CBGB’s Veterans Bemoan Demise of a Shrine
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Hilly Kristal, owner and founder of CBGB’s, announced earlier this week that the club would close at its present location at the end of October 2006. We called some of the pillars of the New York punk rock scene to find out their reactions.
“This is like Paris losing the Moulin Rouge,” one of the founders of Punk magazine, John Holmstrom, said. Punk magazine popularized both the term and the music in the late 1970s. At the same time, Mr. Holmstrom criticized Mr. Kristal’s decision not to fight to stay open past October, as well as his plan to move the club to a new location, perhaps Las Vegas or Times Square.
“The name will always mean something, but everyone I talk to won’t want to go to CBGB’s in a new location,” Mr. Holmstrom said.
The New York Daily News reported last month that CBGB’s might move to a room inside the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe, but Mr. Kristal denied that yesterday.
Richard Hell was a founding member of Television, one of the first punk acts to play at CBGB’s.
“In America, anything that isn’t brand new is regarded as being disposable,” he said. “That’s an amazing thing about CBGB’s and something worth preserving: It hasn’t changed at all.”
“It’s not a matter of nostalgia or artificially preserving something,” Mr. Hell said. “It’s that it’s magic to be able to go to a place and have it be exactly the same as it was 30 to 40 years ago.”
But Danny Fields, the first manager of the Ramones (and, earlier, the Stooges), does not support the fight to preserve the club. “Are we going to have to go through this bull again next year? … If people spend this much time and energy, when there are so many living things to be saved on this earth … to save a bar, I will be furious,” he said. Mr. Fields is a former editor of 16 magazine, and also worked with the MC5 and the Doors.
“Things outlive their usefulness, especially in show business,” he said.