Throwback Thursday (10/15/2020)

Today's Throwback Thursday for a second week in a row is not about a single song or singer/band, but about an institution. Country, BlueGrass and Blues or simply put CBGB.

On this day in 2006, the final show ever at CBGB's happened.

CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan's East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and the name was what Kristal originally had in mind for the club, yet CBGB soon became a famed venue of new wave and punk rock.

Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith and so many others started their journey at CBGB. The names and history go on and on.

- The Ramones made their debut at CBGB in 1975

- The Damned played the club and were the first British punk band to play in America.

- The Police played their first American gig at the club in 1978.

On a personal note, in 1990 I was in New York City with a number of friends from my college radio station for the College Music Journal (CMJ) Conference. One afternoon we had some downtime and decided to explore the city's music scene with of course a stop at CBGB's. The club was not officially open at that point in the day, but the doors were open and we "snuck" in just to look around. It was dank, it was cramped (even with no show happening) but it was historic. As college radio dee-jays, this was it for us. How many albums had we spun by bands and artists that had appeared on that small 10x10 stage?

It couldn’t have been more appropriate for Patti Smith to have played CBGB’s final show. Nor for her to feature covers of The Tide Is High (the Paragons’ tune taken, appropriately, to number one by Blondie), Television’s Marquee Moon with Richard Lloyd, the Dead Boys’ Sonic Reducer and no less then four Ramones songs, in a mammoth 3½ hour set.