High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City
288
High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City
288eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
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Overview
From its opening in December 1965 on Park Avenue South, Max’s Kansas City, a hybrid restaurant, bar, nightclub, and art gallery, was the boisterous meeting spot for famous—or soon-to-be-famous—figures in New York’s underground art, music, literary, film, and fashion scenes. Max’s regulars included Andy Warhol (and his superstars such as Viva, Ultra Violet, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling), Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Jane Fonda, and dozens more. A hotbed of drugs, sex, and creative collaboration, Max’s was the place to see and be seen among the city’s cultural elite for nearly two decades.
With reminiscences from the likes of Alice Cooper, Bebe Buell, Betsey Johnson, Leee Black Childers, Holly Woodlawn, and John Chamberlain, along with Max’s owner Mickey Ruskin and several waitresses and bartenders, this vivid oral history evokes an unforgettable place where a spontaneous striptease, a brawl over the meaning of art, and an early performance by the Velvet Underground were all possibilities on any given night. High on Rebellion dazzles with rare photos and other Max’s memorabilia, and firsthand accounts of legendary nights, chance encounters, romances sparked and extinguished, and stars being born.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504034982 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 898,214 |
| File size: | 60 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
During her tenure at Max’s, Yvonne assisted in developing “Upstairs at Max’s,” which showcased and featured then-unsigned musicians, including Aerosmith, the New York Dolls, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground, Bonnie Raitt, and many others.
In 1979, she started as assistant manager of recording studio Bearsville Studios, before moving on to manage 39th St. Music, Evergreen Recording, and Celestial Sound. While at Evergreen, she created I Contact, the first audio production service to exist in New York City.
Currently, Yvonne is in production on a feature documentary on Max’s Kansas City. She resides in Woodstock, New York.
Read an Excerpt
High on Rebellion
Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City
By Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Yvonne Sewall-RuskinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3498-2
CHAPTER 1
Underground Melting Pot
My places have always been my living room and every night I throw a party. But at Max's it went from being just an ordinary little salon and turned into Magic!
— Mickey Ruskin, owner and proprietor, Max's Kansas City
Everyone who was anyone was there. Max's Kansas City was the place to be. It quickly became the new drug of the late sixties and early seventies counterculture scene and its effects were lasting. The legendary restaurant/bar opened its doors in December of 1965 at 213 Park Avenue South, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets off Union Square, just as popular culture was poised on the brink of a remarkable shift. The mere mention of Max's conjures up images of chic and outrageousness. There never was a place like it and there never will be again.
The key to the energy of Max's was the explosive chemistry among the participants. A veritable who's who of the famous and infamous adorned the place: Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Roger Vadim, Faye Dunaway, Bruce Springsteen, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Betsey Johnson, Bobby Neuwirth, Timothy Leary, Dennis Hopper, Abbie Hoffman, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe are a sampling. Debbie Harry or Emmylou Harris may have served your dinner before each got her big break. The quality of the mix led to such meetings as Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas; Candy Darling and Divine; Abbie Hoffman and Janis Joplin; Robert Smithson and Tuesday Weld; and David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. David Bowie remembers: "Me, Iggy, and Lou Reed at one table with absolutely nothing to say to each other, just looking at each other's makeup." Where else but at Max's could you find the brilliant feminist Germaine Greer wondering who had surreptitiously unsnapped her bra while at another table transvestite Jackie Curtis shared makeup tips with Kennedy family member Sargent Shriven Or the elegantly dressed Duke and Duchess of Windsor decked out in their couturier duds perusing menus within earshot of leather-jacketed Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, Max's couple of the month. Up front, artist Robert Smithson might be sitting in a booth with Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, and Carl Andre arguing over his theories of conceptual art, too intent to notice Cary Grant and his party, sitting in a booth across the way.
Max's Kansas City was the nexus of underground culture where anything could happen, and did. People from all walks of life became addicted to the scene. To enter Max's was to confront a heady mix of faces and personalities. To enter the notorious back room was an act of bravery. It was the longest-running party in history and the home away from home for an influential group of artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, poets, photographers, models, movie stars, and socialites. Young people clamored to get into the joint. The raucous mix led to revolution in every facet of the arts. The action was always shifting and intense. In many ways Max's exemplified instant gratification: drugs, sex, music, exhibitionism and voyeurism — which is not to say that Max's was lacking in intelligent conversation. Everything and everyone became homogenized in the extraordinary, psychedelic, multimedia atmosphere. Journalist Dick Nusser described it as "a coming together of generations whose time had come." It brought the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties into the sixties, and was the one place where anyone felt safe to let their hair down. Perhaps Jimi Hendrix said it best: "Max's Kansas City was where you could let your freak flag fly."
