The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

  Steve Mass wanted the same thing we all wanted—drinks, drugs, sex and entertainment, all wrapped up in a place that felt like home. He was Dr. Mudd and his sense of irony, anarchy and point-specific open-mindedness was what the place was all about. When you crossed it with a bit of semi-intellectualized political incorrectness and a heavy anchor in the worlds of art, music and fashion, you had Mudd Club magic. New York City and its seventies-era ambient disorder was icing on the cake.

  Remaining aloof had already become a dubious exercise. Jo Shane accurately recalls how “enthusiasm was not an affect that shone kindly at Mudd,” and wonders “how we accounted for the ironic re-creation of teen dreams” that played out on the dance floor. If enthusiasm wasn’t the answer, maybe it was cigarettes and alcohol, too many drugs or not enough. Maybe some people were just too cool—but I was never one of them. In the thick or working outside, I made my way; the edge still hadn’t sharpened and the chill hadn’t set in. Keen and eager, I stopped short of gush. I opened the chain and without fully realizing, I was putting my stamp on the job.

  Through the blur of memory and forward to now, Jo winds up answering her own question. “It was the zeitgeist.” She might be right but I still think drugs and alcohol had a lot to do with it.

  Some of the nightly arrivals were cash-poor. They got by on looks, attitude and instinct with a few willing to do anything to get what they needed. It was No Wave Darwinism—survival of the fittest, Mudd Club-style—and there were a lot of ins and outs.

  Getting thru the door for free was part of the game and drinking for free was one of the prizes. There were no drink tickets at the time and it was all about Steve, me, or even the DJs buying people drinks. The bartenders, whether it was a friendly gesture, small-scale deal or part of some late-night agenda, had their own thing going on. Up your nose, down your throat or in your pants, there was a lot of motivation coming from every direction—and at that point rich or poor didn’t matter.

  By 3 A.M., people were talking or still trying to talk, dancing, standing around or trying to stand. You’d get lost in the bathroom and leave with someone you found. The first floor, chaos set to music, the unedited reel; the second floor, a late-night fever dream. By closing time nearly everything was free.

  Jo Shane always reminds me, “There were so many Mudds, each with its own hierarchy and dysfunctional family genealogy.” Between the Punks and No Wave, the Mickey Ruskin art world spillover and the new guard—the likes of which included Basquiat, Cortez, Brathwaite and Goldin—each faction or “Mudd” was identified by how they dressed, where they lived and the company they kept. Cocaine and heroin became identifying markers. The Europeans, Russians and Rockabillies were ever-present while a core group of true Mudd blood included Lurie and Stroud, the Rosens, L’Hotsky, Pedersen, Phoebe, Pyro and Jo. Who was fucking whom was merely gossip but occasionally interesting; straight or gay seemed to have little bearing in a still pre-AIDS awareness world. I was the “doorkeeper” free to join any of those coalitions. I tried being part of them all but I kept losing track—too busy at the door or heading for the bathroom.

  David Bowie and Dee Dee Ramone, Ramones Party, Mudd second floor, 1979, by Bobby Grossman.

  Slumming

  Mudd Club regulars or one-night stands, nightlife legend Steve Lewis referred to those I considered tourists as “the uptown crowd slumming for sex and drugs.” If the hour was late enough and my own drugs stopped working, I wound up slumming too. Maybe we all did.

  I’d look around and laugh. I’d sit in a booth upstairs and nurse a beer, talking to almost anyone. Running for the basement, sucking face or getting my dick sucked, the highs and lows seemed even keel. Taking a break, I’d go for a drive in Dr. David’s late-model Rolls. Privacy, comfort and pharmaceutical cocaine were gifts, payback for free drinks and priority treatment at the door. It felt wrong but I did it anyway and by the sometimes 5 a.m. very last call I tried not to think about it. I’d pull two beers from behind the bar and split.

  Another night feels better and just after midnight the regulars start showing up. Hal’s already inside dancing, Tina L’Hotsky and Steve are at the bar and my friend Roxanne Jefferies, wearing a black eye patch and nearly black lipstick, is outside keeping me company. Cookie Mueller and her girlfriend, fellow John Waters actress Sharon Niesp, arrive. Jean-Michel swings around the corner and Lisa Rosen gets out of a cab. There’s either a party emptying out or some higher state of consciousness sending White Street a mini-convergence; either way, I’ll take it. Now I just have to wait and see who’s in the limo pulling up out front.

