The Bar That Meant to Book Bluegrass

The storefront ahead at three fifteen Bowery does not look like much today, but for more than three decades it was the room where American punk rock was born, almost by accident. When Hilly Kristal opened the club in December of nineteen seventy three, he named it for the music he actually planned to book, Country, Bluegrass, and Blues, spelling out a vision of roots music for what he called uplifting gourmandizers. Almost none of that happened. Local bands with nowhere else to play talked their way onto his stage instead, and Kristal, short on better options, let them.

Within a year, the Ramones were playing their first shows here. Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine talked Kristal into giving their band Television a regular Sunday night slot. A group called Angel and the Snake showed up in nineteen seventy four and became Blondie. The Talking Heads formed out of the same scene, and in February of nineteen seventy five, Patti Smith brought her band through the door for the first time. Within a few years, this had become the single most important room in the country for punk and new wave, launching careers almost nobody could have predicted from a sign that still promised bluegrass.

The club held on through decades of change in the neighborhood around it, but a dispute with its landlord finally closed it in October of two thousand six. Patti Smith played the last show, performing for three and a half hours until after one in the morning. Years later, the building itself was added to the National Register of Historic Places, official recognition for a room that never managed to book a single bluegrass act.