Downloaded from YTS.MX
[jazz music playing]
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♪♪
[man] Max's Kansas City, where is that?
Is that in Kansas?
[rock music playing]
♪ All right, yeah
♪ All right
♪ Take a tip from me and get Ready for the big parade ♪
♪ It's the place to be Every night's a happy holiday ♪
♪ The kids are jumping around Everybody's doing loop de loop ♪
♪ Just a making the rounds
♪ Like a speed freak In a telephone booth ♪
♪ The downstairs is packed
♪ And the groupies Are all dressed up ♪
♪ Upstairs the New York Dolls
♪ Are kickin' it out Looking tough ♪
♪ You've got a Personality crisis baby ♪
♪ Down at Max's
♪ All the boys are
♪ All the girls are...
[music fades]
[buzzing]
[rock music playing]
People always talk about the significance of CBGB's
and how important a club that was.
Obviously, it was, but I always liked Max's.
[rock music playing]
If you date punk rock
to the New York Dolls
and The Velvet Underground and Suicide,
Max's was there well before CBGB's.
It was a place that had a lot of history,
not just punk rock history but classic rock and roll history.
The cool thing about it, it was the cool factor.
It wasn't the idea of going in
and playing Madison Square Garden
because we weren't big enough to do that yet,
and there was a lot of other little places to play,
but Max's was the place.
It was the cool place.
Max's was kind of like...
as far as debauchery and just, like, madness,
it was kind of like as outrageous as Studio 54.
But, like, funky and gross, and poor.
It was always sex and drugs at Max's.
So even when it was an artist hangout,
it was all about sex and drugs.
It was avant-garde, it was very eclectic.
There were artists, there were writers,
and there was music.
Things could happen there.
You go some places, and things just don't happen.
It was truly the greatest club,
and I have been through clubs everywhere.
Max's was it.
That was it.
That was joy.
You know, what the group is wearing
is as important as their music.
So yeah, we're super interested when fashion and music
are connected with music and fashion.
That's what was going on. And art.
[woman] Culture and fashion do not come out of nowhere.
[tongue clicks]
[rock music playing]
New York is an all-night town.
There are very few of those.
Actually, in the United States, most places
close down around one or two in the morning at the latest.
But New York can be open all night.
["Sunglass City" by The Deadbeat Poet plays]
Mickey Ruskin was a serious man, I would say.
I remember him being kind of tall,
a little bit aloof,
right there at the front door
watching everyone who was coming into Max's.
He was very, very friendly.
He liked me a lot.
He came to see one of my plays, and he loved it.
So I could do no wrong.
I just used to waltz in.
Prior to the existence of Max's,
New York was populated with discotheques,
with everybody dancing to Chubby Checker records
and the whole go-go scene.
At that time, there was no local band scene.
Because you live in New York.
Everybody comes through New York,
and none of the local clubs
really had anything more than cover bands playing for dancers.
Once word got out of what Max's was...
And part of that was fostered
by the participation of Andy Warhol and his superstars,
who were right down the block, literally.
That's when the original members of the factory
were going there, - Edie Sedgwick, Taylor Mead -
and all of those people.
[Jimi LaLumia] So the moment Warhol started showing up
with his gallery of theater and film stars
and thereby, the in-crowd models started showing up as well,
at that point, it became the talk of the town.
Max's became the hip in place.
[Elliott Murphy] Mickey Ruskin was creating that atmosphere.
He was picky, but he had good taste.
So the people who he would let into the back room,
and that we considered regulars, I guess,
were first the artists.
Mickey was great because Mickey went to every table.
Mickey was just one of those guys
that everybody accepted as being.
It didn't matter if they were artists.
He was, I think, the art aficionado.
We never paid for anything.
We were just there to entertain,
but the front room was like people like Frosty Myers,
Win Chamberlain, John Chamberlain.
I mean, Max's Kansas City certainly was not a venue.
It was a restaurant in the front,
and in the back, it was the back room.
Max's was a place where people who were rebellious
on a bunch of different levels gathered.
[rock music playing]
[music fades]
[music playing on TV]
[male narrator] Max's Kansas City,
a restaurant near the factory,
is the gathering place for New York's underground.
Almost every evening, Warhol's clan can be found here.
Kansas City functions as both an unofficial casting agency
and a public playground.
Everything in this world is at the same time
both common and pretentious.
Individuals who, once again,
could very well be only copies of their real selves.
[Penny Arcade] Before 1968
was when Andy Warhol was actually at Max's.
After he was shot, he very rarely came to Max's.
And he was shot in 1968.
[Elliott Murphy] And it was smart, you know.
There were smart people there,
they wanted to talk, conversation...
Maybe you can compare it.
The closest thing we had to the round table of the Algonquin
in the 20s was the back room of Max's Kansas City.
[Alice Cooper] It was a great place to hang out.
There was nobody there trying to get your autograph
because everybody was bigger than you.
[scoffs]
[Ruby Lynn Reyner] When Max's became really popular,
and I mean, all these movie stars started coming...
Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda came.
And you know, they came to the back room,
they wanted to hang out with us.
They told me, "Oh, you got to meet Jane and Roger."
She was with Roger Vadim,
and they said Roger Vadim had a long, skinny penis.
And they wanted to take as many little...
you know, punk-type
of little superstars in waiting home with them.
I practically lived there.
I would go during the day for the free food.
We would tell Mickey all the time.
I'd say, "Mickey, it's my birthday,"
just so he would give us a bottle of champagne.
[Penny Arcade] I started going there in the middle of 1968
because Jackie Curtis took me,
and Jackie Curtis took me in the afternoon
because there was free food.
If it's one thing drag queens want,
it's free food.
With big giant salad balls.
We found a couple of worms in the salad.
[country rock music playing]
[Alice Cooper] It was always going to be sort of the Warhol,
the Larry Rivers, the New York artists.
And then rock and roll just came in as...
following that in the second wave.
And then it was... We just kind of took it over.
Well, Max's did not have live music until 1969,
near the end of the winter '69-'70.
Danny Fields brought the first bands in.
There was no intention to have it be a venue
with regular performances.
He brought in Stooges,
Alice Cooper, Velvet Underground.
[Alice Cooper] Well, I think the Warhol people
brought in the rock.
You know, Velvet Underground.
And I think we were one of the very first bands
to play there in 1970.
The police actually came in and said,
"You've got to turn it down."
We were very loud.
I mean, most bands went in there and they were half acoustic,
and half, you know...
We were in there like The Who... [laughs]
...in a room the size of a restaurant.
[Jimi LaLumia] The Velvet Underground are considered
the foundational factor for the New York rock scene,
alongside the New York Dolls, who followed shortly thereafter,
also who were headquartered at Max's
for a good part of the time doing shows there.
Velvet was something else.
It was a different sound.
So they were like "Pushing Ahead",
Walk on the Wild Side.
That was ahead of its time.
I love the Velvet Underground.
I love the Warhol scene.
And we knew the Warhol scene was hanging out at Max's.
And one of my favorite albums
is the live album that the Velvet Underground did
at Max's, live at Max's,
which was recorded on some tiny little cassette
or machine, or little tape reel to reel, or something.
But also, we loved Iggy Pop. I loved Iggy Pop, the Stooges.
The Stooges played at Max's.
Each time it seems to get crazier and crazier.
Where does it stop?
I don't know, probably some kind of extreme violence.
There was an act at Max's Kansas City a few weeks ago
- Iggy Pop is his name - who cut himself on stage
and ended up with 16 stitches.
["Going Back to Max's Kansas City" by Joe Sztabnik plays]
think Danny Fields and I were the ones
that took him to the hospital.
