A Night at Max's Kansas City: Where New York's Most Iconic Celebrities Gathered

This place ROCKED!   Always packed, loud music and you never knew who you were going to bump into.

A true New York icon – Max’s was where art and music seemed to fuse together.

This magnet for artists, actors, musicians, poets and fame moochers was opened by Cornell graduate Mickey Ruskin in 1965.

Max’s Kansas City held court in New York City as a social club and melting pot for the creative worlds most talented and revolutionary personalities.

it was a seedy hotbed of sex, drugs, edgy music and A-list celebrities where Lou Reed and Andy Warhol partied alongside Blondie and David Bowie.

Warhol and his entourage were regulars that frequently took over the back room.

A friend brought you to Max’s for the first time and you’re really intimidated. There was a nasty little woman known as Tiny Malice who sat on a bar stool inside the front door to keep normal people out, which she did with the simple “you don’t belong here, get the fuck out”.

People looking at you, trying to figure out who you are, what you are and what you’re doing in there.

As you penetrated a layer of cigarette smoke that hovered above the long front bar three deep with painters, artists, passionate and stoned drunk and argumentative.

Max’s was a very diverse crowd,  you had everything, you had shabby rich people hanging out with drug addicts, while the more academic type of writers found space at the grimy bar

Going into the seventies Max’s began to see droves of glittered rockers the likes of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patty Smith and Lou Reed that played upstairs in a room for 50 that packed 100.

David Bowie “me, Iggy and Lou Reed at one table with absolutely nothing to say to each other, just looking at each other’s eye makeup”.

Many great musicians either performed here or hung out here on a regular basis including Frank Zappa, Bruce, Jagger, Jim Morrison,  John Lennon, Janis Ian, Alice Cooper, Jackson Browne, Aerosmith, Bob Marley, The Ramones and Iggy Pop.

Many rock dreams were coming true right here.   It was where you watched an unknown Bob Marley and the Wailers open for an only slightly more unknown Bruce Springsteen.

Columbia Records president Clive Davis signed Bruce and Aerosmith at Max’s.

Debbie Harry served New Wave attitude as a waitress there before forming Blondie.

“There were enough drugs in the back room to cause genetic defects” said Lou Reed, no stranger to chemicals made this observation “some of these drugs were so new they weren’t illegal yet”.

Jimi Hendrix called it a place where “you could let your Freak Flag fly.”

Alice Cooper said “a million ideas were launched in that back room”.

Cooper said George Harrison always came to Max’s carrying a little pouch of rubies to pick up girls.   “Once he decided which one he wanted to be with, then he would put the ruby down in front of her. And if she picked up the ruby, that was a done deal then”.

Models and movie stars from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson to Elizabeth Taylor,   “It was a great place to hang out” said Cooper,   there was nobody there trying to get your autograph cause everybody was bigger than you”.

Lou Reed judged it “the home of many a career-to-be and life-to-end, and drug casualties in the extreme”.

The extras for the famous party scene in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy were recruited from the hip yet debauched Max’s crowd.

The writer Steven Gaines described the vibe of the back room in those days as  “kinetic and rubbery people bouncing off the walls, skittering table to table, drink to drink, drug to drug, ashtrays filled with endless smokes and an occasional handjob under a napkin and a blowjob under a red tablecloth”.

Racking up bar tabs which could reach $70,000,  artists would use their artwork to barter payment and Ruskin’s collection became gallery-like,  “things worth $2,000 then would be $20 million now”.

Warhol, Carl Andre, Willem de Kooning, David Flavin, and Frank Stella would prop up the bar in the main restaurant.

Max’s closed in 1983 and all that’s left to be said is you had to be there.