Yvonne Sewall Ruskin

The artist must maintain his swagger, he must, he must
He must be intoxicated by ritual as well as result
Look at me, I am laughing, I am laughing
I am lapping cocaine from the hard brown palm of the bouncer
~ Patti Smith, “High on Rebellion”


High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City by Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin is a memorial to the bar that started and sustained so many careers. Sewall-Ruskin is the wife of the late Mickey Ruskin, the original owner of Max's Kansas City. She started as a waitress at Max's Kansas City.

High on Rebellion reads like an online memorial page -- Remember that time... It is not set up in chapters and paragraphs as such, but rather groupings of comments from patrons and employees strung together to form a coherent story. Leee Black Childers also inserts short biographies throughout the text. The big names hung out at Max's and there is no shortage of name-dropping throughout the book. An employee tells how Mickey told Janis Joplin to leave because she looked dirty and unkempt. That was the same reason Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were not allowed in. Mickey allowed a lot of things but being physically dirty was not one on them. Lou Reed was even interviewed or contributed to the book; but unfortunately, many of the big names are no longer alive. Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Jim Morrison and many others have not survived and live as memories in this book.

There was also two personalities of Max's. In the daytime, it was a nice restaurant with monied clients. One story is about a lunch customer that happens to enter Max's at night. The next day she returns and asks Mickey if he had any idea what went on in this place at night. Night brought out the artists, poets, and musicians and with them came the drugs, drunken debauchery, and wild times. There were times of chaos. The reader will feel this chaos as the story moves from storyteller to storyteller. The reader will almost feel like he or she is in the backroom amongst the mayhem and celebrity.

Artist's would trade their work for credit which kept many of them fed. Musicians got their first taste of New York there. Bruce Springsteen played there with Bob Marley opening. Aerosmith's first New York show was at Max’s. Deborah Harry waitressed there. The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin visited Max’s. Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were regulars. Max’s was the starting place for many and the hangout for the famous. Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin has put together a piece of music and art history in what feels like a living record. Rather than just documenting she allows the survivors to reenact the history in their own words with little narration. A great history told in a unique way.
… (meer)

Max’s Kansas City sounds like a name for a steak house, and up front, that’s what it was. On the first floor in the front area, they served surf and turf and had a well-stocked bar. But it was a lot more than that; it was ground zero for the changing arts and music scene of the 1960s and 70s and saw the birth of glam and punk. Owner Mickey Ruskin liked artists, and the club became their hangout. If he thought their work had promise, he’d let them run up unpaid tabs or take artworks in lieu of payment. Soon Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the Factory regulars were ruling the arts scene from Max’s back room; the drag queens were welcome there when they weren’t in many other places. Lots of musicians started coming in, and it soon became a place where anything could- and did- happen. Sex and drugs in the bathrooms, peeing in the phone booths because the bathrooms were taken, blow jobs under the tables, fights, and waitresses in crotch high skirts were all common. Beat writers were there. Amazing new music started showing up as well as visual art; Bowie, Springsteen, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Aerosmith, Tim Buckley, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith (both she and Janis Joplin would be turned away at the door the first time they showed up, Ruskin saying they were too dirty), Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and the New York Dolls were all there regularly- Debbie Harry was a waitress there before achieving success with Blondie. Ruskin had a talent for working the door; he could sense who would fit in and who wouldn’t, and would turn lots of people away. It was high art and low life, and it was deeply mourned when it closed down because of the debts Ruskin had and his increasing drug use. Everyone spoke highly of Ruskin, even though he was an anti-Semite, a bigot, and a misogynist.

The story is told in snippets from all sorts of people who’d been there. Everyone from Lou Reed to Ed Koch to Halston to ex-waitresses to Abbie Hoffman to Holly Woodlawn have short bits of recollections in the book. It’s all loosely held together by memoirs of Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, a former waitress who ended up marrying Ruskin and having children by him. There are lots of photos. I found it mostly an interesting, if uneven, read although I did get bored a couple of times. Given my interest in pop culture I’m not sure how I got to be this old without knowing about Max’s.… (meer)