A few more acquaintances and friends just popped into my head from those Max’s days.
One of the greatest characters I ever met was Cheetah Chrome. He with his glowing red hair would have great verbal jousts with his wife, whose red hair and pale white skin also glowed under the darkened bar lights. Sometimes they’d be yelling across the bar from each other these mighty couple squabbles while wearing matching outrageous tiger striped spandex outfits. Great Irish heat blazing across the bar from those two.
The first time I saw Cheetah was playing guitar with the Dead Boys. They played the weekend headlining gigs often at CBGBs. I finally caught up with one of those shows, and it was rocking. What great straight ahead rocknroll with a dark and twisted bent to it. Ugly as hell, too. They’d put on this garish green face paint to highlight their faces to give that hint of bruise and decay.
About the same time a friend at Bard, a wealthy Westchester kid who turned me on to much of what was happening in the punk scene in NYC circa 1976 (and had a mighty stereo system with the largest speakers I have ever scene for a home stereo and all inside a tiny single dorm room. I think it may have been the first and only time I heard Metal Machine Music (which I love even if I haven’t played it since) in its entirety. He had some cool Patti Smith bootlegs and some early punk hits like New Rose by the Damned. I couldn’t say what he turned me on to from this late view, but I’m sure it was a lot.) was singing in a most profoundly ugly manner about Amphetamine (it makes you mean). The guy was already odd looking. His spine was slightly off kilter, a slightly askew S, and he would accentuate its unusual bow for the show. Like the Dead Boys wherein Stiv Bators would hang himself at the end of each set twice a night over a three night stint, my friend had a quite visceral gimmick. He would contort about the stage in a straight jacket. The band even gigged a couple times at Max’s.
The guitar player and the bass player from my Bard friend's band were two attractive young men from Boston. I think they may have had some love relationship, but I don’t know for sure. Anyway, to bring up why I digress, the guitar player ended up playing with Cheetah (and he was good). ( The bass player started a band that put out a couple slabs of vinyl under the name the Flies). I’m not sure how long my friend played with Cheetah. I do remember visiting all three of them in their huge loft apartment pretty far East into Alphabet Land in the East Village. It was a beautiful apartments, the beginnings of the gentrification of the area. It was also only two to three blocks from copping central: 11th between Avenues B and C. And the occasions surrounding my visits complemented that coincidence. Like John, during those visits I saw the quiet side of Cheetah and could see the sweet soul clearer.
Later encounters with Cheetah were all indirect. After having a surprising Bard connection, he had a surprising Minneapolis connection. Being a part of the scene here in the Twin Cities since the mid- eighties, I crossed paths with musicians who ended up playing in successful tours of Continental Europe with Cheetah. Sonny Vincent, who I may or may not have met over the years became a close compatriot with Cheetah during the late eighties. Cheetah even appeared on one of Sonny’s band’s (a mid 70’s NYC punk influenced band called Shotgun Rationale or Shotgun something or other) Lps. The songs he plays his mean old guitar on are by far the best. Sonny brought in some of the people he knew from Minneapolis , his hometown, and they played together on the European tours. Along with a guy I knew a little, a clerk from a local record store I frequented, was a fairly close friend, Jamey, who had played in a coworker’s (at Cheapo Records in St. Paul where I worked and still work (except now I work a store in Minneapolis)) band called the Leatherwoods.
Cheetah’s unfortunate alcoholism whipping him into a wild beast, rumor has it, would get him pretty beat up in his old home town of Cleveland some time in the early nineties. I guess he survived cause I hear he’s now gigging in Nashville in a band called L.A.M.F.!!
I didn’t know any of the band nearly as well as I knew Cheetah (which in itself was not a lot). I remember bumping into Stiv at a friend of mine’s apartment, an upstairs waitress who had also at one time had Walter Lure over. (In fact the last time I talked to John he mentioned seeing her in Chicago (which, as my wont, I responded to clumsily)). It looked as if after a night together Stiv was heading out into the Afternoon. Didn’t learn much from the encounter except Stiv had a confident cool, the dark cool of the lower quarter of Manhattan generating from his presence.
In my early days at Max’s, when it was my watering hole and not my place of employment, I met this sleek petite black girl who fascinated me. She was young and wiry and not a little bit wild. I know I didn’t impress her with my place which was at the time a room in the George Washington Hotel on Lexington and 23rd Street. It was a dingy little (to say the least) room. The hotel was the residence of many Bellevue Psychiatric outpatients who I would encounter on every trip up to my 8th floor jail cell (or mental hospital) sized room. On the other hand her place was really cool, a fairly good sized apartment which looked out on the Chelsea Hotel on the West side of 23rd. She had some roommates in (of course) a punk band called Slasher or something. The lead singer would cut lines into his chest a la Sid and Iggy as his gimmick. One Max’s appearance he dug in too deep and cut some major artery and nearly died (actually I don’t know if he survived or not. Max’s had a lot of death in it.). The ambulance took him off in a stretcher.
There were many adventurous moments had over the two years I spent at Max's. Many have been long lost somewhere in the back of my brain, perhaps inside one of the many brain cells I killed off during those and later years. I remember a couple of sexual encounters which would have less than pleasant repercussions but at their moments were most pleasant. Early in a relationship I had with a most beautiful woman, whose identical twin sister was intimate with Joey Ramone and Bob the tattoo artist whose tattoos adorned many a punk rocker including John, we made out in the back room at Max's. We didn't get very far. That was for later. It was a quaint petting, fondling (me fondling her lovely little breasts mostly through her shirt) love session. It was an odd relationship because, unlike many other relationships I had in which others could not see the beauty I saw in my lover, everyone was so hyped on how beautiful she was, and though I was attracted to her and knew she had a classic beauty, I never thought she was THAT beautiful. She ended up living with me. One night she called warning me not to come home because of some major gang fighting happening outside on the street. I went home anyway, and walked down a quiet 10th St (I was living in the East Village at the time) and up the stairs to my apartment where this sleazy speed freak who had a few days earlier been charming my friend with some pathetic guitar ballads, was sleeping with her. She was ashamed and upset, but I must have been some cold fish, because I didn't really care. The other encounter was with this Brazilian bombshell. She was classically voluptuous, very sexy and was flirting with me constantly. We started making out upstairs one day, and it got pretty hot and heavy. The next day I saw her we snuck back into the back room on a dare. She had on the most sensuous and sexually accessible outfit, a silver lame jump suit which easily rolled off her hips when she sat on me and I slipped inside. It was probably too quick by half, but damn if ever since, when I reminisce, it turns me on. And to think, after that brief moment, I would end up with the clap. My boss, Gene, told me I should have gotten a blow job. One of the prostitutes Gene used to hang out with many nights (the one I used to dance with sometimes at my favorite afterhours club) came in one night and sat at a booth by herself. She wanted some Dom Perignon. It was her birthday. I thought she was some young kid from the neighborhood like me and didn't think she had the cash. Gene assured me she did, so I got her the Dom. After being so insulting, she actually invited me to sit with her and share a few sips. All I got to say is it was almost worth the 75 dollar tab. It was fucking delicious!
I think perhaps my memories are running out of steam. If I write more I will bring you only deeper into the banal, so I wish you all pleasant moments and special encounters that you can share with us and hopefully not bore us too much.