by Richard Boch
Cleveland, New York City and Cheap Dreams
Sunday morning I made it home, crashed noontime and woke at 6 P.M. I dreamed of Cleveland or maybe not. I’d been there twice but didn’t stay long; maybe it was me, or maybe it was Cleveland’s fault.
When Rocket From the Tombs left Ohio in 1976, they landed on the Bowery and became the Dead Boys. Pere Ubu, the progressive underground garage band, stayed behind, though bassist Tim Wright moved to the East Village, joined Arto Lindsay’s band DNA and hung out at Mudd. Cheetah Chrome and Stiv Bators were already at the bar or hanging out on the second floor. In 1979, a lot of Cleveland was still headed for New York, and despite the Ohioans’ progressive sense of fashion, none wore a silver leather necktie (or asked to borrow mine).
Fellow students at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cynthia Sley and Barbara Klar arrived in May and found a place at the Arlington Hotel, a semi-dive on West Twenty-fifth Street; it’s where they met their neighbor, Judy Nylon.
Everyone was somehow connected to White Street whether they knew it or not and before long Cynthia started noticing guitarist Pat Place and fellow Cleveland native Laura Kennedy wandering the East Village. Her musical taste led her to a Contortions gig on Bleecker Street and instinct, word of mouth and a love of music pointed her in the direction of the Mudd Club. I’d seen them around and when they showed up I thought, Oh, them.
By midsummer, I was letting Cynthia and Barbara in the door for free; soon they became willing and curious enough to participate in one of Nylon’s performance pieces at the club. Surviving that marked the end of Cynthia’s stage fright and the beginning of a career in show business.
Bush Tetras at Mudd, East Village Eye Benefit 1980/81, courtesy Lisa Genet.
After the performance Cynthia headed upstairs and approached John Cale, one of her musical heroes. In a deep voice, slurred by a night at Mudd, John commented, “You looked so fetching up there onstage.” It was an interesting come-on that left Cynthia somewhere between amused, curious and appalled. Given John’s charm and dry wit she opted for amused and ran off looking for Judy and Barbara. I walked over and bought John another drink.
Cynthia soon joined Pat Place, Laura Kennedy and Dee Pop as a member of Bush Tetras. In March 1980 they would draw a line in the sand with “Too Many Creeps,” their first single released on 99 Records. The funky, newer than No Wave anthem was a wink and sneer rolled into one. Pat wrote “Creeps” when she was working at Bleecker Street Cinema; Cynthia added a verse and creeps everywhere never recovered.
By summer 1980 the band got onstage at Mudd and I left the door to come inside and dance. Destiny, fate and a little luck brought us all together—thirty-five years later my friendship with the band lives on.
Between the Arlington Hotel and getting into Mudd for free, everyone lived on the cheap. The subway fare was maybe fifty cents and six people could get into a Checker Cab, chip in a dollar each and go anywhere. People went out every night.
Writer, author and former One University Place employee Linda Yablonsky, another friend and associate of Bush Tetras, recalls how “no money made everyone more inventive. Taking the same drugs, listening to the same music and hanging out in the same clubs, we were social and creative at the same time.” New York City was a cheap date and allowed for almost anything.
Judy Nylon still likes to remind me, “We all lived out of each other’s pockets.” I remind her that even empty pockets occasionally have something to offer.
Creepy Enough
On July 18, 1979, the Midtown West world of Disco and a car full of Upper East Siders were on a collision course with White Street. Victor Hugo’s theatrical debut was happening at Mudd, and despite the wreckage that spilled out of two double-parked limousines no injuries were reported.
Human Nature Is Made of Snobberies Like These was intended as a two-night affair but after the first night a second was hardly needed. The real show on that hot summer evening was the audience. Nurse Debbie served preshow cocktails on the second floor, and Gary (never one to shy away from rubbing elbows with even dubious fame) shuttled the attending VIPs downstairs in the infamous Mudd Club elevator. When showtime approached, Studio 54’s co-owner Steve Rubell, Halston and McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn were front and center. Despite all the nonsense and pretense, their appearance registered only mild amusement and a few turned heads.
