Every venue I ever played had a landlord. The landlord never came to the show. The landlord never heard the music. The landlord heard the rent check clear and that was the only song that mattered. CBGB had a landlord. Max's Kansas City had a landlord. The Fillmore had a landlord. Every room where rock and roll happened was borrowed from somebody who did not care about rock and roll.

The landlord is the most powerful person in the music industry and nobody puts the landlord on the guest list. The landlord does not need a guest list. The landlord has a key. When CBGB closed it was not because the music stopped. It was because the landlord found a tenant who would pay more to sell leather jackets than Hilly Kristal could pay to host the Ramones. The landlord did not kill punk rock. The landlord just found a better offer.

My apartment on the Lower East Side was two hundred dollars a month for thirty years. The landlord left me alone because I was not worth the trouble of evicting. Then the neighborhood changed. Then I was worth the trouble. The building I lived in for three decades is a hotel now. Three hundred dollars a night. The landlord did not evict me. The landlord evicted the neighborhood and I just happened to be standing in it.

Here is what I learned about landlords. The landlord does not hate music. The landlord does not hate art. The landlord does not hate anything. The landlord is a calculator with a mailbox. The input is rent. The output is access. When the rent goes up the art goes out. That is not malice. That is arithmetic. And arithmetic has killed more music venues than any cop or censor or city council in the history of New York.

Washington Square Park does not have a landlord. That is why I played there for fifty years. The city tried to be the landlord. They sent permits and police and fences and curfews. But you cannot evict a man from a park the way you evict him from a building. A park belongs to everybody. A building belongs to whoever pays the most. I chose the park. The park chose me back. The landlord never got a vote.

See also: Rent Is the New Cops — the rent replaced the badge. They Turned My Block Into a Hotel — three hundred a night where I paid two hundred a month. CBGB Is a Clothing Store — the landlord's best offer. The Venue — every room with a landlord eventually lost to the landlord. Toll Booth — the landlord's cousin on the highway. Fence — the landlord draws a line and calls it property.