  A road-tested former Bond Girl, ex-wife of comedian great Peter Sellers and recent ex-girlfriend of Rod Stewart is parked at the curb. Her driver gets out, asks me to come to the car; whether she’s shopping or slumming is hard to tell.

  Britt Ekland is slouched in the back seat behind a pair of shades looking like a character from Saturday Night Live. She offers a quick hello, then cuts to the chase, asking, “Who is inside?” I take the question to mean young, famous or nearly, plays Rock ’n’ Roll and looking to get laid, but all I can come up with is David Bowie. Following me in, she has a drink and disappears. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to Peter Sellers or James Bond.

  The rest of the night is a blur and at 4 A.M., upstairs is still crowded; it’s the anything-can-happen hour and everyone’s guard is way down. I’d been going full speed since midnight, couldn’t wait till 4 and dropped mine in the basement a few hours ago. Now I want more.

  Thought-Provoking

  The following night, Ronnie Cutrone was talking to me outside. He worked for Andy Warhol, knew even more people than I did, and introduced at least half of them to the Mudd Club. In November ’78 he brought artist Neke Carson to White Street to meet Steve Mass.

  Neke moved to New York in 1970 and settled in a loft on Broome Street, six blocks from 77 White. He hung out at Max’s Kansas City and spent a little time at Warhol’s Factory on Union Square. Carson’s one-man art movement, rectal realism, was uniquely radical and equally obscure. Warhol, intrigued as anyone would be by the idea of a rectally held paintbrush, agreed to sit for a portrait. Neke remembered how his “eye-ass coordination was in sync” and things proceeded smoothly. The end result was stunning and forty years later, the painting’s history—including its theft, return and eventual exhibition at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA—is both thought-provoking and exciting.

  It made sense that Neke would wind up on White Street. He was at Mudd for the Rastafari roots Reggae star Burning Spear and, like Kate Simon, was blown away when Percy Sledge took the stage. He even remembers “runway legend” Pat Cleveland’s long-forgotten performance. Fearless and fun-loving, Neke was soon tossing back shots of NyQuil at the NyQuil party on the Mudd Club’s second floor. I couldn’t help recalling my wayward teenage Romilar experience and took a pass.

  Ronnie headed inside; Neke showed up shortly after. It’s 1 A.M. and the place is just getting started. My friend Ray Adams walks up to the door with Marion Pinto, the artist, SoHo pioneer and Punk enthusiast; they look like twins in matching motorcycle jackets. He gives me a hug, looks at the crowd and asks, “How do you do this?” I ignore the question but sometimes wonder the same thing.

  I’ve known Ray since my college days in Connecticut and Marion’s one of the first friends I met when I moved to the city. We order drinks, go downstairs and smoke a joint before Ray and Marion hit the dance floor. I try to sit still for a few minutes and breathe before going back outside. Half a minute later I head for the door, DJ Anita cues up “Public Image” and John Lydon starts screaming. The place goes crazy and the night disappears.

  By 5 A.M., the club empties out, the sun’s coming up but I have no idea where I’m going. Home seems an almost logical choice.

  Best Known Missing Child

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I turned on the TV, turned off the sound and put on Blondie’s Blondie album. Debbie Harry started singing about an X Offender; I went into
the studio and picked up a paintbrush (with my hand). I played both sides of Blondie twice and crashed. I woke up late afternoon but had no idea what was happening in SoHo.

  Friday, May 25, 1979. Etan Patz was walking to catch the school bus on West Broadway, his first time doing it on his own. He disappeared on the short two-block stretch and was never seen again. Etan was six years old and lived on Prince Street, five blocks north of Canal. The Ballroom where I once worked was just steps away from the bus stop.

  There were posters on every lamppost, every corner and in every doorway. Sadly, Etan Patz became the first face to appear on a milk carton and was soon to become the world’s best-known missing child. The neighborhood was long to recover; his parents never did. Decades later his family still lives on Prince, and people still wonder.

