Last month, Flavorpill praised her “gravity-defying oil paintings and mesmerizing claymation”. She gained a great deal of attention for her stunning work in Grizzly Bear’s official video for ‘Ready, Able’. This week, we chatted with Allison Schulnik. Here’s the full Q&A.

1. How would you describe your work to someone just being introduced to you?

Hand-made, lady-made, textural and food-like.

2. Where does your imagery stem from.

What inspires you?

So many things. Right now I am inspired by the old arcade at the Redondo Beach Pier. They have all these beautiful old clown games. I seem to have developed a love for clowns. I draw a lot, just letting things come out of my mind. I don’t always know where my images come from.

But sometimes they come from a definite place like a photograph. I like to get ideas from books, music, film, dance, art, cartoons, flea markets. Often that which is old, decrepit and discarded but still beautiful.

Read the remainder of this interview AFTER THE JUMP…

3. What was it like to work with Grizzly Bear?

They were great. They are amazing musicians. They don’t compromise, and are complete examples of integrity. They gave me complete freedom. I was handed a song (‘Ready, Able’), I disappeared into my little black box for a few months, then came out with Forest, and they loved it.

4. What do you have lined up for the beginning part of 2010?

I have my show in LA Jan. 9, closing Feb.6 (this Saturday) at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. There are paintings, sculpture and the video in the installation, all the work I’ve done over the last year. Next I have a small show of my paintings at Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago.

And a few group shows, including one at Western Exhibitions, Chicago, The Contemporary Museum, Hawaii and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park. Then I am going to be in the happy cave that is my studio for the rest of the year and create things.

5. Are there any misconceptions that you’d like to clear up?

I don’t think so.

Dustin Pittman

Dustin Pittman is an incredible lensman who has covered the edgier and more intriguing pockets of the fashion and music scene since the late 1960s, and as you would imagine, his photo archive is absolutely immense. He has shot rock stars like Iggy, Hendrix, The New York Dolls and fashion icons like Halston, Calvin Klein, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent. He’s made movies with members of Andy Warhol’s factory, and been the major photographer for editorial powerhouses like W, WWD and Life magazine. And the amazing thing is, to this day, he keeps plying his craft with the same vim, energy and brave creativity.
We caught up with Dustin on the set of a fashion shoot in the Adirondack Mountains and he spoke to us for more than an hour about he came to be one of the most talented camera-wielders of recent times.
MAX’S KANSAS CITY:  I was going through your website and online portfolio and it’s just mind-boggling to me how much you’ve captured and recorded of popular culture. Congratulations. That’s a lifetime and a half of work. Kudos to you on that.
Dustin Pittman: Well thank you, thank you so much, that’s very kind of you.

MKC: How does it feel to be one of the most respected chroniclers of popular culture? Do you ever wake up sometimes and just think, “wow!” – and you’re still doing it too!
DP: It’s really kind of amazing that I am still doing it. I’m grateful, you know. They’re still shooting the same way I shot before, you know, traditional cameras, and now I’m shooting of course digital and traditional and the thing is, you know, the same way I kind of operate the is still the same in all areas. I’ve always been like that.
I’ve never been stuck with one thing. Just music, or just fashion, or just celebrities, you know whatever it is. I always have been grateful in that I was able to do what I felt like shooting. It’s been really great. And also, I guess a lot of it, I was above radar, but a lot of it stayed below radar too. It was really kind of great. My career’s been really steady and very fulfilling. As you already know, my archive is pretty immense

MKC: Did you always intend for your life to sort of unfold this way? Or did it just happen? Sort of being at the right place at the right time?
DP: You know it just happened. It’s so funny, the way things work. I remember at 9-years-old trying to get into shows and concerts with my camera.

MKC: Where were you living?
DP: Upstate New York. I was outside of Utica. And all these girl bands and all these great bands would come and play, right? I didn’t have tickets or anything, so at that time there were no roadies, I used to tell the guys, “oh let me carry your guitar in.”  So I would carry their stuff, but I would be backstage the whole time shooting. It was amazing. We’re talking about early, early stuff. It was crazy; I was able to mingle and get around and get all access. And at that time, of course it was years before the word paparazzi or anything that prevented people from having more and more security, so it was great, there was no such thing as security at that times.  It was all loose. It was like that all the way up until the late ‘70s. In the ‘80s it started getting kind of crazy. But you know, those days, that kind of freedom was not only myself as a photographer, but also as a person – everybody was wonderful, I was able to mingle and just sit down and smoke a joint, you know what I mean?

