Feature Song: Piss Factory by Patti Smith (November, 1974/Mer Records/New York, NY)

Alright, maybe I should stop worrying about whether or not I'm doing a bad historiography for a bit. Y'all want your slop, so here's what happened with that bar I mentioned last time.

Hilly's On The Bowery was a bar owned by Hillel "Hilly" Kristal, a 40 year old ex-Marine who returned to New York City to pursue a career in music. Initially a choral singer, he switched to promoting in the mid-60s, managing the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village and launching the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival in 1967 with Ron Delsner. The year prior, he opened a bar and restaurant at 62 West 9th street, called Hilly's. On weekends, Hilly would have musicians come in to entertain the patrons, including a number of Broadway singers. By 1969, the neighbors were complaining about the noise on weekends, so he closed up and focused on a new location on Bowery.

Around this time, The Bowery had been in decline for almost 100 years. Bowery street had sprung up in colonial times and at one point was a higher-class alternative for the well-to-do in the burgeoning New York City. By the time of the Civil War, the estates and shops were giving way to beer halls, pawn shops, and brothels. By the turn of the century, it had become an epicenter of sex work in the city (mostly for gay men, though there were workers who catered to women). The Temperance movement would lead to the closure of many of these establishments, and in 1921 most of the street was renovated for retail space. Shops that opened in the new Bowery street specialized in cheap clothing, restaurant equipment, and lighting fixtures. The attempt to re-brand the street was noble, but led to nothing. By the 1940's, The Bowery would become notable for the vast number of homeless who lived in the area, gaining the nickname 'Skid Row.' This is the Bowery that Hilly's moved into in 1969.

Hilly's on The Bowery soon attracted a much different crowd than the ones Hilly intended. Instead of Village types, Hilly's became a dive bar favored by local bikers. The layout of the long, narrow venue meant that the bathrooms were all the way at the back, requiring one to squeeze past the small stage nearby. However, the plumbing in the Bowery was decaying and the toilets at Hilly's barely worked. For most of the patrons at this time, it seemed more reasonable to relieve yourself where you stood. In mid 73, Hilly closed the bar, and went to work rebranding. When he re-opened, he instituted a new music policy to encourage better-behaved clientele. He named the bar after this music policy, by which he would only allow live music from Country, BlueGrass, and Blues musicians. However, when that policy became a detriment, he appended OMFUG (meaning Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers) to the awning. Pretty soon the OMFUG part became more important than the CBGB part.

The OMFUGgery began in late February 1974, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Mercer Arts Center refugees Television were on their way to a rehearsal when they spotted the new awning at CBGB. The two decided to see what this place was about. Hilly was in, and they asked what CBGB stands for. He told them, they lied and said they were in a band that played a little bit of all of that. Despite his reservations. Hilly agreed to let them play a gig on Sunday, March 31st, and he let them charge a $1 cover fee at the door. However, he had two conditions: The band has to unload their own gear, and they can't play covers. These rules held fast for the rest of CBGB's existence, and inspired much of the D.I.Y. aesthetic that sprung up around punk rock.

Sundays were the slowest day at the fledgling CBGB, so booking this unknown band wasn't quite as big a risk as it seemed. Television manager Terry Ork had posters made, and took out an ad in the Village Voice to promote this first show. Ultimately the first Television concert at CBGB drew about 15 people. But the word started to get around that acts who used to play the Mercer Center could now find a home at 315 Bowery. A lot of people were hesitant to go to this biker bar in Skid Row that smelled like stale beer, urine and feces. However, people who did often found themselves inspired like those who went to shows at The Kitchen in the Mercer Arts Center. Eventually, all those same bands were playing at CBGB. Just like in the Kitchen, people who came to these shows were moved to make music themselves.

Among the regulars to the Sunday night shows by Television et al were Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, who approached Tom Verlaine about joining them for a track they planned to record at Electric Lady studio. The song was a cover of blues rock standard Hey Joe , wherein Patti goes on a monologue about then-fugitive Patty Hearst. For the b-side, they hemmed and hawed about what to put on it before settling on a poem Patti had written in the 60s about her time working on an assembly line in Glassboro, New Jersey. The Hey Joe cover was certainly novel, but Piss Factory really resonated with the alienated young people who gravitated towards the underground music scene in New York. The group struggled to find a label to release the single, prompting Lenny Kaye to start up Mer Records, which existed at first to release music by The Patti Smith Group. The lo-fi, D.I.Y. recording and release of this single leads many to refer to it as 'The First Punk Record."

Next time: The band you've all been waiting for