CBGB’s and the American Punk Scene | Television / Talking Heads / Blondie / Ramones / Patti Smith / Suicide | Clinton Heylin, 1993
Suicide outside CBGB, NYC, July 18, 1977
“An essential difference between British and American punk bands can be found in their respective views of rock & roll history. The British bands took a deliberately anti-intellectual stance, refuting any awareness of, or influence from, previous exponents of the form. The New York and Cleveland bands saw themselves as self-consciously drawing on and extending an existing tradition in American rock & roll.”
Richard Hell + Television – Blank Generation, CBGB – 1974
“A second difference between the British and American punk scenes was their relative gestation periods. The British weekly music press was reviewing Sex Pistols shows less than three months after their cacophonous debut. Within a year of the Pistols’ first performance they had a record deal, with the ‘major’ label EMI. Within six months of their first gigs the Damned and the Clash also secured contracts, the latter with CBS. The CBGBs scene went largely ignored by the American music industry until 1976 — two years after the debuts of Television, the Ramones and Blondie. Even then only Television signed to an established label.”
Allan Tannenbaum, Patti Smith at CBGB, NYC, 1975
David Godlis, Talking Heads at CBGB, c 1977
“If the early English and LA punk bands shared a common sound, the New York bands just shared the same clubs. As such, while the English scene never became known as the ‘100 Club’ sound, CBGBs was the solitary common component in the New York bands’ development, transcended once they had outgrown the need to play the club. Even their supposed musical heritage was not exactly common — the Ramones preferring the Dolls/Stooges to Television’s Velvets/Coltrane to Blondie’s Stones/Brit-Rock. Though the scene had been built up as a single movement, when commercial implications began to sink in, the differences that separated the bands became far more important than the similarities which had previously bound them together.”
Talking Heads – No Compassion – Live at CBGB – 1975
Blondie – A Girl Should Know Better – CBGB – 1975
“In the two years following the summer 1975 festival, CBGBs had become something of an ideological battleground, if not between the bands then between their critical proponents. The divisions between a dozen bands, all playing the same club, all suffering the same hardships, all sharing the same love of certain central bands in the history of rock & roll, should not have been that great. But the small scene very quickly partitioned into art-rockers and exponents of a pure let’s-rock aesthetic.”
Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World, 1993
Bob Gruen, Ramones at CBGB, July 18, 1975
Roberta Bayley, Blondie at CBGB, 1976
Suicide – I Remember – CBGB, November 4, 1978
CBGB was a music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in the East
Village in Manhattan, New York City. CBGB & OMFUG stands for
Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers.
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