BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE (2009)

You know, you watch a movie like this, presuming you’re of a certain age, and perhaps disposition, and you start to think about posterity, and the mark you or anyone else might be likely to leave on it. This can get a little depressing.

In the case of Hilly Krystal, who ran the rock club CBGB’s in New York City for the best part of three decades, his legacy is assured, if also perhaps slightly depressing. The music that came out of there, thanks to the then no-name groups he allowed to play there in the early-mid 1970s, was critically lauded for what constituted forever in the 20th Century, and likely will be for as long as anyone remembers or cares about rock music. Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Heartbreakers (Thunders, not Petty) – they all played there, as did everyone else in the New York punk scene at the time. Hell, it kind of WAS the New York punk scene.

(The New York Dolls mostly played elsewhere, and maybe a little before this time-frame, I think. This doco doesn’t mention the Mercer Avenue Arts whatever-it-was, where they played, nor is Max’s Kansas City – a New York venue despite the name – mentioned at all.)

Hilly Krystal was a former male chorus singer (in a heterosexual type of way, one gathers) at Radio City Music Hall, who had ambitions of being some kind of bluegrass artist, and never made it as such. He opened up a club called CBGB, which stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, and lived to see it become an icon for precisely none of those kinds of music.

According to this movie, by all testimonies given therein, his joint was a complete rat-hole in the early 70s, which he never spent a dime on if he could avoid it, with the one exception being a then-state of the art PA he had put in, roughly (it isn’t quite specified in the movie) around the time that he started booking the bands that were to become known as “Punk Rock”.

This was a happy accident, or a brilliant selective use of available capital, as the sound in CBGB was apparently excellent. (You have to trust them on this, because most footage included in the movie from the old days is rugged as hell for both sound and visuals. Actually, they even have an unrelated clip of Aerosmith which is just about digitising, it’s so crappy. Anyway, I’ve been in there, and the sound was good.)

By the way, him “booking” these bands is kind of an overstatement. CBGB was a dive on the Bowery, which was a street for down and outs that, in general, made the venue almost posh by comparison, “almost” being the key word. Again, by all testimony, there was no young rock scene indigenous to New York at the time. Bands like Television and Richard Hell’s band were around and wanted to play somewhere. One gathers that they saw CBGB as a place shitty enough and with low-enough standards and expectations, that they might be allowed to play there, since they and their friends being there would boost the bar-tab.

Krystal went along with it, and, as a result, history subsequently happened in his long, skinny, divey rock bar. He was a kind of absent-minded accommodator of the arts, in a kind of not-quite beatnik (he had played at Cafe Wha? and that NY coffee-house set-up of the early 60s that gave rise to Bob Dylan, among others – incidentally on an unrelated note of bizarre cross-culture pollenisation, David Lee Roth in his autobiography mentions that Cafe Wha? was run by his Uncle Manny), not-quite hippy kind of way. That tendency to nurture the somewhat wayward musical artists and the otherwise artistic, and the sound-system he put in, are probably the foundation of his legacy, along with having his “colourful” club in an even more colourful street.

The movie is not a history of the NY punk scene, although there’s plenty of that in there, and principals from the time are interviewed, including Debbie Harry, Tommy Ramone, Cheetah Chrome etc.

One good thing about Burning Down The House is that it DOESN’T stop with the club’s famous days. It continues through the hardcore punk days of the 1980s, and the times when it booked grunge era bands in the 90s, which is just as well, because those periods of CBGB are relatively undocumented, and while no more revolutions came out of there, people around the world still iconicised the joint, mostly with some time-locked idealised vision of what it represented, and some documentation of the fact it continued as an active rock venue, and what was played there, was due, and probably overdue.

Unfortunately, this is only partly a documentary on CBGB, or Hilly Krystal. The framework director Mandy Stein (daughter of Linda Stein, former Ramones manager, and, I presume, Seymour Stein of Sire Records) has chosen to construct the picture around is Krystal’s final fight for the venue’s survival, when the landlord, a non-profit organisation aimed at helping the homeless, was trying to kick them out.

Many points are made about the gentrification of the Bowery, and of New York in general, and of the vital cultural nature of what CBGB represented. It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that something irreplaceable and valuable was lost, no matter how crappy in some ways it might have quite literally been. (The legendary CBGB toilets – a Manhattan version of the Black Hole of Calcutta – are cited many times over, not to mention the frequent prevalence of dog poo and worse throughout the club. It’s hard not to get the impression that the only money Hilly Krystal spent on the joint after the PA was on liquor to stock the bar, and whatever staff wages amounted to.)

