CBGB is arguably the most famous nightclub in rock 'n' roll.
Like the Fillmore, New York City's CBGB — no apostrophe ess, please, it's not the owner's damn initials — is a piece of American history, a music-scene equivalent of Edison's birthplace in Milan, Ohio, or Casa Antigua, where Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, on Key West. We can argue endlessly about where punk rock was actually born, but CBGB is unarguably where it staked out a piece of turf on the cultural landscape. Almost from the day it opened in December 1973, CBGB has been synonymous with the synthesis of what were once this country's most frightening and antisocial sounds.
CBGB is legendary.
It's also one hell of an ugly dive.
Sitting at 315 Bowery like it's guarding the Lower East Side, the original CBGB is a dark, cluttered, oversized railroad car of a space. One must negotiate an interminable narrow walkway between the bar and some elevated seating just to get a look at the stage, and the sedimentary layers of stickers on every surface have surely shaved at least a couple of feet off the total cubic volume. In fact, eyeing the ancient speaker enclosures, bent cafeteria chairs and infamously undisciplined downstairs bathrooms, one can't help but wonder if the adhesive band logos are the only things holding the damn place together. And a few years of indoor smoking ban haven't cleared up much of the decades-old dank, either.
Next door is the newer and more refined CB's 313 Gallery — there's, like, curtains and art and shit — but below its underbelly, like a hernia, is a third CBGB performance space. It's called "CB's Downstairs Lounge" — a barely furnished basement, it makes the down-at-heels main room look like Barbie's Dream Loft.
While formerly hip pop-rock band The Dandy Warhols command the sold-out iconic venue above and to the left, Tampa Bay death metal outfit The Absence is down here, playing a welcome-mat-size stage surrounded by eroding brick and exposed pipe.
It's the first night of New York's annual four-day CMJ Music Marathon. The Absence is among the initial acts, of more than 1,000, to play this year's festival showcases at over 50 venues scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn.
But while the group is signed to well-known extreme-music label Metal Blade, and has played in front of hundreds at hometown shows, it's still a Wednesday night; this gig looks and feels more like an evening at Tampa's own strip-mall dive The Brass Mug than part of fringe music's biggest yearly event.
The Absence plays a blistering set to an interested, mostly longhaired crowd of 30 or 40, then politely thanks them for listening and packs up its gear as a CD starts playing over the P.A. and members of the throng head for the bathroom (shudder), the bar or another club where another showcase is happening.
I went to this year's CMJ Music Marathon, which this year ran Sept. 14-17, for a lot of reasons. It has long enjoyed a reputation as the coolest new-music showcase in the business — the only real competition is Austin's annual South by Southwest festival — plus I'd never been. I figured this, the Marathon's 25th anniversary, would be the year to go. There were loads of bands I wanted to see, industry contacts I wanted to meet in person, displaced Bay area residents I wanted to catch up with, slices of pizza I wanted to eat, overpriced beers I wanted to drink. Plus, any opportunity to revisit the massive, dichotomous symbol of America at its best and worst that is New York City is one worth taking.
But I mostly went to find out what the term "indie rock" means these days, if it still means anything at all.
I use the term in a lot of music columns, and older Planet readers — say, boomers and above — are always asking me for a definition. The short answer is independent rock — music that's made, distributed and listened to outside corporate channels, without the promotional muscle or conspicuous mainstream trendsetting of any of the handful of record-label conglomerates or FM-radio networks that largely control the industry.
The long answer is much more elusive. Like so many other institutions, time and perception have had their way with indie rock, replacing the thing itself with something between an idea and an ideal. And that change is mirrored in the development of the CMJ Music Marathon, a festival as synonymous with indie rock as any on the planet.
Twenty-five years ago, a small publication called the CMJ (College Music Journal) New Music Report decided to hold a college-radio convention in New York City. It was a one-day schedule of panel discussions attended by radio DJs, programmers, station managers, promoters and peripheral companies similar to CMJ, which was little more than an insider tip sheet tracking what was being played by the mostly low-power stations that subscribed to it, and throwing information about new artists back at them.
In 1981, there was no such term as "indie rock." There wasn't even an "alternative rock." The cool, underground, cutting-edge artists — a vibrant, eclectic group including everything from do-it-yourself punk bands and quirky new wave acts to hip-hop pioneers and world beat acts — were grouped together under the umbrella "college rock," because those collegiate stations were among the only ones playing them.
