News

The scuzziness, excitement and history-making music of 70s club Max’s Kansas City thunders through Danny Garcia’s nostalgic documentary

On the site of what is now a Cvs Pharmacy on Park Avenue South stood one of New York’s most legendary venues: Max’s Kansas City. In the late 1960s and 70s it became the key hangout and centre of glam rock and then punk, with all sorts of celebs and artists and notables showing up – including, of course, Andy Warhol, the Zelig of so many different American artistic zeitgeists. Danny Garcia’s documentary even says that Federico Fellini went there, too, but gives no details, and incidentally leaves untouched the mystery of how it got the name.

Max’s was legendary for the music, the drugs, the fights, the scuzziness, the excitement, the horrific lavatories. The great rival club Cbgb outlived it by decades but Max’s seems...

Punk-rock nostalgia has an oxymoronic quality. Ah, the toasty, cozy good old days…of shooting up in the bathroom at Cbgb as the Dead Boys lay waste to Western Civilization onstage! Sid Vicious, we hardly knew ye! Yet the nostalgia for punk, as much of a contradiction as it can seem, has only grown with the decades. That’s partly because punk, with its assaultive immediacy and defiant not-niceness, now seems like the quintessence of the pre-digital world. In these pandemic and social-media times, direct human contact is something many of us are starved for, and punk was a bumper-car ride of human contact. The bands were in your face, you were in their face, and everyone was in the face of the beer-guzzling stooge next to them. It’s no surprise that this is what some people now crave.

If you’re a person who gets misty-eyed when you...

“Nightclubbing,” the first-ever documentary about the legendary New York City nightclub Max’s Kansas City, which from 1965 through 1981 was a hotbed for the city’s rock, glam, punk and new wave scenes, has announced a series of screenings across the globe in July and August.

The film — the full title of which is “Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC” — will screen along with another doc from Chip Baker Films, “Sid: The Final Curtain,” which is a brief documentary about the late Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious’ final concert, which took place at Max’s.

“Nightclubbing” is the sixth music documentary from Spanish filmmaker Danny Garcia (others include “The Rise and Fall of The Clash” and “Rolling Stone: The Life and Death of Brian Jones” about the group’s founder and original leader). It premiered at the Dock of the Bay Film Festival in San Sebastián, Spain last month...

Richard Hell is known for many things — his short-lived stint in Television, his success with the Voidoids, his long career as a downtown poet. But maybe best of all, he’s known as the handsome lothario of the 1970s NYC punk scene. Yet when cultural historian Carlo McCormick asked Hell about the connection between punk and sexuality, Hell told him that wasn’t the point. “I remember Richard Hell saying to me, ‘Well Carlo, punk wasn’t really about sex,'” McCormick says with a smile in a gallery at...