[Jayne County] Iggy had been playing at Max's.
And he'd been rolling around on the glass,
rolling around on the glass that was on the stage
and getting up and bleeding,
just bleeding all over from the broken glass.
Iggy's on stage, and he's rolling around on stage,
cutting himself all over,
and people would go, "Oh really?
Oh really? What else is he doing?"
That was the attitude at Max's.
"Oh, what else is he doing?"
[Alice Cooper] Iggy was not a New York guy at all,
he was a Detroit guy.
And I think that's what...
He is animal.
He was certainly the godfather of punk.
In Detroit, he'd come out with a pair of Levi's on
and no shirt.
And I mean, he was built great.
I mean, the guy didn't have an ounce of fat on him,
and he was a contortionist,
and he had this kind of street thing.
Guys loved him, girls loved him.
He was-- he had this thing.
He was just sexual up there,
and from what I understand, he was pretty well-endowed.
I don't have to say what I understand.
If you lived in Detroit, you saw his penis
as much as you saw his chest
because he would always just take it out, you know.
[laughs]
[Peter Crowley] And it wasn't until '71 or '72
that it became a regular venue.
That was when the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village
lost their lease,
and Sam Hood, who booked the Gaslight,
asked Mickey, could he use the upstairs room for bands?
And Mickey said, "OK,"
and that's when they began having regular bookings.
[Penny Arcade] A lot of people who worked in the music industry
went to Max's.
It was an incredible mix of people
because there was a rebelliousness
that wasn't limited to somebody's behavior.
People were intellectually rebellious.
They were gender-rebellious,
meaning they chose their own gender.
[music fades]
[rock music playing]
Yeah, it was the home of--
it was one of the homes of punk, really.
That's what it was for us.
Yes, the fact that we could read about it,
hanging out with Bowie there, with Lou Reed and Warhol,
and the whole scene going on...
And Brigitte, so-and-so, and all the different names...
and I don't know, all the people.
[Ruby Lynn Reyner] But I remember
Brigitte used to pull down her pants in the back room...
Or I don't think she even pulled down her pants.
I think she shot Amphetamine right through her jeans,
right into her butt.
Yeah, big shot of speed.
And of course, it was a crazy place too, you know.
There were a lot of drugs going on.
Andy Warhol, superstar, pristine condition,
we used to get up on the table and flash our tits.
And Alice Cooper was there.
Alice Cooper, I think, must have lived there
because every time I went there, I saw him.
[Alice Cooper] We were kind of like the first band
that really put really good hard rock
with a really good band
together with, you know, the genderbending thing,
and the name, and the glamor...
Glamor, horror, and violence all packed into one,
but the songs were good.
I mean, I remember looking out, and there were all these guys.
I guess it was the New York Dolls
that were just coming up.
And they watched our show, and they understood, "Oh, OK."
And at that time, Bowie was coming to see us in England,
and he came and brought The Spiders from Mars
and said, "This is what we should be doing."
[Louie X. Erlanger] I saw Mick Jagger in there,
David Bowie, and Lou Reed.
A lot of different people would go in and out of there.
["Magnet" by Stony Sugarskull plays]
And all these people were out every night,
between Max's,
and not far away was Harold Black's 210 club,
where you could meet everybody if you were cool enough.
And it was David Peel
and "The Pope Smokes Dope", "Marijuana",
and this was radical things for the time.
Yeah, you know, fearless.
[Lenny Kaye] All of Downtown Manhattan was very compressed.
There was a sense that the avant theatre community
was bleeding into the avant music community,
that was bleeding into the avant film community.
All of these people gathered in the back room
of Max's Kansas City.
So Max's became a well-known place,
plus it was the Warhol crowd, so it was uber hip, ultra hip.
Everybody knew where it was at.
That wasn't like today.
There wasn't loud music coming through the back room, you know.
And Debbie Harry was the waitress.
The back room was her foundation for getting started
by making contact with that crowd,
becoming part of that crowd.
She was hard to miss because she was this...
You know, she was this gorgeous blonde girl,
and she was also a Playboy bunny before that.
Max's was pre Studio 54,
and who they wanted to let in and not let in.
I mean, there wasn't a velvet rope outside,
but if you went,
you had to get Mickey's blessing to kind of sit in the back room.
It was really crazy.
You'd walk in there, and this table would be Bowie,
you know, Frank Zappa, and da-da-da,
and the next table was George Harrison
and da-da-da, and da-da-da.
I mean, every table was like...
You wanted to sit at every table.
There was a lot of table hopping.
You would go and sit in one booth of people,
and you'd see other people you knew at other booths,
and they would know the gossip, "So what's happening?"
"We were sitting over there with so and so."
"What's happening? Is it true he has a little peener?"
"Tell us all about it. We want to know."
"What did he say?"
"Is it true that he likes to be shit on?"
You'd meet people in there that you'd never thought you'd meet.
I really liked Andy.
I thought Andy was great because he was really unique.
He really did want to take pictures of everybody.
I don't know how many Polaroids he took
of everybody in that room that night,
but he did that every night.
Mickey took care of us.
Mickey did, yeah.
The chickpeas on the table.
And if somebody started a chickpeas war,
then it was all out.
Bang! You'd get hit,
and you'd see somebody on the side go, "Yeah, got you!"
And it might be Elizabeth Taylor.
I remember going there one night with George Harrison,
and one of the cool things with him was
there'd be three girls at the other end,
you know, on the other side of the table.
He always carried a little pouch of rubies,
and once he decided which one he wanted to be with,
he would put the ruby down in front of her.
And if she picked up the ruby, that was a done deal then.
Well, you know, there were nights I went in there...
And I knew John Lennon.
And he was always trying to get me into politics.
You know, John loved politics.
He loved the whole, "We can change the world."
I said, "John, you want to change the world.
I'm just trying to entertain them."
[laughs]
I remember Jane Fonda,
you know, sitting next to these heroin dealers.
But that's what she wanted.
She wanted to be around the lowlifes,
the real gritty New York scene,
which that's what it was.
I was just the kid,
and I would come there with the folks and eat dinner
and pass out, and they'd stay there all night.
Allegedly, they only forgot me once.
[interviewer laughs]
That's the story that I have heard, however.
And so, consequently,
I'm a second generation Max's aficionado.
[rock music playing]
The Dolls were pure New York,
and they had no problem walking around
in high heels and all this.
And I admired the fact that they took it so far.
Well, there was nobody like them at the time in New York City.
I mean, everything at Max's had been more Velvet Underground
and all the Andy Warhol people,
and this was a totally different scene.
This was a glam scene.
It was not like the Velvet Underground.
We were hanging in the same places, the same clubs.
Max's was the den for the Dolls,
That was the sort of headquarters for the Dolls.
And it was sort of amateurish too.
It wasn't like going to see Led Zeppelin
or these bands that were really, like, professional.
It didn't look like it was rehearsed.
It didn't look like... It barely came together.
It was kind of like a trainwreck in process or something.
So I went to see them every week.
They had a residency.
And I would go there all the time,
and I kept hoping that they would get better.
We were playing the Coventry...
with KISS and the Ramones opening up for us,
and people like that and stuff.
Moving out into the Boroughs,
you had the Harlots of 42nd Street,
you had street punk, the early performances of KISS.
You had a sense of seeing growing
that would form a foundation
for a very elemental sense of New York rock and roll.
The Dolls were very much emblematic
of that next step that culture takes.
Culture takes a next step.
They embodied many rock and roll traditions within them:
the blues, the kind of three-chord great hit single,
the sense of flash and trash, and having a great time.
They were a great show band.
They reeked of rock stardom,
which meant that they were after what we were after also.
