Dying Scene Book Club – “This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB” by Roman Kozak
Roma Kozak’s This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB was originally released in 1988 and was one of the first books documenting the scene at CBGB’s in New York. Located in the Bowery, the oldest street in Manhattan, CBGB’s time may have been brief in comparison to its location’s history but Kozak’s book shows it’s definitely the most interesting.
This Ain’t No Disco sometimes feels like an oral history type of book with big paragraphs of quotes from the characters of the club. The way this book transitions through subjects is great. The stories told feel like they are being relayed to a friend reminiscing on a scene that was continuing to evolve as it covers about the first fifteenish years of the CBGB’s existence. The book has a full-on cast list of regulars where the bulk of the interviews in the book are derived. This includes members of the Hell’s Angels, members of the bands who shaped the scene, and club staff, who were all connected to CBGB’s owner, Hilly Kristal.
Kozak gives a little backstory on Kristal and his accidental placement of a Country, Bluegrass, and Blues club in the middle of a bad New York neighborhood in 1973. While there is some info on what Hilly did before CBGB’s in regards to other bars he owned, we never get a sense of who he was before the club. There is talk about his family including his ex-wife and kids who worked at the club. This gets skimmed a bit as It seems like the club and the community that grew around it was his life.
We get the origin stories for a lot of these early bands who formed at the club. Whether it was going over pre-Blondie band the Stilettos or Patti Smith’s transformation from poet to lead singer with the Patti Smith Group and their early performances. There’s a vivid description of trans rocknroll pioneer Jayne County’s show that may have been shocking at the time of the book’s writing, but now just seems like a regular Sunday at a drag brunch. Kozak doesn’t go too deep into how bands that were formed separately from the club, like the Ramones and Television, but does go into how The Shirts, and the Dead Boys came together while the scene was growing around CBGB’s. There is a nice little section on the women of the CBGB’s scene, outside of performers like Debbie Harry and Patti Smith, but the key word here is little and mostly involved the compiled sex list in the women’s restroom at CBGB.
As the scene grew there are accounts of CBGB and Hilly’s relationship with publications like the Village Voice and The Soho News, who either praised or punished Hilly’s club depending on his relationship with them. John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil are also interviewed about their adoption of the term punk to describe what was happening at CBGB’s and when it spread across the sea to England. Kozak’s comparison and contrast of the American punk scene to England’s is pretty spot on. There’s no disdain in the text for how England’s scene took some thunder from New York’s, but it would be hard To argue that the revolt The Clash, The Damned, and Sham 69 waged on the monarchy had no artistic merit to the weird art rock that the New York scene had created
Hilly’s failures of managing the Shirts and the Dead Boys and other ventures like the CBGB theater shows risks that didn’t always pay off, but other ones that did later in the clubs existence. It showed that Hilly failed into success. At the time this book was written a lot of hardcore bands were playing Sunday matinee shows. In the 1980s, the club had become a hub for hardcore bands as much as it was for that first wave of punks. Despite Hilly’s indifference for the genre he knew he had to evolve with the scene. There’s a great piece at the end about the New York Hardcore scene with Jimmy Gestapo (Murphy’s Law) and Roger Miret (Agnostic Front) seemingly at the beginning of their careers.
Choosing a regular patron and rock journalist was a good call. The new edition of the book boasts a new intro written by Chris Franz of the Talking Heads and some pages of photos of the early bands taken in the club’s heyday by Ebet Roberts. Ira Robbins’ articles about the club’s money problems and inevitable closing in 2006 have been repurposed as an epilogue of sorts for Kozak’s original text.
If I have one criticism with the book, it’s that if you know the history of punk rock, a lot of this info isn’t new. It doesn’t make it any less cool and definitely fills in some gaps and in no way takes the relevance of Roman Kozak’s words away. Either the people interviewed about CBGB told the same stories over and over or this book was the source for a lot of different projects about the club. I’d like to think its the latter. The broad strokes here only made room for the details the bands around the Bowery would tell in their respective books later down the road.
If you’ve seen the critically panned CBGB movie from 2013, you’ll clearly get the untruncated version here. While your big three – The Ramones, Blondie, and The Talking Heads – got a lot of attention in that film, here, a light is shined on some of the smaller bands that typically get left in the dust for various reasons. The real shame is that Roman Kozak passed away before the book wasreleased. CBGB shut its doors in 2006. An updated book or edition every so often and similar to Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York would have been an interesting read as the scene morphed. Pick up This Ain’t No Disco: the Story of CBGB here from Trouser Press Books.