Save CBGB's in New York

[boston]

After 31 yrs of uncompromising musical integrity, and starting such bands as Ramones, Deadboys, Joan Jett, Television, Blondie, and Talking Heads- CBGB's needs your hrlp to keep it's doors open !

USE THIS LINK savecbgb.org

[erose]

cbgb's rock!!!!

c'mon people, make a difference!

[noonespecial]

good thread...signed the petition...thanks 4 posting

[boston]

good thread...signed the petition...thanks 4 posting

thanx, everyone else please sign also

[boston]

good thread...signed the petition...thanks 4 posting

thanx, everyone else please sign also

repeat that

[Where is Hassan Nasrallah ?]

good thread...signed the petition...thanks 4 posting

thanx, everyone else please sign also

repeat that

did not see that , signed

[erose]

lets not make this thread die. c'mon everybody sign this fucking thing, it only takes a minute.

 

[journey]

I signed it.

Hope it works out.

[Rob]

The Misfits and The Offspring are both gonna be playing CBGB's pretty soon.  I can't wait for those shows.  I've never been there, and seeing those two bands there will be an awesome experience.

[boston]

The Misfits and The Offspring are both gonna be playing CBGB's pretty soon. I can't wait for those shows. I've never been there, and seeing those two bands there will be an awesome experience.

  the Dead Boys will also play !!!!

[KeVoRkIaN]

I was just there - this is a shame - I signed this a while back and should have posted it before

Cbgb rocks!

[boston]

Save CBGBs

CBGB?s has been home to roughly 75 bands a week ? every week- for over 3o years.

Aside from the diverse mix of bands presented at CB's from punk to jazz, the CBGB Gallery next door hosts poetry readings and art exhibits, including hundreds of benefit shows for important causes such as the Lymphoma Research Foundation and the Tsunami Disaster Fund, among many others. 

The Bowery Resident?s Committee is threatening to close the historical landmark by not agreeing to renewal their lease which expires August 31, 2005.  Its time New York City stand up for the music and arts community that made the Lower East Side great and fight to keep CBGBs a part of the Bowery. Sign the petition at www.savecbgb.org

[GypsySoul]

Gypsy comment:? Wish I could get away with not paying my rent for four years! THROW THE FUCKERS OUT!!!?

Judge Says CBGB's Can't Be Evicted
Thu Aug 11, 12:53 AM

NEW YORK - A civil court judge ruled Wednesday that the landmark punk club CBGB's can't be evicted from its Bowery location, saying it shouldn't be punished for not noticing it owed its landlord money.

The ruling was a victory for the club where groups like the Ramones and Blondie defined the punk scene in the 1970s, but CBGB's future is still uncertain.

Its lease with the Bowery Residents' Committee expires on Aug. 31, and a renewal remains up in the air.

The executive director of the Bowery Residents' Committee, Muzzy Rosenblatt, said he had not seen the ruling so he could not comment on it.

"All we're looking for is a responsible tenant," he said of his group, which provides shelter for homeless people in the building that houses the club.

The dispute involved about $100,000 in rent increases, interest and fees. The club says the increases went unpaid for four years because of a bookkeeping mix-up. CBGB's said it wasn't billed for the increases, but Rosenblatt said the increases were clearly stated in the lease. CBGB's rent is $19,000 a month.

In her ruling, Judge Joan Kenney praised the club's impact on the neighborhood, which she said was plagued by "destitution, degradation and substance abuse" when the club opened in 1973.

"CBGB has proven itself worthy of being recognized as a landmark - a rare achievement for any commercial tenant in the ever diverse and competitive real estate market of New York City," she wrote in the ruling, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press by the Save CBGB's Coalition.

"It would be unconscionable for this court to allow petitioner to proceed with its intent to evict CBGB ... because it failed to notice that monies were outstanding for approximately four years," the judge wrote.

As part of its proposal for a new lease, CBGB's has said it would find a third-party guarantor and would raise money for the committee every year with benefit concerts.

[Doc Emmett Brown]

How's that petition coming along?

Something I found the NYTimes, complete with a tiny GNR mention:


You Want Punk Rock? Close CBGB, Say Goodbye
By JON PARELES

A FEW nights ago, one more band was making a racket on the stage of CBGB. It was the Bush Tetras, a short-lived New York City punk-funk band whose early-1980's discs are now cherished collectors' items. They had reunited for this lone gig as a tribute, benefit and possible farewell to CBGB, the club that could face eviction in September after nearly 32 years on the Bowery. The Bush Tetras chose their last song pointedly. The beat was a single-minded shuffle, topped by a discordant slide guitar and a blunt, matter-of-fact vocal: "It won't be long till the money's gone. Bye-bye."

That's punk: simple and ruthless. The dispute that could dislodge CBGB, however, is more complicated. CBGB has lately grossed millions of dollars licensing the logo that stands for punk integrity, while its landlord is the nonprofit Bowery Residents' Committee, itself a multimillion-dollar organization, which runs the homeless center upstairs. A new rent, at market rates for the neighborhood, would be hard to support with cheap beers and admission prices under $10. Hilly Kristal, the club's owner, has talked about official recognition for the club as an institution worth preserving, about turning it into a punk-rock museum, and about accepting offers to move CBGB to Las Vegas. Supporters want the club to remain where it is.

