WA029 – Roman Kozak, ‘This Ain’t No Disco’

The first draft of the history of CBGB

Roman Kozak, This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB (New York: Trouser Press Books, 2024; orig. Faber & Faber, 1988)

I came across Roman Kozak’s name long before I heard of his book, though the same project, Can’t Slow Down, was the impetus for my encountering both. By his own telling in the introduction to his only book, Kozak had just moved from Italy to New York when he started working for Billboard as a music-business reporter. He stumbled into CBGB shortly after it garnered a rep for being full of, in the words of Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, “not millionaires of money, but millionaires or zillionaires of the spirit of music.” It also had a rep for being full of dogshit, which one learned to step around as just another obstacle in the ongoing all-eyes-open New York of the mid-to-late seventies, i.e. what Lenny Kaye, in a 2005 afterword, one of two supplied by book re-publisher Ira Robbins: “I lived across the street from CB’s for 15 or 20 years. I watched that neighborhood do a 180-degree shift from flophouses to the new gold coast.”

So much so that it’s almost hard to believe that CBGB—which held three hundred and fifty, contained a horrifying toilet area, was famously cheap at the door, and featured what many agree in this book was the best sound system in a New York City rock club—wasn’t lionized from the word go. But in a way, it was—the press discovered the place within a couple years of its opening. In This Must Be the Place (2023), Jesse Rifkin notes the proximity of the apartments of key band members as integral to CBGB, and the same thing could be said (and sometimes was, usually by Greil Marcus) that those bands were extremely lucky to be in such a similarly cozy proximity to the downtown press of the time. They were lucky, but so was the press—not least Kozak.