The social aspect of the club was also important. The club became a meeting place for many like-minded people to exchange ideas, make plans and start creative endeavors. “Suddenly you were part of the crowd,” Poe recalls. “You were an alien up until that moment, and then all of a sudden you’re inside something. I think that was part of it. ‘Oh, okay, I’m accepted here. I’m weird. I’m not some weirdo.” “Because there were also writers, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, painters, sculptors, playwrights, poets. So many great artists multiplied in one place.” So it had to explode into something huge.”
life after the golden age
By the end of the decade, a healthy number of these early important bands were playing huge theaters and well on their way to enduring careers. At that point, the club was changing, entering an era more defined by hardcore punk. “When the word punk changed from a small P to a capital P, the atmosphere changed,” Kay recalls.
Hardcore punk was harder, faster, more aggressive, and perhaps much more macho than previous musical styles, and thus brought about a change in energy. “Punk then became a certain definition of what a band needed to be on that stage,” Kay says. “I like it when genres and boundaries blur. When no one really knows what’s going on and it doesn’t fit. And when it doesn’t, that’s when you come up with something unique. The golden age of CBGB. That’s it.”
After the hardcore punk spell, the club returned to a more genre-fluid policy, welcoming a variety of up-and-coming new bands, but was unable to repeat its mid-1970s peak and closed for good in 2006. Kaye performed her final concert there with Patti Smith in October of the same year. “It was a very moving experience to look out into the audience and see so many ghosts from the stage where I had spent so much time,” he recalls. “I was very impressed.”