The space that was once occupied by New York punk landmark CBGB, shuttered since its farewell run last October, will soon be filled with the designer suits and upscale fragrances of a John Varvatos boutique. The designer hopes to move into the vacant spot along the Bowery by March. If cancer hadn’t recently claimed CBGB founder Hilly Kristal, this news might have. The boutique is just the latest addition to hit the formerly dilapidated Bowery strip: Whole Foods and Starbucks were recently constructed as the street continues to morph from punky to yuppie. While we’re a bit pained picturing cash registers where Talking Heads and the Ramones once performed, New York City blog Gothamist points out that Varvatos is kind of a rock-star designer — Iggy Pop was a model in his fall 2006 ad campaign, and Alice Cooper, Slash and Ryan Adams have donned his designs. Still, we’d rather reminisce about better days at 315 Bowery.

Related Stories:

• CBGB Founder Hilly Kristal Dies After Battle With Cancer
• The CBGB Countdown: Bad Brains Opens the Final Week
• The CBGB Countdown: Non-Fakers With Tickets, Share Your Review

• KISS has announced Kissology Vol. 3 — nearly ten hours of the band’s live performances from 1992-2000 on four DVDs (some sets include a bonus fifth), including their MTV Unplugged in 1995 and a show at L.A.’s Dodger Stadium in 1998. The set, due in stores December 18th, also features the 1973 Queens, New York gig that marked KISS’ first concert filmed in makeup.

• Foxy Brown has pleaded not guilty to assault charges stemming from an August BlackBerry-throwing incident. Brown is currently serving a year in jail due to probation violation. Last Friday the MC refused to travel to the hearing on a prison bus, leading prosecutors to threaten to place her on a bus in handcuffs for the rescheduled date.

• CBGB and MVD Entertainment have partnered to release a series of CDs commemorating legendary performances at the defunct NYC venue. The first set will include shows by Mooney Suzuki and the Queers, with another disc expected before the end of the year.

• Elliott Smith’s girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, will no longer receive payments from Smith’s estate because she “acted as an unlicensed talent agent” when serving as Smith’s manager. If Chiba appeals, the case could be reviewed by California’s Supreme Court.

• My Morning Jacket, the Roots, J Mascis and more will play a show together on November 7th for “I’m Not There: In Concert a Celebration of Todd Haynes’ Film” at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The lineup also includes Calexico and Cat Power.

As a final sendoff to CBGB founder Hilly Kristal, who passed away on Tuesday, we wanted to post a couple of Rolling Stone dispatches from the first bloom of New York punk: Charles M. Young’s early profile of the Ramones from 1976, and a review of a blistering Patti Smith live stand at CBs from 1977 by Mark Von Lehmden. (Click here for photos of the Ramones, Smith and more onstage at Kristal’s club.)

• “The Ramones Are Punks and Will Beat You Up” (August 12, 1976)
• “Patti Smith: Love and Anarchy in NYC” (July 28, 1977)

As Rock Daily reported earlier today, CBGB founder Hilly Kristal died in Manhattan yesterday after a battle with lung cancer. He was seventy-five years old. Though Kristal originally opened his Bowery bar in 1973 to showcase country, bluegrass and blues music, the gritty East Village club developed into the hub of 1970s punk rock and then gradually evolved into a spot for emerging bands to showcase their talents in the later Nineties. In the past few years, Kristal engaged in a very public struggle to keep his beloved club open, but he and his landlord ultimately failed to reach an agreement (read Rock Daily’s coverage of the club’s last days here). After Patti Smith stepped off the stage for the last time on October 15, 2006, Kristal carefully dismantled the bar, shipping its most precious pieces of memorabilia to Las Vegas, where he aimed to reopen the venue (notoriously nasty bathroom and all).

A few months prior, Rolling Stone spoke with Kristal about the club’s history. “I never did this as a point of making a lot of money,” he said. “I found it, or it found me, or we found each other, this new music. And I got to love these people and what some of them were doing, and of course, hate what some of the others were doing. You get very involved in getting these people who are trying to do something, especially this creative music, a chance.”

Here are some memories from artists who benefitted from getting a chance at Kristal’s club over the years, including Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Steven Van Zandt, Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz and the B-52’s Fred Schneider (and click here for a photo gallery of bands performing at CBGB):

Debbie Harry: “I am very sorry that Hilly is gone. He was a big help to Blondie and to the New York music scene for many years. His club CBGBs has become a part of New York lore and rock & roll history.”