But the first CMJ convention wasn't about celebrating the music, it was about analyzing the "business," if such a word could be used in conjunction with college radio. Not a single act performed at the '81 shindig.
A lot of things have changed in 24 years.
The influence of college radio as a grassroots musical tastemaker — hell, the fact of college radio itself — has been on the wane for well over a decade. (In addition, few universities host underground shows anymore, whether due to insurance issues, budget constraints or creeping institutional conservatism; the idea of a broke, unknown touring act scoring a lifesaving triple-digit payout for an on-campus show is laughable these days.)
From a cynical standpoint, it seems college radio fulfilled its purpose of introducing larger audiences to cooler music, and was left to die. A lot of "college rock" became "alternative rock," and poured through the tunnel Nirvana helped dig between the underground and the mainstream.
The rest of it became indie rock, the still-edgy, still-below-the-radar alternative to alternative rock. Which, of course, placed it in line directly behind alternative rock as the next thing to be marched into the light of mass cultural awareness.
And somewhere along the line, CMJ — now the College Media Journal — became less about the college radio business, and more about the new cool-music business college radio helped build. CMJ's industry-centric weekly New Music Report has long been augmented by hip consumer magazine New Music Monthly, and the multimedia company's website is a treasure trove of data whose usefulness depends largely upon which access plan one subscribes to.
But it's the now-mammoth college radio conference that has become the company's true claim to fame. Since its rebirth as the CMJ Music Marathon (or simply "CMJ," to give you an idea of how much the Marathon has come to define the company) in '83, the festival has been instrumental in breaking fringe bands. As the success of such acts as R.E.M., Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Modest Mouse and dozens of others illustrates, a featured showcase at CMJ has long amounted to instant Next Big Thing status.
The career paths of The Killers and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, performers in recent years, confirm it: The most heavily hyped names of any year's Music Marathon can be the coolest mainstream names of the next year, if they want.
Which begs the question:
If CMJ is a bastion of indie rock — and artists of all stripes, from death metal to folk to jazz to pop to hip-hop, play CMJ, and some of them aren't really indie rock, but rather mainstream hitmakers in waiting — then exactly what the hell is "indie rock" again?
Seriously, I want to know.
All I know is that jam bands aren't "indie rock," because as far as I can figure, no jam bands played CMJ this year.
It's still Wednesday night.
Hub bartender and Tampa musician Mark Bustin and I are catching up with WMNF DJ Scott Imrich at another Lower East Side club called Tonic. Imrich had gone ahead to catch a performer named Jason Forrest, whom he described as a mash-up artist — a DJ who builds new songs, usually in the electronic dance-music vein, out of existing well-known songs of disparate styles. Bustin and I had gone to see The Absence instead, not only because they were hometown guys but also because Jason Forrest sounded like something we would rather kill ourselves than endure.
There isn't a sign outside Tonic advertising its presence, just a guy who looks too small to be a bouncer and too cool to be homeless, so it takes us a few minutes to decide we are in the right place. Virtually every club in New York boasts a minimally decorated anteroom or barroom or chair storage facility between the front door and the actual venue. At Tonic, it's a bit of everything except a bar, but the performance space is open, high-ceilinged and impressive.
Onstage, a pudgy, balding man who resembles a Christian camp counselor is having a theatrical seizure behind a laptop computer. The laptop is swaddled in a toilet-seat cover with the words "cock rock disco" written on it. The tall table supporting the laptop sways unsteadily as the man jumps, kicks, bangs his head and flails his arms in time to the hugely loud, crunchy hunks of sound lockstepping from the speakers.
Apparently, we haven't missed Jason Forrest.
It's a good thing, though. Forrest knows nobody in their right mind wants to watch a guy fiddling with a laptop onstage. So he makes his body the show, pausing in his manic gesticulations and imaginary-orchestra conducting only to start, stop and fuck with the sounds his computer is producing, or to say hilarious things into the microphone that he's constantly on the verge of dropping in order to move that hand around more.
I don't think I could be persuaded to put on one of the guy's CDs while driving my car, but he puts on a hell of a show. Imrich catches me enjoying myself, and gives an I-told-you-so smile as the members of the crowd around us spasm along.
CMJ was conceived more or less as a business conference. And to some minimal degree, it still is. This year, it was headquartered at culture-vulture HQ Lincoln Center instead of a hotel, but the events held there still resembled the schedule for some sort of convention: discussion panels (this year's topics included "Retail's Role in Breaking New Artists" and "All I Wanted Was a Pepsi: How and Why to Get Sponsored"), exhibitors' booths, sponsor raffles. These were primarily for the music-industry workers who registered early and plunked down $400 for an all-access badge.