In Europe, they wouldn't be aware of the Dolls
and be interested in their music.
In America, they couldn't have cared less.
They thought they were a bunch of druggie transvestites
who wore women's dresses on stage,
which was not true at all.
A new rock group has surfaced at Max's Kansas City
and created a sellout.
[Sylvain Sylvain] Our first album had just come out.
It was just released, and we were scheduled
to play Max's Kansas City for six nights in a row.
We sold it out, two shows a night.
And it was a small place.
I mean, 50 people, 60 people.
You know, you put 100 people in there,
and that's-- they're gone.
I saw the Dolls, and they played Max's,
and I said, "You know, I could do this.
I could get a band together, I'm doing it on the stage."
Obviously, the biggest foundational event
was when Danny Fields decided to drag Iggy Pop
down to Max's one night, where he ran into David Bowie.
And the Bowie-Iggy Pop coalition, from that point,
became legendary, with a series of albums
and working back and forth with each other.
I think the most interesting thing about Max's Kansas City
was it was at a time when the rock world
and the art world melded together,
and it was also a time
when the audience wanted something new.
[rock music playing]
[Neon Leon] And then you had the MIAMIS,
and they had a great song
which was very popular in the underground
called "We Deliver".
Because they came up with this thing about,
"OK, you call us on the phone, and we deliver."
But they weren't delivering pizza.
They had a spliff delivery service.
New York in the '70s, it was just this kind of place.
It was like, anything goes.
There were no limits.
A little scary too.
[laughs] You know.
They weren't aiming for punk rock.
I mean, although they did do Suicide
and New York Dolls and such,
they were also doing Howlin' Wolf.
When Mickey had Max's, the music upstairs was very eclectic.
You had folk singers.
I mean, you could have Arlo Guthrie,
you could have Bruce Springsteen, the Wailers,
John Fahey, and myself.
♪♪
♪ Well after baby comes around We're going downtown ♪
♪ And see what it is we should know ♪
♪ Don't matter about the city
♪ Girls and boys Are always pretty ♪
♪ And like leaves in the fall They will blow ♪
♪ Into the place Where there's a scene ♪
♪ And a screaming machine They will go ♪
♪ And you can laugh You can stare ♪
♪ But we're all In the same damn show ♪
♪ Na-na-na-na-na
♪♪
♪ You might find yourself In Paris ♪
♪ In a burning drugstore
♪ And Rome's Spanish steps Are just around the corner ♪
♪ You can be in London In a hard rock cafe ♪
♪ And Max's Kansas City Got the same things to say ♪
♪ And I said, Whoa now baby What are we doing this for? ♪
♪ And she says, You better shut up ♪
♪ Cause you know who Just walked in the door ♪
♪ Now give me something more
[instrumental]
I'm not sure, but he left a lot of bills behind.
Because when I was with David Bowie's management company,
I had a charge account at Max's
and ran up all kinds of bills,
and a lot of people ran up bills, and Mickey couldn't--
It was all these bills that he couldn't pay or make.
[Peter Crowley] Mickey had walked away.
I don't think he even declared bankruptcy,
and he just turned the key and lock, and walked away.
While Tommy Dean was in Paris with Laura Dean,
they saw in the Herald-Tribune
that Max's had gone out of business,
so they called their lawyer in New York and said,
"Go check and see what it would take to get this place."
The lawyer discovered that there was one lien, $3,500.
Tommy paid the electric bill, boom, he got Max's Kansas City.
["Hangin' Out by Elliott Murphy plays]
[music fades]
-♪ Gimme a C -♪ C
-♪ Gimme a B -♪ B
-♪ Gimme a G -♪ G
-♪ Gimme a B -♪ B
-♪ What's that spell? -♪ CBGB
-♪ What's that smell? -♪ CBGB
[Jimi LaLumia] Wayne County, in December of 1973.
It was the first of the Max's recorded artists
to play Hilly's on the Bowery,
just as it was about to turn into CBGB's.
Wayne opened that door at that time.
The fabrication of television,
just happened to be walking down the street one day in 1974,
when Hilly was changing the sign,
and that's how CBGB's was discovered?
No.
Oh, New York City in the mid 70s was Danger City.
And I remember getting on the train after a night of Max's,
and once, Clem Burke got on the train with me
to sort of scope it out and make sure everything was OK
because it was Danger City.
[Frank Infante] The Lower East Side, back then,
you just went there to cop heroin.
There was no other reason for me to be there.
The rents were cheap and all,
but in terms of anybody else going there, there was no point
in going unless you're going to go get drugs.
And so you had a place like CBGB's
that met people
that really didn't have any kind of reputation or anything.
You could be anybody and just go down there and get a gig.
At that point, CBGB's was the only game in town.
82 Club had closed,
every other venue for unsigned bands was dead,
and my friend, Mike Umbers, turned me on to Mother's.
And I went up there, and I built the stage
and started putting bands in there.
And then when Max's reopened, it opened as a disco.
And that wasn't working,
and the new owner asked me if I would help him out.
And I said, OK, and I just moved
all my Mother's operations into Max's.
But Peter Crowley,
when he started booking the bands at Max's,
it totally changed Max's.
It put Max's really on the map with all those bands, you know,
bands like Blondie and the Ramones playing there.
Peter ran Max's, he managed Wayne County.
He got us. He understood us right away.
Hillary never understood us.
CBGB's, God bless Hillary,
but Hillary, the whole thing fell into his lap,
and I never ever, ever got the impression
he knew what to do with it.
He didn't understand the music,
or he didn't understand the Ramones or the Dead Boys.
I don't think he understood any of it.
[Frank Infante] And basically, it was taken over
by a certain bunch of people and bands,
and it became the place for all these bands to play,
you know, like the home spot.
[Peter Crowley] It built on itself,
and then all these record companies started coming down,
and they started to sign groups.
[rock music playing]
[Louie X. Erlanger] You know, Mink DeVille...
I met Mink DeVille down there.
He really knocked me out as a singer.
I heard him do "These Arms of Mine",
and I just thought, "This guy can sing anything,
and there's no young singers that can sing like this."
He had a voice that could go very deep
and also could reach up to falsetto with no effort.
Willy DeVille was the coolest guy on the scene, absolutely.
And you know what, the other bands recognized it as well.
I remember having a conversation with Jerry Nolan
and him saying, "Watch this guy.
He's the epitome of cool."
And he was. There was nobody like Willy DeVille.
[Jimi LaLumia] So Max's developed its own lineup,
and CB's developed their own lineup as well.
And at a certain point, things became a bit more rigid.
["Junkie See, Junkie Do" by Jimi LaLumia plays]
Yeah, the whole scene really was concentrated
at Max's and CBGB's.
Some bands were Max's bands, some bands were CBGB's bands,
and sometimes there was crossover.
If you were going to Max's, you were going to CB's.
If you were going to CB's, you were going to Max's.
There was this whole thing of like CB's bands and Max's bands.
But when I was in Shrapnel, we were lucky enough
to play both places.
CB's didn't have a back room.
CB's had the Bowery, you know what I mean?
CB's had the hotel next door, the Bum hotel,
and they're throwing bottles at us downstairs.
[Neon Leon] It was a very creative place,
but Hilly had a dog,
and there was shit all over the floor!
He never would clean the shit,
and he didn't really clean the bathrooms.
So all the bathrooms smelled like urine,
the floor smelled like shit, but the music was good.
That was a drag because it was a great place to be.
It really was.
[Elliott Murphy] I played one gig at CBGB's.
I was not a fan of CBGB's.
I thought it was a dump, you know.
But I liked Max's.
