Who was the best-selling CBGB band?
Sticky floors, flooded toilets, and rats scurrying around in damp corners; the CBGB club was about as far away from the sanitised land of the pop charts as you could get back in the 1970s.
It was the ground zero of punk rock rebellion in New York and, as such, an endless plethora of sneering, safety-pinned revolutionaries came and went over the years. A select few, however, managed to graduate from those sticky floors to the dizzying heights of pop stardom.
No self-respecting punk band set out to appear in the singles charts, particularly as far as the East Village scene was concerned. These were people living in squats and down back-alleys, adopting a ‘no future’ philosophy and fighting against the repressive authority of the establishment the only way they knew how, with buzzsaw guitars and confrontational lyricism.
With that, though, came the acceptance that the scene probably wouldn’t reach the masses. After all, no radio DJ or television presenter was ever going to utter song titles like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ or ‘Love Comes In Spurts’. Punk’s unwavering DIY ethos and subversive spirit acted in direct opposition to the mainstream music industry, and CBGBs was no place for record company executives.
Before too long, though, the industry began to recognise the potential profits lying dormant in that blossoming scene of misfits and outsider artists. By the end of the 1970s, many of the names and faces who had passed through the doors of the CBGB club were signed up to deals with major record labels, and although some – the Ramones being one notable example – never abandoned their blitzkrieg punk sound, others began to adapt and develop to the changing musical landscape, breaking into the mainstream in the process.
Once the abrasive sounds of the scene had been toned down for the mainstream, CBGB did produce a number of artists and bands who ended up commanding the pop charts. Talking Heads are one such example, having played their very first gig at CBGBs – supporting the Ramones – before growing to become defining voices of new wave success into the 1980s.
But who was the best-selling?
In fact, David Byrne’s outfit are, on paper, one of the most commercially successful groups to ever perform at the East Village institution.
Even the weird and wonderful mind of Byrne, however, could not best the sheer number of sales amassed by one of CBGB’s most enduring offspring, Blondie. By the mid-1970s, at the peak of the punk explosion, the Debbie Harry-fronted group were regulars at the club, but their sonic sensibilities were always a little more expansive than their contemporaries.
Namely, Blondie were far less antagonistic towards the infectious grooves of disco than some of their punk peers, who viewed the Studio 54 sound as the ultimate enemy. When the band fully embraced the disco sound on tracks like ‘Heart of Glass’, they were quickly rewarded with colossal mainstream success, earning a transatlantic number one with that particular single, and selling over 20 million copies of the Parallel Lines album it featured upon.
Even more impressively, Blondie were able to carry on that intense success into the early 1980s, amassing a series of new wave smash hits, including the likes of ‘Call Me’, ‘Atomic’, and the pioneering rap-rock anthem ‘Rapture’, among various others.
They might have been branded ‘sell-outs’ by their former CBGB comrades, but the band forged the defining sound of the new wave age, and became the best-selling group to ever arise from the CBGB club in the process.
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