Max's owed its incredible success to the late Mickey Ruskin, its owner and founder. The name Mickey Ruskin is synonymous with Max's. Mickey was happiest in the company of painters and sculptors; his freewheeling attitude and generosity nurtured the budding careers of now-renowned abstract expressionists including Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Brice Marden, Sol Lewitt, and Carl Andre, and Pop Art Superstars like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Ruskin gained his loyal following with a string of artist-oriented bistros, previously having owned the Tenth Street Coffeehouse, Cafe Deux Megots, the Ninth Circle, and the Annex. Mickey Ruskin nurtured the development of the New York underground scene from before the beginning. But Max's Kansas City was his crowning achievement.
His transformation from nice, straitlaced Jewish boy with a Cornell law degree into ultra-hip restaurateur and unofficial rabbi of the demimonde, mirrored the transformation of so many others on the cutting edge of this provocative period who fled safe, middle-class backgrounds, pushing hard at the boundaries in search of adventure, artistic and otherwise.
Mickey Ruskin provided a libertine atmosphere in which the unconventional could flourish. Drugs and sex were definitely a major part of the mix at Max's. In the years before the Stonewall Rebellion, Max's was one of the few places of its kind where drag queens were accepted and, notwithstanding some good-natured ribbing from the macho artists at the bar, gay and straight reveled in each other's company. Blurred sexual identity and sexual preferences contributed to the charged atmosphere. Beautiful young people exhibiting their flesh in black leather and miniskirts fueled the fire. Speed, LSD, pot, downs, heroin, and of course alcohol, all in plentiful supply, removed inhibitions. Photographer Derek Callender recalls, "There were enough drugs in the back room to cause genetic defects."
Showtime, a nightly back-room event, often involved a striptease by Warhol Superstar Andrea "Warhola Whips" Feldman that was part performance art and part drug-induced psychosis. Danny Fields said, "It's no cover, no minimum, for the greatest show in town." As far as Mickey was concerned, "If I liked somebody, they had an absolute right to do whatever they wanted." And they wanted a lot. Enter the ladies' or men's room and you might catch a glimpse of blond-haired, blue-eyed Eric Emerson (awarded the prize for the most sexual encounters) getting it on, or getting it up, with Jane Fonda, while her husband Roger Vadim watched. The age of consent in the back room was the age at which one could say yes. After all, this was the sixties and Max's was the place where you could not only confront the values of the next generation — you could go to bed with them.
William Burroughs said, "Max's Kansas City was at the intersection of everything." And what a crowded intersection it was! It was also the wildest party that ever raged. The nightly events at Max's Kansas City have permeated nearly every aspect of modern life, from the way we dress and behave, to our notions of freedom and liberty. Many of today's biggest stars and creative talents had the best times of their lives at Max's. It was where they came of age. Rock icons like Jim Morrison, Alice Cooper, and David Bowie got an eyeful at Max's and then translated it for their mass audiences. Punk was born at Max's. Both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin used the crowd at Max's as a sounding board for ideas. Politicians and socialites rubbed elbows with radicals and hustlers. Uptown met downtown.
LEO CASTELLI, ART DEALER: Max's was the Cedar Bar of its era. The atmosphere was different because times changed so much between the abstract-expressionist period and the period of conceptual and minimal art. There was a great difference in the individuals because art hung on the walls of Max's — beautiful Flavins, Judds, and many others.
ULTRA VIOLET, WARHOL SUPERSTAR: Max's wasn't just for painters. It was the melting pot of the sixties. You could be with a senator, a patron of the arts, a dancer, and a hippy. There were uptowners, like Ahmet Ertegun, the Sculls. The place was so in and so wild. Before, that never happened. Then they'd only mingle among themselves. Max's was crucial in setting the tone for the sixties.
MYRA FRIEDMAN, PUBLICIST/AUTHOR, BURIED ALIVE, A BIOGRAPHY OF JANIS JOPLIN: Max's was a lot more than a magnet for sex games and drugs. It was an earthy, invigorating hangout and the people who Mickey let stay there for hours and hours were definitely a breed apart, when being "apart" had real meaning in the world. I remember it for lots of conversation with lots of people who had lots and lots to say, and looking back on it now, the hum of the place strikes me as sort of the last hurrah of a genuine American bohemia. Like a great piece of writing, it was airborne from the minute it opened. It had beautiful wings; it soared.