By the time Tommy Dean came in, it was punk, and it was--
He was booking a lot of the same bands who played at CBGB's.
But I didn't just book local bands
at Max's in the beginning.
So I brought in Luther Allison,
Mongo Santamaria,
Discotex, and the Sex-O-Lettes.
This was not working out,
so I stopped doing that after a few weeks
and concentrated on the New York bands
who would work for the door.
And we gave them the door,
whereas Hilly gave them the door
after he took the Hilly tax off the top.
So everybody liked to play Max's more than CBGB's.
Every band was different.
There wasn't one kind of thing.
I couldn't categorize it as just punk rock or what--
You couldn't really pin down
because all different kinds of bands played there.
Max's volume two,
when it changed hands from Mickey Ruskin to Tommy Dean,
was really the birth
of the New York underground at that point.
Because prior to that, with the exception of the New York Dolls
and maybe one or two other artists,
Max's was very mainstream record label acts
or acts that were auditioning for Clive Davis, primarily.
Clive signed Bruce Springsteen at Max's Kansas City.
He signed Aerosmith at Max's Kansas City.
[soft rock music playing]
One day, I'm walking down in front of the Chelsea Hotel
on 23rd Street in New York.
Who do I see coming out the lot is the front?
Malcolm McLaren.
He said, "How's the Dolls, mate?",
you know, and all this.
And I say, ""Ah,
pretty fucked up, man, we're about to break up."
And then that's how we got together
and we started doing the whole Red Patent Leather show.
[Bob Gruen] It wasn't like he became
the manager of the New York Dolls.
He kind of organized some shows
so that they would wear his clothes.
What Malcolm did do was save their lives
because they were so down and out.
Johnny and Jerry had pretty severe heroin habits.
Arthur was drinking more than anybody had ever seen.
So Malcolm put Arthur into Roosevelt Hospital,
into a detox unit there, and he got Jerry and Johnny
into a kind of drug detox situation
to clean them up a bit,
basically so that they could play a show
and wear his clothes, and publicize his outfits.
For me, seeing the Dolls in that period
was seeing actually an era transition.
Because you've also lost the glam rock scene
that was part of New York in the early '70s.
And it's moved over to a club called CBGB,
where the style of dress is different
and the attitude is different,
and the presentation is different.
A band like Aerosmith started out making money
and just kept making money,
and they were making money in barrels.
The Dolls were like losing money in fucking barrels.
And they're gonna go, take Arthur out of rehab
and go down to Florida and start a tour
with no roadie and Malcolm driving.
But as soon as they got there, Johnny and Jerry
were more interested in feeding their heroin habit
than in playing any shows.
And they got some of the local kids to go out
and try to find new heroin, and it wasn't good enough,
and they wanted to come back to New York to get some more dope.
But yes, I mean, it's very hard for anybody to score,
especially back in 1975 in Tampa, Florida.
That's where we were.
Thunders and Nolan can't score drugs down there,
and they said, "Well, fuck it. We're going back to New York."
And David told them that if they came back to New York,
if they left the tour just because of drugs,
he didn't want to play with them anymore.
[Marty Thau] And at that point,
David and Syl knew that the Dolls were over.
[Bob Gruen] In the end, they were truly ahead of their time.
They predicted not only the coming of punk
but the renaissance of garage rock.
[rock music playing]
I think Syl had to sell a guitar
in order to buy a ticket for Malcolm
to get back to London.
[rock music playing]
He said to me, "Mate, what do you want to do?
"I've got all these-- my wife's got all these kids
"hanging around the shop,
"and we could put a great band together for you,"
and all this kind of stuff.
And I said, "All right, well, let's try it."
And he said to me, "Look, give me your guitar
and your piano, by the way, and I'll send you a plane ticket."
[Marty Thau] And he went back to London
with his tail between his legs,
but he learned a lot from the downtown music makers
and taste makers.
And so he put together the Sex Pistols,
which was a combination of the Dolls attitude
and the Ramones three-chord riff,
and Richard Hell's fashion.
[Sylvain Sylvain] He loved Richard Hell.
He left me a suit that I gave to Richard.
He took that whole-- he borrowed, man,
from that whole thing there with The Police,
"Kill Me", "The Blank Generation".
We did all this.
We put all this together.
This guy, this shopkeeper, comes in,
and he takes all the ideas, and he runs with it.
[Peter Crowley] Malcolm claimed that
he invented the Sex Pistols, yada, yada, yada.
That's an extreme exaggeration.
He did introduce Rotten to the band,
but the band already existed,
and basically, they created themselves.
[Billy Idol] Eventually, in England, it did explode,
and it went kind of mega, you know.
The Pistols went mega after being on the bill grunge.
It just exploded.
[Penny Arcade] I remember Danny Fields
asking me to come down to CBGB's
because he was representing the Ramones.
I had never seen the Ramones.
And then you go in,
and there were these gawky-looking creatures,
you know,
and they were all wearing motorcycle jackets.
[Jay Jay French] They were simple, but they were--
they had something.
You could see it.
There was a unification of images,
a unification of playing.
There were all exactly on the same page.
[Peter Crowley] When you have the Ramones on one hand,
and Blondie, and Talking Heads,
lumping them together as punk rock was a bit strange.
The Talking Heads were definitely a breakthrough band.
The Ramones we would go to see,
but the Ramones, after a short period of time,
became more of a CBGB's band.
[Alice Cooper] I love the Ramones
because the Ramones were just street kids.
They didn't try to be the Beatles.
They weren't trying to be this.
They were the Ramones.
When you heard a Ramones song, you knew it was the Ramones.
When you heard a Blondie song, you knew it was Blondie.
That's the important thing, is that identity.
The identity was so strong.
To get that identity that nobody else had was really important.
[Jayne County] Blondie,
with their radio-friendly approach to pop singles,
became theband.
The group reflecting the success of the New York rock scene.
No one would believe that Blondie
was going to become such a-- so big.
And when she became bigger, it's like, "Oh my God,
"yeah, even Patti Smith got a little crazy
when she started getting so big."
I always considered Debbie the Marilyn Monroe of punk.
And Patti Smith, well,
she's not the Marilyn Monroe of punk, that's for sure.
So I DJ'ed at Mickey Ruskin's Max's
and I DJ'ed at Tommy Lane's Max's.
I remember Dee Dee Ramone coming to me and in the record booth
and the DJ booth,
and saying to me, "They're all saying we're punk.
We're not punk, we're rock and roll."
Punk was kind of forced on everyone.
[Penny Arcade] People want to go on and on
about punk at Max's
as if it was some kind of political movement
like it was in London.
In England, punk was a political movement.
In New York, punk was a bunch of people
trying to get a record deal.
[rock music playing]
[Jayne County] Dee Dee was going out with this crazy girlfriend
who had been with Arthur Kane before,
and she had tried to chop off Arthur Kane
from the New York Dolls;
tried to chop off his stumps so he couldn't play bass.
What was her name?
Crazy... Crazy Connie.
Everyone called her Crazy Connie.
She was totally psychotic,
and that was the story that people used to tell
about how when Dee Dee was going up to 53rd and 3rd...
♪ 53rd and 3rd
["53rd and 3rd" by The Ramones plays]
♪ Let's cruise to the shore Get some beer ♪
♪ We need some more I feel good tonight ♪
♪ Let's get drunk And have a fight... ♪
And he came back from hustling,
went up to 53rd and 3rd,
and Connie got mad because Connie caught him with a trick,
and she freaked out and tried to stab Dee Dee in the cock,
and tried to cut his cock off.
And he had scars on his cock.
And so one night at Max's,
I was upstairs in the dressing room
and Dee Dee came up to go to the bathroom.
