When I first heard there was a CBGB Festival taking place at a park in Brooklyn, then saw the lineup, I was intrigued… until I checked the ticket prices (!) and contemplated what it’d take to get from my house to Greenpoint (!!). Friends on social media dissed the event as yet one more crass attempt to capitalize on whatever nostalgia lingers over CBGB as a brand and the few punk rock/hardcore elder statesmen who’d perform (Cro-Mags, Iggy Pop, Murphy’s Law, Sex Pistols, The Damned). I saw the Sex Pistols back in 2002, or whenever they initially reformed, and didn’t feel the need to see an understudy “Now in the role of Johnny Rotten!” The Cro-Mags and Murphy’s Law I’d performed alongside back in the day. Iggy Pop? I went to that Stooges reunion show out at Jones Beach with the Asheton brothers and Mike Watt on bass, so I’m good.
I suppose I’m weird in that I don’t need to see the same performers over and over. When I was at SiriusXM I worked with several mental cases who’d seen Bruce Springsteen HUNDREDS of times and I remember thinking What the fuck is wrong with you? I get it, you’re a super fan. You go to the show, you sing along, you swap stories and bootleg tapes with other fans. But come on. I’m at the point in my life where – with rare exception (looking at you, Neil Young and Nick Cave) – I don’t want to see artists who’ve been at it since I left high school.
The only OG band at CBGB Fest I even gave a shit about was The Damned. Somehow, don’t ask me how, I never managed to see them back in the day, despite the reports that’d come back about the killer shows they’d do. The Damned were the first punk band whose 45 I went out and bought – New Rose – and Mike Nicolosi (RIP) and I considered it a foundational document for the Nihilistics. I don’t know how many times, in Mike’s bedroom, stereo cranked up really loud, we started our night out with cold beer and a New Rose sing-a-long. Mike would play air bass guitar and I’d bang my head. Mike would cycle through more Damned favorites – Neat Neat Neat, Problem Child, Love Song, Smash It Up – before moving on to a palate cleanser, like Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. Brian James of The Damned was my platonic ideal of a punk rock guitarist: a true basher for whom open chords were anathema but who could also spice things up with some well-timed Johnny Thunders-esque filigrees.
Still, I wasn’t about to pay the asking price and navigate mass transit to Brooklyn to attend CBGB Fest (or Festival or whatever the fuck). Then fate intervened. My friend Jim said he’d bought me a ticket as a birthday gift. This Saturday I drove my electric Mini to Williamsburg, where I’d pre-paid for a parking garage spot. Getting through Manhattan was bad enough (between assholes lining up for parking garages and assholes being dropped off in front of hotels, I crawled across the width of the city) but then the parking garage attendant says “We’re full.”
“Yeah, but I pre-paid.”
I hand him my phone, he looks at the QR code, hands the phone back to me. Just as I’m thinking We’re fucked he says “Well… you’re car is small. I think I can fit it in somewhere.” I thank him profusely and Jim and I set off walking toward the “Under The K Bridge Park” – which is, yes, under the Kosciuszko Bridge. Through Williamsburg and into Greenpoint Jim and I compare notes on the Brooklyn we used to know as compared to this off-putting hipster center of the universe it’s become. As we pass a young, beautiful couple cross the street we hear snatches of their conversation about meetings and finance and money markets and shit that has us rolling our eyes and inwardly wretching.
Yep. That’s how you can afford to live here now. Work in finance.
Twenty-five minutes of walking takes us from coffee shops, farm-to-table, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and every other type of food joint you could imagine into an industrial stretch of Greenpoint where truck repair shops, warehouses and light manufacturing have yet to be supplanted by luxury condos (give it time). We find the VIP entrance (Jim splurged on the tickets) and make our way into the venue as Lunachicks break into another song. There are thousands of people here, most of them in black T-shirts with white screen-printing proclaiming their favorite band. I’m feeling decidedly out of place in my snap-button Western shirt, even if it has a subtle black-and-white skull pattern all over it.
“Jim, I was gonna wear my Nihilistics shirt… but that would’ve been stupid, right? Wearing your own band’s shirt?”
I’m amazed by just how many youngsters are in attendance. Somehow I thought it would be all old fucks, like me, and there are a few decrepit types using canes to amble about. But the under 30 contingent is strong and there are fucking teenagers here, too. One kid goes past trailing his dad and I want to tell the kid to drag his denim vest covered with DEAD KENNEDYS and KILLING JOKE and DAMNED iron-on patches behind his bike for a few miles to scuff it up. It looks like those sponsor vests you see in NASCAR or on the professional bull-riding circuit. But damn, the kids love the punk rock and hardcore.
There are so many people here Jim and I find it difficult just wading through the crowds to get to where the food trucks are parked. After some gyro at the Greek truck we wander from “Hilly’s Stage” on the far end to the “Young Punks Stage” in the middle and back to the main stage near the entrance. Along the way, we pass various CBGB “artifacts” like the supposed original bar, replete with bar stools, being protected by a burly security dude – and I think about the times I sat at that very bar talking with Hilly Kristal about the Nihilistics and where we might take our band. Hilly liked us, felt we had the same spirit he saw in the Dead Boys, and somehow took a liking to me. On one of our many appearance at CBs he even gifts me with a cassette of music he’s made (I have no idea what happened to that tape but it’s out there on YouTube and it’s… not good).
While on line for an adult beverage a young woman – 22, 23 – comes over, says I’ll give you ten bucks to buy me a Sprite.
“Why don’t you buy your own Sprite? You don’t have to pay me.”
I don’t want to wait in this line.
Jesus. I look behind me and the line is long. All day long, the lines are long. I take her ten and while we wait, apropos of nothing I find myself telling the above story, about chatting with Hilly at CBGBs (look, we never said “CBGB”: we always said “CBGBs”) and being in one of the original NYHC bands.
Oh yeah? Which one?
“The Nihilistics.”
The young woman and anyone listening squint, search their brains, nod, go Oh… sure… Nihilistics.
I get called up next and ask for a Sprite.
I don’t sell soft drinks here. Only beer and mixed drinks. I have water?
“Okay. Here.”
I proffer the ten.
I don’t take cash.
“Yup. Got it.”
I take out a card, pay $15 for my Bourbon & Cola in a can and god-knows-what for a bottle of water for the young woman.
“Here. They don’t have Sprite and they don’t sell soft drinks.”
She gets her ten back, too.
Jim and I manage to catch, in addition to Lunachicks, a bit of Teen Mortgage and Cro-Mags before we decide to stake out positions near the stage for The Damned. Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Paul Gray appear as the sun begins to dip and launch into Love Song. Over the next hour and fifteen minutes they work their way through all the songs Mike and I would listen to before heading out to Legz in Valley Stream. At one point Dave Vanian climbs down and comes over to where we are stage left until he’s close enough to almost touch him. Which I don’t. For a bunch of old men, these motherfuckers are still able to rock my balls clean off. Why did I wait so long?!
After The Damned, Jack White comes on in a bit and Jim and watch half his set and decide to fuck off back home. We get stuck in traffic (firetruck) in an Uber back to the parking garage and abandon ship, walking the few blocks left. I drop Jim at Grand Central and end up going through the belly of the beast – 42nd Street on a Saturday night after 9:30 – to the Lincoln Tunnel. Fuck me. Even though we missed much of what was on offer (I fucking hate the simultaneous, overlapping multi-stage thing) we saw just enough to satisfy. More importantly, I can confidently report that punk rock and hardcore is alive and well and doing just fine.
The kids, while probably still royally fucked, are alright.