Adieu CBGB
10/16/2006 10:54 PM
CBGB has closed its doors. It
happened the other night - Patti Smith came back
to partake in the farewell festivities, and true
New Yorkers shed a tear for the club that
established the Big Apple as an incubator of
great rock and roll in the mid 70s and early
80s. But this has special poignance for me
because I played the first non-local gig of my
life there in 1985, as the 15-year-old drummer
of
Delayed
Green Wait. At the time, I didn't even know
what CB's was - the bands, the history. I just
knew I had to convince my mom to let me go, and
she ultimately came to the gig and had a
swinging good time. It was a Monday night
audition showcase, and we did a nice job. The
band on before us was smitten with our
earnestness and tunefulness. We were Green (in
every way), not so tight, but we had great songs
and the genius guitarist Lexi Stern. Friends
schlepped in from Great Neck and it was a real
trip. I called back for weeks afterward. First
they told me that we passed the audition and
they were going to book us. Then they said that
we weren't quite tight enough, and that we
should re-audition and good luck to us. Then I
lost the CB's board tape and told the other band
members it was stolen out of my high school
locker, and some members of the trio (not me)
had a falling out, and some members (not me)
went to college, and the history that we all
felt certain we were poised to make didn't get
made. In the intervening years I've been in a
few bands, and even had the opportunity to play
CB's again a couple of times manning the kit for
Billy Dechand's Trike. But the hall - the pit,
as everyone told me it was when I was 15 and
impressionable - has always brought me back to
that bright early and eager time, when the city
was mucky, alluring and frightening, and the
future was only possibility. Possibility for a
call-back, a return engagement, a discovery,
signing, well-deserved career of fame and
jamfests and San Tropez and remembering that
golden moment back in the pit, back there on the
dusty old Bowery, one Monday night in the middle
of the roaring 80s. Adieu dear CB's, and OMFUG
too.