MEL BROOKS, DIRECTOR/ACTOR: Billy Wilder used to tell me about the coffeehouses in Vienna, and Max's was like that for me. I never knew any other place you could talk with writers, performers, various wandering gypsies, and bullshit about the ways of the world.
GREG BROWN, FILMMAKER: It was the first place I ever saw a man walk around in high heels and a body stocking, with monkey fur wrapped around his neck. Once you gained entry, you were accepted no matter what you did, where you were from, if you were a freak, if you were straight. It was that connection that made the place brilliant.
IVAN KARP, ART DEALER: This puts me in a kind of existential quandary because I never liked Max's. It was the noise — the din — the din and the lighting were contrary to my sensibility. I'm very sensitive in that regard. Dining and drinking are rituals on a very high order for me — I have no other religious beliefs, and Max's didn't fulfill my conditions for those activities.
BILL GRAHAM, PROMOTER, OWNED THE FILLMORE EAST: The word "grungy" comes to mind.
ABBIE HOFFMAN, POLITICAL ACTIVIST: Max's was allowable. All the worlds could meet there, and I guess you were kind of gooop [gossip] proof. ... Whatever happened there was off the record so there was a certain amount of protection.
RICK KAUFMAN, ART DEALER: A lot of people were just like nuts and bolts on a listing ship that had fallen out and gotten lost in the waves, and Max's was always gathering them up and keeping them safe and sound and giving them a little cushion against reality.
DAVID JOHANSEN, ROCK MUSICIAN: It was so decadent. You didn't have to learn how to do this place because you had already been doing it in high school for four years at the soda-pop shop. I was kind of like a rock and roll mascot to the artists. I used to dance a lot at the discotheque. Max's had the first hip discotheque in New York. I went when Patti Smith had a party in the afternoon. I went to everything. It was like the administration building.
DANNY FIELDS, WRITER/PUBLICIST: Max's was a part of everyone's nightly routine, so was there. Whoever I was with or entertaining I would go with, and it was very easy to bring famous people there because they would never be the only famous people there and there would always be other ones so they wouldn't feel as if you took them someplace where they were exposed. Although they were, but in the kind of way that they wanted to be. The tone seemed to be set at a certain level of lunacy as a base, so that people who were performers immediately felt at home. People always kept the level where they wanted it to be, so you could make an entrance or not make an entrance, and it was sort of tacit agreement between the people coming in, and the people already there. Everybody together regulated the tone so that it was always a show. It was a show being directed by the participants ... very theater.
MARY WORONOV, ACTRESS/ARTIST: Max's was where everybody met and hooked up with each other. It wasn't very intellectual. In fact, it was hideous to be intelectual. We certainly did enough cutting up of other people. Everybody talked about doing things all the time, but nobody did anything really. The nights were very long, very boring — we were just sitting there. It wasn't even about table-hopping or working the room. It was all about nothing. Sometimes, people would freak out and have fits. I remember Ondine once getting furious in the middle of making a salad and throwing the salad stuff everywhere. It was the place to go but it was very juvenile — nobody introduced anyone, nobody talked to anyone — it was very chic to be like that.
TERRY O'CONNOR, BARTENDER: Fellini came in and people were all over the place going crazy, and he came up and spoke to me. Max's was like a Fellini movie, so for him to come there it was like the godhead coming. He came up to me and asked me something ... and people came up to me and said, "What did he say?" I said, "He asked me for a book of matches."
JIM SIGNORELLI, FILMMAKER/PRODUCER: People expected immersion. They expected to walk in the door and be enveloped by a visual, auditory experience that did not require contact with another human being. Max's was not like that. Max's required contact with other human beings, physical if you were lucky. You had to know how to talk to another person. You had to know how to relate. We were at a table one night and some guy who passed himself off as some aficionado came over and started to razz Poons about his paintings, saying he was washed up. The guy was just ranting on and on. Somebody came up behind him and just took the tail of his suit coat and split it right up the back and walked off. His coat was flapping and that was that.
