Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin and Tim Buckley at Max’s Kansas City, 1968
In 1998, High on Rebellion, the definitive oral history of Max’s Kansas City, the bar/restaurant/nightclub that was THE in-spot of New York’s rock/art demimonde, was published. Written by Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin (once the wife of Max’s founder, Mickey Ruskin) it’s a classic book, one that should rightfully be as well-known as Edie: American Girl, Please Kill Me or POPism: The Warhol Sixties, one of a handful of truly must-read volumes if you want to understand what was happening culturally in New York City during the Sixties and the Seventies. Sadly, the book is obscure, but hopefully it will be republished one day.
At Max’s, the regulars would include names like Alice Cooper, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, William Burroughs, Larry Rivers, Tennessee Williams, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Philip Glass, Halston, Jackie Curtis, the New York Dolls, Candy Darling, Iggy Pop, John Waters, Salvador Dali, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, John Cale, the list could go on and on. Devo, Tim Buckley, Aerosmith, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bruce Springteen, Tom Waits, Sid Vicious, the B-52s and Gram Parsons all played Max’s and Debbie Harry and Emmylou Harris were waitresses there. As Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler said, “You knew even the assholes would be famous one day. It was that kind of place.”
He’s right about that. Abrams Image has just published a gorgeous new coffee table book of photographs and ephemera (menus, newspaper ads, notes from an art auction) from Max’s, titled, appropriately enough Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll. Edited by NYC gallery owner Steven Kasher with contributions from Lou Reed, Lenny Kaye, Danny Fields, Lorraine O’Grady and Steven Watson, this oversized volume is one of the best books of this sort to come out in a long.long time. It also makes a nice, decade-late companion to High on Rebellion: If the earlier book was primarily anecdotal, Kasher’s volume takes the opposite approach of a picture being worth a thousand words. When the subject is a place like Max’s—once described by writer Terry Southern as “the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno filled with Bosch and Breughel characters—a well-framed photograph communicates more than words ever could...
For instance, a big part of Max’s legend was the infamous “back room” VIP area where anything could—and apparently did—happen. (The line in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” about drag queen Candy Darling: “In the back room, she was everybody’s darlin’” refers to Max’s). Not only is there a shot in the book of a man (identified as poet/artist Rene Ricard, although you can’t really see his face) giving another man a blow job right in the middle of the restaurant—tell me that’s not context, people!—there is also a photograph of someone standing on a table in the foreground, with people laughing, but in the background, where the camera wasn’t pointed, we see Warhol superstar Taylor Meade, bare-assed naked. Casual nudity seems like the way it was done at Max’s, if these photos are to be believed.
Currently there are two Max’s Kansas City related shows going on in New York. Steven Kasner Gallery (521 W. 23rd St.) hosts an exhibit related to his book with over 150 limited edition photos and the Loretta Howard Gallery (525 W. 26th St.) has “recreated” the art that hung at Max’s (artists like Warhol and Larry Rivers would pay off their tabs in trade) with an exhibit called “Hetero-Holics and Some Women Too.”
Max’s was open on Park Avenue South from 1965 until 1974 and reopened under different management in 1975. That incarnation lasted until 1981. 213 Park Avenue South, the building that once housed the insanity that was Max’s Kansas CIty is now occupied by a Korean deli (that I went to often). Mickey Ruskin died in 1983.
Max’s Kansas City (official website)
Revisiting Max’s, Sanctuary for the Hip (New York Times)
An Artist Oasis (New York Times photo gallery)
Below: Some (mostly silent) footage from the heyday of Max’s Kansas City shot by Anton Perich featuring Warhol actress Andrea Feldman (who killed herself at the age of 24), Taylor Meade, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, a gorgeous young Mary Woronov and towards the end (with audio) Max’s owner, Mickey Ruskin himself.