MKC: Right, I totally understand,
DP: Danny Fields who was a very good friend of mine was Iggy’s manager. Iggy used to come to New York, and he had an incredible reputation for smashing photographers’ cameras. No way could a photographer shoot Iggy in concert. He would smash the camera in two seconds. But Iggy and I were friends. He used to stay over at Danny’s place over on 20th or 21st street, a couple of blocks from Max’s. I used to go to Danny’s all the time, and we used to do our thing and hang out. And Iggy and I always had a pact. That I would be able to photograph him the way I wanted to photograph him, in concert, and he wouldn’t smash my camera. It was fantastic. And I got incredible, incredible pictures. Everyone was always totally frightened to death to get close to him.

MXC: How is Iggy in person? All the images you see of him are so strong, is he that intense?
DP: Incredibly intense. Iggy then is a different Iggy from now. He’s an incredible guy of course a great personality. But he’s an incredible together businessperson. You know, Iggy’s a show.

MKC: Right …
DP: And that’s what’s amazing about it. Now, he’ll go out and give it his all, but it’s a show. I’m not trying to demean it, but it’s like Iggy and the Stooges’ regular style. Whereas before, Iggy was rock n’ roll, it was raw. And I mean raw. At that time when Iggy first came around, he was hated by the press. They couldn’t stand him. They couldn’t stand what him and The Stooges were all about, they thought it was all noise. Like anything else in new directions. But the thing is it was really crazy because he was able to come around with this personality and it was fantastic, nothing was like that. At this time you had this boring, monotonous, arena rock. It was disgusting. This huge pomp, and it was all props and show biz. And when Iggy came, it was this kid in torn jeans and bare-chested with his dog collar on his neck, cutting himself with glass, and doing all this stuff for the audience. The people, their mouths were wide open just gasping for breath.

MKC: Wow ….
DP: Yeah I mean that’s what it was. It wasn’t anything that had come around like that. Those times were incredible. I mean to witness that, especially those few early ones. When he was just getting his feet wet. It was amazing, man. Truly amazing. It turned my life around.

MKC: What about the fashion aspect? How did you get into that? I saw all the pictures of  Yves Saint Laurent and André Leon Talley, Calvin Klein and Iman etc on your website – that was so amazing to me.
DP: It’s really nice that you appreciate that, man. That’s just a little teeny fingernail of what I have. It’s a little taste. But yeah, I did eight and a half years with W and WWD. Then I did another 5 or 6 years with the fashion of the New York Times Magazine. I started in W in 1976 or 77, around there. So at that time, things were flying in fashion. Not only in New York, in Europe also, not to say that it wasn’t before then, of course it was, I mean there was a lot of stuff going on.
I started doing fashion in 1970-71. I was shooting Vivienne Westwood’s Let It Rock.  Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood, all that stuff in 1973-74. My studio was underneath 23rd street in Manhattan. It was this raw crazy studio underneath the street, like this old subway place. It was amazing and it had all these old incredible turn-of-the-century electrical power outlet units, almost looked like The Bride of Frankenstein. I would shoot a lot of trans-sexuals around there, way before Rocky Horror. That kind of stuff was amazing, man. It was such a great studio to use because everybody used to come here and you’d have to take this freight elevator down about 3 floors. The freight elevator was manually operated. When you got down there, it was these catacombs of rooms after rooms and these old wine cellars. And people loved it man. We would have parties in there, it was unbelievable. And shoot all night. It was great man, it was really great. That was my factory underground. I mean it was really underground.

