember exactly how we found CBGB; it may have been through the Village Voice.

“After the first time we played, Hilly said to me, ‘Nobody is going to like you guys, but I’ll have you back.’ I remember the sawdust floor, and I remember having to sidestep the [dog] shit, like stepping over mines or something. We liked the place. It had a nice atmosphere, good acoustics and it was very comfortable. And when we started playing there Television was there, Patti Smith was there as a poet, I think, with Lenny Kaye and Blondie, who at the time were the Stilettos. And we tried encouraging other bands because we felt we could create a scene or a movement of some sort.”