The Bowery block that was its home is now grayer, bleaker, and a lot quieter. And as it regularly does, New York City is getting ready to destroy another corner of a neighborhood along with many of its voices. This is no surprise. It happens every twenty or thirty years, and each area goes on to re-invent itself over and over. The uneasy ’home’ of punk rock is no more; and the street that gave it life gets ready for its next incarnation.
The Bowery today is a long way from that ancient path that led to Peter Stuyvesant‘s farm-in-the-woods in the 17th century. That path led to the country home of the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam. No remnant of that bucolic time lingered into the hurly-burly, gritty era that saw a transformation of the Bowery from woodland path, to farmland, to low-level popular entertainment spot.
The Bowery housed places that were always a little off- the- beaten-track and always at the edge of a city that was hungrily moving uptown in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is a connection that the emblematic street bears to those down-on-their-luck, and the closing of one of the epicenters for a raucous alternative music eruption. The Bowery in the late 19th and early 20th century was a place for those the world had turned its back on — fitting indeed to serve as a place to give birth in America to music that would not be ignored. There is a symbiotic chord that transformed a Bowery mission/flop house into the cathedral of the punk-rock era in the early 1970’s.
Probably no one at the closing of CBGB’s was thinking about Peter Stuyvesant, or those 19th century voices that boomed popularized versions of Shakespeare, or the dives that lined the street, or the image of the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys, that ‘30s emblem of a city in trouble. But metaphorically, those voices are all a part of Bowery lore. The angry voices of punk were part of a long line of Bowery residents.
In many ways, the high-energy pitch of early punk-rock, demanding its place in the rock scene, pushing aside the soft rock sounds of the early ‘70s pop music scene, best describes CBGB’s caustic relationship to its neighborhood, its time, and the generation of voices that it produced. It didn’t matter what side you took on punk: love it or hate it, it was in-your-face music that refused to be polite, politically correct, or tamed. “Do not go gentle into that good night”, poet Dylan Thomas once wrote about old age. CBGB’s screamed its way from memory to history.
Some New Yorkers always admired the fact that CBGB’s (315 Bowery), was a stomping ground for the musically disenfranchised, and yet was only steps away from the Amato Opera House (319), the music venue that has produced opera for the masses, on a dime, in a sliver of a building. This is New York, after all. 19th century popular culture could readily rub shoulders with its late 20th century counterpart.
But where will the next CBGB’s emerge? Well, putting aside a possible re-location to Vegas (!), the real question becomes where are the new homes of alternative music? Or even, will new music need a ‘home’? When emerging new technologies create so many outlets for the ‘next’ sound, does new music need a starting place in the same sense? What happens to the mentoring places? What happens to live music altogether?
We associate grunge with Seattle, know the Minneapolis sound, remember the folk revival came out of coffeehouses in New York, Cambridge and San Francisco, and that Hip-Hop was born on the streets of the urban ghetto. American punk emerged fully blown on the Bowery. But if file-sharing and music downloading have already changed the face of the music industry, then is it so impossible to imagine a world where clubs are not pioneers, but social venues — reflections, not places of origin.
Music has become so private, so personal in its modes of access that these private spaces, wired into multiple points of distribution, could well be the source for what comes next. How quickly can it happen? How badly do musicians need a live audience? Some might argue that it already has happened, and that the graffiti-covered walls of CBGB’s are about the past, not the future.
The music scene in New York boasts a number of clubs, new and old, survivors all. These are, and continue to be, the gathering places.
But will they be the points of emergence? Is the next generation less in need of a communal experience? Can the box change all that? Stay tuned.
We know it will all change, as surely as that old woodland path. We only know that there will be voices. How we hear about them, and hear them for the first time, remains the next part of the story.