MKC: So how is it like working the editorial side? Did you find that they gave you a carte blanche to do whatever you wanted, or did they try and control you a little bit more?
DP: Well I was lucky. I came into W in 76 so I wasn’t seasoned, I thought I was seasoned for fashion, but when I got to W, I mean that was fashion with a capital F. I worked there with John Fairchild, who was the man. W and Women’s Wear Daily at that time -  they were called the bible of fashion. It was revered. You didn’t fuck with Women’s Wear Daily. So my working for W was really great. They respected me because I worked really hard. It was a rough job. That was my Army Seal Basic training of Fashion. I really learned the realest stuff that you don’t really know about, behind the scenes. I was working with the best. I mean André Leon Talley and I, we worked practically every day together. And Ben Brantley who is now the theatre critic of the New York Times. We worked every day together. I worked with incredible people. Incredible editors. I worked with 84 different editors who were amazing people, man, the fashion would dictate what kind of mood or something or style that you do. I’d say, “Oh I wanna shoot Norma Kamali in the subway,” so I’d go down into the subway with a whole crew, all these people…


MKC: I love it.
DP: Yeah, that kind of stuff.  If I wanted to shoot in the meat market with slabs of beef coming through, they’d let me do it.  Anything I wanted to do was really brave. So it really kind of worked out that way, that I was able to kind of massage my whole creativity with them. As long as I delivered, they gave me the ball and let me run with it. They were really nice with it.  And I tell you they were incredible. They really treated me well. I went on tons of trips with them and you’ve everywhere. And I went everywhere. Rome, Tokyo, Paris, Milan, London, everywhere.

MKC: That sounds fantastic.
DP: I’m not going to lie to you, and it was tons of work. I had no assistants, so I had to use the editors – they’d hold refractors and the lights and all that. And I had to shoot with three different formats of cameras at the time. Pentax 67 is what I was using. People used to say to me at the camera stores, “Why are you using that big clunky camera.” The 67’s a great camera, you know it’s a 6 by 7 format. It’s fantastic. It’s a great negative. And we used to use it because it was the format vertically of W – it was the cover. You know I shot tons and tons of covers for W. And then working for them was great because it was like having the top American express gold card. I had all access to anything. Like Studio 54, I was there every night shooting, man. After that, I would head down to CBGB’s or some place. It was amazing. And then I’d come to work. No sleep. And then work again. And then go out and then work again. Sleep wasn’t in the agenda.

MKC: Sleep wasn’t part of the equation at all ….
DP: Yeah, you didn’t need sleep. It’s funny now, about sleep, you know. Those days you didn’t need sleep. Weird.

MKC: Tell me about Max’s Kansas City, and the vibe there. Did you know Mickey personally?
DP: Well I met Ingrid Superstar in Central Park in 1968. And Ingrid was one of the Warhol factory people. And she immediately brought me to the factory to introduce me to Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. And then we kind of all hit it off. And this is when the factory was just moving again, 68’, 69’ – they were moving down to Union Square. But we started hanging out, and everybody said let’s go to Max’s – everybody was hanging out at Max’s then.
My first foray into Max’s was with the art crowd. Everybody was there; Andy, Paul, Taylor Mead, Candy Darling and Andrea whips and Eric Emerson and Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlorn. It was the crowd. You name it, that’s the people that were hanging out there. It was like one big family.
The reason we used to go to Max’s was to hang out and trade ideas and it used to be this big collaborative theater thing going. Because when you hung out at Max’s, and you wanted to shoot a movie, you’d shoot a movie at night. We’d go to Max’s and we’d start get there around 4:30 – 5:00 in the afternoon for the hors d’oeuvres. You got a drink. The drinks were cheap; people usually bought you a drink and Mickey used to put out hors d’oeuvres.  He used to put out chicken wings and chickpeas, all kinds of stuff, and that was your dinner – the early, early dinner. And then from there, you just hung out in the Back Room. Because it was all happening in the Back Room then, that’s where I hung out.