And he went to the bathroom, and he turned around and said,
"Wayne, look at my cock, look at my dick, look what she--
"Connie tried to chop it off.
Look, there's scars all over my dick."
And Dee Dee was the first person who noticed my tits
when I was growing-- started taking hormones
and growing my chest.
And Dee Dee was like, "You've got tits, Wayne.
Look you've got little tits."
And I said, "Yeah, I'm going to grow tits."
And he said, "Oh, don't grow 'em real big.
Don't grow 'em real big, just grow a handful."
And he took his hands, and he put them right there.
"Just grow a little. Just a handful is enough."
But luckily, I didn't have to get anything done.
They just grew on their own,
much to the disbelief of people at Max's.
And Patti Smith, oh my God! What a bad reaction!
She saw them.
I was walking down the street one day and I ran into Patti.
And I go, "Hey Patti", and she goes, "hey, hey.."
[mumbles] ...like that, you know.
And then she went...
...back like that because she got a gander on my tits.
Her reaction was like, "What's that?"
And then she clammed up, so it was--
My tits were very famous at Max's.
[Peter Crowley] The place was pretty successful
with those bookings,
and Tommy set out immediately to enlarge the upstairs.
So we ended up with a room that would hold 200 people.
Well, Tommy Dean was great.
But basically, you worked for Laura Dean.
She was the boss.
She wore the pants.
[Jayne County] You know, during the first,
Max's was really--
The place was really for artists
and for the Warhol crowd, and people like that.
During the second Max's, it was more the music.
It was Blondie, Ramones...
Patti played there, of course, on television,
and all these other bands that didn't go on to do anything
but they were part of the Max's scene.
There were a lot of people that hung out at Max's
that made Max's what it was
that did not go on to be big stars,
but they really did make Max's.
One thing about Max's is you oftentimes went on
very, very late, super late.
So what we were looking at in our audience were prostitutes,
taxi drivers, Warhol,
superstars, junkies, writers...
whoever didn't have to wake up like at 8 o'clock or earlier.
♪♪
♪ Some say
♪ That we [inaudible]
♪ That life is just for living
♪ The object only win
♪ Keep your head
♪ But I say
♪ There is no denying
♪ We all question dying
♪ If you can't hear the crying
♪ Then you're [inaudible]
[vocalizing]
[Sonny Vincent] We liked Max's because you could do
anything you wanted to there.
You could be wild, you could lay down,
you could jump in the audience, you could deconstruct songs,
you could play songs with bad endings,
play bad songs with great endings...
You could experiment, do whatever you wanted to.
We really felt like we'd arrive somewhere
and that this was the center of the universe for us.
Every night there were genius bands.
I don't remember seeing any band I didn't like.
[Peter Crowley] I found The Cramps at CBGB's,
and they were doing the audition night.
In the middle of their set, Hilly came over and poked me,
and he laughed, and he said, "You think they're serious?"
And I said, "I don't know if they're serious,
but I think they're fabulous."
I mean, they were terrible.
They were so out of tune it was painful.
They were crying because they came from Ohio
and they expected to be CBGB stars,
and here they were being rejected.
And I said, "You can come to Max's
"and I'll give you bookings,
but you got to bring a tuning machine to my office."
[Phil Caivano] The other band that I really think
doesn't get enough credit, Suicide...
they were really that art music,
didn't know what was going to happen,
scary, phenomenal.
There was one time Alan got up on stage with a cassette player
and played it through the PA because Marty wasn't there.
Like, it's a Suicide show, it didn't matter.
I call him Suicide.
So for me, he always did weird shit.
And when Suicide played, it could be quite an event.
Bottles being flung,
physicality, being chased off stage.
[Alan Vega] [inaudible] Suicide was [inaudible] me,
We both had our way.
And our way was democracy.
So in words, we only played what was good for both of us.
And then the Max's Kansas City album came out,
and I recorded three tracks.
Peter Crowley decided to take my "Death to Disco" single
after my borrowing a paragraph from Punk Magazine.
And that became a mainstay on the Max's Kansas City jukebox.
[Sonny Vincent] The scene was great as far as the clubs
and the music.
It was really inspiring, a lot of feeling.
And a lot of the bands were very raw, which I liked a lot.
I liked the rawness.
I liked the fact that it wasn't fake.
Nobody was doing it only for the money,
except perhaps a few notable exceptions.
And yeah, it was great.
It was really great. It was inspiring chills and thrills.
In high school, I really used to go a lot.
I used to kind of cut class and take a train at the city,
and go to 48th Street and check out all the guitars,
and then I'd head down to Max's Kansas City
and spend all night there,
and come home late and get in trouble.
[rock music playing]
[crowd cheering]
One of the pivotal moments in the New York rock scene
was the Dick Manitoba- Wayne County incident at CBGB's.
After that occurred, the scene was never quite the same.
There was a real divide between Max's Kansas City and CBGB.
And that was mainly because of the fight I had
with Dick Manitoba onstage at CBGB's.
He was harassing me and saying very homophobic things.
[Jimi LaLumia] Manitoba of the Dictators
heckled Wayne County in a way that Wayne took as menacing.
[Jayne County] And then he jumped up on stage
to go to the bathroom, but I didn't know
he was going to the bathroom.
I thought he was jumping up onstage to hit me.
He'd been yelling horrible things at me from the audience.
When he jumped up on stage,
I did not wait to see what he was going to do.
I just conked him with the mic then,
and he fell off the stage and hit his head into a table
and gave himself a concussion.
[bell dings]
Then he proceeded to jump up on stage again with me.
[Jimi LaLumia] They wound up on stage together,
battling, fighting, punching.
[Jayne County] And finally, I had to pin him down to the floor
and just go bam, bam, bam.
There's blood everywhere, you know.
[bell dings]
And it just turned into a whole War and Peacescenario,
which divided the New York rock scene.
And I think that people at Max's were disappointed
because they said, "Oh my God,
we wish that this had happened at Max's and not CBGB's."
[Phyllis Stein] The Heartbreakers
were a Max's band straight out.
And part of the reason they were a Max's band
is because Max's paid them a lot more
than Hilly paid his bands.
The Dolls had been a Max's band,
so it was a natural progression for the Heartbreakers.
[rock music playing]
That band basically revolved around drugs,
not as a band but as individual members.
[Jayne County] They brought in a very drug-oriented audience
because at one time, people used to come to Max's
to see if this is going to be the gig at Max's,
that Johnny Thunders drops dead.
Eventually, he played on it, you know.
They had advertisements: "Catch us while we're still alive."
[Jayne County] They also captured a New York sensibility.
You know, Chinese Rocksand that sense of dissolute abandon.
[Bob Gruen] In spite of whatever drugs he was on,
he knew how to take care of business.
Of course he was pretty slick about it.
He'd have a show at Max's scheduled,
and so he'd talk Tommy, - a teen who was the manager at Max's -
he'd talk Tommy into giving him an advance,
and then he'd show up on the day of the show
and say there was nothing he could do.
He had pawned his guitar, he'd run out of money,
and he had the guitar in the pawn shop
and he needed more money or he couldn't play the show.
And Tommy was in a bind. If he said no, there was no show.
If he said yes, they don't make money.
So he's the kind of guy that if the show sucked,
it didn't matter.
It was always exciting and cool,
even if he fucked up, and it didn't really matter.
But when he was on, and everybody was all together,
obviously, it was better.
Possibly some of the greatest rock and roll music
ever composed
by some of the greatest, including Jerry Nolan,
who was crazier than them all.
The greatest music that you could possibly hope for,
but just mismanagement, including me,
that just wrecked it up.
We were all hanging out at Max's.