Rubell was sweating and his eyes were lidded. Halston was stiff, mumbling in a cigarette cocaine whisper. Cohn was creepy by reputation alone, but live he was even creepier. Flanked by Halston confidant D.D. Ryan and Studio 54 doorman Mark Benecke, they were alternately animated, frozen and comatose—ready for more cocktails, Quaaludes and cocaine along with a defibrillator and a sleep apnea device.
Halston, Roy Cohn and Steve Rubell, more cocktails please. The Victor Hugo event at Mudd, 1979, by Allan Tannenbaum.
The show went on as scheduled and its saving grace was Walter Steding’s electric violin, an always revelatory accompaniment. Teri Toye, sliding up and down the naked, bound and full-frontal beauty of sometime model Scott Daley, was a highlight. Benjamin Liu a.k.a. Ming Vauze added a touch of charm while Victor and Nan Dugan wandered around the stage doing something but not much.
I never got the whole Victor Hugo thing and the Mudd Club performance didn’t help. On looks alone, Teri was the star, and Scott became a larger part of the White Street story without knowing it. A handful of telling photos by SoHo Weekly News photographer Allan Tannenbaum seem all that’s left of an oddly remembered evening while the show itself signaled a slippery slope for Mudd Club entertainment. The end of Studio 54 was slowly approaching and White Street’s connection or similarity was never more than Quaaludes, basement blowjobs and cocaine.
Scrawled Walls and the Beautiful Scream
The uptown versus downtown thing was boring at best. I crossed Twenty-third occasionally but other than an afternoon at MoMA, a movie at the Ziegfeld or a trip to Max’s or Hurrah, I was happy staying south of Fourteenth, and happiest at Mudd.
Diego helped Steve orchestrate the chaos and Anya offered the encouragement of a smart in-your-face banshee cheerleader. With scattershot intent far different from the eventual outcome they opened the doors. The dark dirty fire that ignited Punk had already turned to a No Wave reactive dissonance. Ready to rage on White Street, the beat was feral, the sound tended violent but the scream was beautiful.
By ’79 SAMO speak was still scrawled on the walls of downtown but Jean-Michel’s blond Mohawk was either growing out or turning green. The Little Hollywood filmmakers of East Third were hanging at 77 White and No Wave’s noirish bark and bite found a place to drink for free. Everybody was up to something and it was happening with a sense of community and collaboration. The shift from past to present, meditative to knee-jerk was radical, and the Mudd Club became the container for a new, loosely defined aesthetic. It was only a matter of time before it needed more space.
A semi-functional basement area, a minor redo of the second floor and a future third-floor expansion were all possibilities. As it stood, the club already offered a huge takeaway with every conceivable statement, overstatement or understatement on display. Art and music were still collaborating and moving forward while fashion was absorbing, processing and repackaging anything and everything it could. Diego Cortez looked at the “white, white, white—people, walls and wine” of the art world and knew something had to change; a head-on crash with what was happening in the clubs and on the street was the way to go. Punk was the force music had to reckon with and graffiti was a force ready to fire both barrels at the art world. Blondie and TV Party, along with Jean-Michel, Fred Brathwaite and soon Keith Haring, were just some of the visionaries and voices on the front lines. White Street stood ready.
Mudd’s intellectual edge, mixed with a dose of political incorrectness and irony, made the club fertile ground—“needed and correct,” as Judy Nylon dubbed it. From CBGB to Max’s, Hurrah to the newly opened Tier 3, the new aesthetic—the intellect an
d the anti—were coming together. Putting the bloat that Rock ’n’ Roll had become out of its misery and into its grave was the sentiment expressed by Punks like Anya and Richard Hell, among others. It was a radically necessary extreme, whether coming from the Ramones, Patti Smith, DNA or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
Saying hello or not as it strolled or staggered past me at the door, I stood where high culture and low came together. I watched it collide and squeezed thru the mess, tripped over it in the bathrooms and on the dance floor. I kept showing up for work and working in my studio. I was opening the chain and handing out those free drinks, trying to be more than just a voice in the crowd. Wanting to be part of what was happening, I came to slowly appreciate that I already was. Standing at the door of the Mudd Club I watched the world change and tried to hold on.
