取り敢えず合掌。
以下はInternational Herald Tribuneの記事なり。この記事は、例えばビート・ジェネレーションとパンクとの絡みとか、文化史的にも興味深い；
Hilly Kristal, 75, catalyst for punk at CBGB, dies
By Ben Sisario
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of New York punk and art-rock in the 1970s and was the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives around the world, died in New York on Tuesday. He was 75.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son, Dana, said Wednesday.
Looking more like a lumberjack than a punk rocker, with his bushy beard and ever-present flannel shirt, Kristal cut an unusual figure as the paterfamilias of the noisy downtown music scene. But for nearly 33 years his club was an incubator for generations of New York rock bands, and performing within its dank, flier-encrusted walls became a bragging right for musicians everywhere.
Thousands of bands played CBGB, from its opening in December 1973 until a dispute with its landlord forced it to close last October. In the 1970s and early '80s, the bar became by default the headquarters for innovative local groups like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth, who in the club's early days had few other places to play.
"There was no real venue in 1973 for people like us," Smith said in an interview Wednesday. "We didn't fit into the cabarets or the folk clubs. Hilly wanted the people that nobody else wanted. He wanted us."
Hillel Kristal grew up on a farm in Hightstown, New Jersey, and studied classical violin as a child. He moved to New York and sang in the chorus at Radio City Music Hall and managed the Village Vanguard before he opened his Bowery bar. A lifelong lover of folk music, he kept an acoustic guitar at his desk and named the club CBGB & OMFUG, an abbreviation for the kind of music he had intended to present there: "country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers."
Within months after CBGB opened, young musicians and poets like Tom Verlaine and Smith became curious about the bar as they passed it on their way to visit the beat writer William Burroughs, who lived a few blocks down the Bowery. Verlaine persuaded Kristal to book his band, Television, and others followed suit, including Smith and her band, which had a seven-week residency in 1975. Record executives soon joined the neighborhood punks as habitués at CB's, as it was familiarly called.
Kristal was quick to recognize the new scene's potential, and though he professed a cantankerous distaste for some of the music, he had a keen ear.
"He might have tried to give the impression of being outside of it," said Tom Erdelyi, a k a Tommy Ramone, the Ramones' first drummer and only surviving original member. "But I don't think that was the case. He understood instinctively that what was going on was something special and important."
Kristal decreed that bands had to perform original material. His policy fostered creativity, but it was also a way to avoid paying performance royalties. Kristal had other schemes. In the '70s he ran a moving company that hired some CB's regulars, and in time the club's distinctive logo became a valuable copyright to exploit for T-shirts and other memorabilia. By 2005 he was making $2 million a year through his CBGB Fashion line.
As time left its mark on CBGB's walls in the form of stickers and taped-up fliers left by musicians and fans — as well as damage to its notoriously unpleasant bathrooms — the club's interior itself became a tourist draw, as both a relic of rock history and a kind of living museum of graffiti. Kristal, who kept office hours until the end, answering the phone "CB's" in a phlegmatic baritone, resisted any changes to the club, a narrow, dark room that still held remnants of its history as a 19th-century saloon.
In the '80s and '90s, the club began presenting metal bands and especially young, hard-core punk groups in all-ages matinees. Though less celebrated than the ones in the club's 1970s glory days, these shows drew in new generations of fans. They also allowed the club to book two shows a day, one in the afternoon for fans under 21, and another at night for a drinking crowd. Critics began to complain that CBGB had lost its edge.
In 2005, Kristal became embroiled in a real-estate battle with the club's landlord, the Bowery Residents' Committee, a nonprofit group that aids homeless people. The committee said that CBGB owed $75,000 in unpaid rent increases. Kristal, disputing that claim, fought the landlord in court and in the news media for months, enlisting the help of celebrities like David Byrne of Talking Heads and Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and "The Sopranos."
At the prodding of a judge, Kristal agreed to close the club. Smith played its final show, on Oct. 15. The exterior of the club, at 315 Bowery, at Bleecker Street, is now a frequent stop on walking tours of the Lower East Side and East Village.
Besides his son, of New York, Kristal is survived by a daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, also of New York; a former wife, Karen; and two grandchildren.
Facing eviction, Kristal frequently said that he was considering reopening CBGB in Las Vegas, Tokyo or any other city that would have him. But in an interview at the club with The New York Times, as tourists walked in and out and bought T-shirts, he said that he wanted to hold onto the corner of the Bowery that he had made famous.
"Millions and millions of musicians in this world think of CBGB as a home base," he said.
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