by Richard Boch
Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite and Debbie Harry, TV Party, 1980, by Bobby Grossman.
I’d seen Glenn around, everywhere from CB’s to Mickey’s to 54. In fall 1978, someone told him to check out “Eno’s club” on White Street. He went; it wasn’t really Eno’s club, but he kept going back. By December, not long after Mudd opened, he created Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, a variety talk show and entertainment hour filmed in classic black-and-white for public access cable. Unlike anything previously offered on television, the show featured a conglomeration of “celebrity” guests that doubled as the show’s staff and production team. O’Brien’s love of Warhol’s films and the idea that “good production values weren’t important and mistakes were funny” helped inform the TV Party aesthetic.
The regular and revolving cast seemed built around a roster of Mudd Club regulars. Cohost Chris Stein along with Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lisa Rosen and photographer Kate Simon all did their thing for the sake of the Party. Richard (Ricky) Sohl handled the call-in phone line with the skill of a seasoned receptionist. Bobby Grossman was the official TV Party photographer, Walter “Doc” Steding was the Party bandleader and even Steve Mass made numerous guest appearances. Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite’s enthusiasm and resulting camerawork added to the charm, chaos and television excitement.
After taping, the TV Party cast and crew usually wound up at the Mudd Club, where my Party contribution was making sure everyone got safely inside. One of those after-show visits was Fred Brathwaite’s first trip to White Street and marked the beginning of his relationship with the club. Along with actress, future “gallerist” and Mudd Club regular Patti Astor, Fred went on to help change the way we look at art from the street and art in general. As part of the notorious Fabulous 5 crew that included Lee Quinones, he realized that graffiti was ready to take on a new life. He moved sound and vision forward, guiding Hip-Hop, Rap and graffiti to a larger audience.
TV Party taped three episodes at the Mudd Club, helping to expand the show’s audience and broaden its curious appeal. One of those nights Debbie Harry and the Doc Steding Orchestra thrilled the crowd with a world-premiere performance of Blondie’s future hit “The Tide Is High.” Still, it was hard to tell who or what, other than Mudd, drew the crowd.
Working the door, often six nights a week, I started to believe that proximity and association was the near equal to being part of. I unknowingly toyed with that belief, on and off, for years.
Whether it was a TV Party taping or just another evening at work, I came face to face with several hundred people a night. Between the crowd outside, the crowd at the bar and the crowd on the dance floor, I sometimes felt a connection. Eventually, though, I felt the need to hide, and the only safe place was the basement. Drugs and subterrane went hand in hand.
Over the years I’d acted out and I hid in a number of basements but this was the only one with a Mudd Club upstairs. You walked down a flight and twenty feet back from the coat check window was a wall with a door. The door had a lock and behind the door was the other side—the ultimate VIP room, the perfect hideaway. There was a cage filled with cases of liquor and beer that only the bartenders could steal. With enough privacy to drop your pants and pull down someone else’s, or have a momentary meltdown and quick recovery, the basement was a great place to snort a few lines, smoke a joint, snap a Quaalude in half and relax.
I always had a key to the storage area door but I can’t remember if it was mine or whether I got it at the bar. I’d trail past the coat check with a few people in tow and close the door behind us—an indiscreet attempt at discretion. The sound of the dance floor came through the ceiling and I could feel the beat. I could hear a muffled Bryan Ferry crooning, “Come on, come on, let’s stick together...” From Robert Rauschenberg to Mick Rock to Michael Maslin, from Joni Mitchell and Bowie to Teri, Ricky, Gary and Lynette: several were my friends, the others “proximity and association.”
Back upstairs the dance floor’s packed. I grab a beer and dive in as the Ramones, Iggy and Motown pound the beat and rattle the brain. Ronnie and Gigi are deep in the crowd, making up new dances as they go along; Abbijane and her girl gang Heather, Jackie and Julie, spinning around in some kind of Hullabaloozified spastic seizure. The DJ’s flying in the face of Disco and circling back to Rock ’n’ Roll. Three-minute intervals of sound, Diana Ross’ voice in the middle singing faster than I remember and the room’s about ready to explode. Years of pushing-to-the-front rock concert experience paying off, I make it past the stage and into the first-floor bathroom.