RICHARD GOLUB, CELEBRITY ATTORNEY: I met my first client at Max's — Marjoe Gortner. My secretary at the time was Laurie Sebastian — she married John Sebastian from the Lovin' Spoonful — and she and I used to go there together. You'd see everybody at Max's, from West Village hippies like Laurie to people like Pilar Crespi, who in those days would appear regularly on the cover of some magazine. Everyone from the slick to the mysterious would be at Max's. In those days I was a rock and roll lawyer. I represented Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the New York Dolls, and more transvestites than any other lawyer.
PAMELA KRAFT, WAITRESS: That first time I walked into Max's it was like a strange dream of the most wonderful people that you loved in the art world all sitting in the same restaurant. It was a dream come to life. You had a sense of the absurd given to you in material form. It was a phenomenal sensation, because I think it was more like a great piece of art, framed memories. A great club is that kind of life. Impressions are not linear, they're hallucinogenic, and the great uniqueness of it was that Mickey really loved all of these people. It was this great love affair. He took care of everybody. ... The sense of being cared for ... that's why it could exist.
BRICE MARDEN, ARTIST: I remember the night Cary Grant came in, and the night Dylan came. That was the only time anything ever stopped the place. Ten minutes later Mick Jagger and Brian Jones came in and nobody noticed. I remember meeting Hendrix. He had just done Monterey. ... Years later, it turned into a punk club and my son went there all the time while he was in his Sid Vicious phase.
TOM O'DONNELL, BALLOON VENDOR: Mickey and Robin, the manager were standing up near the door bragging about the fact that Cary Grant had been coming in for dinner quite regularly. Everyone was charmed by him. I'm standing there eavesdropping, and I say, "Guys, you know I can get Cary Grant to talk to me." Mickey just looks at me and walks away. A few nights later, I'm standing at the bar and Mickey walks over. "Okay Tom, there's Cary Grant in the alcove eating dinner, I'll wager a little bet with you." So I walked over to the alcove area, and I saw there was a guy that I sort of knew sitting in a booth across from Cary Grant, a guy named Don Buxbaum. He used to make slasher movies in Canada. I walked up to him with my back to Cary Grant, and I started talking to this guy Buxbaum, who didn't particularly like me. I said, "Hey Don, did you hear the news?" He looked up at me like, What the hell is this guy talking about? There's four guys in the booth eating steaks, and probably talking shop. I said, "The Dodgers traded Don Drysdale," the big pitcher at the time, to the Giants, who were the hated enemy of the Dodgers. And then I threw in some double-talk. All of a sudden I felt this tap on my shoulder, and there he was. It was all his real hair too. This was 1967, he was about sixty-two. And he says, "Who did you say they traded Don Drysdale to the Giants for?" And I said, "Are you talking to me?" He says, "Yes, yes, I'm talking to you." I looked over at Mickey and Robin who were standing back near the bus station, and I said, "See that, he's talking to me," and I walked away. I knew Cary Grant was a baseball fanatic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from High on Rebellion by Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin. Copyright © 1998 Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Foreword: The Dark Brigade by Lou Reed
- Preface
- Introduction
- Underground Melting Pot
- In the Beginning Was Mickey
- The Door
- Eat Your Art Out
- The Laser Beam
- Letting It All Hang Loose
- Empire-Building
- The Chick Pea Conspiracy
- Sex, Drugs, and Superstars: The Back Room
- The Fashion Scene
- Upstairs at Max’s
- Max’s after Mickey, Mickey after Max’s
- 130 Fabulous Faces by Leee Black Childers
- Cast of Characters
- Acknowledgments
- Acknowledgments, 2016
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
What People are Saying About This
Max's was at the intersection of everything.
I used to go back and forth between CBGB's and Max's. Wherever they would take me. That's the truth. I'm greedy.
It was a speedy world -- New York -- and revolutions were taking place in it -- art, life and rock 'n' roll. A young reckless nighttime bunch we were. The dark brigade who never saw the sun.
Max's was like one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno filled with Bosch and Bueughel characters.
I usually went to CBGB's every night and I went to Max's if somebody was playing. In my poor white trash mind, I though Max's was a bit more upscale and out of my league.
I went to Iggy's shows upstairs when he cut himself with glass and was rolling around in it. I'm sitting there thinking, this guy wants to die.
Max's Kansas City was the exact spot where Pop Art and Pop Life came together in the sixties.
People talked about art. They threw each other through windows because they disagreed about art. To what extent the visual content was the real content or whether the ideas were the content -- this is what people went through windows for.
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