The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

  In spring 1979, I met Teri Toye at Mudd. Transcending gender and beyond androgyny, Teri was a beauty, an accessory and accomplice. That same year I met Ron Beckner—a.k.a. Big Ron—at Mickey Ruskin’s One University Place. A merchant marine and the only male waitress on the One U staff, he liked it fast and crazy, and found it with the four of us.

  I met a lot of people in those years, and most of them came out of nowhere. Some stumbled out of bars on the Lower West Side and some were hanging on the sidewalk outside of CBGB. I woke up next to some others, not sure who they were or where I was. I met everyone else on White Street.

  Part of that everyone—the friends I came to know.

  Meeting Steve Mass was different, and it never really happened until I began working for him. I bumped into him once or twice before but he didn’t know me except possibly by sight. I went to the Mudd Club when it opened; after the Richard Lloyd shows in January I started going regularly. Those nights were wild—the sound was incredibly loud and Richard’s guitar tore the room apart. I remember walking there after work and hearing the music as I crossed Canal Street. At least I think I did, or think I remember I did.

  I was drawn to the place. I felt as though I’d found something. The whole world was there, or what passed for one in my mind in 1979. It was like a new drug but still I had no idea, no clue—and never looked back until now.

  End of summer 1980, I was hooked on Montauk. Those last few Sunday afternoons were shaky and heading back to the city was rough. I worked on small paintings, hung out at the beach and coasted along on what always was supposed to be my last line of dope.

  When I’d get back to Murray Street I’d pull it together. Drinks at One University and several more at a new club called Danceteria. I’d come in for a landing at the Mudd Club, float around upstairs and see who was going out for breakfast. The only other option was home, and hanging on to the slow burn of Monday morning.

  I thought it was the life and for a while it was, until the edges started to fray. Painting was becoming more of a dream and drugs more of a focus. I began drifting away from the heart of what was happening but was too busy to notice.

  September 1976 already seemed a distant past—living in the Village and getting settled on Bleecker Street, just the beginning. I found a job and had a short-lived career as a personal assistant to the elderly author and science writer Harland Manchester and his wife, Letitia. They lived in a large apartment above the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street and he kept an office next door above The Blue Mill Tavern. They were sweet and kind, and the job was easy. I walked to work and was finished by 1 p.m. I stole blue and yellow Valium from their medicine cabinet.

  My love life was always more of a sex life. I liked the idea of being involved in a relationship but maintaining one seemed to require more of an effort than I was capable of, or willing to make. When a one-night stand turned into two or three I was ready to move on.

  Then I met John, a nice guy who was even more confused than I was. We were both easily distracted and sex eventually became tiresome. He dumped me after six months, in winter 1977. It was done over the phone with a late-night call from San Francisco; he said, “You’re a really nice guy, it isn’t you.” I cried; I was messed up for days and then I got pissed off. I spray-painted Fuck You on the wall of his New York City apartment, swiped a few Hawaiian shirts, an old oak file cabinet and a copy of Patti Smith’s Seventh Heaven. I wore the shirts at the door of the Mudd Club and never once thought about how I got them. I still have the file cabinet and the book became a treasure; the ex-lover, a memory—but a treasure, not so much.

  By spring I was fully recovered, spending late nights in the West Side backroom leather bars. Days were spent sharing a workspace on West Fourth with my friends, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin and a painter I knew from college named Sarah Heidt. We were working hard, excited to have a large studio to call our own.

  Three months later I met a guy wearing a black cowboy hat during the August ’77 blackout. I was twenty-three and eager to make bad choices. He was twenty-eight, not quite rough trade and visiting from the Midwest; I called him “Chicago.” He stayed for a couple weeks before we said good-bye. I cried again but only for a minute. I thought I got over it and went out that night looking for sex. Nearly forty years past, I still think about Chicago.