MKC: And then later it transitioned into the concert venue, right?
DP: Yeah. The concert venue, that’s when it was different; In the beginning it was artsy, very artsy. It was theater, you went to Max’s in the backroom and you sat there and you ate, and you drank, and it was theater. Andrea Whips used to get up on the table and do her thing, and Eric Emerson, and it was theater.  And everybody would discuss what they were doing, and what they’d be doing next, and you’d take somebody home and take pictures, or make a film. Taylor and Jackie and I – I’d make films with all these people … my other thing is, that I’m a filmmaker. I have a ton of 16 mm films, and Super 8 films that I shot of these people. We just made films.  That’s what it was, you were able to do that. It was cheap enough. And at that time, I was going to the School of Visual Arts, majoring in film. I did 4 years there. And while I was at visual arts it was really great because I was able to use all the equipment there. Just grab all the equipment there and use it, and you know that was my thing.

MKC: After the original incarnation of Max’s where Mickey and that whole artsy thing to when it became more of a concert place, was there any sort of back and forth rivalry between Max’s and CBGB’s as to what was the cool place to go see music?
DP: First of all, you know what the thing is, there were very few venues. Now the thing is Max’s, the people there were like Debbie Harry early stuff, and of course Iggy. I mean I shot Iggy in Max’s around ’69 or ‘70. The Velvet Underground played all summer long – every night at Max’s. In 1970, the Velvet Underground played an eight-week commitment gig upstairs at Max’s. And the way they played it, it was precious.
And I have pictures. I’m the only person to have pictures of the last Velvet Underground concert. There were no more than 30 people there each night. It wasn’t like this hysteria today where you have to scalp tickets. There weren’t any tickets, you just went in. The space was incredibly tight and small, and there was a little teeny platform. And Lou and the Velvets used to play right there, and the audience would be right there.  It was more like a cabaret. People weren’t sitting there in awe watching Lou Reed. People would dance, Lou would play and people would dance, and they would dance to the Velvet Underground every night for the whole summer.  And Lou Reed would play you his stuff like “Heroin” and “Sweet Jane” but he would play it improv every night, differently. He would do two long sets a night, I mean huge. He’d play for hours. Sometimes “Heroin” used to go on for fucking 45 minutes. It was amazing, it was absolutely phenomenal.

www.dustinpittman.com

Stay Tuned for Part Two…

Mickey Ruskin on the right

The following excerpt is from an interview with Mickey Ruskin by Danny Fields which originally appeared in the April 1973 issue of Interview magazine:

Danny Fields: When did you start the Ninth Circle?

Mickey Ruskin: 1962.

Danny Fields: How long were you involved with it?

Mickey Ruskin: Two years. I had two coffee shops before that. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?

Danny Fields: No, tell me about it.

Mickey Ruskin: They were the first thing I ever had. You know, this is serious, I read an article in the Village Voice, I was practicing law and I was living with this girl who became my first wife, and we were living uptown and we read an ad in the Voice, and it said, ‘Rent or own coffee shop,’ and I made her answer the ad. To make a long story short, we rented this little coffee shop in E. 10th between Third and Fourth with all those little galleries that used to be there. And there was this little coffee shop and I rented it, and I was doing that at night and working during the day. After about three months I discovered that I was making enough to live on from the coffee shop. It was really small, maybe 10 by 20 feet, really tiny and I did everything. I waited on tables; I washed the dishes; I cooked. It was kind of pleasant and I was having a little fun. Then one day these poets walked in and said, ‘Hey, before you owned this shop we were having poetry readings here and then when it was sold we didn’t know if you’d be interested in doing it, so we’ve been doing it a Diane Wakoski’s house, but it’s not the same as the public thing in the coffeehouse.’ And so they asked if they could have them there. This was 1960.

Danny Fields: What was the name of the coffeehouse?

Mickey Ruskin: The 10th Street Coffeehouse. So I said fine, because I think th whole reason I had this coffee shop thing really was because I had wanted to go to Greenwich Village. I had never been there. I guess I just really wanted to be involved with creative people… Anyway, so they started having poetry readings, and that clicked. It’s really amazing, like the number of people who used to read in my coffeehouse, how many of them have become fairly major poets of the late sixties and early seventies. Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Clayton Escham, Le Roi Jones – Now I don’t know if LeRoi ever read there, but he used to come around – Bob Kelley, George Economou, Joel Oppenheimer, Jerry Rothenberg, Diane di Prima… within 3 months after I got the poetry thing going it was really too small, right, so Howard Ant brought me another guy who was interested in opening a coffee shop, so the two of us together opened a coffeeshop on East 7th Street called Les Deux Magots, where the Paradox is now. Well I started having partnership problems. I just wasn’t getting along with my partner, and meanwhile this other guy whom I had known from my home town in New Jersey started popping up and we started talking, so I sold out my interest in the coffeeshop and my partner and I decided we’d open a bar, so we started shopping around and then we opened the Ninth Circle.