  Puffy Coat

  Nearly a week went by but the story of a missing six-year-old kept getting bigger. I passed at least half a dozen posters on the way to work and stopped to stare at one on the corner of Franklin Street. I walked three more blocks to Dave’s Luncheonette and passed two more. The kid was gone but his face was unforgettable.

  Heading into June, White Street never slowed down and I was at the door working with Joey, Louie and Robert. The crowd was usually six deep and closing in. The DJ was playing “Heart of Glass” and we could hear it thumping outside. The song, as Chris Stein later confided, was a goof or a fluke but the dance floor ate it up. I kept the chain in my hand, movin’ to the groove. It was a catchy song.

  Blondie was touring constantly and it seemed like months since Chris and Debbie Harry were at the Mudd Club. It was a late winter night and Debbie was still wearing a full-length black puffy coat. Discreetly obvious behind dark glasses, they huddled in a corner near the windowsill with Interview editor Glenn O’Brien. Now, the weather’s warmed and the band’s on the verge of selling a million records; the success of Parallel Lines, a big deal. Debbie’s already an icon without any formal acknowledgment, and the boys from Blondie, when they’re not on the road, are always at the club. Drummer Clem Burke’s a friendly guy who knows everyone, and songwriter and keyboard player Jimmy Destri often arrives with Bowie. The puffy coat came and went but never said good-bye.

  Fear of Music

  Across the East River but avoiding the bridge-and-tunnel stigma, Talking Heads were recording Fear of Music. They were the first band I saw on my first visit to CBGB, and this was their second collaboration with Brian Eno, the onetime temporary roommate of Steve Mass. It was another constellation with a connection to White Street and it stretched from the Bowery to Long Island City.

  Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth lived in a loft building on Forty-fourth Drive. Jerry Harrison lived upstairs and Ernie Brooks, Jerry’s friend from Harvard and bandmate from The Modern Lovers, lived somewhere in the middle. Chris remembers the whole gang piling into his new Honda and “bombing across the Williamsburg Bridge headed for Mudd.” There was barely any late-night traffic and a spur-of-the-moment run to White Street took about fifteen minutes. Chris parked across the street from the club and the gang from Forty-fourth Drive headed inside. Fear of Music was just about ready.

  The Second Floor

  I’d seen Talking Heads perform many times. I was a fan and they were part of Rock ’n’ Roll’s mid-seventies reawakening. At the Mudd Club, I was getting to know the band and followed them thru the door. I started talking to Chris but the Russian Punks surrounded me. It was after 1 A.M. and the question on everyone’s mind: When is the upstairs going to open?

  When the Mudd Club began, the second floor of 77 White was just a second floor. By late winter it had become something else and everyone wanted up there. Limited access immediately upped the ante.

  With an ice-filled, claw-foot bathtub for a beer cooler, folding tables for a bar and a few torn vinyl booths, the Mudd’s second floor was a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot dirty version of heaven. Artist and former whip-dancing go-go boy Ronnie Cutrone added a black steel cage giving the room a touch of charm, menace and art world edge that influenced the club’s nondesign and salvage décor.

  Andy Warhol, Alan Ginsberg and Victor Bockris, Cocaine Cowboys party at Mudd, 1980, by Kate Simon.

  The Bathrooms

  The second-floor bathrooms were equally legend and possibly the biggest draw of all. Memorable moments barely remembered took place in those strange, brightly lit rooms. Locking the door when there was one to lock, we gathered in conversation or what passed as—drinking, pissing, doing a line or waiting for the yet to occur. Time loses its frame, impossible to capture but beautiful in a cinematic Super 8 kind of way; acid-trail hazy, stoned and frozen, disappearing in the white fluorescent light.

  The smaller bathroom or men’s room, if labels applied, was about eight-foot square with white tiles and exposed brick, a toilet, a urinal, a sink and a mirror. There was no partition and no privacy. The door was a bifold steel contraption with a drop-lock bracer bar on the inside. It was a room built for drugs, sex and getting lost.

  The ladies’ room—or whatever it might’ve been—was more of a standard design in a public restroom kind of way. The toilets were separated by partitions that came and went with the seasons, the room itself more inviting and communal than the men’s. There were mirrors on the wall, no lock on the door and most of the time, no door at all. You could freshen up, take a seat and watch the world go by.

  Nick Berlin. He only looks innocent, 1979, by Bobby Grossman.

