CBGB Festival, at Webster Hall Summerstage and Times Square Agnostic Front performed on Thursday at Webster Hall, where fans crowded the stage - and Roger Miret, center - during the CBGB Festival, which included more than 300 bands. The legend of CBGB has lasted like an old tattoo. From Thursday through Sunday more than 300 bands appeared at the 2012 CBGB Festival, praising that famously grubby Bowery hangout, which closed in 2006 after 33 years of presenting (mostly) loud, punky unknowns. Countless clubs have come and gone in New York, disappearing into memory and trivia questions. But CBGB regulars have continued to put on small-scale commemorative shows at clubs that followed CBGB onto the Bowery, while the CBGB logo has remained an easy, all-purpose symbol for rock integrity. With free concerts on Saturday at Central Park Summerstage and Times Square - the festival had alternating stages, at 46th and 51st Streets - along with panel discussions, film screenings and club shows in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the CBGB Festival was exponentially larger than events during the club's lifetime. It was also far more punctual. Plenty of musicians were eager to remind listeners of their CBGB bona fides or to accept the club's post-facto imprimatur. The festival held nostalgia for an era of pre-Internet, do-it-yourself networking and noise-for-art's-sake experimentation, as well as gratitude for how much current music can claim some CBGB lineage. Krist Novoselic, who was the bassist in Nirvana, gave the festival's keynote speech. He praised what he called the power of association: the way like-minded people could create a subculture, whether it was punk-rock or a political movement. (He also confessed that Nirvana had never played at CBGB. The club's booker, in the audience, said that Nirvana's agent had held out for an extra $300.) CBGB & OMFUG - which stood for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers - opened in 1973 at 315 Bowery, the ground floor of a flophouse on the seedy Lower East Side. Its owner, Hilly Kristal, stipulated that bands performing at CBGB had to play their own music, not other people's hits. His country and bluegrass aspirations didn't last. In 1976 CBGB started regularly booking the New York City bands that happened to be inventing punk-rock and new wave, among them Television, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie. CBGB became a meeting point of arty, bohemian concepts and hard-nosed urban realities. During the 1980s the club was a home for even louder, faster, punker-than-punk New York hardcore, with all-ages matinee shows that turned into teenage mosh pits. Those were re-enacted during the festival at Webster Hall, where a "No Moshing" sign was entirely ignored as hardcore bands played their short, pummeling blasts of frustration, self-affirmation and outsider unity while fans hurled themselves into mosh pits and dived from the stage. On Thursday night Agnostic Front - formed in 1980 and still making albums, and also the band that headlined the final hardcore matinee at CBGB - joined the rock repertory movement, playing songs from its 1989 album "Live at CBGB"; by the end of the set, the band was barely visible amid the crush of fans onstage. On Friday night hardcore's rougher side surfaced when an ex-member of the Cro-Mags was charged in the stabbing of his replacement before the group was scheduled to play its festival show. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, CBGB continued to present entry-level bands, but it also became a pilgrimage point for rockers seeking credibility. Duff McKagan, who led his band Loaded on Saturday afternoon in Times Square, proudly noted that his former band Guns N" Roses played CBGB in 1987 (although it was four months after the release of the band's major-label debut album). For its finale Loaded was joined by a 1970s punk figure: the guitarist Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols. Saturday's big outdoor concerts mingled CBGB alumni with bands that would have sounded at home there. Superchunk, formed in 1989 and no stranger to CBGB, bounded through its brisk, punky power-pop songs on the festival's 51st Street stage, with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance jumping around even as they acknowledged passing time in songs like "My Gap Feels Weird," a reaction to a younger generation of rockers. At Summerstage, Guided by Voices was rowdy as ever, with its leader, Robert Pollard, doing head-high kicks as the band knocked out more than two-dozen brief songs, so melodic that their inscrutable lyrics seemed plausible. Their opening acts had studied the bands that came out of CBGB. Songs by the Cloud Nothings kicked up the momentum of punk-rock as Dylan Baldi blurted out insecurities and resentments with nasal determination; then the music stretched into frenetically strummed drones. The War on Drugs approached drones from more serene ground, blending the orderly Minimalist patterns and pinpoint picking of bands like the Feelies with some of the lilt - and the mobile, improvisatory bass lines - of the Grateful Dead. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart offered earnest, by-the-book punk-pop. But the festival also preserved the CBGB legacy on Thursday and Friday nights by extending into dozens of clubs, large and small, where even newer bands were playing for fellow musicians and for the curious - hoping, perhaps, for an early glimpse of the kind of paradigm-shifting music once nurtured at CBGB. On Thursday night at Bowery Electric about a block north of where CBGB stood, musicians who had performed regularly in the earliest years of CBGB shared a lengthy bill. Some were still pugnacious, like the band Certain General, playing its angular post-punk as the singer Parker Dulany stalked the stage with hollow-eyed intensity. And some had mellowed. After midnight a slight, gray-bearded man with a mandolin took the stage: Tommy Ramone, the last survivor of the original Ramones, leading Uncle Monk, his duo with an acoustic guitarist. Partway through the rural-flavored set, he said, "We'd like to do a little song that I wrote when I was very young." It was the Ramones" "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," redone Appalachian-style. All these years later CBGB was finally getting its bluegrass.