Burning Down the House- The Story of CBGB

[schwenko]

http://www.cbgb.com/burning_down_the_house.htm

[toyah]

are they still claiming that Television 'discovered' CBGB and was the first of the NY scene
bands to play there? cos they weren't, Wayne County was....

[schwenko]

[quote][i]Originally posted by toyah[/i]
<br>are they still claiming that Television 'discovered' CBGB and was the first of the NY scene
bands to play there? cos they weren't, Wayne County was....
[/quote]

I believe that , technically, you are wrong, but I see where you are coming from. Here is a short excerpt from the book "This Ain't No Disco- The Story of CBGB", 1988, by Roman Kozak (pp10-11).

"And Hilly's on the Bowery was willing to take a chance once in a while on an unusual band. "We played there in late 1972, when it was still called Hilly's" says Jim Wynbrandt, later with the Miamis. "We had a band called Queen Elizabeth where Wayne County would have a strap-on vagina and he would fuck himself using a dildo. It was a pretty wild act, needless to say, and our first performance was at New York University in the fall of 1972. The president of the university happened to be strolling by and he was accosted by a gay activist who thought the act was demeaning to gays. He had the power shut off. That was our first date.

We were disappointed but that was tempered by the fact that we had another gig lined up at Hilly's, which was then frequented by Hell's Angels. On the bill with us, and it wasn't really a bill because everything was so informal, was another band that didn't have enough equipment to play. I remember the show because there were three Hell's Angels in the audience, and Wayne, who was dressed in drag, sat on their laps. But it turned out okay, though there may have been a long dry spell after us for our kind of bands, though there were other acts playing there, like jazz or country.

Hilly was ready for Television."

So it seems like the venue was not called CBGB when Wayne County et al first played there. But the physical venue was the same.
Interesting that when it was called Hilly's, at one point country bands would play in the morning, and breakfast served!

[toyah]

my point is that, in all the revisionist histories that followed,
we're told that no one knew that the place was there before Television
'discovered' it;
if you were around at the time(I was) or you know your history, Wayne
County was a very big deal in NY at the time, running parallel to The
New York Dolls, and Wayne's gigs there(which were advertised in the Village
Voice, you can look it up on the microfilm) made all the other NY bands
aware of Hilly's;
Television discovered CBGB by opening a copy of the Village Voice, not by
bumping into Hilly one day when he was hanging a sign outside, or whatever
the fairy tale claims;
Wayne County was the Christopher Columbus of CBGB, not Television, but for
VH1 purposes, they prefered 4 straight white guys getting the credit instead
of a fierce ,Warhol spawned drag queen fronting a kick ass rocknroll band.