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At the end of a three-and-a-half hour show, on the last night of music at the New York club CBGB, Patti Smith read a list of the fallen, just a few of the musicians and spirits who were so important to the room's legend but couldn't be there for the October 15th wake. They included the Cramps' Bryan Gregory, the critic Lester Bangs, singer Helen Wheels, guitarist Robert Quine, Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone and Smith's original pianist Richard Sohl. As her band played at soft funeral-march volume behind her, someone in the audience yelled out, "You missed one." Smith smiled. "We remember everything," she said with maternal assurance. Then she pointed out that CBGB was expiring at thirty-three -- the same age as Jesus.
That was not blasphemy. CBGB opened its doors in December 1973 as a country and bluegrass bar, then became a rock & roll club early the next year when Television convinced owner Hilly Kristal to let them play there. But more than that, CBGB was, for the rest of its life, a place of safe haven for the aspiring, the creative and those living in exile from mainstream culture, either by force or choice. The place was a pit, the downstairs toilets infamous. At one point in her second set, Smith wondered aloud if Sirius Satellite Radio was simulcasting the show, as scheduled. "I haven't seen any Sirius people here," she said. "Maybe they chickened out." When guitarist Lenny Kaye told her the equipment and engineers were in the basement, she grinned in amazement. "There's nothing chicken about being in that basement."
Yet CBGB had always been there, until last night, for any musician with a bright new idea, especially those young bands that couldn't get booked anywhere else in the city. The flood of obituaries for the club has focused, naturally, on its mid-Seventies heyday, when the Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and Talking Heads were among the nightly entertainment with Smith and Television. But some of the best shows I ever saw there were in this century, including but hardly limited to: Soundtrack of Our Lives (their first U.S. tour), the Raveonettes (their first U.S. show) and, just a few months ago, proto-metal gods Blue Cheer, who played to what looked like half a house. In comparison, the line into the club last night ran around the block; I was in that line for ninety minutes and missed Smith's first four songs.
But I walked in at a perfect point: Smith reminiscing about her first CBGB moment -- Television on Easter Sunday, 1974 -- and singing that band's "Marquee Moon" in a subdued folk-ballad arrangement with serpentine electric flourishes by Television guitarist Richard Lloyd. Smith, who divided the evening into an acoustic-mood set and two hours of full electricity, frequently paid heartfelt tribute to Kristal, sitting on the raised platform in the back. She did not wax nostalgic for the ambience. "This is not a fucking temple -- it is what it is," she declared after a blistering version of the Who's "My Generation." Anyone else could start a club just like it, she said, anywhere in the world. All it takes is the will.
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The determination to renew and rise up was present in nearly every original song she sang, and most of the covers. Smith's band featured lifelong members Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, bassist-keyboard player Tony Shanahan and guest bassist for much of the night Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And they accompanied Smith with warm understatement in the first set, which included Lou Reed's "Pale Blue Eyes" -- a staple of her early shows -- "Ghost Dance" from 1978's Easter and the resurrection story "Birdland" from her 1976 debut album, Horses. She also performed a new, blunt reminder of the crisis raging outside the club's doors. "Without Chains" was a quietly searing indictment of the Bush administration's disregard for human rights at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- "our particular shame," she said, introducing the song, "a stain on the United States."
The long electric blowout started with Smith belting the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer." She dedicated "Redondo Beach" to her first manager Jane Friedman, "Pissing in a River" to her late brother and original road manager Todd and "Space Monkey" to R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. Smith put her own spin on the apocalypse in the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" ("Love, forgiveness, peace -- it's just a breath away!") and included part of Television's "Little Johnny Jewel" in "Rock and Roll Nigger," with Richard Lloyd back on guitar. The boys in the band got a pair of spotlights -- a Ramones medley and the Yardbirds' "For Your Love" -- and Smith's encore was the inevitable, galloping "Land," appended with a blazing "Gloria."
The weight of the occasion finally got to her then -- that this magic would never happen again on this stage. Smith was on the verge of tears, somewhere between sadness and ecstasy, as the crowd shouted "G-L-O-R-I-A" with her. But she quickly recovered for a final benediction. "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not" -- Smith and the band paused dramatically -- "CBGB's!"
Amen.
For more coverage on the finals days of CBGB, click here.