You know that game where you create your ultimate rock 'n' roll band featuring only dead musicians? Well, now you can mentally book them into the greatest dead rock 'n' roll club of all time. As of October 15, 2006, CBGB on The Bowery is no more. NEWS FLASH: It is with great sadness that I must report that on August 28, 2007, Hilly Kristal, CBGB's founder and the man at the heart of it all, died after a long struggle with lung cancer. Still, the place and the man will live on in the hearts of those who loved it and the man and this page will be a tribute to CBGB on myspace until hackers take it over and start spamming you about bitchin free ringtones. God bless Hilly and all the musicians who made the place so great. So, unless it ever moves to Las Vegas, CBGB is no longer of this Earth. I took all of these photos over the last several years and, as you can see, focused on the bands and individuals who originally instigated what came to be known as punk rock. I'm currently locked up in a cave in Afghanistan finishing a book I've spent the last 10 years working on called NEVERMIND NOSTALGIA: The Last Book On Punk Rock (Part One), which features many of these photos and hundreds of others. I miss the damn place. I still dream of it, often, and no rock 'n' roll club will ever take the place of the birthplace of punk. It could be a rough place where you could get kicked in the head (by stagedivers) or kicked in the heart (by hardened/hardcore skanks) or have your stuff stolen if you weren't paying close attention to it, but it was part of what made NYC great and I still feel the place, or rather the absence of it, like a phantom limb, haunting me and not letting me forget that it was there and a part of me.
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