However, it’s also difficult to escape the feeling that change like this is inevitable, and happens all over the place. In general, given the way things are going, it’s easy to believe that in 50 years’ time, the shittiest of live music bars, clubs or pubs that people fondly complain about would be unrecognisably shimmering, streamlined, clean and modern to those of us with a 70s or 80s start-date for rock joint attendance, and basically look something like the Legion of Superheroes club-house in the year 3000.

It’s also a factor that the Ee-vill landlord bent on cleaning CBGB out of its hidey-hole is an organisation which assists homeless people. If it had been a case of clearing Krystal and CBGB’s out of there to put in some rich nob’s expensive apartment building or something, the fight over the space would have a different feel to it, put it that way.

But probably the biggest factor is that the details – legal, logistical and otherwise – of this fight to save CBGB become tedious by comparison to discussion of the music that was played there, and the interview snippets with the musicians themselves.

Hilly Krystal’s story is a story worth telling, and it’s as big a part of the CBGB story as anything but the best-remembered music that came out of there, but the incredibly detailed recounting of the long, drawn-out and ultimately hopeless final battle to save it is hardly the most riveting portion of this documentary. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of this documentary.

But for anyone interested in any of the music that happened there, there’s still more than enough interest generated to make it absolutely worth your while. The footage of the final concert (Patti Smith, The Dictators, among others) and the venue’s final days is pretty fascinating. The stuff about the merchandising generating CBGB’s survival money in its later years is real interesting. There’s plenty of stuff in there about the scene of the 1970s and interviews with people whose music became an acknowledged part of international music history, as well as mainstays like Wayne/Jayne County, and the Dictators, who didn’t so much.

It’s actually worth it just to see Hilly Krystal’s office, a clutter of such baroque, toweringly filthy magnitude that it’s difficult to believe a single decision that generated so much as a dollar was made from there.

You get to see the joint pulled apart, which has its eerie hold on the viewer as well.

The final irony is seeing various mementos from CBGB enshrined in a New York rock museum, ironically in (presumably) the same Mercer Avenue which used to host the Dolls. They tore the joint down, but saved some scraps to put under glass. Kind of bizarre.

If you were into any of the bands mentioned, and/or the Dead Boys, the Tuff Darts (nice clip!), or whoever, make sure you see it, despite any deficiencies or misjudgements mentioned above. It might not all be great history, but it’s the history of something great.

——————————————————

(I went to CBGB’s exactly once, in the early 1980s, either ’81 or ’82. There were three bands on – one was called Great Jones, another I can’t remember the name of, and Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls was the headliner. The venue was very very thin, and long. Beers were not cheap. I don’t know if the place had been mildly spruced up since its 70s heyday, but I don’t remember it as being really much shittier than various live music pubs and clubs I was attending here at the time. It just didn’t strike me that way. I can’t remember any poo on the floor, or anything like that. It had a great feel for a rock joint, kind of both welcoming and vaguely threatening, like it says at one point in the doco. But then, there were places like that here too, only I knew them better. I went down to the notorious CBGB toilets. Hell, when I need to go for a beer pee, I’ll go to anyone’s famous toilets. It was all cracked, marked, spattered and splattered, but I’ve seen as bad if not worse in pub toilets here. Maybe I caught it on a relatively good day. That said, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to consume a sandwich in there, or anything. Some kid who looked like Andy Warhol tried to score drugs off me. This is not so remarkable in itself in that (a) about one in six people in there looked like Andy Warhol, and (b) I have a lifetime history of being mistaken for a drug dealer, by civilians, police and drug dealers alike, even though I basically don’t use drugs at all, and have never dealt them. However when you’re a fairly young-looking 21 year old from Australia City, with at best mid-length hair, no facial hair, no tattoos, no earrings, and some guy who looks like Andy Warhol approaches you to score drugs in the CBGB toilet on your first visit to the Big Apple, it’s kind of hard not to have that “If I can MAKE it there/I’ll make it ANYWHERE” line going through your head, once you’ve safely established that the guy is not going to ask you out on a date, to take effect almost immediately. By the way, from memory that wasn’t the only time someone tried to score drugs off me that one time at CBGB. Fortunately for my heart-rate, it was the only time someone did so in the toilet, however.)

————————————————————————————————————————————