🎹 CBGB

CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal and his ex-wife Karen Kristal at 315 Bowery in the East Village in Manhattan, New York City. The club was previously a biker bar and before that it was a dive bar. The letters CBGB were for Country, Bluegrass, Blues, Kristal's original vision for the club, but CBGB soon emerged as a famed and iconic venue for punk rock and new wave bands, including Poly Styrene and the X-Ray Spex, Ramones, Dead Boys, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, and Talking Heads. The club has been identified in academic scholarship as a linchpin of early American punk culture. Histories of punk have positioned CBGB as the venue at which the genre took root in New York before its transatlantic spread to the United Kingdom.