  In November 1977, I moved to Murray Street, nine blocks south of White, and left a crazy fifteen months on Bleecker Street behind. South of Canal was a different world and I was drawn to the no-man’s-land of half-empty buildings and nighttime desolation. Despite the risk, and a fear that no one would ever visit me, I saw opportunity. I took a leap of faith.

  Ten months earlier I’d started tending bar at The Ballroom on West Broadway. It’s where I met Pat Wadsley when she was writing her “Cabaretbeat” column for the SoHo News. I watched battle-axe Broadway legend Ethel Merman get drunk and loud at a table up front and Robert Mapplethorpe occasionally would stop by to meet me after work. Producer Joe Papp, the actress Estelle Parsons and other names, big and small, appeared on stage. The place was an oddball mix of entertainment, insanity, alcohol and drugs; for a while, I fit right in.

  A week after the call from Steve Mass, I left a note on the bar. It read simply Thanks and good-bye. I’d been working at The Ballroom for over two years and never went back.

  Lucky to Be Alive

  My friend Steve Miller found his way to Murray Street in November ’78. Co-conspirators from high school and college days, Steve and I swam with the Flushing Flyers, the team at the Flushing YMCA. He was one of the first people I went with to the Mudd Club.

  Miller was an instigator and inspiration; he remembers the late nights dancing on White Street, followed by early mornings around the kitchen table on Murray. Drugs, alcohol and reckless behavior were nothing new, often taking us to the edge, but one snowy post-Mudd morning I wound up on the lip of my roof listening to Steve play a fiddle at 5 A.M. He refers to some of those experiences as “over the top”—even for him—and placed a few in the “lucky to be alive” category.

  Maybe it’s true, but at the time we weren’t thinking about it and didn’t care. Somehow we survived and remember. Not everybody did or can—or wants to.

  Rock ’n’ Roll

  Drifting back more than a decade. Rock ’n’ Roll had become a constant. I was always jumping up and down in my bedroom listening to records, informed by the music and the images on the album covers. Staring at the Rolling Stones on the cover of High Tide and Green Grass, I wanted the red wide-wale “cords” that Brian Jones was wearing. I wore out my copy of Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Big Brother and The Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills never left my turntable. I peeled back the peel-away banana skin on The Velvet Underground and Nico and thought a song called “All Tomorrow’s Parties” was a weird song. I knew the words and sang along to “Heroin.” I saw Andy Warhol on the news and wanted to know more. I smoked pot and tossed back cough syrup at a neighborhood basement Romilar party. I was staring at my future and didn’t know it.

  Growing up in New Hyde Park, Long Island, I was the only child of two working parents. I got used to being alone but never got comfortable—always wanting for something I couldn’t describe. I saw it and felt it in New York City when I cut school with my friends to hang in Washington Square, on St. Mark’s Place or at the free concerts in Central Park. Reading about life in Greenwich Village, I wanted to go for the ride but it was still out of reach.

  My first acid trip was a Purple Haze microdot handed to me by my friend Steve in the locker room at the Flushing Y. I took it the next morning before school and laughed my way thru homeroom and the next six periods. Wandering the halls, I believed I found the answers to whatever questions I was asking when it was really just the microdot singing in my ear. I picked up lunch in the cafeteria, holding on to a scoop of instant mashed potatoes when it tried to run away. Then I tried to s
tep inside my locker, laughed too hard, and stepped back out. No one noticed but I wish they had—or maybe they did and I just didn’t notice.

  I spent over four years at the University of Connecticut, drifting back and forth to New York City, absorbing as much art and music, alcohol and LSD as I could. The experience made me believe I could do anything. I was accepted at NYU for my graduate work (painting and printmaking) and finally said, to no one in particular, “I’m moving to the Village.” I registered, set up my courses and schedule, and never saw the inside of NYU again for thirty-five years. I lived at 167 Bleecker Street near Sullivan, on the third floor above a dive called Mill’s Tavern. My graduate “work” took place in my apartment, at CBGB’s and at Max’s. Extra credits, a number of bruises and several cases of the “clap” were all earned at The Mineshaft.