A SAMO scrawl, scrubbed from the wall, is rehappening; Jean-Michel Basquiat, with a stubby blond or green Mohawk, exits, leaving another mark behind. It’s so crowded that people are standing on the toilets, and one cracks under the weight. There’s an inch of water on the floor but hardly anyone moves except me. It’s the new reality of wear and tear, the cost of doing business—not to mention being part of the club’s appeal.
The broken toilet stories wouldn’t die and before long Steve’s talking plumbing repairs with Glenn O’Brien on TV Party. Lamenting “three hundred twenty-nine dollars for nothing,” he compares Mudd’s exploding toilets to “something like the Manhattan Project.”
Despite water on the floor my feet are dry. I cross the room and push my way past the bar, a long narrow rectangle that reaches from the door to the dance floor. Two or three bartenders in the middle are handling a crowd four deep. The DJ booth, within arm’s reach of the liquor and beer, is part of the bar. The DJ: a sitting duck, his only protection a pair of headphones, a beer bottle and a cigarette. William Coupon’s rogues’ gallery of club denizens peers from the facing wall. Ken Compton and Boris Policeband are in position near the front door; I turn the corner and I’m back outside. Gretchen’s just inside holding what’s left of the door money after Steve did a cash pickup, stuffing wads of bills into his pockets. I look at Gretchen and we laugh, dip behind the door and do two blasts from a vial of coke. Louie’s off tonight, Robert just took a break and Joey’s somewhere inside. There’s about two hundred people waiting and a few look at me like they want the real doorperson to come back. A minute later, Dan Aykroyd barrels down the stairs from the fourth floor and bulldozes thru the crowd. I step up to the chain and ask a few people, “How many?” It’s after 2 A.M. when somebody screams, “Let me the fuck in!” I turn around and Gretchen’s still laughing.
Before we know it, it’s 4 A.M. and the fun’s almost over. By 4:30 we’re prowling around the bar, searching the floor for Quaaludes and hundred-dollar bills. We kick around some plastic cups, and broken bottles, pick up several empty vials and check out a few odd pieces of clothing. I come up empty-handed but Gretchen finds twenty dollars. It’s cab fare and breakfast money. Tomorrow we get paid. This is the life—and I think I love it.
Colter Rule once said the first six months of Mudd were magic. He called that time “the real candy.” Colter may have split, but the place was candy for quite a while.
A Boom Box and Jug Wine
Over the next several months and following few years the deed to 77 White Street bounced between Ross Bleckner and Steve Mass. The price moved up several hundred thousand since Bleckner bought the building, but the crowds kept coming, and Steve was raking in the cash.
The Mudd Club drove Ross crazy from the start and when the barely legal contraption of an elevator nearly killed him, fellow artist (and 2007 Academy Award-nominated film director) Julian Schnabel came to the rescue. Ross survived but his leg was nearly crushed and spent months in a cast. Still, he managed to paint, make it to One University Place for dinner and have a few drinks at Mudd.
Ross and his boyfriend, Ron Dorsett, offered me an easy friendship and a place to escape when I needed one. I kept an eye on the door from their front windows, caught my breath and watched the crowd. From that sixth-floor vantage point it was hard to believe that less than a year ago, in summer 1978, Ross told his friend, artist and editor Kim Hastreiter, “Something is happen
ing on the first floor.” He told her, “They’re doing something down there.” They were Steve, Diego and Anya.
Ross and Kim knew each other from Cal Arts and in ’78 she was living on Lispenard Street, around the corner from 77 White. One night, months before the club opened, they decided to see what was going on and three decades later Kim remembers a large empty room with a folding table, a boom box and a few bottles of Ripple-ish jug wine. She also remembers, “There was something about the place.”
We’ve all looked at things without realizing what we were seeing and Kim was looking at the strange beginning of something that would redefine New York nightlife. The bare-bones spirit of a boom box and jug wine was there from the start, and that spirit never left.
Waves of No and New
Maybe I had the night off or maybe I just woke up early. I left the loft and headed for the Village. Eno is God was spray-painted at the entrance to the Chambers Street subway station—a slightly higher-plane kind of rock idiocy than Clapton is God painted on the wall at West Fourth Street. Both comments made me smile but Eno hit closer to home.
