CBGB's Home at the Stereo Society

Download QuickTime VR panoramas from 1995 CBGB
Hang out backstage or step up to the mic.

Cosmo Ohms in interview
Cosmo Ohms was the lighting manager at CBGB for most of its heydays. Like many at the club, he made up the rules as he went along as CBGB developed to become a new music focus. Here, he tells of his own dramatic start in lighting, and reflects on the club during the classic period from the mid-seventies to the nineties.
(continue to the full interview)

B G Hacker In Interview
BG was often the first person you’d meet on starting an evening at CBGB, defining a pleasant mood on the way in. So many establishments overlook how much the mood and pleasure to be had inside reflects the people at the door.
(continue to the full interview)

CBGB Past, Present And Future
By Marc Berger for Downtown Magazine, New York City, February 4 1987

Hilly Kristal started managing downtown music clubs in the late '50s, beginning at The Village Vanguard, then with his own club, Hilly's on Ninth Street in the late '60s (in the space that is now Village restaurant), and finally at Hilly's on the Bowery, later renamed CBGB.

With Ron Delsener, Kristal began the popular Rheingold-Schaeffer concert festival in Central Park. At CBGB, Kristal was at the center of a seminal New York music scene which launched the careers of such influential artists as Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie and The Ramones......(continue to the full interview)

CB’s: A Personal Note By Mike Thorne

The club’s name was strictly CBGB and OMFUG, short for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers. Somewhere it got shortened to CBGB’s and then down to just CB’s in conversation. It functioned at 315 Bowery, New York City, end of Bleecker Street, from December 1973 to October 2006.

The owner, Hilly Kristal, managed the Shirts, who were a joint signing between EMI London and Capitol Records, after which I arrived in late 1977 to meet everyone with a view to producing their first album. Fresh out of the roaring UK punk scene, and arriving unfashionably early at the former railroad workers’ bar still smelling of cigarettes and stale beer from the night before, I looked around and thought, ‘what a dump.’ But was before the people showed up. Years later, in the 21st century, The New York Times’ Jon Pareles would use the same word in an article about the club’s demise, which put Hilly in a bad mood for days. I couldn’t ever use the phrase in front of him, even in joking mode with a friend. He cared. And it was a dump in appearance only.

I came fairly late to the party, three years after the club really got going, but was lucky to become effectively embedded after producing two Shirts albums and becoming close with Hilly and his crew. The people who ran it and who played there transformed 315 Bowery to transcend grungy surroundings and make what many people now look back on as a shrine. We are often more comfortable in unprepossessing surroundings and it was a very comfortable and sociable dump/shrine for many people. We all grew there, in our own individual and erratic ways.

So much has been written about CBGB’s that a brief history isn’t necessary here. You’re visiting this page because you know already. Hilly himself started writing a history, but this remained unfinished at his death in 2007, a year after his club was wrenched from him, a loss which took his wind away.