The bands that converged on CBGB (and later the reopened Max's) rejected the blandly professional pop, overblown guitar jams and elaborate progressive rock they were hearing on the radio. But instead of attempting some kind of revival, they reconfigured old rock virtues into music that had not been heard before.

Self-consciousness was crucial to the bands at CBGB. Though the music often seemed simple, it was primitivist, not primitive. ''We knew that what we were doing was revolutionary,'' said Tommy Erdelyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, the Ramones' first drummer. ''We were connoisseurs of rock's history and where it should go. We wanted to bring back short songs, pop melodies, things like that. But I think we were the first group to consciously use the fact that we weren't virtuosos, to realize that this was an advantage. We stripped down a lot of things and just put in the gist of what was needed.''

At CBGB, that determination to purge inessentials led not just to the Ramones' definitive punk rock but to music as multifarious as Television's jazzy, elastic drones and jams, Patti Smith's incantatory poetry merged with garage rock, Talking Heads' clean-lined bubblegum funk, Blondie's radically deflected girl-group rock, DNA's atonal jolts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids' gnashing guitars, and the relentless, confrontational organ-and-drum-machine songs of Suicide. In the mid-1970's, none of it seemed headed for the Top 40 anytime soon.

But New York was in a recession then, and the living was cheap, if not easy. David Byrne recently recalled that the three original Talking Heads shared a Chrystie Street loft for $300 a month. So there was far less commercial pressure on musicians. Bands like the Patti Smith Group and Blondie woodshedded at CBGB, playing four sets a night for weekend after weekend. And in 1975, Mr. Kristal seized media interest with a festival of what he called the top 40 unsigned bands in New York -- actually, about 70 of them. What had been downtown entertainment was suddenly seen as a movement, and it would go on to seed do-it-yourself rock worldwide.

Decades later, independent rock has a firmly established infrastructure: clubs, college radio stations and coverage from both ingroup fanzines and a mainstream determined to detect the latest thing immediately. Yet for a few years, New York's rock resurgence hid in plain earshot, amid a glut of grunge, hardcore, rap-rock and punk-pop. The new rock has also kept its distance from heavy metal, roots-rock and self-pitying collegiate rock. As it renounces bombast and decoration, it inevitably harks back to the first salvo of CBGB's rock.

This time around, there is a hint of a revival, the same nostalgia that's driving other bands to rediscover early synthesizers and write so-called electroclash tunes. But unlike most electroclash bands, the rockers are twisting together their sources, not simply imitating them. And this time, while New York is the music's stronghold, there are already like-minded bands elsewhere, like the White Stripes and the Von Bondies in Detroit.