I had only two connections to Max. One was my friend Leonard Koren who started and ran an exciting 1970's LA magazine WET (Leonard is still a friend). WET was a leading edge magazine and it led Leonard to San Francisco where he interviewed me several times. Max was a major funder of WET.
The second was another friend Black Panther leader Huey Newton. Some day I'll write about why Huey and I were friends. Huey has such an awful media reputation, there is no way I can explain our friendship. Back to Max, who funded Huey on a personal level and gave him a luxury penthouse apartment in Oakland on Lake Merritt where he could live in safety (with a few body guards).
Thanks Max on behalf of both my friends.
In Max's obituary I learned that he helped fund Jann Wenner and his Rolling Stone Magazine from the beginning. Max lent Jann $10,000 as a personal loan then had the temerity to ask for repayment. Max got repaid in kind in his obituary where Wenner says: "We had the typical Max falling out ...he could be very rigid."
The word "typical" from Wenner really applies to Wenner. Here is what I wrote about Wenner five years ago: "I knew Jann in the late 1960s when his Rolling Stone had just passed the 100,000 circulation mark.
"I was a banker studying the investment potential in the San Francisco music scene. I took Jann to lunch. He asked me to help arrange a loan so he could buy out Ralph Gleason, his partner, a friend of mine, and the leading local pop music critic. When he told me he planned to buy Gleason out for $25,000 I said that the price was ridiculous, Ralph’s share was worth something in the hundreds of thousands --- I wouldn’t help him get a loan from my bank, The Bank of California.
"Jann remembered my moral rejection of him. When The Seven Laws of Money was published in 1974, to widespread acclaim in the alternative press, only the Rolling Stone wrote a negative piece. Not just negative; nasty."
Max was an extreme Lefty and he backed up his ideology with money. Another extreme Lefty who tries to buy Democratic party love with his money, Wenner, should never be considered a reliable source by anyone.