What a strange week and a half: Hilly Krystal of CBGB dies, and then I recognize the something that I was part of is over forever – and then, a few days later, my elderly mom, for whom I’d been care giving for the past 10 years, also dies, and something that was part of me is gone. What a strange time to overview the symbolic death of the New York punk scene via Hilly’s passing.
I had been writing for Good Times on and off since the late 60s, when I was a teenager. Rock music had become very boring and clinical for my taste by 1970. I was waiting for a burst of color, and it came from England via the glitter/glam movement led by David Bowie, T.Rex, Mott The Hoople, and on the U.S. side, Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls, and Iggy & The Stooges. The psychosexual ramifications of these artists impacted how radio, TV, and magazine editors received them, which, in America, was mostly as a joke.
These artists indicated a swing away from hippiedom and a shift to something more insular, more ironic. Some people loved this trend, and many others hated it or were frightened by it, and for good reason: The glam trend set the table for the forthcoming feast known as punk. The glam artists were centered around the New York club called Max’s Kansas City, which open in 1965 when Andy Warhol and his crew made it their second home and served as a magnet for artists, actors, TV stars and big time rockers – Dylan, Joplin, you name it.
Max’s closed briefly, changing hands around 1973, and it was then that Hilly Krystal decided to open the doors of what came to be known as CBGB, which filled the gap while Max’s was between owners. When it was still called Hilly’s, Krystal booked Rock Scene underground star Wayne County into the club in December 1973, and that booking put the place on the map and drew the attention of the other New York bands.
By May 1974, the club had been renamed CBGB and began booking bands such as Television (who for decades traded off the myth that they were the first of the New York rock bands to ever play there), The Ramones, and Patti Smith. Max’s on 17th Street and CBGB in the Bowery began to share the same bands, and eventually began to compete with each other; they were businesses, after all. The legendary event that divided the scene and the clubs was the slug out between County and Dick Manitoba of The Dictators onstage during a Wayne gig, which sent Manitoba to the hospital with a broken collarbone. From that moment on, everyone
took sides, and it became a Max’s versus CBGB situation, although Hilly never publicly acknowledged it as such. When I started The Psychotic Frogs in 1977, we were automatically banned from CBGB because I had sided with County and Max’s; they also refused to book Cherry Vanilla, another Wayne County ally, at CBGB.
It was, to quote a Talking Heads album title, life during wartime. Hilly wound up with the upper hand as Punk Magazine had taken up the cause of Manitoba and thereby CBGB and began to belittle and marginalize Max’s and the bands associated with it, and there was no way to fight back. There was no other magazine on the scene to compete against Punk, and no Internet yet, so CBGB won the media wars.
Thus, when MTV came on the air in 1981 (the same year that Max’s Kansas City closed) and started to cover rock news and history, all the young impressionable audience heard about was CBGB, even though Max’s was the actual birth place of punk; any club that gave rise to Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, and Iggy & The Stooges is the birthing ground of punk – period. When VH1 started doing documentaries on punk, no mention of Max’s was made. One show even credited the final Sid Vicious shows as having happened at CBGB, when Max’s was the venue. Hilly saw the ball always rolling favorably in his direction and went with the flow, and who could blame him. While my band was refused a booking during the warfare period, Hilly was always beyond wonderful to me in my journalist guise, and I adored him and his open, frank, often blunt take on things. He is a major part of the popular music history of New York City and will never be forgotten
And in my little universe, the beloved Sadie La Lumia Polidoro, gone at 89 years of age, will never be forgotten by those to whom she was a bright, innocent world. Rest in peace, Sadie and Hilly.