It was Judy Nylon who introduced Brian Eno to Steve and Diego. He needed a place to live and Steve offered the second floor of his West Eighth Street duplex. That was only part of Eno’s roundabout connection to the Mudd Club. Another part was the result of a passing friendship with Maureen McLaughlin, the first manager of the B-52’s. When Eno left New York for however many months, he offered McLaughlin the keys to the apartment on West Eighth. The B’s, back and forth from Athens, sorely needed a place to crash and the Steve Mass-Brian Eno pad perfectly suited that need. Steve liked Maureen, met the band, and it wasn’t long before he offered them the opening night gig at Mudd. A little bit tangled web and a little bit luck—the song about a lobster sealed the deal. A few months later, that same kind of luck and tangle landed me the job at the door.
The confusion over Eno’s club, the one Glenn O’Brien was told to check out, wasn’t the club itself but the actual bar on Mudd’s first floor. According to Chris Frantz, Brian Eno chose the aerial maps that were placed under the bar’s plexiglass countertop. That was Eno’s contribution to Mudd and a curious detail of the club’s non-design concept. Stories persisted that Brian created the Mudd sound system and that he was a partner in the club but they were just rumors. The countertop maps was the only story that might’ve been true.
Brian Eno, on the second floor, 1979, by Allan Tannenbaum.
Brian Eno’s larger contribution was a soundtrack of the seventies. His pioneering collaborations with Roxy Music, John Cale, David Bowie and Talking Heads along with his solo work made him a hero. His cover of the 1961 Tokens hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was an early evening Mudd Club favorite.
Eno produced No New York, the 1978 No Wave compilation album featuring Contortions, DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. The No Wave sound was an aggressive jackhammer scream; the No Wave films of Poe, Nares, Vivienne Dick and Jim Jarmusch were equally dark, artfully demented and occasionally confrontational. The movement was short-lived but influential, challenging and curiously avant-garde. The New Wave music that followed on the heels of No and post-Punk was less renegade, having a wider range and appeal due largely to its pop characteristics and a vague definition of the genre.
Brian Eno’s No Wave curatorial effort No New York still stands as a document. His ongoing work with such bands as Talking Heads and U2 pushed the boundaries of New Wave into next.
The Blue Tiles
I collected my paycheck once a week at Steve’s Eighth Street apartment, but I never saw Eno and rarely saw him at the club. I ran into him a few times at One University Place and sat down with him and his girlfriend Alex for a drink. By that time I was burnt on Mudd and he was living in a loft on Broome Street.
The payday routine soon changed and the brown paper grocery bags filled with cash accompanied by a teenage courier changed too. The money stayed at White Street and I’d swing by the club in the afternoon. Then one day the money was gone. The safe, bolted to the floor, was missing—along with half a dozen floorboards and Wilfredo, the daytime janitor. By the next day, two new janitors were already on the job.
When Steve finally moved to a loft at Franklin and Broadway, around the corner from the club, I’d ring the doorbell, go upstairs and get paid. I remember dark blue tiles in the bathroom, empty pizza boxes in the kitchen, lots of paper garbage and not much else. The blue tiles were nice.
The only time I had a problem with the Mudd Club payroll “system” occurred during one of my mini-meltdowns. I paid myself from the door receipts and left a disbursement slip on a scrap of paper, quit my job and went home. Steve called, asked me what happened, but I couldn’t really say, except possibly too much cocaine. I threw some water on my face, smoked a few joints and went back a few hours later. Steve made sure I never paid myself again.
That was the only thing he ever told me not to do and I tried to keep it that way.
Everything from the jug wine to Waves of No and New, from Eno is God to a missing safe and an offbeat payroll system; that was my New York in 1979. Change happened fast and the years even faster.
I remember that first season on White Street; spring was slowly closing down and the weather was getting warmer. I ditched the leather jacket and the Tony Lamas, broke out the Converse All Stars and started working the door in a sport jacket. I occasionally wore jeans even though we frowned on other people wearing them. There were a few exceptions but for the most part it was No jeans, except mine.
