Good bye CBGB's

August 15th 2004

Hello,

Just think its been 70 years since the creation of social security, lots of things have changed inn those 70 years but not social security, you can still have any color you want as long as it is black, but for small investors there are many more opportunity’s to save for the proverbial rainy day. Individual retirement plans, 401k plans, Simple IRA plans, Roth IRA plans, SEP plans, Single K Plans the trick is pick a plan and follow thru.

It has also been about 27 years since the last time I was at CBGB’s and I still don’t know what OMFUG stands for. This month the landmark may close it doors forever. So you want to know what a famous Downtown New York City Punk Rock club has to do with the stock market? Well first if you under 30, there used to be something in New York called the “down town scene” and yes people used to play instruments and not lip-sinc. People even smoked and drank and fought about ideas and other really stupid things. In those days the City (NYC) was the place to go when you wanted to do things you couldn’t do anywhere else. It was dark, dirty and dangerous, but it was a lot of adventurous fun. Yes there were poseurs but there was always a feeling that this really mattered and was or will be the next big thing. Like East Siders who never cross to the West side, the downtown scene was a world onto its own. Today of coarse none of this exists. The music is stale, the clubs are boring and the beer is very over priced. New York with a Starbucks on every corner has become clean, “nice” and totally suburbanized. Streets that were once filled with rockers boasting Mohawks are now filled with tourists from Japan talking photos of menus. Like the bands of that era Blondie, The Talking Heads ,Johnny Thunders and the Ramones there is simply no place for a CBGB’s ,it just doesn’t belong anymore. In the late 1970’s when things were really rotten, the music was desperate, the economy bad and the Bronx was on fire people who were willing to admit how bad things really were and how awful “disco” was flocked to clubs like CBGB’s looking for answers. Overtime the creative process produced a whole new music scene. Madonna popularized the “down town look” and it is no surprise that fall of “disco” in 1982 and the rebirth of music coincided with the birth of a bull market that would not end till spring of 2000. The moral to the story is that when the music is awful so is the stock market, the creative process seems to foretell coming booms and busts in the economy .Don’t believe me notice they started playing “disco” again in the summer of 1999,by March 2000 we were done.

James