I mean regularly, every night,
it would be Johnny, Jerry, me, Stiv.
Tommy Dean was still supporting Johnny Thunders
in a lot of ways by giving them food
and paying them advances, and all of that kind of stuff.
During the Happy Hour, there was free food,
and a lot of the musicians would come,
and that would be their only hot meal of the day.
But that put 3,000 to 4,000 to $5000 in the register
before I even did a soundcheck.
Therefore there was no heavy pressure on me
to book for money.
Well, I first went to Max's in 1978.
I was now in a group, Generation X,
my own punk rock group.
I was actually on a press junket in New York.
Patti Smith was doing a showcase for her album Radio Ethiopia
at Max's, so who I first saw
doing an incredible show at Max's was Patti Smith.
So it was like, "Wow."
I mean, she was a massive hero to us.
And so we loved Horses,
and there I was getting a sort of a view into her new album.
So Max's... there, it was all coming true for me.
[rock music playing]
I used to hang out at Max's all the time
and CB's, and for a long time, my old band, The Stimulators,
we were almost like the house band at Max's.
We used to play there so much.
Along comes Harley.
12 years old, kicking his drum kit over twice a night.
And this was also two sets.
Max's was two sets a night: an early set and a late set.
I'd go there to see The Stimulators
when I was a kid before my band could play,
and there was little Harley playing the drums
and Denise's aunt on guitar blowing us away.
We played there very often.
We were beloved at Max's.
And early on, when we began,
our set was so fast and so invigorating.
And we'd knock over the table
so we could have room to jump up and down,
kind of Pogo-ing.
So whenever The Stimulators played,
the staff had to take away all the tables and chairs
before we began, or they would be destroyed.
But anyway, I started playing there around the same time
that Sid was doing all his shows there.
He was living in New York at the time.
It was right after he had left the Sex Pistols.
[Jayne County] Oh yes, he used to come to me and he'd go,
"Wayne, do you think Sid is gay?
"I think Sid not be gay.
He can't fuck me."
And I'm like, "You're on drugs, you're on dope, you're on junk.
He can't fuck you."
The first Thursday, Sid went over well
as far as ticket sales and all that sort of thing.
Nancy was happy.
Poor Sid was half dead.
He had the flu or something similar
with a very high fever.
He'd gathered a really good set of musicians.
The band was just fine.
[Nick Marden] Mick Jones jumped up in the air too much.
[laughs]
Other than that, they were a good, solid rock and roll band,
Mick Jones, Killer Kane, and Jerry Nolan playing drums.
What a fantastic band!
And he sang. He did his best.
I mean, it was a lot of criticism that people had,
that they were shit and everything.
I thought it was great.
You know, it's rock and roll, it's not perfection.
I loved when Sid sang.
♪♪
♪ I create a lot of problems But now I'm really gonna try ♪
♪ Been in a messy situation
♪ And for you it's been no fun
♪ But if we're Getting down to favors ♪
♪ Then honey you can do me one
♪ But take a chance on me
♪ Take a chance on me
♪ Take a chance on me, yeah
[instrumental]
♪ Well I know I'm just a junkie ♪
♪ And I can't make it off the floor ♪
♪ But all that Really doesn't matter ♪
♪ Because with you I'm something more ♪
♪ It's just a little Complicated ♪
♪ And everything they say Is true ♪
[rock music playing]
[Neon Leon] The death knell for the scene, I think,
was Sid and Nancy's deaths,
and it brought a kind of attention to it
that wasn't really necessary to the scene.
It wasn't really safe in here.
The blitz incident took place in 1978,
when a lot of bad things were happening all over the scene.
[Denise Mercedes] Johnny Blitz got attacked and stabbed,
and that was really bad.
I mean, that kind of changed the feeling of, like...
punks and musicians walking down the street
and feeling that you could get attacked
because of the way you dressed or the way you looked.
[Sonny Vincent] I think it was threatening to people,
to the extent-- more than we realized.
We'd walk down the street and people would say,
"Where the fuck you going? To a Halloween party?"
Or, you know, "Look at that crazy motherfucker."
[Denise Mercedes] It's funny because when I think back
to the whole punk scene in New York,
and CBGB's, and Max's,
and you really think about the different bands,
I would say that the Heartbreakers,
and the Voidoids, and even the Sex Pistols,
I would say, were not tough.
They were not macho kind of guys.
But the Dead Boys were legitimately tough.
They were from Cleveland. They were from Youngstown.
They were scrappy.
They would mouth off to people.
Even Stiv, as tiny as he was,
wouldn't hesitate to get into a fight with somebody.
[rock music playing]
We played with the Talking Heads,
we played with Iggy, we played with the Ramones...
You know, I got friendly with the Ramones and Johnny.
Especially Johnny.
♪ Well everyone suffered For weeks and for weeks ♪
♪ When the telephone building Burnt down ♪
♪ Well, there were Many lonely days ♪
♪ When I just didn't speak
♪ Well over on my side of town
♪ It's just like when the circus is around ♪
♪ You see the clowns They're nodding out on downs ♪
♪ And the junkies Are making dead sounds ♪
[vocalizing]
♪ And I'm Ruby From the wrong side of town ♪
♪ And I'm a girl With both feet on the ground ♪
♪ I always thrive while others just survive ♪
♪ I'm Ruby From the wrong side of town ♪
[Jesse Malin] I tried to sneak in a few times
and in those days, they didn't really hit you too hard
if you were underage; 11, 12.
It wasn't like it became where they had IDs.
But I tried to sneak in.
I had no money, and I had, I don't know,
like a fifth of whiskey or something on me,
or some small... I don't know what I had.
And they threw me down the stairs.
The bouncers were really tough.
And I just went right down those stairs.
Jesse, he was too young, man.
Can't be throwing a little kid down the damn stairs.
Shoot.
[Ruby Lynn Reyner] In the beginning,
it was like hanging out,
and the people were interacting with each other,
and we were creating.
Plus, I kind of, at the same time,
was introduced to shooting amphetamine.
And then it became kind of a criminal element.
It was like the speed...
It got dark. It became very dark.
People would offer us drugs as kids,
and you could see that so much of this
was going on in bathrooms.
And I also was noticing that, at the time, that men and women
would go into the same bathroom together,
and nobody bothered them.
It was like-- that was normal.
If one bathroom was full, they'd just go on to another.
You had men in the ladies room all the time,
and ladies going into the men's restroom.
The bathrooms that matches were integrated.
[Donna Destri] They weren't like the bathrooms at CBGB's,
where you took your life in your hands.
I mean, I would never go to the bathrooms at CBGB's.
That was just like bacteria to the n-th degree.
Max's were clean at least.
There was some sex going on in the bathrooms, I'm sure.
There's the famous story of Eric Emerson having sex
in the bathrooms at Max's, so...
I don't know about that personally.
[laughs]
[Ruby Lynn Reyner] He used to take girls into the bathroom
and have sex with them.
He asked me one time, "Do you want to have my child?"
[Louie X. Erlanger] Sex was rampant in the bathrooms,
as well as, you go into a stall
and you hear a lot of sniffing in the stall next to you.
[Harley Flanagan] It wasn't like a bunch of rich people
sniffing blow.
It was a bunch of total scumbag, crazy,
punk rock, junkie, prostitute, fucking messes.
And here, my 12-year-old ass is running around,
hitting people up for quarters for the pinball machine, yeah.
"Do you have any quaaludes?"
"Uh... No I'm on speed tonight."
It was such an extraordinary place,
where you never know who you would run into
or see,
or who would perform.
Everybody from Wayne County...
Where else would you see someone like Wayne County?