When I spoke to Diego he told me, “Art is made for the long haul.” I thought about it and realized some of us are made for it as well. Along the way we passed thru White Street—and moved forward.
That Was Fashion
Timeless and part of the “long haul,” a leather motorcycle jacket was something of a uniform. A torn T-shirt on a pretty kid from the East Village was easy, and thrift shop suits on Danny Rosen or John Lurie were classic menswear. Chi Chi’s black leather corset, Wendy Whitelaw’s full-on glamour and Boy Adrian’s androgyny were sexy beautiful. Klaus Nomi’s pointed shoulders and small-waisted futurism was a best of the moment but in turn spawned a worst-of-the-eighties exaggerated form. Animal X presented savage designs on the first floor and hung out upstairs with a baby in her arms. Natasha’s Revenge Vampsuits were already a hit on the high-society, “rock idiot” and hooker circuits while her spandex gear led the way as one of the first collections to show at Mudd. The dead-end dark basement look of No Wave and the in your face of Punk were already being co-opted, branded and sold. Teri Toye’s designer dresses from Neiman Marcus, worn with I don’t give a shit attitude, was the backhanded fuck off that kept things interesting. Betsey Johnson turned it around, put a smile on fashion and made it big business. Art and music converged at the Mudd Club. Fashion hung out there and so did the kids who loved it.
SoHo Designers show, no comment, 1979, by Allan Tannenbaum.
In It Together
I had mixed feelings about fashion but either love or fear was too strong a word. Sometimes I figured it out and looked sharp but most of the time I looked like any other skinny guy dressed in jeans, thrift shop odds and ends and occasionally curious choices. The only difference, I was at the door and everyone else was on the other side of the chain. Forced to judge, I avoided the word fabulous and often had no comment other than a roll of the eyes. Clothes alone didn’t always matter—who was wearing them did.
Debi Mazar was a kid from Queens, a saxophone player and a fashion-forward fifteen-year-old. She was hanging out at the Mudd Club dressed in a porkpie hat and a man-tailored suit, and somewhere between the drinking, dancing and radical new aesthetic, she saw what was happening. I asked Debi what made Mudd different and she told me, “So much of what was going on was propelled by love. We looked out for one another because we were all in it together.” That sentiment kept us connected, and still does.
Vicki Pedersen, the writer, sometime actress and former full-time party girl, liked to say she was “checking in at the office every night.” All these years later, she still feels “the bond between people that lived at the Mudd Club.”
Fred Brathwaite found his way to White Street by way of Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party and never stopped coming. The first time he showed up at the door without Glenn or the Party entourage, he heard me ask, “Fred, how many?” Grateful to see me and hear his name, he realized, “Oh shit, I’m getting in!” Decades later, I’m touched when Fred retells the story, not just because he remembers but because the memory’s based on what he calls “being part of it.”
I’ve talked to so many people and asked them all, “What was it?” Writer, musician and underground star Adele Bertei calls it family. Debi remembers the love and Vicki calls it a bond. Jane Friedman was one of the first to call it home and Fred talks about being part of it. Whatever it was or is, the connection has lasted all these years.
Tuesday, July 24, and I’m back at work after a night off. The Mudd Club is presenting Justine’s Deadly Feminine line of clothing, the fashion show that Colette (a.k.a. Justine) has been telling me about for the last few weeks. The clothes are being sold at Fiorucci on Fifty-ninth Street, hanging in the same window where Colette slept as part of a 1978 installation. Tonight it’s a full-scale White Street production but I’m feeling more like a spectator, sitting on the steps, not sure of what I’m watching.
There’s an antique roadster parked in front of the club and a dozen of whom Justine considers “the best girls at Mudd” climbing all over it. It’s a great photo op and a wild time until Tina L’Hotsky’s heel goes thru the roadster’s fold-down windscreen. Tina’s shoe suffers little damage but the car is fucked and I’m left trying to spin the chaos into a three-dollar event for anyone willing to pay. Despite my confusion and the broken glass, the show must go on.
