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Hilly Kristal, Catalyst for Punk at CBGB, Dies at 75

 

Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of New York punk and art-rock in the 1970s and was the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives around the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 75.

  Thousands of bands played CBGB, from its opening in December 1973 until a dispute with its landlord forced it to close last October. In the 1970s and early '80s, the bar  became by default the headquarters  for innovative local groups like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth, who in the club's early days had few other places to play.

  Within months after CBGB opened, young musicians and poets like Tom Verlaine and Ms. Smith became curious about the bar as they passed it on their way to visit the beat writer William S. Burroughs, who lived a few blocks down the Bowery. Mr. Verlaine persuaded Mr. Kristal to book his band, Television, and others followed suit, including Ms. Smith and her band, which had a seven-week residency in 1975. Record executives soon joined the neighborhood punks as habitues at CB's, as it was familiarly called.

  As time left its mark on CBGB's walls in the form of  stickers and taped-up fliers left by musicians and fans -- as well as damage to its notoriously unpleasant bathrooms -- the club's interior itself became a tourist draw,  as both a relic of rock history and a kind of living museum of graffiti.  Mr. Kristal, who kept office hours  until the end, answering the phone ''CB's'' in a phlegmatic baritone, resisted any changes to the club, a narrow, dark room that still held remnants of its history as a 19th-century saloon.

 

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