Patti Smith: “Hilly dying made a flood of things come back to me. On that last night [at the club], he knew that we loved him. He stood up and we saluted him. I’m not trying to romanticize anything because in some ways it was a shithole. (more…)

After a lengthy battle with lung cancer, Hilly Kristal, the founder of legendary New York City punk club CBGB, has died at age seventy-five. Kristal, who founded and ran the East Village venue for thirty-three years, bitterly fought with his landlords to save it from closing down, but was forced to pack up his grimy club — the sticker-covered bar, legendarily disgusting bathroom and all — last year after he was finally evicted. Rolling Stone will have much more on Kristal and CBGB throughout the day, including a photo gallery documenting the venue’s rich history, but for now, remember the last days of the club Kristal fought so hard to preserve by reflecting on its last days.

Click here to read David Fricke’s interview with Patti Smith and reports on the last few shows to ever take place at the spot that helped launch the careers of the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie and more.

Check out a photo gallery featuring shots of the Ramones, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and more CGBG regulars at the club here.

[Photo: Gries/Getty]

Much like the mafia, we take care of our own. Which is why we’re presenting you with an exclusive Patti Smith Q&A in which the singer waxes poetic about New York’s beloved cultural nexxus CBGB. She and David Fricke shot the breeze two days after Ms. Smith headlined the club’s final show. You can read it all here. Who loves ya, baby?

Not ready to say goodbye? Neither are we. Read David Fricke’s report on the Patti Smith-helmed final CBGB’s show here. It’s OK to shed tears. We won’t tell anyone.

Dozens of young’uns pleaded with bouncers to gain entry to the penultimate CBGB’s show, to no avail. Inside, the capacity crowd was comprised of dark-clad twenty- and thirtysomethings too young to remember the good old days. The show featured a nicely random lineup: The club’s most famous alumni (Blondie) in redux form, playing acoustic, as well as far less famous, though more reliable, New York punk warriors the Dictators. (more…)

To a first-timer, CBGB’s is intimidating: the peeling walls; the beer-soaked floors; the leather-clad dudes, and, worst of all, the smell—a potpourri of Porta-Potty and post-kegger frat house. But when NYC punk stalwarts the Dictators hit the stage on Friday night to mark the legendary club’s third-to-last show, all sensory sins were forgiven. (more…)

So by now you know that we’re on a serious CBGB-is-closing bender in which we chainread Please Kill Me while listening to Television and Richard Hell and Ramones records and pretending that our East Village apartment costs $300 not $3,000. That’s where you come in.

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Perhaps you’ve heard that CBGB is closing? For a while now there have been farewell-ish shows at the legendary club, but this week the real countdown begins. The remaining performers include Bad Brains, Debbie Harry and Patti Smith (among many others) between now and Sunday when the last show ever will be held. We’re trying to say goodbye gracefully, and last night the Bad Brains helped us along in our quest. We were joined by approximately 563 dudes who look like the adult Beastie Boys. Everyone was pretty and buff with prematurely grey hair and youthful faces. And tattoos. Lots of tattoos. They all knew the words to the classics like “I Against I,” “Sailin’ On,” and “I,” and sang unabashedly while sipping light beer and purchasing expensive T-shirts. It was quite moving, really.

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The founding late-Sixties lineup of the San Francisco power trio Blue Cheer – singer-bass guitarist Dickie Peterson, drummer Paul Whaley and guitarist Leigh Stephens – was so loud that the band literally recorded half of its second album, Outsideinside, outdoors, on waterfront piers. There was so much amp hum on Blue Cheer’s infamous debut, 1968’s Vincebus Eruptum, that it was practically a fourth instrument. And in one memorable ’68 TV appearance, promoting their freak hit cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” the group – armed with a long wall of Marshall speaker cabinets – was introduced by host Steve Allen this way: “Blue Cheer. Run for your lives.”
The terror is back. The Blue Cheer that turned up – and turned it up – at CBGB on June 20th featured Peterson, Whaley with long-serving guitarist Andrew “Duck” MacDonald and resurrected the whole of Vincebus Eruptum and chunks of Outsideinside, with every needle on the soundboard pinned to the red. (more…)