Hilly Kristal, who died Tuesday at 75, saw his skid-row country music dive bar, CBGB, transformed into the crucible of punk rock.

Such bands as Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie got their start in the mid-1970s playing at the 350-capacity venue, in a storefront beneath the Palace Hotel on the Bowery.

Kristal, a longtime music industry figure and Greenwich Village bar and restaurant manager, founded CBGB with the apparent ambition of serenading brunch-goers with country tunes — the full name of the establishment stood for Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers. Food never managed to make the bill at CBGB, and what little acoustic music made it was soon swept away by the acidulous whine of Television and the monotonic roar of the Ramones. The two bands appeared on the same stage one Sunday night in 1974, and punk rock can be pretty well dated from then.

If Kristol’s first reaction to the do-it-yourself bands was “What the hell? What do we have to lose?” as he once wrote, he later came to like and even respect some of the music and those who made it. “I got to love these people and what some of them were doing, and of course, hate what some of the others were doing,” he told Rolling Stone magazine last year, shortly before CBGB finally closed. In what must stand as an irony worthy of punk, the club was evicted by a homeless services agency.

Hillel Kristal was born in New York City in 1931, but his family soon moved to rural Highstown, N.J., where his father established a chicken farm. Kristal moved back to New York after high school and served in the Army during the Korean War. A violinist as a child, Kristal later sang bass for the Radio City Music Hall Choir and became a booker at a jazz club, the Village Vanguard.

He helped organize the Ford Caravan of Music, touring with acts such as Nina Simone and Herbie Mann in the early 1960s. He also helped found the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival in 1966. He later managed two establishments in the West Village; one was a restaurant on West 9th Street with a showcase in the back room where Bette Midler and Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were known to perform after-hours, Kristal’s daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, said. He also managed a folk music venue on West 13th Street.

CBGB opened in late 1973 and within a year became the center of the most fertile downtown music scene since the folk music revival a decade earlier. Kristal didn’t always care much whether the bands he booked could play their instruments, but he did insist that they write their own songs. The club thrived despite — or because of — lousy aesthetics: frayed seats, neon beer lights, and a legendarily filthy bathroom. Fred Schneider of the B–52s once described it as “a smoky boozy rock and roll joint with the worst toilet in the world.”

Ever the rock ‘n’ roll poet, Patti Smith once described CBGB to Rolling Stone as “A s—hole. The sound was crappy, there was always things breaking down and glasses breaking and people vomiting and the rats scurrying around in the back, but it was our s—hole.” As for its proprietor: “Hilly Kristal was the good shepherd of a flock of black sheep.”

A July 1975 festival of “the top 40 unrecorded bands in New York” brought the punk movement more general recognition. CBGB’s fame grew and by the 1980s, Kristal told the New York Times, there was “so much competition that bands have to play their own music well enough so that you can tell if you like it or not.” Standards were never overly high, though, as Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry once told the Associated Press: “It was so successful because Hilly had such low standards.”

In the 1990s, Kristal opened a gallery next door to the original club. A CBGB store remains open a few blocks away.

Paying the rent was periodically an issue, but problems intensified in recent years as the club’s landlord, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, insisted on a $20,000-a-month increase. Despite several fund-raisers, CBGB closed its doors for the last time in October 2006. There was much hopeful talk at the time of opening a new version of the club elsewhere, perhaps in Las Vegas, where some of the bar’s furnishings were shipped. Kristal’s family announced that “there currently are plans to open new CBGB clubs in several locations.”

Despite the accolades heaped on him in recent years, Kristal stayed true to his garage-band, skid-row roots. The club still booked just about any band. “The truth of the matter of CBGB’s is that it was an accident,” Kristal told the Associated Press in 1994. “If it wasn’t CBGB’s it would have been another place.”

Kristal is survived by his daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, a son, Mark Kristal, and two grandchildren.