CBGB: Decades of Graffiti (2006); Paperback
$30.00
CBGB: Decades of Graffiti (2006); Paperback
64 pages – Introduction by Richard Hell, New
CBGB (the initials stand for Country Blue Grass Blues) is the officially designated birthplace of Punk Rock. It is a bar located in the Bowery of New York City described by author Christopher D. Salyers as ‘No better place to drink in the wonderful nothingness of the 1970s Bowery and Lower East Side than at this bar. On the streets outside, crime soared, cracked-out bodies imitated corpses as anxious junkies scurrying like alley cats scratched around for their next fix’….’Cheap rent, cheap beer, cheap sex.’ And inside CBGB the likes of Talking Heads, Ramones, Richard Hell (who writes a colorful Forward for this terrific little book), the Voidoids, and the Dead Boys introduced punk rock to the patrons. What this superb little book celebrates is the atmosphere in which all of this history took place, a club notoriously filthy, whose owners invited the patrons to graffiti the walls, the floors, and especially the bathrooms. Photographer John Putnam has supplied designer/writer Salyers with gritty photos of the stage and the seats, the green rooms (where artists prepared before performing), the bathrooms with some of the most wonderfully vile language and demonstrations of man’s ability to deface public property are at a peak, and the bar. The colors are rich and ludicrously dirty and the words left behind are scribblings by minds toked on drugs and loud music.