Well, Jayne is, you know... How can I shock you?
And how many different ways?
Fabulous. Fabulous performer.
Every couple of months, I would play Max's.
But when I moved to England, I would come back and play
like one night there, and it would be a big night,
because I'd been away in England for six whole months.
People would come to see me,
there'd be lines around the block.
You know, lines around the block at Max's Kansas City.
"Come see us," you know.
♪ The New York Dolls Are kicking it out ♪
♪ And looking it up
♪ You've got A personality crisis, baby ♪
♪ Down at Max's
♪ All the boys are
♪ And all the girls are
♪ All the kids are They're down at Max's ♪
♪ Blondie's all in a buzz
♪ She's on the cover Of the New York Rocker ♪
♪ Dee Dee Ramone Strips his bass to the bone ♪
♪ He's a blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg, blitzkrieg bopper ♪
♪ The Heartbreakers Are going to give you ♪
♪ A taste of going steady With Pirate Love ♪
♪ You'd better watch it 'Cause the Electric Chairs ♪
♪ Are gonna fry your brain
♪ Come on, boys!
♪ The downstairs is packed
♪ And the groupies Are all dressed up ♪
♪ Upstairs the New York Dolls
♪ Are kicking it out And looking it up ♪
♪ Bad girls Just looking for a kiss ♪
♪ Down at Max's
♪ All the boys are
♪ And all the girls are
♪ All the kids are...
[Jimi LaLumia] Years later, I heard the various stories
about money being manufactured in the basement.
I always said, "I never heard that."
Because if I did,
I would probably have asked for some of the gig money
that we sometimes didn't get.
[Peter Crowley] He and Laura, again, they were in Paris.
They have all their brilliant ideas in Paris.
And they noticed that French money
is different sizes for the different denominations.
And they noticed that American money is all the same size.
And the biggest problem for counterfeiters in America,
at that time, was getting a hold of the correct paper.
So they got home
and Laura started working with various bleaches
and things like that,
and she figured out how to bleach out a $1 bill
without destroying it.
At the same time, Xerox came out
with a new color copier that was so precise
it could do the very fine lines in money.
So they started bleaching out those ones
and printing the hundreds.
And they figured out how to pass them without getting caught.
They would go to Atlantic City and buy chips.
He was relatively adept at gambling, so at one time,
he could make money playing poker and that sort of thing.
By 1881, he wasn't so good at it anymore.
It was the influence of the White Lady that...
Well, that got him involved in doing all this crazy shit
in the first place,
and then also threw off his skill.
So anyway, here he was,
printing away money, printing away money.
He made two mistakes.
First mistake was, he paid the electric bill with bad money.
Around 1980, a vice president from Con Ed came to Max's
and said, "So Tommy, we'll take your check,
but we won't take your cash anymore."
If I was in Tommy's shoes at that time,
that would tell me it's time to get out of the business,
to stop, because if the Con Ed people can catch me,
how far behind can the Treasury Department be?
[rock music playing]
The rise of what we now know as New York hardcore
starts with the Bad Brains' first shows in New York.
And the Bad Brains had played Max's
when they hadn't quite yet made the break yet,
when they were still kind of a punk band.
[Dr. Know] That shit was punk rock.
[laughs]
We had something to do with that
because it was the message
and the music,
and then the speed.
We saw that a lot of people believed in us
and supported us,
and kept on coming, and coming, and coming.
And eventually, the kids would sell out.
[Jesse Malin] Max's, at that point,
became the foundation
for the early, early versions of hardcore,
along with CBGB's, which was having hardcore matinees.
But Peter was booking them at nighttime.
[Jimi LaLumia] Glenn Danzig gives full hosannas
to Max's and to Crowley
for allowing the misfits to cut their teeth at Max's.
[Steven Bush] So in some ways,
you could say that the whole hardcore,
New York hardcore scene, really starts at Max's.
And it's very true.
The final days of Max's was the earliest days of hardcore.
And the hardcore scene was beginning in New York,
and my band, Heart Attack, put out a record, God is dead.
And I was going to junior high school,
but all my friends in the Boroughs were making bands.
Before CBGB's would do the hardcore matinees,
Max's was accepting it.
[hardcore music playing]
[applause]
[rock music playing]
[Billy Idol] When I actually came to live in New York,
in March of '81, I did hang out at Max's.
After a few months of living there,
I gradually met Steve Stevens,
and we started to put a band together.
We had a drummer, Steve Missal.
When he said, "Tonight I'm playing,
"it's the closing night of Max's.
Max's is closing, I'm in one of the bands they're playing,"
I said, "Can we jump up and play before or after you play,
or something, or before you?"
And he said, "We could get up and play a couple of tunes."
[Billy Idol] And we played Dancing With Myself.
We played about four or five songs.
And I could see the minute that we got on
people going, "Fuck, it's Billy Idol."
There I was on the stage,
where people like Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide
had been on that stage.
A lot of my heroes, the music I loved
that came out of New York had been on that stage.
It was my way of saying "thanks" by getting up there
and doing this jump up, and sort of, in a way,
cementing myself a little bit
in with the Max's history, in a way.
So I knew, man, this is the last night.
And it did, it shut the next day.
That was, I believe, the last show of the--
before Max's closed, and it was our first show.
You'd go from CB's to Max's,
it didn't really matter who was playing.
You just went anyway,
especially if they let you in for free.
And Peter Crowley was nice enough to let me in for free.
Because Birdland played there a lot,
and the Rattlers played there a lot.
The Rattlers was actually the very last band
to play on the stage at Max's.
And I think that's a huge honor,
because Max's does not get enough acknowledgment
for all the bands that broke out of there.
[Donna Destri] My friend Dorothy, one night,
fell asleep upstairs under a booth.
OK, she was really wasted,
and she fell asleep, and she came walking down,
early in the morning, while they were still counting the money.
And I was asleep in the car, waiting for Michael,
and she said-- she walked down the steps
and all of a sudden, all the guns went up.
So, yeah, they were doing something shady, come on.
[laughs]
[Peter Crowley] Second mistake,
which brought down the whole house of cards:
Laura went to the gift shop in Atlantic City,
bought a purse, and paid with a bad 100.
And they remembered who passed that bad 100,
and she got arrested,
and they were going to prosecute her.
Tommy went to the prosecuting attorney and said,
"If you let her go with no charges,
I'll plead guilty to whatever you want me to plead guilty to."
So he went away to the country club prison for four years
in the 80s,
and the sad part is while he was in there, Laura died.
In '81, the final blow to Max's
was he needed money
to pay back the guys in Atlantic City.
And you have to pay them.
And the only way he could get that kind of money,
in legitimate money, was to sell the building.
I had made him so much money in the 70s
that he was able to buy the Max's building.
And he owned it outright, no mortgage or anything.
The woman who owned the office building next door
wanted desperately to have Max's gone
because of the broken glass, vomit,
and whatever that was there every morning.
And so Tommy went to her and said,
"If you give me a million dollars,
I'll give you the business and the building."
And she said, "OK."
He peeled off a million, he went and paid off
the boys in Atlantic City.
And that was the end of Max's Kansas City
and put me in the street.
[rock music playing]
[Jimi LaLumia] Max's does not get the due that it's deserved.
Max's closed at the dawn of the 80s.
CBGB'S remained open.
Hilly stayed in business for another 20 years
and was able to stay in the public eye,
whereas Max's died in the end of '81.
By default, CBGB's became the punk place
for the MTV generation.
Max's unfortunately was cut out of that equation.
[Denise Mercedes] Max's was very unique
because it allowed the diversity of acts,
of humans, to come together,
no matter what you were trying to do.
