FTLGTP: Country Blue Grass Blues

Stop #12: CBGB’s

Moving south and slightly west, we come to the former location of CBGB, which stands for Country Blue Grass Blues, at 315 Bowery. This became the primary venue for the proto punk scene in the 1970s. Patti Smith and Television began playing here early on. Later, bands like the Ramones, the Talking Heads, and Blondie also shared the stage.

Tom Verlaine (who named himself after Rimbaud’s lover, Paul Verlaine) discovered the venue when he walked by and saw it as a great new place to perform his music. Television began playing there regularly and eventually brought Smith and Kaye to the club in 1974 (Shaw, 79).

Continuing a connection between the Beat generation and the new generation of punk rockers, William S. Burroughs was a frequent visitor to the music club. Although he was much older than the performers and members of the audience, he sat up near the front of the stage and actively participated in the shows and supported the up and coming musicians.

In describing the musicians that played at CBGB and their connection to poetry, Kane states,

Musicians looked to poetry not just in terms of what the art had to offer them as a model for their own songwriting but also as a form that could provide them with ways of thinking about how to make actual lifestyle choices. That is to say, poetry was both something they read and, in one form or another, something they tried to live (191).

In a way, musicians like Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, and Richard Hell were trying live poetry through their music.

CBGB eventually became a rock n’ roll icon and began to grab bigger crowds and bigger names but it was the early punk movement that started it all for the small grungy venue. CBGB eventually closed in October of 2006.

Last Stop: The Bitter End

FTLGTP: An Outlaw Posture

Stop #11: Cafe Metro

After the Café Les Deux Megots changed ownership, the poets migrated over to Cafe Metro, another East Village café, formerly located at 149 Second Avenue, where they continued their experimentation with spoken word poetry and other artistic expression including the mimeographed magazines. It was at the Metro that “poetry and a kind of outlaw posture verging on nihilism became apparent” (Kane, 195).

The examples of poetry and experimentation that was prominent at Café Les Deux Megots and later Café Metro show the strong connection between this new rule breaking poetry and the rule breaking punk rock that was starting to happen a little bit farther downtown.

Unfortunately I have no picture to share because I could not find any old pictures of the place and there isn’t really anything at 149 Second Avenue anymore. So it goes.

Up Next: CBGB’s

FTLGTP: “Monday Nothing…”

Stop #7: Cedar Tavern

Along the opposite side of the park from MacDougal runs University Place. Along University Place there was one bar in particular that was central for overlap of Beats and Folk artists. It was the Cedar Tavern, originally at 24 University Place. Cedar Tavern was also popular to the visual arts crowd during the time period. Regulars at Cedar Tavern included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, members of The Fugs, and Bob Dylan.

One of the very first bands to mix folk and punk, The Fugs collaborated and borrowed much from the poets and other artists in the neighborhood including their name, which was borrowed from the pages of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Daniel Kane describes this connection in his essay, “From poetry to punk in the East Village” also for the Cambridge Companion:

Links developed between poets and punk-folkies including the band The Fugs, and—combined with the interest among young musicians in poetry and poetics from Rimbaud and Baudelaire through to Allen Ginsberg, Berrigan, Waldman, and beyond—resulted in remarkable artistic cross fertilization. Ultimately, the move from poetry to punk suggests that the period under consideration provided a fascinating challenge to conventional understanding of what constitutes “high culture,” “low culture,” and the status of the lyric as static, page-bound text (190).

This collaboration is something we see throughout Greenwich Village in both the literary and the musical movements and it seems to be vital to the kinds of artistic creativity that was produced.

(Here’s a glimpse into the music of The Fugs:)

Stop #8: Andy Warhol’s Electric Circus

Andy Warhol was particularly involved in the move to mix different kinds of art during this time period. He became the manager for the Velvet Underground and rented out the Polish National Social Hall, which he turned into the Electric Circus at 23 St. Mark’s Place, and used it as a performance space for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which included the Velvet Underground and poet Gerard Melanga.