An End of An Era

[aamusedinatx]

August 29, 2007, 10:42 am
Hilly Kristal, Founder of CBGB, Is Dead

By Sewell Chan

Hilly Kristal, who founded the punk-rock club CBGB and ran the legendary Bowery institution for nearly 33 years until it closed its doors last October, died on Tuesday from lung cancer. He was 75.

“The club — its initials mean Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers — was a hangout in a dire location,” Jon Pareles, The Times’s pop-music critic, wrote in October, when the club closed. “But its owner, Hilly Kristal, agreed to book artistically ambitious, high-concept, generally primitivist bands that defied the commercial imperatives of early-1970’s rock.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/hilly-kristal-founder-of-cbgb-is-dead/index.html?hp