Despite the seminars and the networking opportunities and the concurrent film festival, CMJ has long been all about the shows. While 12,000 industry representatives bought badges this year, the vast majority of showcases were open to the public as well, and 100,000 music fans attended.
At most of the festival's biggest shows, only a certain amount of space was reserved for badge-holders, with the rest going to ticket sales; your $400 badge wasn't so "all-access" after all, unless you wanted to forgo seeing any other showcase on a particular night in favor of getting in line two hours early for a big gig, and remaining inside that particular venue for the duration.
For example, last year's hot new act, The Arcade Fire, staged a triumphant return performance in Central Park this year — only the show was sold out weeks in advance of the Music Marathon, with a paltry 200 admissions being raffled off to badge-holders on the day of the gig.
A heavily hyped Canadian power-pop band called The New Pornographers is playing at 7:15 on Thursday night. We arrive outside the comparatively large Bowery Ballroom around an hour before, and are relieved at the sight of a surprisingly short and fast-moving line. We queue up.
I'm about four people back from the door when one of the venue's staff appears and tells the doorman not to allow any more badge holders in — the show is officially sold out, and only those with prepaid tickets or guest-list spots waiting for them inside will be admitted.
It stings a little, being this close, but I'd been warned that there would be several good shows I had no prayer of getting into. I turn to shrug at Bustin and get out of line, but then notice that even though the doorman's shouting that no more badges could get in, he is still checking the badges of the guys in line in front of me, and letting them pass. I turn back, and start forward.
Three.
Two.
One.
The doorman puts a beefy hand on my chest, stopping me cold.
"Nope. That's it. No more badges."
I have the distinctly dubious honor of being the very first person turned away from this New Pornographers show.
After I remain at the head of the line for 10 or 15 minutes trying and failing to conjure a workable scam for gaining entry, we spend another 10 or 15 minutes trying to find a cab to take us west, and finally do.
The Knitting Factory, an enduring avant-garde performance space, hasn't been in its storied original location for years. It has, however, settled rather nicely into its current configuration, a wonderful little group of connected intimate showrooms that goes three stories down under the cobblestones of Leonard Street, between Broadway and Church.
We watch a showcase-opening set by progressive-pop outfit Aloha (a recent visitor to Ybor City's Masquerade) from a cozy balcony above the "Main Space," then begin exploring the other rooms, looking for something interesting to watch.
We find it down at the lowest level, in the "Old Office" space, and by "interesting," I mean "so bad it's impossible not to be mesmerized." According to the CMJ festival guidebook that came with our crap-filled courtesy tote bags (emblazoned with the Myspace.com logo), Doofgoblin is a "one-man electronica orchestra bouncing chaotic sound effects and trotting blips around in a claustrophobic little bundle." According to our eyes and ears, Doofgoblin is a biker dude who creates a horrible racket by groaning into a microphone while tapping various buttons on his chest that trigger various unpleasant and often cacophonous sounds.
We immediately and gleefully begin talking all manner of shit about the guy. The pretty, polite redhead behind the bar brings us four shots and four beers, charges us $40, and tries nobly not to be amused by any of our mean-spirited dialogue.
"If I died right now," muses Scott Imrich glumly, "this would be the very last thing I heard or remembered about being alive, and that scares me worse than the idea of going to hell."
That's the one that finally cracks the bartender. She laughs deeply and beautifully along with us.
"I'm going to buy you a shot," she tells Imrich.
Later, we check out an act we've been talking about for two days: the evil metal joke-band that is Goblin Cock. It turns out the name is the only thing about it worth mentioning.
Like its aforementioned Texan peer South by Southwest, CMJ made its bones on the premise that it's going to present to you the latest and greatest in new music, from all genres but mainly from, you know, the cool ones. Also like SXSW, CMJ accepts submissions from any act that cares to send one in, no matter what its status. For a fee.
Of course, if you think that the bar-rock stylings of Mr. Ed & The Deaf Wilburs from Decatur, Ark., are going to get the same consideration as, say, the latest band signed to formidable independent record label Sub Pop, then you're a moron. The best time slots for the best stages at both events are reserved for well-known names, and the number of unsigned bands appearing at either is always depressingly low.