I took some of my hard-earned Mudd Club dollars and shopped for work clothes on the Lower East Side, SoHo and the Village. I found a thrift shop out near the Brooklyn Navy Yard that sold shirts with zippers instead of buttons, and vintage Western shirts for fifty cents. Back then it was still the Brooklyn my Aunt Olga referred to as God’s country. It was still bridge-and-tunnel and it was still the Brooklyn where I was born. Back then I looked good in a shirt with a zipper and I could still wear a fifty-cent Western shirt to work.
Peep-Toes, Capes and Iowa
When the after-hours and cocaine allowed, I got home by 6 A.M., out of bed by one in the afternoon. I’d spend part of the day painting, making marks on paper: bright colors, diary entries scribbled along the edges. They happened fast, a stream of fluorescent words—no overpainting, no rewrites.
I jumped in and out of the shower and got dressed, looked in the mirror and everything seemed fine. A pinstriped shirt with broken buttons and turquoise pants from Merchant of Venice on Prince Street in SoHo where my friend Lynne Robinson worked looked pretty sharp, at least to me. I laced up my sneakers and I was almost ready. All I had to do was roll a joint, buy some cigarettes and grab a hot dog and egg cream at Dave’s. I smoked the joint walking south down Cortland Alley, staring at 77 White from a block away. It was early and for the moment I had plenty of time.
White Street went from empty to crazy in less than six months and working outside I got to see everything, coming and going. When Chi Chi Valenti strolled toward the door wearing peep-toe shoes, a cape and a leather motorcycle cap it was something to behold. Her hair was as close to natural blonde as a shade of white heat platinum could get. She had the alleged proof to back up the natural part, the nonchalance and charm to show it off. Everyone enjoyed an occasional flash.
Chi Chi was a remarkable reinvention. Born in New York City with a given name long since forgotten, she spent time in Chicago and returned to New York in the later mid-seventies. Upon arrival she dressed a few windows and bounced around on a stage or two in Times Square. A straight-talker and the real deal, Chi Chi and I connected at Mudd and became friends. Before long, we were working side by side, thru the night, and getting lost in the morning after. She voyeured her way thru a funny (for all the wrong reasons) 8 A.M. sexual encounter of mine, offering suggestions, encouragement and commentary throughout; by 9 we were a threesome having breakfast at a local diner. Chi Chi was the first person I heard speak the words peep-toe a
nd the only person I ever met who wore a cape.
Considering my memory for clothes, drugs, drinks and faces, I have no idea what Teri Toye was wearing when we met. From the popcorn fields of Iowa (where I’m sure no one had worn a cape in years) by way of Parsons School of Design, Studio 54 and who knows where else, Teri began showing up at Mudd a month or so after I started. I’m not sure who brought her or how she landed but it was a fast friendship and before long she was hanging at my place on Murray Street.
In spring 1979, Teri was still Terry. Never a boy even when she was, she fooled at least half the people all the time. She could pull off the natural beauty look in a plain white T-shirt and khakis or go topless in a de la Renta skirt, a sash and a tiara. Before long she was on the front lines of Mudd, hanging at the door, sitting on the bar or hiding out in a second-floor bathroom. A true original, there was never anyone at the club or anywhere else like Teri Toye. She was a star just by being, and the first person I met from Iowa.
I never wore khakis or de la Renta but I had a handmade Mudd Club pin that someone gave me—a strange wobbly 3-D font that read MUDD. I wore it for a couple of days, pinned to the front of a stretched and torn Punk-era yellow sweater. I still have the pin but moths ate the sweater in 1982. I had also a red blinking “Andy Blinks” brooch I wore on my lapel for a few weeks but so did a lot of other insiders and regulars. One day the brooch stopped blinking and disappeared. So did Andy Blinks.
Blondie’s Chris Stein liked to think that “the Mudd Club was hidden—the image of a club you’d see in films all the time.” An alley, a dark street, a smoky interior; he appreciated that the club never had a logo T-shirt. The model of a certain kind of discretion, Mudd never really went public, even when it did: ads in the Village Voice and the SoHo News were just an address and phone number, the names of various bands and the occasional dose of snark. Besides, an ad didn’t mean you were coming in.