Danny Fields: At what point did you thing that you were in the business of running an establishment or being a restauranteur?

Mickey Ruskin: Well, when I had the 10th Street Coffeehouse, after about oh a month or two months of being there… I realized that I had enough money to live on, so I immediately gave up law… Actually, in those days, my heroes were the guys on MacDougal Street – Tom Ziegler and John Mitchell and Manny Roth were my three heroes… Mitchell was the Gaslight, Ziegler had the Figaro and Manny Roth owned the Cafe Wha?

Danny Fields: When did you make the transition from poets to painters?

Mickey Ruskin: That happened at the Ninth Circle. It just turned out that poets really aren’t drinkers and artists are. When we opened the Circle I had no idea that we were opening an artist’s bar or anything else. And the only bar I could think of in Greenwich Village to go to see what I was going to be doing really was Googies, (which was) what I would consider the first modern beatnik bar in New York. Until then you had places like the San Remo.

Danny Fields: The Cedar?

Mickey Ruskin: Well, the Cedar was the artists’ bar. Googies was the beatnik bar. I had been in the Cedar once in my whole life and I had trouble getting in. Anyhow, at the Circle we took away Googie’s business.

Danny Fields: Took away the beatniks?

Mickey Ruskin: Yeah, we really sort of wanted what I guess would be considered Village beatniks. I always described the Village like there were three classes of bars: I considered the White Horse and the Limelight what I called the upper-class beatniks, and then I considered us and Googie’s the middle-class beatniks, and then I considered – oh, the one on Houston Street – the Kiwi and the Kettle of Fish were what I called the lower-class beatniks, but particularly the Kiwi. Well, my club really did take off, and I guess we were getting some artists hanging out there, but I wasn’t really aware of it… I guess the first artist I became aware of was Neil Williams, and I have a feeling he’d been drinking there a long time before I even became aware of him, and Joel Oppenheimer – who had been one of the Cedar regulars – they’re the first two artist types, even though Joel is a poet, there’s a group of poets, the drinking poets, who’ve always hung around the artists…

Danny Fields: And in two years you became the artists’ bar?

Mickey Ruskin: Well, we never really became an artists’ bar, you know, there was a group of them that hung out there, right, and I really got to love them… Anyway, one day my partner came to me and said ‘One of us has got to go, you can buy me out or I’ll buy you out.’ It was very friendly, so I let him buy me out and I went to Europe and North Africa, and it was fabulous because I had enough money to do what I wanted, I wish I could do that now. Then I came back and I started looking for another place, and this place where Max’s is now was available. It was something called the Southern Restaurant… so I bought it and here I am.

Danny Fields: When was the opening of Max’s?

Mickey Ruskin: December 6, 1965. I opened with a huge opening party. I just invited everybody I knew… Well, I actually opened before I had my opening party, and the first people that started coming around were the artists that I knew, Poons and Neil, John Chamberlain, you know the hard end school of artists, lets’s see, Don Judd lived across the street, Larry Zox lived across the street, Frosty was there, and so for the first 6 or 7 months that was the basis of my crowd… I don’t remember when Andy [Warhol] started coming, actually, but Andy added one element. He was still on 47th Street when he started coming, and that shaped the character of the back room, ’cause Andy would always sit at the big round table and everything kind of followed into the back room. The only group I can remember being in the back room before Andy was one time about 20 or 30 people were back there and started dancing around, and I said, ‘Hey, you can’t dance here,’ and that was Joan Baez and her crowd. Then Jimmy Moore and a whole bunch of fairly young good photographers who all had studios around there started coming in…

Danny Fields: When did the music people start coming?

