SO YOU WANT TO BE (A ROCK'N'ROLL STAR). Sunday, CBGB & OMFUG ("Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers"), the unique club plays its last show, and closes its doors forever. I've written about my history there a number of times, including here, here, here, and relatively recently, here (with links to other posts by me about Patti Smith). Feel free to go read, please. The closing is rightfully getting a lot of attention. Slate also has a nice little piece that helps capture the spirit of what it was like to play there. The captain goes down with the ship, and when famed Bowery club CBGB closes Sunday night, it'll be with a final send-off by Patti Smith. You can imagine how the cultural obits will read: CBGB, the scrappy and scraggly home of art-punk, dead of palpitating rent payments at 33. But the most sensible paean has already come via Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye. Doing some quick napkin math in the Village Voice, Kaye reckoned that at three bands a night, 365 days a year for more than 30 years, the club hosted somewhere around 50,000 bands and 200,000 musicians. Even allowing for repeat performances, that's an army, mostly drawn from the ranks of the pretty good drummers, the not-so-bad bassists, and the promising guitarists you never hear of again. The club will always be connected to famous names like Smith, but its real glory was in nourishing the infinitely branching root system of the good to indifferent musicians—the schlubs, the schmucks, the shredders—that underlies any rock ecosystem. I know: I was one of them. Since you read the previous posts I made about CBGBs and Patti Smith, above, you know my history with Lenny, knowing him from sf fandom, and our friends in common, and getting to hang with him at parties, and backstage with Patti and the Group. And my days at CBGBs, seeing the litany: Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blondie (really terrible back then!), Talking Heads, the Ramones, and a million forgotten bands, most pretty bad. Ah, the smell of vomit and piss over broken glass and dope smoke, and the joys of stepping over the bums as you came and went from the club, probably on the way to or from Max's Kansas City. Goodbye, CBGBs! I shall think of you next time I piss and next time I throw up! Death to disco! punk lives! Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for all of it: what, do you want to be sedated?