by Richard Boch
In summer 1980, Steve Mass set up a Mudd College of Deviant Behavior recruiting station in the basement of the club. Initiative, Dedication, Intensity and Progress was the official school motto. “Students” were photographed, asked to sign their full name, and issued a universally accepted ID card. In some cases, people checked a box indicating a sworn “Anti-vegetarian loyalty oath” while others noted their personal “Onset of puberty” date—all of it vital information. The cards were laminated on the spot and immediately used for identification.
When Television guitar hero Tom Verlaine arrived I brought him downstairs to register and sign a Mudd Club ID card. His photograph came out fine. I introduced him to designer and Ex Dragon Deb Mary Lemley and she took him upstairs to the second floor. Over the years Verlaine’s guitar had taken us from past to present, leaving us with sound and song that marked the era. Working the chain and doing my job, I’d get lost and wander the days ahead. When the door swung open, the music brought me back. The nighttime air was almost cool but still felt like summer. I smiled remembering Tom Verlaine, CBGB 1976, knockin’ on heaven’s door, and blowing it away.
Steve Mass once again raised the bar, and set the standards high. The ID cards, tangible evidence of the life we lived and a time that disappeared. In some states, countries and border crossings they’re still valid today.
The Mudd’s second anniversary is less than three months away and the club is experiencing a revival of sorts. The regulars, celebs and quasi-celebs are still showing up, and a new Mudd Club photo ID is in everybody’s pocket. The upstairs renovation has transformed the second floor into the same old second floor, and begging for drink tickets has replaced begging for drinks. Sex and drugs remain as popular as ever.
The front door of 77 White continues to be a tightly controlled operation. The chains are still in place and I’m still standing. Chi Chi is looking as beautiful as ever, and Gennaro is speaking his own language, doing his own thing. Aldo is handling security with silent strength and patient resolve, while Debi Mazar is either watching the stairs, losing herself on the dance floor or getting trapped in one of the bathrooms. Most important: crowds keep coming, bands keep playing and people keep waiting.
Mudd ID Card information, benefits, penalties and security clearance clarification, 1980.
They Eat Scum, East Village Eye Benefit, 1980, courtesy Howie Pyro.
August 4, I arrived at work early, looking forward to an easy Monday. The East Village Eye, a newly established old-school rag with cheap ads and a great sense of what was happening, was having another benefit to help keep the paper alive. Nick Zedd’s film They Eat Scum was being shown at 9 P.M. followed by the Revelons, a band more affiliated with CBGB than Mudd. The film had an air of rabid Punk nihilism rather than No Wave deadpan noir and synced nicely with White Street’s oft-preferred entertainment gone astray. Referring to himself and his like-minded collaborators (Lydia Lunch and Lung Leg to name but two) as the loosely banded Cinema of Transgression, Zedd went on to make a number of films, among them 1983’s Greek Maggot Bingo.
Leonard Abrams, a Mudd Club regular, was the publisher of the Eye and Pat Wadsley, well suited for her position, was the Special Sex Editor of the Summer 1980 issue. The club was busy by 11 and the film lived up to its scum-eating title.
Ricky, Teri, Gary and Andi all showed up late and by 5 A.M. we headed off into our own versions of sleepless night. When we weren’t at the Mudd Club, we continued to pass away the downtime at One University Place. Engrossed with Space Invaders and Asteroids, we owned the back room. I’d see Andi sitting on the back of a chair, watching the action until she was either overcome with excitement or the chair tipped over. I heard the husk in Teri’s voice, cheering until she was hoarse, then running to the bar for another Kamikaze. Ricky went through a lot of quarters. We all went through a lot of drinks.
Inspired by our collective obsession, Andi wrote a song called “Chinese Chance.”
“Always not knowing
Which course to choose …
Chinese Chance
Drop in a quarter
Chinese Chance
Try your luck …”
One University Place—it’s where we lived for a few hours each night.
Run Through the Jungle
We’re connected by where we live and the people we know—in those days, by where we drank and danced, and by the drugs we did or didn’t do. The distance between zero and six degrees offers little separation and when someone got nudged we all felt the push. Every now and then people fell over; most of the time they got back up. Sometimes they didn’t.
Lydia Lunch’s band 8 Eyed Spy played their first New York City show to a packed house at the Mudd Club back in October ’79. With a dark sound, sharp jangly edges and a heavy beat, Lydia was all screamed out after a set that included Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle.” The people wanted more, Lydia said no, Steve Mass stepped in and gave her a hundred-dollar bill. She stepped back up for an encore. That was ten months ago, when encores were still cheap.
Lydia Lunch, smiling 1980, by Lisa Genet.
The guys in 8 Eyed Spy drifted in and out of Mudd, but Lydia only came around if she had a gig. Guitarist and keyboard player Pat Irwin lived around the corner on Franklin Street, started coming around at the beginning, and even saved the B-52’s on opening night. (They blew an amp and needed another; he ran home and brought one back.) Soon he was playing with Lydia, and fooling around with another band called The Raybeats. He eventually became an unofficial B-52.