Mickey Ruskin: I have no idea. I was not aware of the music people at all. You were the first music person I was aware of, and you were bringing people in there, and I knew they were music people. Brian Jones was there once with a little black girl, and I had no idea who it was, and I gave them a little table on the side, and someone told me that was Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, so I moved them to a bigger table, but I had no idea who he was. I remember you bringing the Doors in, and I kind of remember the Velvet Underground people because they were all part of Andy’s scene. I remember Nico, God, I remember Nico.

Danny Fields: What about Janis [Joplin] and the San Francisco people?

Mickey Ruskin: That I remember very well, at that point I was becoming aware of it, and Albert Grossman I got to know fairly well, and he told me he was bringing this group in, and I remember Janis certainly…

Danny Fields: To what extent do you feel that you got what you wanted when you frirst started out?

Mickey Ruskin: I once set a goal for myself, that within ten years of the opening of Max’s I wanted to be a millionaire. And I opened the place across the street, and then I had Max’s Terre Haute, and everytime I’ve opened another place I’ve bombed, so I guess I’ve had to face the fact that whatever I do, I’m not really a restauranteur…

Danny Fields: What do you think Max’s is now, as a place?

Mickey Ruskin: I don’t know, I’d really like to ask you what you think Max’s is.

Danny Fields: I don’t know. I guess the back room is dominated by the new bands, Wayne [County] and the [New York] Dolls.

Mickey Ruskin: What do you think of Wayne?

Danny Fields: I think Wayne is the last great underground act. He’s great… How’s business these days?

Mickey Ruskin: It’s OK. The way I look at it, I hit my peak in 1969, and then I had that big fire and from that point on it was all downhill. Then last year it levelled off, you know stopped going down, now it seems to be slowly climbing back…

Danny Fields: How many times have you raised the price of the Kansas City Steak? What did it start off costing?

Mickey Ruskin: $2.95

Danny Fields: What is it now?

Mickey Ruskin: $5.95.

During the second incarnation of Max’s Kansas City (from 1975-1981), Peter Crowley was the man in charge and the person to know. He was the club’s main booker and art director, and without him, Tommy Dean Mills would have completely flushed away the rich memories and tradition that Mickey Ruskin had created from 1965-1974.

Max’s Kansas City recently caught up with Peter Crowley, who has currently relocated to Florida, and he run us through how he made Max’s one of the top rock n’ roll music concert venues in downtown NYC. (It was a long and informative talk, so the interview is broken into three parts – below is Part One)

MAX’S KANSAS CITY: So with you at the helm, Max’s Kansas City officially came to be looked at as the birthplace of punk rock …

Peter Crowley: Well I think if Max’s Kansas City can make a claim to be the birth of punk rock (which of course it really can’t because punk rock predates all of that), but we can trace punk rock’s beginning to The Stooges, (Max’s 1969), Alice Cooper (Max’s 1969), Velvet Underground (1969), so that is pretty much all of Danny Fields’ doing. Therefore for me, going in there in 1975, there was already a history of Max’s being a punk venue, or a music venue, because we were never really a punk music venue – that was just the fashion of the time.

MKC: How did you come to be the main booker at Max’s?

PC: My title at Max’s was music and art director, and basically when Tommy Dean bought Max’s for no money whatsoever, he almost got it for free. He spent a bunch of money renovating and on questionable décor, and then he opened up with a top-40 jukebox downstairs – just a regular jukebox that would be supplied by the jukebox company.

And upstairs he had a live disco band playing the disco hits of the day with polyester flairs and all that kind of

stuff, and then he took a bunch of ads in local papers and probably on radio as well, and therefore was packed for about 10 days. And then it was empty. And he knew that he had done something wrong but he didn’t know what it was, and he started going around the various bohemian places including CBGB’s and other places and asking people at random. And one of the people that he asked, “What did I do wrong?” was Wayne County, and Wayne said to him, ” I don’t know anything about that stuff, talk to my manager. And I was Wayne’s manager.

