Down at Max's

I'm talking 'bout New York City

One of the earliest Nihilistics gigs was at a benefit for Lyle Hysen’s Damaged Goods fanzine at the legendary Max’s Kansas City club (recent focus of a documentary titled Nightclubbing: The birth of Punk Rock in NYC). But when did this show take place? Wikipedia has Max’s closing in November 1981. Max’s own website says 1982 (no month is cited). 1981 seems early but it’s possible we were there in November (I remember it being cold and the club closing shortly after). I also recall a conversation with Max’s booker, Peter Crowley, about coming back for another show. Is that how to explain the flyer above, showing us on a December 4 bill with The Mob and Pricks (Rick Rubin’s punk band)? If Max’s closed in November 1981 how in the hell did we play a gig in December? Because there’s no way it was December 1980. We were not a going concern quite yet, certainly not playing gigs in Manhattan.

This is the problem with memoir: Even the goddamned internet can’t agree on basic facts.

Until I nail down the actual dates I’ll go with what comes floating back to me about that first Max’s gig. Lyle asked us to be on the bill along with a few other bands and we didn’t hesitate to accept. We knew of Max’s storied history, from its opening in 1965 as a restaurant and Andy Warhol hangout (the Factory was three blocks away) to it’s reinvention in the 1970s as a a launching pad for Blondie, Devo, New York Dolls, et al, and the place where David Bowie met Iggy Pop. I owned the Velvet Underground and compilation albums recorded there and couldn’t wait to see the inside of the place. I’m almost positive the benefit was on a weekday night and I was a bit put out by our late placement on a four or five band bill. But before we could even play we had to hump our gear up the long flight of stairs to the performance space. The place had no elevator and my guitar amps back then were heavy. We might’ve gone up one step at a time. The room upstairs wasn’t particularly impressive and anyone famous had long stopped coming to Max’s, so no celebrity sightings took place. There was a definite feel of a fabled institution on its last legs.

During our performance I was nervous as fuck, worried I’d screw up, convinced we’d go over poorly. But Peter Crowley was enthusiastic, supportive. He must’ve liked us because we were back a month later. And that was that. Within weeks Max’s had closed and the Nihilistics joked that we killed it. The same was true with the Mudd Club, which we played not long after Max’s. The Mudd Club was also seeking reinvention through the booking of punk and hardcore bands but I’ll be damned if I remember much of that gig, beyond thinking “So THIS is the Mudd Club?!” It didn’t impress me much, just a big open box of a club more suited for disco dancing than live performances, like many repurposed discos in the wake of the Studio 54 implosion. We played them anyway. Initially, we’d play almost anywhere, so impressed we were asked we didn’t care much about particulars. Getting paid? Maybe. Decent PA system? Who knows?! Going on at 11 PM? Probably! We didn’t give a shit if it meant we could get on stage and spend forty minutes to an hour making a racket and processing some anger. And the Nihilistics were mostly anger.

I plan to conduct more interviews with contemporaries who can help me reconstruct a timeline and a more complete list of the places we played. But I sure wish I’d kept some flyers, took a few pictures, wrote things down in a diary or journal. Reading Dave Scott’s Adrenalin OD memoir If This Is Tuesday This Must Be Walla-Walla, I was gobsmacked by his degree of documentation. The man listed almost every gig AOD every played and included the evidence in reproduced flyers and ads. Then he added fairly complete memories of some of the more significant shows. There’s no way in hell I’ll be able to approach what Dave’s written so I’m not gonna try. NIHILISTIC is a different creature entirely.