Watched: Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC 🍿
Nightclubbing chronicled the rise and fall of Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York club that helped birth the NYC punk scene and was sort of a rival of CBGB. I sensed that it didn’t take too much embellishment to highlight the wildness of that time and place. My favorite line in the film is uttered by trans singer Jayne County when she describes fighting with a guy who was heckling her and jumped on stage while she was performing at CBGB. To paraphrase, “I punched him and he fell off the stage, hit his head on a table, and gave himself a concussion.” Amazing how easy it is to self-administer head trauma when someone punches you. That was the scene at those clubs 45 years ago.
I had more knowledge about CBGB than Max’s going into the documentary, having watched the movie CBGB starring Alan Rickman as the club’s founder, Hilly Kristal. I can’t imagine myself in the bowels of NYC’s The Bowery, pre-gentrification, even if it was to see Blondie or The Ramones. Once I went to the Cat’s Cradle for a show and forgot to bring earplugs. My industriousness and lack of functional fixedness led me to grab some toilet paper out of the bathroom to cram in my ears. I ended up with a terrible ear infection that gave me low levels of pain for several years after official treatment. If you’ve seen pictures of the bathrooms at CBGB, you know that they probably harbored the baddest bacteria on the block. I’ve never been a germaphobe, but I’m also not like RFK Jr. motorheading coke off toilet seats.
