Maxwell's - History

History

The club was opened in August 1978 by Steve Fallon. When the Fallon family bought the corner building in uptown Hoboken with its street-level tavern, Steve's sisters Kathryn Jackson Fallon and Anne Fallon Mazzolla along with brother-in-law Mario Mazzola were interested in turning the factory workers' tavern (General Foods' Maxwell House Coffee factory was a block away on the Hudson River) into more of a restaurant. The Hoboken band "a" (featuring Glenn Morrow, Richard Barone, Frank Giannini, and Rob Norris; the latter three later forming The Bongos) asked if they could rehearse in an unused back room and play a few gigs in the front for the restaurant's patrons. The live music quickly caught on and Steve started booking bands into the back room. Over time, Steve's booking taste, freewheeling personality and respectful treatment towards musicians made Maxwell's and Hoboken a looked-forward-to stop on many bands' tours. By making the blue-collar mile-square city with a rough-and-tumble reputation a cultural gathering place, Maxwell's was instrumental in sparking Hoboken's first wave of early 1980s gentrification — the artists and musicians. In that light, it is also believed that Anne and Mario may have offered the first successful Sunday brunch in Hoboken.

Maxwell's, having become so successful that it spawned not only Pier Platters, an independent record store near the PATH train station that Fallon invested in, a whole music and cultural "scene" epitomized by the Hoboken Sound (which was featured in an hour-long television special on a local NYC station), and Fallon's own record label Coyote Records, Steve hired Todd Abramson to take over the booking of the acts in the mid-1980s. Abramson has, essentially, been booking the venue ever since (except for a short period in the late 1990s after Fallon sold the club and Maxwell's was converted into a short-lived brew pub.)

At a time when one of the Fallon siblings wanted to divest of their interest in the business, Peter Buck (guitarist for R.E.M.) bought their piece to help his friend Steve Fallon keep it open as a resource for enthusiasts of new music. Later, Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, Sugar and a solo career bought out Buck's ownership for the same reasons.

When Fallon wanted completely out, he and his partners sold Maxwell's to William (Silverback) Sutton in December 1995 who then turned it into a brewpub. Booker Todd Abramson, Steve Shelley (drummer of Sonic Youth) and Dave Post of the Amazing Incredibles and Swingadelic arranged to bring Maxwell's back, and re-opened it on July 26, 1998. While some longtime patrons miss the more free-wheeling Steve Fallon days, Maxwell's is now as vital a part of the independent music community as it was in the 1980s and 1990s.