‘The drugs were so new, they weren’t illegal yet’: the debauched rise of New York’s wildest bar

It was a seedy hotbed of sex, drugs, edgy music and A-list celebrities where Lou Reed and Andy Warhol partied alongside Blondie and Bowie. How did Max’s Kansas City fall apart?

‘It was the exact spot where pop art and pop life came together,” said Andy Warhol of Max’s Kansas City. “Everybody went there.” Indeed they did – from painters to poets, musicians to movie stars, and politicians to drag queens. A baby elephant was even photographed in there once.

Almost 60 years since it first opened its doors as a restaurant in New York in 1965 – “steak lobster chick peas,” read the sign – Max’s Kansas City has become legendary. “It was just where we hung out with friends,” says Peter Crowley, who booked bands for the watering hole and eatery. Crowley has now written his memoirs, Down at Max’s, with a focus on what many consider to have been New York’s wildest nightclub. “But looking back, it was responsible for the cultural future of America. It was a place where anything could happen.”

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