And so Tommy invited me over for dinner and he said, “What did I do wrong?” and I said, “You got a legal pad? ‘Cause we’re going to have to write all this stuff down, there’s too many of them to remember.” And I started with the physical place, the things that he had done wrong in terms of interior decorating. He didn’t mess up the exterior decorating because he pretty much left it alone. Basically we went over all that and he was really unsure but he didn’t have any other way to go, because he knew that he had definitely screwed up. But on the other hand, everything I told him sounded alien to everything that he knew about popular culture. And so he sort of just let me make these alterations and changes slowly for a period of about 3 or 4 months until he finally decided that in fact I was moving in the right direction and there gave me a carte blanche.

MKC: To do whatever you wanted?

PC: To do whatever needed doing.

MKC: So what kind of criteria did you look at as far as what kind of bands you invited to play?

PC: Well I had already been running a little club on 23rd street across from the Chelsea hotel called Mothers. And basically I did that because Hilly [owner of CBGB’s) was being reluctant to book Wayne. And I was managing Wayne, and there weren’t any other places to play. So I went and made one because you know that old myth, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad…

So basically, when I went over to Max’s, I just moved the whole operation from Mothers over to Max’s. And obviously I added a few of my own discoveries, and over time I added a lot of my own finds.

MKC: So what were some of the first bands that you actually had play there and how was their initial reaction because at first Tommy was trying to go with the disco thing and then you totally flipped the whole sequence up, what was the reception? Did it catch on right away?

PC: Right away. Immediately. The very first night that we booked rock n’ roll was a full house. No hesitation. Because New York, for original rock n roll music was down to just CBGB’s and Mothers. The primary thing was to keep the correct ambiance that the music and the decor…

MKC: As far as the crowd that came in, was it strictly a music venue? Was there any type of food and other things attached to it?

PC: Downstairs was the same as Mickey had it, almost the same menu. It was a smart menu because it had inexpensive things for kids, but very expensive things for the high rollers to show off. And you could buy your Dom Perignon champagne or you could buy a 3-dollar bottle of beer. But there was definitely more emphasis on music than there had been. During the first era of Max’s, the music room upstairs was the really small backroom, really tiny. All those famous bands that played there from the Wailers, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Muddy Waters and Velvet Underground, an endless list. They played in a tiny room that would barely fit 60 or 70 people – completely squished.

MKC: Wow.

PC: With Tommy we knocked down a wall and expanded the entire upstairs. We made the entire floor through and it was really two buildings: Max’s Kansas City, front building and a back building. The floors didn’t match – it was kind of an architectural nightmare, but we made it so it could hold about 200 people.

MKC: And that was upstairs?

PC: Yes.

MKC: And was there still the famous backroom?

PC: Yes the backroom still was there downstairs but it was usually empty. People would go there to have quiet conversations to get away from all the action.

MKC: But was there a backstage, per se?

PC: On the third floor. There were dressing rooms and offices on the third floor. And a basement with walk-in meat lockers. This was a real steakhouse. Full facilities for a major restaurant operation.

MKC: What were some of the bands you groomed, Peter?

PC: Some of the ones that came from nowhere, and then I managed to get a big following for them were … Suicide. They had been around already since ‘72, but they’d always been an opening act for a rock band and that never worked. So I said, “ok you guys have to be the headliner yourself. And then we’ll build from there.”

And that’s what we did and so they had a few people in the beginning and each time they would have more, by word of mouth. Another band, similar to that would be The Cramps. The Cramps did an audition night at CBGB’s that I attended. And they failed that audition. And I went backstage and told them, “you can play at Max’s but you have to come to my office with a tuning machine in your hands, because you hurt my ears.” (Laughs) And so they did, and everybody thought I was crazy, that’s one of the things that I mentioned before where Tommy really kind of looked and wondered what the hell I was doing. And everybody thought that I’d lost my mind with The Cramps and within a year they were a big, big draw within the New York City scene and within a few months after that they were touring all over. I guess you would say that they were always an underground band, but with a good following where they could play theaters and that sort of thing.

MKC: As far as velvet ropes and letting people in and curating the crowd, did that happen when you were in charge?

PC: Tommy got rid of all that. Tommy’s words: “Max’s is now a people’s club…you got five dollars, you can get in upstairs.”

(Please check back soon for Part Two of The MKC Interview with Peter Crowley.)