  My last acid trip was a ’79 vintage orange barrel remake. I split two tabs three ways at the Mudd Club and quickly realized those synthetic sunshine days were gone. Standing on the front steps and winding my way thru the club was a new and different kind of trip.

  I was always looking to fit in and stand out at the same time. I was looking for something I couldn’t define, some identity specific to me; it was something I wasn’t sure I’d ever find simply by going out, hanging out or fucking my brains out—though all of that helped. I needed to find out what other people like me were doing.

  The first time I walked into the Mudd Club I knew I was getting close. The music I grew up with was playing alongside sounds that were happening on the spot. The nights spent on the Bowery, Park Avenue South and other joints and dives around town had reopened my eyes, ears and mind. When I got to White Street, lightning struck twice and saved me.

  Looking back is a funny thing. The timeline in my mind is faded but linear. I believe what I’m remembering to be true, just a little charred around the edges, worn at the elbows and knees. I was a twenty-five-year-old artist living downtown via Greenwich Village, Long Island, Queens, and Brooklyn (where I was born). I wound up in the thick of it on White Street and Cortland Alley, two blocks below Canal—an address nobody knew, yet.

  Dark and Golden

  Knowing where I wanted to go was one thing; figuring out what to do when I got there was the challenge. Uncomfortable without a drink in one hand and a joint in the other, by the third or fourth drink I was on the way to comfortable but drunk. Hanging out in a club or bar, discovering a new band and listening to new music, I just kept going. I felt myself getting closer.

  Hearing a little about the place and reading a few articles in the Village Voice—all of it true—was my initiation. CBGB’s on the Bowery was Rock ’n’ Roll reborn. Patti Smith and Television, Talking Heads and Blondie; along with Richard Hell, the Ramones, and the Dead Boys, they blew the doors off the place. CB’s even showcased the new British Invasion featuring The Damned, X-Ray Spex, and The Jam. There were nights I stood near the stage, jaw dropping, mouth open, absolutely stunned. By 1977, the sounds coming out of CBGB’s changed everything.

  Over a decade earlier, in 1965, Mickey Ruskin gave us Max’s Kansas City, the birthplace of hip, cool and beyond. The Velvet Underground became the house band and there was blue chip art on the walls. Emmylou Harris (pre-Gram Parsons) and Debbie Harry waited tables there. Max’s showed us all how it was done.

  Mickey left in 1975 and by 1978 had moved several times, from The Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and The Locale to One University Place Chinese Chance. Like Max’s, One U masqueraded as a bar and restaurant but was totally out of bounds: great art, bad behavior, decent food and lots of drugs—it was all on the menu.

  MUD [sic] Club Newsletter featuring The Cramps, 1979, courtesy Richard Boch.

  Max’s had new owners after Mickey, and its mid- to late-’70s incarnation transformed into a full-on Rock venue. Everybody from Sid Vicious to Devo performed at Max’s, and half of everybody still went there.

  The city had already wound its way thru a number of dark and golden ages and the club scene kept pace. When Studio 54 opened in April ’77 it was the place to go but by 1979 had become a machine. It was crowded and still had its moments but everyone had already been there. Hurrah was a onetime coke bar disco that by the late ’70s turned Rock ’n’ Roll. Paradise Garage was a dance palace in a machine shop, and DJ Larry Levan and the Paradise sound system—legends in their time. Infinity on Broadway had already burned down and no one I knew was going to 12West. Between The Anvil and The Mineshaft, one was a carnival sideshow, the other a leather-bound inferno. Club 82, New York’s oldest drag club, featured a few bands, but kept getting older. Xenon in the West Forties wasn’t much; and The Saint, located at the site of the old Fillmore East, was still a year away from opening. Places like The Bottom Line and The Lone Star Café were already becoming institutions. The one thing they all had in common was an ultimate expiration date.

  New York’s corporate front was on the rise—threatening a takeover—and affecting, infecting and finally eliminating the possibilities and freedom we knew and loved. What many failed to see through the lens of that time was rapidly approaching.