  The bathrooms were modified more than once and repaired regularly during the club’s history but never lost their magic. From the Kennedys to the Rolling Stones, sailors, sex workers and Sex Pistols, it seemed everyone had a lost and found moment in a Mudd Club bathroom, including me.

  Phoebe and the Troubled Youth Brigade

  I watched a tiara-wearing Teri Toye get up from the “throne” and wander out as Rastaman Richard “Dirty Harry” Hall wandered in. There were even what appeared to be “children” running in and out of those bathrooms, but without proof of age it was hard to be sure. Phoebe Zeeman and Ellen Kinnally ran amok, looking and playing the part of jailbait, all the while keeping Steve Mass on his toes. Phoebe’s barely older sister Eloise, along with bad girl Marina Lutz, singer David Scharff, photographer Eileen Polk, musician DJ Howie Pyro and musical delinquent Nick Berlin were all part of White Street’s underage troubled youth brigade. They survived the first-floor bathroom and laughed their way onto the second floor. They referred to the club’s unwitting No Wave hipster contingent as Fish Heads, torturing some of them with early-morning crank call serenades of the “Fish Heads” song. Funny now and funny then, the kids were unselfconsciously radical and as deep in the Mudd as anyone.

  Phoebe, natural born killer, 1980, courtesy Phoebe Zeeman.

  Billy Stark, Eileen Polk, Howie Pyro, 1979. Mudd Club portrait series, Punks of New York by William Coupon.

  Steve loved them all and quickly offered Phoebe and Ellen jobs. He bought them drinks and encouraged them to get fake IDs. Phoebe’s mother had Steve’s phone number and occasionally called, looking for the girls, checking to make sure they were okay. The word okay—very loosely defined.

  Howie Pyro was still a Mudd Club DJ; he and Nick, along with Billy Stark and occasionally Heartbreaker Walter Lure, were members of a band called The Blessed. Their twisted vision and sense of humor, along with that of the other kids, informed everything from the Rock ’n’ Roll Funeral to the Puberty Ball, successfully deflating Mudd’s cool intellectual bent. The pubescent coming-of-age celebration featured a giant Quaalude and Tuinal hanging from the ceiling and a squadron of post-pubescent cheerleaders on hand to fluff the crowd. A buffet set up along the sidewall was stacked with a six-foot pyramid of pimple-inducing kiddie favorites: Twinkies and Ring Dings. The Blessed performed their hits, including “Kindergarten Hard-on” and “Flagellation Rock.” Fellow juvenile delinquent and Revenge girl Eileen Polk was one of the Puberty Ball masterminds and a driving force behind the event. By the end of the night
the Twinkies had all been eaten.

  Puberty Ball Memo, 1979, created by Eileen Polk/courtesy Howie Pyro.

  David Scharff, another teen troublemaker, sang with The Student Teachers, whose lineup included future curator and museum director Bill Arning and Jimmy Destri’s girlfriend Laura Davis. Laura and Jimmy were the second and third wheels of Bowie’s nightclubbing posse.

  Marina Lutz, one of the Puberty Ball cheerleaders, loved the Dead Boys, the Cramps and the Ramones. She was an eager beaver, at the club every night, and most of the time ready to help out any way she could. However, when offered big money to strap on a strap-on she drew the line (if only in pencil) but still agreed to shuttle a grocery bag full of cash from White Street to Steve’s apartment on West Eighth. Someone had to handle the night deposit and who better than a teenage girl riding around in a cab at 4 A.M.?

  I was still at the door when Phoebe came outside and asked if I’d seen Steve. We went inside together, ordered a couple drinks and for the moment she forgot about him.

  Always one of the smartest people in the room, Phoebe Zeeman knew that “hanging out at Mudd was way more fun than working there” and never took Steve up on the job offer. My time on White Street posed the counterargument, and for a long time I had as much fun as anyone. Part of the fun was getting to know Phoebe.

  TV Party

  Some of those kids were in high school and some in college but Glenn O’Brien, a Georgetown grad who studied film at Columbia, was beyond all that. Born in Cleveland, Glenn started working for Warhol in 1970 when Andy was looking to lose the speed freaks and “get some clean-cut college kids on the staff.” In some peculiar or nonpeculiar way, he fit the bill.