The club has been some kind of symbol for decades. The question is whether that symbolism can transcend real estate and real noise. A transplanted CBGB would be irrevocably changed, and an artificially preserved one could be just as dicey. Punk-rock certainly has enough artifacts to fill a museum, but solemn academic inquiry just doesn't seem right for CBGB. A transplanted CBGB might become something like the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles woodshedded and which was demolished and rebuilt as a replica (with some of the original bricks). What has been a symbol of unlovely urban survival would turn into a self-conscious icon.

Or, to be precise, a more self-conscious icon. It's hard to say how long ago CBGB started considering itself legendary, but decades is a fair estimate. While punk promoted itself as overthrowing the status quo, CBGB has prided itself on staying put.

Everyone knows CBGB is a dump, same as it ever was: a place where punk spirit holds out against gentrification, a remnant of the old stinking Bowery versus the slick NoLIta. CBGB & OMFUG (which once stood for Country Blue Grass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandisers) started out as a neighborhood joint and never upgraded much beyond its sound system. It's had chic visitors, but it never turned chic; even as it became a tourist stop, as it has been at least since the early 1980's, it stayed dingy, a place where kids could still afford to hang out. Mr. Kristal hasn't profiteered unduly.

The floors are uneven, the ceiling paint is barely hanging on; the walls are encrusted with graffiti, stickers, fliers and probably chewed gum from countless vanished bands. (On a visit to the club nowadays, the walls can seem as eloquent as anything onstage: all those wild names and all that punk bravado turned to tatters and illegible scrawls.) Like its jazz counterpart the Village Vanguard, CBGB has a peculiar setup. The stage is at an angle, and oddly deep; a row of speaker horns overhead is like a proscenium. Yet CBGB performers aren't isolated like stars. The way to the dungeonlike restrooms is along the left side of the stage and past the dressing rooms, where clubgoers wander even during sets.

By the early 1980's, CBGB had already earned its legend by booking arty primitivists - like Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie - who turned out to be hugely influential. (Mr. Kristal's early edict that bands had to play only their own material was crucial; it has lapsed.) The post-punk and no-wave bands that are now being widely imitated also had a home at CBGB as the 1970's turned into the 1980's, and so did hardcore matinees. But in the years since, well, it often seems that all a band needs to get a CBGB gig is a wacky name. Musicians like P. J. Harvey and Guns N' Roses, who were grateful for what they learned from the first CBGB bands, have performed there by way of tribute. But it has been a long time since the club was the crucible for a movement.

In some ways, CBGB is a victim of one of punk's enduring myths: that amateur enthusiasm is all a band needs. All the stickers on the walls prove otherwise. What made the first CBGB bands important wasn't that they were amateurs, but that they were inspired amateurs; they had a sound in their heads, one that didn't require too much technique.

Clubs become legends with a confluence of acoustics, ambience (or lack of it), attitude and memories; they stay alive through their bookings. If the Village Vanguard were to start presenting student jazz groups, its magnificent acoustics wouldn't be much of a draw. Somehow, CBGB has managed to capitalize on its memories for years; it has become a pilgrimage site more than a place to discover bands. When punk got its second wind in the 1990's, and when New York art-rock recharged itself in the early 2000's, CBGB was a bystander. What's legendary now is not CBGB's music, but its stubbornness - a punk virtue, but one of the lesser ones.

Still, it's hard to imagine CBGB transplanted to Las Vegas, even if there are already replicas there of the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the canals of Venice and other bits of New York City itself. Maybe an architect could copy the club's peculiar dimensions; maybe, though more unlikely, a new version of the club would keep that unobstructed backstage passage. Maybe a team of art directors and decoupage artists could recreate the impasto on the walls (though not the three decades of bodily fluids soaked into them). Maybe CBGB Vegas could hire the Warped Tour's bookers to plug the club back into the punk/post-punk/indie-rock nexus that would never have existed without CBGB. But it's hard to imagine driving to CBGB in an air-conditioned car, finding an easy parking space and strolling up a clean street to the door.

Then again, the Bowery may be a clean street soon enough anyway. Strictly for sentimental reasons, it would be great to have CBGB still in its place as an oasis of raunch. The best outcome of CBGB's crisis would be if all the attention made a CBGB gig something extraordinary again. With all the legend-mongering that the club has fostered lately, it could use a renewal of what made the place so precious. It wasn't just the club's dumpy physicality. It was the way its squalor once made musicians feel they had nothing to lose by tearing the world apart and starting from scratch. And from squall. And from blare.

[boston]

intersting stuff , keep it up , things are lookin good for CBGB's

[SLCPUNK]

Pay your rent bitches!!!

[Mr. Dick Purple]

Signed, and really don't know what I signed 

[erose]

Pay your rent bitches!!!

thats not the problem anymore tho, the rent is paid, but the land lords want to use the space for something totaly different anyway since the contrace is about to expire....

[Will]

Signed. CBGB's rocks!

[KeVoRkIaN]

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050901/D8CB6NRG0.html

Fucking sad.....I was just there a few wekks ago