  I was running around every night and so was everyone I knew. It was easy to find out what was going on, even easier to make friends. Getting high and getting laid was easy. Getting lost was easy too.

  I loved the white-light daytime hours of the city, but I was drawn to the weird illuminated darkness of a New York night. I felt anxious getting off work or leaving my apartment, not sure if I was looking for sex, drugs or both. Downtown was an almost gothic Gotham City, parts still desolate. I remember walking alone, late at night, in the middle of the street with no plan and little idea of direction. As screwed up as New York was, I was fearless and ready for anything.

  Heading south, Broadway was still a long stretch of empty between Houston and Chambers Street, still a land of opportunity. Walking home in those after-midnight hours, I never passed a single person on the street and there was hardly any late-night traffic below Canal. “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, a member of the Fabulous 5 crew, remembers those days as “the era before the twenty-four-hour Korean deli.” It was a time before containers of cut-up cantaloupe, multicolored bunches of short-stemmed tulips and bottled water drawn from faraway springs. Only a crazy person with a crazy idea would’ve thought to open a nighttime business below Canal.

  The New Club

  Performance artist and musician Judy Nylon (whether wrapping people in bandages or vocalizing with Snatch) was a big part of the scene and found most of “the existing venues incorrect for a lot of what was happening.” Judy was one of the first to realize the Mudd Club would help correct that.

  It wasn’t about money, at least in the idea stage, and the concept was simple enough. The new club would be a bar, a place to hang with friends and a venue for art, performance, film and whatever might follow. That’s a version of what was told to the building’s owner in order to secure a lease. The “whatever might follow” is what made things interesting.

  If it sounds easy, it was. In New York City 1978, anything was still possible. The neighborhood south of Canal was rundown, up and coming, or undeveloped, depending on whom you were asking and what they were selling. The space itself was a hole in the wall, minimally transformed by aspiring filmmaker and ambulance service operator Steve Mass, curator and provocateur Diego Cortez, and the incendiary and uncensored Anya Phillips. Years later, when I spoke to Contortions and Bush Tetras guitarist Pat Place, she referred to them as the Radical Three. We laughed but it was true.

  Steve, Diego and Anya were on a mission and Steve Mass had the cash to fund it. Legs McNeil, the Please Kill Me mastermind and cofounder of Punk Magazine, remembered Steve as “the only person at the time with an American Express card,” a generous guy who picked up the bar tabs at Phebe’s on the Bowery, between sets at CBGB’s.

  It wasn’t long before Steve became the generous guy who gave away a million drinks at Mudd.

  The Seeds of an Idea

  Steve Mass wa
s born in Macon, Georgia, in 1940, the oldest of three children including a sister and a brother. He was from a southern, liberal, Reformed Jewish family descended from an ultra-Orthodox grandmother. Navigating all that with both ease and discomfort, he was bar mitzvahed and was on his way.

  Georgia was the land of golf and nothing was lost on Steve. He was on the high school golf team and his picture appeared in the Macon Telegraph acknowledging his talent with a driver, a five iron and a putter. He was also a member of the ROTC. His path to achievement was paved a few years earlier when his scouting career earned him the rank of Eagle Scout, another honor noted in the Telegraph. Promise and irony were already in sync.

  Steve’s college career took him to Northwestern University where he studied anthropology and philosophy; he became interested in the writings of Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard. This was deep and direct thought, rooted in sociology, class struggle and a study of the individual. It was also the time of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Along with expanded boundaries of acceptability and a lack of conformity, all would eventually play a role at the Mudd Club.

  When the fifties ended I was starting first grade, Elvis was “All Shook Up” and the world was getting ready to blow. The Beatles were in Liverpool without a Ringo, Andy Warhol was without a Factory and a Campbell’s Soup can was just a can of soup. Marilyn was still alive, filming The Misfits with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. It was her last film and nearly the end for all three.