Max’s

Andy Warhol was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and came to New York in the fifties. He became famous in the next decade as an artist, film-maker and promoter of all manner of new and provocative things. In those days he frequented Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar and second-home for many of the era’s famous and infamous.

In September we started going regularly to a two-story bar/restaurant on Park Avenue South off Union Square that Mickey Ruskin had opened in late ’65. It was called Max’s Kansas City and it became the ultimate hangout. Max’s was the farthest uptown of any of the restaurants Mickey had ever operated. He’d had a place on East 7th Street called Deux Mégots that later became the Paradox, and then he’d had the Ninth Circle, a Village bar with a format similar to what Max’s would have, and then an Avenue B bar called the Annex. Mickey had always been attracted to the downtown art atmosphere—at Deux Mégots, he’d held poetry readings—and now painters and poets were starting to drift into Max’s. The art heavies would group around the bar and the kids would be in the back room, basically.

Max’s Kansas City was the exact place where Pop Art and pop life came together in New York in the sixties—teeny boppers and sculptors, rock stars and poets from St. Mark’s Place, Hollywood actors checking out what the underground actors were all about, boutique owners and models, modern dancers and go-go dancers—everybody went to Max’s and everything got homogenized there.

Larry Rivers once said to me, ‘I’ve often asked myself,’ ‘What is a bar?’ It’s a space that has liquor that’s usually fairly dark, where you go for a certain kind of social interaction. It’s not a dinner party. It’s not a dance. It’s not an opening. You move in a certain way through this space, over a period of time, and you begin to recognize faces that begin to recognize you. And you may have had experiences with some of these people before which you kind of pick up on in another way in this space.’

I started going to Max’s, lit by Dan Flavin’s red light piece, was where everybody wound up every night. After all the parties were over and all the bars and all the discotheques closed up, you’d go on to Max’s and meet up with everybody—and it was like going home, only better.

Max’s became the showcase for all the fashion changes that had been taking place at the art openings and shows: now people weren’t going to art openings to show off their new looks—they just skipped all the preliminaries and went straight to Max’s. Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going. The event itself was optional—the way Max’s functioned as a fashion gallery proved that. Kids would crowd around the security mirror over the night deposit slot in the bank next door (‘Last mirror before Max’s) to check themselves out for the long walk from the front door, pass the bar, past all the fringe tables in the middle, and finally into the club room in the back.

Max’s is where I started meeting the really young kids who had dropped out of school and been running around the streets for a couple of years—hard-looking, beautiful little girls with perfect makeup and fabulous clothes, and you’d find out later they were fifteen and already had a baby. These kids really knew how to dress, they had just the right fashion instincts, somehow. They were a type of kid I hadn’t been around much before. Although they weren’t educated like the Boston crowd or the San Remo crowd, they were very sharp in a comical sort of way—I mean, they certainly knew how to put each other down, standing on chairs and screaming insults. Like, if Gerard walked in with his fashion look really together and had that very serious Roman god-like expression on his face that people get when they think they’re looking good, one of the little girls at Max’s (the Twin-Twats, they were called) would jump up on the table and swoon, ‘Oh my God, it’s Apollo! Oh, Apollo, will you sit with us tonight?’

I couldn’t decide if these kids were intelligent but crazy, or just plain pea-brained with a flair for comedy and clothes. It was impossible to tell whether their problem was lack of intelligence or lack of sanity.

Brilliant. I loved it. It reminded me of Mick Jagger's Golden Globe-winning song 'Old Habits Die Hard', an old favorite of mine.

I thought I shook myself free
You see I bounce back quicker than most
But I'm half delirious, is too mysterious
You walk through my walls like a ghost
And I take everyday at a time
I'm as proud as a Lion in his Lair
Now there's no denying it, a note to crying it
Your all tangled up in my head

Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Harder than November rain
Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Hard enough to feel the pain

We haven't spoken in months
You see I've been counting the days
I dream of such humanities, such insanities
I'm lost like a kid and I'm late
But I've never taken your coats
Haven't no block on my phone
I act like an addict, I just got to have it
I can never just leave it alone

Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Harder than November rain
Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Hard enough to feel the pain

And I can't give you up
Can't leave you alone
And its so hard, so hard
And hard enough to feel the pain

Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Harder than November rain
Old habits die hard
Old soldiers just fade away
Old habits die hard
Hard enough to feel the pain