But while SXSW is widely alleged within the independent-music scene to have devolved into little more than an industry-sponsored product rollout dressed in hipsters' clothing, CMJ has retained much of its cachet. Clear Channel might have been a sponsor this year (along with Budweiser, Mountain Dew's Amp energy drink and God knows how many others), but every time I went up to Lincoln Center, Clear Channel's large display/meet-and-greet corner was completely deserted. It's as if the attendees had resigned themselves to the corporate presence, and wouldn't blame CMJ for it; they'd tolerate it, but they didn't have to like it.
Crash Mansion is a huge basement nightclub, lavishly appointed in retro-futuristic playboy fashion to resemble, as Imrich puts it, "Frank Sinatra's house in the original Ocean's Eleven." It looks like the kind of place that's usually filled with ostentatious upscale thirtysomethings who know as much about independent music as I do about mixed drinks that include Red Bull. Despite the killer stage and sound system, it looks like the last place in the world where you'd see a really raw, fun rock show.
Strange, then, that out of every showcase I will attend, Friday night's CMJ lineup here feels the most like exactly that — a real bar-rock bill, as opposed to a hurried, slightly chaotic and often stylistically mismatched series of bands trying to get on, impress, and get off.
It definitely helps, however, when the bands involved are raw, drunk and very, very good.
By the time the Chris Mills Band has finished its set of catchy country-rock, and California outfit Limbeck is set to take the stage, there are more significantly inebriated people crowding Crash Mansion's dance floor than I've encountered all week. Most of them don't appear to be CMJ attendees, either, but rather various folks who either wander down here all the time regardless of what's going on, or have come and paid specifically to see this particular twangy, punky show.
The men of Limbeck look like they've been taking peyote all week, and have just washed down their last few buttons of hallucinogenic cactus with four or five cases of beer. All dilated pupils and big, big, I-don't-know-where-I-am-and-I-don't-care smiles, the band rumbles and stumbles through several great, countrified pop-rock tunes.
Between them, singer Robb MacLean launches into lengthy, barely coherent stories about where the songs came from, or how good he feels, or whatever. Audience members yell at him to shut up and play — his own band members try to cut in with song introductions — but he just waves them off, rambling on about how sitting in the van in a parking lot in Tulsa sucked, then shambling into another quality song.
It's glorious.
So is Memphis' highly anticipated Lucero. The quartet charges from one boozy lament into another, and can't be deterred by such minor nuisances as the lead guitar player screwing up the riffs, the lead guitar player breaking strings, and the lead guitar player taking a little time off in the middle of songs to down shots. Lucero frontman Ben Nichols is a magnetic presence, and years of no-budget touring have taught him how not to be dimmed by the occasional club-show glitch. I decide that when Lucero puts out a live album, it should be called A Hot Guy and Three Pudgy Drunks Walk into a Bar.
This is it, the single most enthralling showcase bill of the week, the one where we get three great sets, one after the other, boom boom boom, without having to string an hour's worth of subway rides and cab fares between them. Strange again, then, that one of the best experiences of such a huge and ostensibly important music-culture event is one that makes all the peripheral hoopla seem far away and irrelevant — we travel 1,000 miles to a titanic happening in a foreign city, and enjoy most the feeling that we could be seeing these bad-ass little bands at a crowded dive around the corner from home.
I will go back to CBGB the following night, Saturday, the final night of CMJ, mostly because, given the famous club's well-publicized wrangles with its landlord, it may be the last time I get the chance. There, I'll see astonishingly good performances by both an arty, futuristic instrumental band called Turing Machine and an arty, seedy bar-rock band called The Hold Steady. (I'll also piss off the singer of The Hold Steady by asking if they'll be playing any songs by Lifter Puller, his former band.)
But as good as those shows will be, it's tonight's gig at Crash Mansion that stands out as my favorite CMJ moment, because of the way these artists effortlessly render all the hype surrounding their reason for being here moot, just by doing their thing.
So Clear Channel's a main sponsor of an event purporting to showcase underground music. So there are 100,000 kids running around the city trying to out-cool each other, and 1,000 bands wondering if this 40-minute set will be the fulcrum upon which their futures turn.
So David Bowie got up and performed with The Arcade Fire, the band that became famous because it played here last year.
So there's death metal, and hip-hop, and punk, and folk, and pop, and blues, and jazz, and no one's making much of an effort to explain how they all relate to one another.
So what?
Here are our songs; this is what we do.
That's as good a definition of "indie rock" as any.
In fact, it's better than most.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.