We had the platform and the ability to experiment on stage,
bring our best, see what happened.
And we were all there: gay, straight, Asian, Black,
Hispanic, White... Who wasn't there?
We were all there,
kicking ass on that fucking stage.
[Sonny Vincent] We had some managers back then
and they said, "Oh, Sonny, drink this before you go on stage,
it'll cut the edge."
Well, after a while, I was really cutting the edge.
And I told Gene, "Oh, we're not going to play the first song.
Let's start with the second song."
And I told the drummer, Gregory,
"We're not going to play the first song,
let's start with the third song."
And then I started with the eighth song,
and there was this din of noise, and the audience loved it,
and I was going, "Wow, this is so great.
I can do what I want."
[Harley Flanagan] I'll tell you man,
Max's was a really crazy place.
You can only imagine what it was like for me.
I was 12, and you got people like Johnny Thunders
stumbling down the steps from the dressing room
with, like, a syringe hanging out of his arm,
and talking about, "Are we on yet?"
I mean, total debauchery.
[Nick Marden] Crazy people there,
crazier people, or flashier people,
or on other nights, it was just the regular people.
Which, for the Max's crew, that could be anybody.
[Phil Caivano] I think in a lot of ways,
Max's was more important than CBGB's,
because of the lineage of the history of it.
It was all, like, this line that went back
to the Velvet Underground,
and that was the club that I had in my brain,
from the magazines, from the stories,
from records, from songs,
from print.
That's why it was so important to me,
and that's why I loved it so much.
[Alice Cooper] Back at Max's Kansas City,
there were a million ideas launched back there,
in that back, because there was so much creativity
in that room back there.
Remember this,
if you forget everything else.
They were all stoned, all the time.
And this is the Clash and the Sex Pistols,
and Sid, and Malcolm, and me, and Susie.
Everyone.
David Bowie, Gene Pitney, to Mick Jagger--
Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones.
Wherever they were, they were all high
all the time.
Everyone was high.
No one was straight ever.
[rock music playing]
[Elliott Murphy] So Max's was really, for me...
You know, there's the whole art side of Max's too,
and the Andy Warhol side,
but from the music side,
Max's played a very important part
in the Golden Age of music.
And I'm very grateful to both Mickey Ruskin
and Tommy Dean for all the...
for how much attention they paid to that, you know.
[Alice Cooper] I was having the most fun I've ever had
and being-- it was part of the Alice Cooper thing.
It helped me create.
Max's Kansas City helped me create a lot of things.
[Jayne County] The legacy of Max's lives on.
In one way or another, Max's legacy lives on.
It'll never die, really,
because Max's, it's like--
it's like Paris was in the 20s, or Berlin was in the 30s,
or England was in the 60s.
Max's in the 70s was, like, famous.
It's going to be always remembered.
It's going to be written about and filmed about always.
[Harley Flanagan] I'm up on stage playing, and I'm like,
"Give me a Coke! Get me a Coke," meaning a Coca-Cola,
and half the crowd thought I was yelling "Coke" like cocaine.
I mean, this is the fucking mentality
of how depraved this shit was.
[Jesse Malin] The thing about Max's II for us
was kids could play there, or even go to shows there.
You felt like you were really part of history.
You'd seen it in the magazines, you knew the iconic ad
that was in the paper, that strip ad.
To see your name in it, in the Village Voice,
it really meant something.
It felt like you were part of something.
[Ruby Lynn Reyner] I, like-- Mr. T used to say,
"I pity the poor fools that don't have Max's Kansas City."
Because Max's Kansas City was a once in a lifetime experience.
[Steven Bush] You're asking why all these really cool shows
of soon-to-be stars were happening there,
and there's your answer: it really was the place to be.
[Nick Marden] There would be an energy there.
And some nights it would be a bummer energy,
it'd be like real heavy junky energy.
Other nights it would be this weird aggro energy.
Other nights, it would be a mellow thing.
But there was always something percolating there,
as opposed to other places, where you'd just sit down
and drink and leave.
[Harley Flanagan] A lot of good times, though.
I saw some great fucking bands at Max's.
And it was really cool to...
I should say, it isreally cool to have played there.
It was a great piece in New York history.
[Denise Mercedes] Without Peter Crowley, without Max's,
I can't imagine what the New York music scene,
what the music world would have lost.
That was my first gig in America, really.
It was at Max's Kansas City on their last night.
[Alice Cooper] It's an era gone by.
It's a place that's gone by.
And it will always be a place that's almost like...
Everybody wanted to at least be there once.
You know, they go,
"That must have been spectacular!"
And I go, "It was."
["Leave My Pussy Alone" by Jayne County and Jimi LaLumia plays]
♪ In the name of science There's nothing you won't do ♪
♪ You think you have the right But it's wrong ♪
♪ You know that's true
♪ Killing, scarring, torturing The ones that can't fight back ♪
♪ We'll do their fighting For them ♪
♪ You'll get a big payback
♪ Keep your hands off my pussy Don't you mess with my pussy ♪
♪ Just leave my pussy alone
♪ Not tonight with my pussy
♪ It ain't right with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ Yeah Leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ In the name of profit You're monsters on the loose ♪
♪ You've crossed the line Too many times ♪
♪ Your neck is in the noose
♪ You slash their throats You stab their eyes ♪
♪ You lead them to their doom
♪ Just so that some old bitch Gets to test a new perfume ♪
♪ So keep your hands Off my pussy ♪
♪ Don't you mess with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ Don't you stare at my pussy
♪ Don't you dare with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
[instrumental]
♪ In the name of justice We're knocking down your door ♪
♪ We'll chain ourselves We'll paint ourselves ♪
♪ We'll nail you to the floor
♪ We'll spray paint All your furs ♪
♪ We'll boycott All your stores ♪
♪ Until you get the message We won't take this anymore ♪
♪ So keep your hands off my pussy ♪
♪ Don't you mess with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ Not tonight with my pussy
♪ It ain't right with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ So keep your hands Off my pussy ♪
♪ Don't you mess with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ Don't you stare at my pussy
♪ Don't you dare with my pussy Just leave my pussy alone ♪
♪ Yeah, pick on somebody Your own species ♪
["Max's Kansas City" by The Electric Chairs plays]
♪ Take a tip from me
♪ And get ready For the big parade ♪
♪ It's the place to be
♪ Every night's A happy holiday ♪
♪ The kids are jumping around Everybody's doing loop de loop ♪
♪ Just a making the rounds
♪ Like a speed freak In a telephone booth ♪
♪ The downstairs is packed
♪ And the groupies Are all dressed up ♪
♪ Upstairs the New York Dolls
♪ Are kickin' it out Looking tough ♪
♪ You've got a Personality crisis, baby ♪
♪ Down at Max's
♪ Max's Kansas City
-♪ All the boys are -♪ At Max's Kansas City
-♪ All the girls are -♪ At Max's Kansas City
-♪ All the kids are -♪ At Max's Kansas City
♪ Down at Max's
♪ I see Patti Smith
♪ She's the Stagger Lee Of rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ She threw a seven and eleven
♪ And she always knows Which parts to hold ♪
♪ And I see Lou Reed And Iggy Pop ♪
♪ There just to get Higher and higher ♪
♪ Go get them boys One more drink ♪
♪ And they're going to set The place on fire ♪
♪ Go get 'em boys
♪ The downstairs is packed
♪ And the groupies Are all dressed up ♪
♪ Upstairs the New York Dolls
♪ Are kickin' it out Looking tough ♪
♪ Bad girls just a lookin' For a kiss ♪
-♪ Down at Max's -♪ Max's Kansas City
-♪ All the boys are -♪ At Max's Kansas City