Punk rock nostalgia has a contrasting quality. Ah, the good old days full of warmth…to shoot in the bathroom at the CBGB while the Dead Boys roar western civilization on stage! Mr. Vicious, we hardly knew you! However, punk nostalgia, as paradoxical as it may sound, has only grown over decades. This is partly because punk, with its offensive immediacy and defiant gentleness, now appears to be the core of the pre-digital world. In these pandemic times and social media, direct human contact is something many of us are hungry for, and punk has been a bumper car ride for human contact. The gangs were in your face, I was in their face, and everyone in the face of the beer-drinking customer was by their side. Not surprisingly, this is what some people are craving now.
If you’re someone who feels foggy when you think back to what it was – or must have been like – to stumble out of a dirty rock club at 4:00 in the morning after your eardrums were blown out by an unwashed gang anarchists who may or may not have been able to If they can play their instruments, you’ll want to make every effort to see “Nightclubs: The Birth of Punk Rock in New York City.” It’s Max’s first documentary about Kansas City, and he’s taking a summer road tour of places in America, as well as a few European places (here’s the schedule); After that, it will be available online. Directed by Danny Garcia, who over the past decade has assembled a trove of punk documents (he’s made films about Johnny Thunders, Steve Butters, The Last Days of Sid and Nancy, The Last Days of Clash), “Nightclubbing” is a raw inside slice of nostalgia and punk history. (To be shown with a 20-minute documentary, “Sid Vicious: The Final Curtain”).
It’s also the perfect movie for anyone who thinks CBGB was 10 times more important than any other punk club — a misconception that’s easy to get, because that’s how it was generally portrayed. Since 1977 or so, not only has every aspect of the CBGB been chronicled, but it has also been written into legends. The fact that it started as a biker’s bar and was located along the Bowery, a legendary street where there was a kind of karmic continuity between street bums and spoiled CBs patrons. The fact that the club was a sweaty, sweaty rectangle was described by critic James Wolcott as “a subway train to hell”. The fact that the bathrooms were filthy bacteria with a sprinkling of graffiti was horrific.
And of course, there was a legendary roster of great teams that played there, like the Ramones and Talking Heads, Blondie and Television and Patti Smith, along with the not-so-great but more dedicated teams that helped shape the club. Tone destructive psychosis, such as Dead Boys and Plasmotic. When I first entered CBGB, the place was so iconic that I felt like entering the Cavern Club. In his unpresentable style, CBGB came at just the right time to become a media meme.
Max City Kansas City was different. In New York, it was all as formative and famous as CBGB, but it opened its doors in December 1965, when the media and rock ‘n’ roll were still a strange companion. And even as the club became a magnet for celebrities, it kept its secret quality. As “Nightclubbing” picks up, Max was like CBGB with some exclusivity in Studio 54 – which might sound like the absolute paradox, but one can’t begin to understand punk unless one realizes how arrogant he was. You had to be the right kind of extravagant that suits you. Located on Park Avenue South, a block from Union Square, Max’s was a restaurant with a flashy exterior. But the VIP event was in the legendary back room, and to get there you had to get the approval of the owner and owner of the club, Mickey Ruskin. Being the first punk club to have essentially a velvet rope is essential to what punk was. Max was about the aristocracy of immorality.
Once inside, you could see anyone, from Frank Zappa to Elizabeth Taylor to Janis Joplin to Jack Nicholson, and most importantly Andy Warhol (the factory was only three blocks away), who attended his entourage every night, doing as much to establish Max as The bond of fame that would emerge from the now amalgamated worlds of art, fashion, music and film. This was embodied in Warhol’s sponsors of Velvet Underground, which became a fixer at Max (in 1970, they recorded a live album there). Forget MC5, who had the soul of a shattered abandon without the talent; The punk was born under the throttle and driving of the Velvets.
In “Nightclubbing,” Jayne County, the transgender singer, DJ, and tongue-tied contestant who was a fixture on Max (she’s like John Waters’ character), tells us that the basic truth about the club is that everyone has been high, the whole time. However, once they were in the back room, they to speak. The venue is described as a rambling counter-culture version of the Algonquin Round Table, which feels like a stretch – but Max didn’t host musical acts until 1969, and just imagine how much you wish it was a fly on the wall for some of those conversations, even as David Bowie said Once, “I met Iggy Pop at Max Kansas City in 1970 or 1971. Iggy and Lou Reed and I were at the same table with nothing to say to each other, just looking into each other’s eyes make up.”
There was cross-pollination. After all, Bowie wasn’t a punk. But Max was a Petri dish where “rock” became punk and punk infused “rock” into it, all by passing through a charming warp drive. Iggy played there, as did brilliant rocker Mark Pollan and pioneers Electronica Suicide, as well as Alice Cooper, Bob Marley, Phil Ochs, Aerosmith and 22-year-old Bruce Springsteen. (Bruce and Aerosmith were signed by Clive Davis at Max.) Alice Cooper was interviewed extensively on “Nightclubbing,” and he bears witness to how the club was a great center that divided categories even as it was being created.
By the time the New York Dolls came along, in their grotesque, gender-bending glory, they were like a living being created in Max’s lab. Malcolm McLaren met Dolls at Max’s and took his first stab at managing punk Svengali by trying to show them that they would wear the costumes he was marketing. The plan fails, but McLaren learns from his mistakes, and returns to London to pack the Sex Pistols, which he depicts when dolls meet Brahms in Richard Hill’s outfit. It’s part of Max’s lore because Debbie Harry was a waitress there, which seems like a relic of a sexist world, but Harry, in an effort to break into a rock establishment made entirely of men, finds a way to do it. Everyone there knew she was destined for more.
“Nightclubbing” is packed with adorable archival footage as well as interviews with a range of Max’s musicians, directors, and survivors making it a vibrant oral history. After the Sex Pistols disbanded, Sid Vicious played gigs there, and I always assumed (based on a scene from “Sid and Nancy”) that his performance was a corruption. But we see extended clips from the last gig there, when he was backed by a band that included Mick Jones and Arthur “Keller” Kane, and guess what? The band wasn’t just tight; He was a good master! I walked out thinking that if he hadn’t destroyed himself with heroin he would have had a career.
But the magic of self-destruction was part of Max’s fabric, and so was a certain entitlement to do what she wanted. The film is full of priceless anecdotes that attest to both motivations. We hear about Brigid Berlin, Warhol’s star, releasing steroids through her jeans. We hear about how George Harrison brought a bag full of rubies and placed it in front of a woman he wanted to call. Alice Cooper recalls: “If you pick up a sapphire, it’s over.” We hear about Iggy walking around the tables and rolling in shattered glass until blood was dripping all over the cabaret, at which point he needed to be taken to the hospital. We hear about how, in 1974, the club closed due to unpaid bills and how after Tommy Dean reopened it a year later, Max became an even crazier place, as Dean made a fake cash operation outside the basement.
At this point, CBGB was making the headlines now. However, Max’s and CBs became the yin and yang of punk performance, with famous CBGB teams going back and forth between the two clubs, many of them actually preferring to play at Max’s, as Hilly Kristal wasn’t hijacking their revenue. The Max closed for good in 1981, but not before helping launch the movement that became ’80s, with basic gigs by teams like Bad Brains. The club spanned 16 years. In the time of the rock, three or four revolutions spanned. What “nightclubs” witnesses testify is that you had to be there. You had to feel the noise.
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