Just past midnight, I walk inside and the place is packed full of girls wearing Justine’s ruched fabric creations. Charlie Yoder, the very tall artist and Rauschenberg associate, is dressed as King Kong and he’s carrying Justine through the club.
It’s a gorilla-guerrilla moment, a lot more than just a fashion show.
Colette knew, “Something like this couldn’t happen anywhere else; the Mudd Club obviously had magic.” I knew it too, and so did Charlie and “Justine.”
Colette, in the doorway, 1979, by Rose Hartman.
I snapped out of the Deadly Feminine confusion when the sweaty Gorilla asked me for a drink. I told the bar to give him whatever he wanted.
Close to the Fire
The summer was heading toward August and I was at the club nearly every night. The door was open and the sound of Mudd was pouring onto the street. Halfway around the world the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was banning music, comparing it to opium. I often made the same comparison but saw no reason for a ban.
Saturday, July 28, 1979, and I still remember watching her arrive. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and got out of an old black limo that had seen better days; a remarkable woman, who looked as if she’d seen those days too. A tragedy that screamed Russian roulette and teen suicide had buried her in personal drama and a tabloid mess. I opened the chain and asked how she was—she shook her head and went inside. I have no idea why, but I followed.
Anita Pallenberg, the Rolling Stones muse, Keith Richards companion and long-ago girlfriend of Brian Jones, was a force of nature in her own right. One of the great beauties of the sixties, her influence on fashion was huge and her influence on the Stones legendary. Smart, funny, brutally honest and a little bit scary, she could’ve done anything.
Anita wasn’t like anyone I’d known before or since. She knew Brando and Kubrick and I was a kid from Long Island. Her Euro-, Rasta-, beatspeak was offhanded and conspiratorial whether she was talking to you or just talking. She’d been close to the fire so long that when you leaned in you could feel the heat. Following her thru the front door became a habit and hanging out with her was something I wanted to do. Getting lost with Anita was easy; getting hooked was easy too.
I leaned in close and tried to hear every word. I lit a cigarette and did another line. We were downstairs at the Mudd Club—a long way from High Tide and Green Grass and a long time since coveting those red wide-wale cords.
Blue Mud Facial Masque
I was attracted to badass and trouble, thinking they’d give me an identity or at least a bit of cred. When I sold some blond hash in high school I thought that would do the same. Instead, people only cared about the hash and wondered if I could get more. Now when anyone wondered who’s the badass, they usually meant the person next to me.
Whether I was lost in the basement or drifting around the second floor, the Mudd Club offered
everything from close encounters to close calls, sex and drugs being part of both. Artists and writers, musicians and dope dealers had their own kind of appeal—often related to bad reputation as much as good personality. Young, attractive and fuckable was an obvious plus, stoned and kinky was better. Even the occasional art patron turned up at the bar or in the bathroom. If one of them came by the loft and bought a painting, I was happy. If they liked to get high it was another plus.
I met Brent Ward when he showed up at the door dressed in a suit and tie. He was an audiovisual designer whose reach included a job for filmmaker Derek Jarman, the interior of a skateboard shop in San Francisco, and the staging for a one-off performance by the band Tuxedomoon. We wandered around together near the bathrooms on the second floor and wound up at Murray Street as the sun came up. He sat on the couch doodling away on a scrap paper—a thumbnail version of one of my paintings. He bought the piece a week later, and in 1980, headed home to Australia. Today that painting is alive and well, living Down Under.
I told two other guys from the club to stop by sometime. Like Brent, fuckable wasn’t in the cards but selling a painting probably was. A few nights later, they called from the pay phone on the corner of Broadway and Murray; I rode down in the elevator and brought them upstairs.
Teri and Gary were getting ready for a night out and Teri was in the middle of her beauty regimen. Covered in a blue mud facial masque, she walked into the kitchen and startled my guests. When the screams finally died down we lit up a joint, went into the studio and one of the guys bought a pink painting on paper for a few hundred dollars. We smoked another joint, snorted some coke and they left. I spent the money on dinner, more cocaine and breakfast at Dave’s. At some point, we all wound up at the Mudd Club.
