From Jim Fouratt:
Hilly Kristal and the CBGB legacy
CBGB's was an extended family and a cultural frontier. Hilly was the dad at the door behind BG eying who came and who paid and who did not. Louise was the tireless booker and she held the telephone frontline. Lisa and Robert the real children grew up in and around the club. No one who observed her can ever forget his first wife, the hectoring, seemingly crazy one, who would pop up when ever she needed money or his last companion who gave her heart to her teddy bear of a man. Plus all the musician foster kids who passed through the club's back stage door.
Hilly was also a shrewd businessperson and knew how to make the filthy, sacred club into the ground zero of original rock'n'roll. CBGB's out lived Max's and all the others that came to steal CBGB's thunder and disappeared one after another as Hilly kept his doors open, the beer cold and the sound system first class. The intimacy between the waist high stage and the fans was unlike any other club. A band never knew if record executive Seymour Stein, or manager Danny Fields, the writer Lisa Robertson or the dean of rock critics Robert Christgua or artists like John Lennon or Lucinda Williams or Hal Wilner were in the room. (and this usually made up for the paltry pay based on low cost door receipts)...those folks usually hung out near Hilly in the back far from on stage view.
Everyone used the same foul smelling, exposed space, gender free bathrooms. Many an adventure and right of passage began on that stairway between the stage and those bathrooms. The hieroglyphics left by thousands of bands, like pups, that had to stain the wall with their names on every surface of the club, made a post-modern location deconstruction wet dream. CBGB'S was, like Max's in the 60's, Studio 54 in the 70's and Danceteria in the 80's a cultural and nightlife essential stop any night of the year. Like Mickey Ruskin (Max's, Steve Rubell (Studio 54) Larry Levant (Paradise Garage), Hilly put his personal imprint on a cultural institution that shouted New York and was ground zero for style, taste and music.
Even if he would rather had listened to Blue Grass, Hilly knew what was authentic from fake... and on any night of the week you could see and judge for your self. Who you saw and heard at CBGB might never be seen or heard again. It was a roll of the dice. You could have been present the night that Suicide, Television, Hot Lunch, Patti Smith, the Black Rock Coalition, Dean and the Weenies, The Stilettos, Blondie, the Stimulators, DNA, Glenn Branca, the Talking Heads, Helen Wheels, the Student Teachers or any number of either puck or art rock bands played. Their music made NYC and CBGB's the center of modern rock music. Or you could have had to endure the sounds of completely forgettable bands from anywhere in the world as they were "born again" by the music ritual of performing on the CBGB's stage.
If hilly knew and liked you, he would quietly tip you off in advance when something special just might happen.
Hilly kept in step with the cultural turns as the century came to a close with the addition of an art gallery and acoustic room next door and in the basement a lounge room for dj trance culture and romance. Hilly is now gone and the downtown music clubs that mattered are almost all in the graveyard of memory buried by the brutal assault of real estate, greed and drugs on the creative heartbeat of downtown NY.
But CBGB's influence still bleeds into the fantasy life of any kid, boy or girl, white or of color, straight or gay or unsure who thought that picking up a guitar or writing a poem like Patti to sing or scream was the path to their own kind of soul music. CBGB's spirit will not die. Blessed be Hilly. You are indelible in the cultural history of music that matters anywhere. What a legacy! I trust I will still be able to buy that CBGB t-shirt to strut at any age my identification with the beautiful art of noise and downtown otherness.