Drummer Jim Sclavunos was a member of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and another of Lydia’s bands, Beirut Slump. Bassist George Scott III was a founding member of The Raybeats until he left and officially joined 8 Eyed Spy. Before that, George had been a player in the short-lived proto-Punk band Jack Ruby with violinist Boris Policeband. He’d worked with James Chance and the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, and played some with John Cale. He’d only been in town about five years.
The third of August was a busy night. While Gray played the Mudd Club, 8 Eyed Spy was playing at Hurrah, recording live tracks for what they hoped would be their self-titled album. Later that week on Wednesday, August 6, Claudia Summers walked up to me at the door and said, “You knew George, right? He OD’d yesterday.”
I knew who George Scott was and I’d seen him play, but I didn’t really know him. I wasn’t sure if it was a push or a shove, but I felt something when Claudia told me he died. I looked around, the street was empty, and hardly anyone was waiting. I left the door and went inside to see what was going on. I asked the bar for a soda. Death came and went. 8 Eyed Spy was finished.
Persian Brown
The following night, it’s heat-wave crazy. Eighty-five degrees at 3 A.M. and I’ve been lounging on the second floor too long. I climb over Andi, tell Ricky and Teri to move, and gently push Plasmatics bass player Chosei Funahara out of the way. I pick up my beer and head for the door but the bottle’s empty by the time I get downstairs. Half a dozen cabs are idling at the curb and the night’s almost over.
I’ve got a crumble of tinfoil with a line or two of brown Persian dope in my pocket. It’s from Pierre, a heroin dealer from Marseille. My friend Kirk introduced us, and I introduced Pierre to some friends at the club. It’s 1980 and introducing heroin dealers to friends still feels like the right thing to do.
Closing in on 4 A.M., I look around and walk inside. Downstairs is on a slow fade, the dance floor is down to a stagger, the barflies are headed upstairs. By 9 A.M., I’m standing in the sunshine outside Laight Street and I’ve lost track of the last five hours. I want to go home and sleep but sleeping is difficult. Something’s getting in the way and I’m not doing anything to help. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try and figure it out, try and do something different.
The summer’s been up and down with a wild streak thru the middle. It’s still got another month to go. Next week the French navy pulls into New York harbor. They’re part of this story to
o.
Joni
Friday night and I’ve already lost track of Thursday. Standing at the door smiling, the crowd seems to smile back. We’re all part of the story and I want to let everyone in but it’s just not possible. Then a taxi pulls up and Nathan Joseph gets out, his friend Joni Mitchell right beside him. I open the chain and the three of us walk in. Thirty minutes later, Joni’s onstage strumming a borrowed guitar and singing songs as only Joni Mitchell can. The dance floor stops. She blows the place away.
It was dark when I left the club with Joni, Nathan and Gary. By the time the sun came up, around 6 A.M., we already had crashed in and out of an after-hours joint a few blocks away. By 7 we’re back at Joni’s loft on Varick Street drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and playing pinball. It felt like the usual, but it wasn’t—we were drinking Joni Mitchell’s beer at her place and shooting pinball on her machines. I thought about the first time I heard that strange, affecting voice, maybe “Clouds.” A decade later I felt more a connection. That voice and those songs: 1969, 1980 and forward.
Joni lit another cigarette and she and Gary kept talking. I kept playing pinball.
Jimi Hendrix Studio “B”
Saturday, August 9, 1980, and we made it home from Varick Street by 10 A.M. Later that afternoon Andi Ostrowe gathered her friends at Electric Lady Studios. It was four years to the day that she went to the Record Plant where Patti Smith was recording the song “Radio Ethiopia”—the day Andi and Patti officially met. She stuck around; Patti couldn’t do without her and still can’t. I couldn’t either.
Andi booked Hendrix’s legendary Studio B to record a cover of Pete Townshend’s “Nothing Is Everything.” “Chinese Chance,” the pop song that took Andi about twenty minutes to write, became the A-side. The band was Richard Sohl on keyboards, Andi’s cousin David Ostrowe (a.k.a. DRO) on drums, Gary Buildings on bass and Jimi Monroe on saxophone. Jay Burnett was producing. Everyone was at the ready when one of Patti’s jagged and worn REFM (Radio Ethiopia Field Marshall) guitar picks, used in 1976 to tear up the strings on her Fender, finally arrived special-delivery from Detroit. That’s when Andi picked up her guitar.
An all-star lineup of hand-clappers, including me, Gary Kanner, Pat Wadsley and the entire band, added just the right touch. Andi worked hard and the songs sounded great. I got to design the record sleeve. Now all she needed was a test pressing.
Coasting along on less than no sleep at all, I left Electric Lady with Ricky and Andi. They stopped at Mickey’s for some food and I headed over to First Avenue to cop from Patrick and Melanie, a freakish but friendly couple who sold heroin to support themselves and their habit. She was tall and skinny with Sanskrit letters tattooed on her forehead; Patrick was cadaverous and burnt out. Given that, and despite the giant green iguana running around the apartment, it was still less scary than crawling thru the ruins of Alphabet City.
An hour later, I was back at One University. When I tried to leave Jesse Chamberlain pulled me aside. We got in a cab, stopped at his place a few blocks east, and ended up on White Street by 2 A.M. The Saturday crowd was backed up into the street, the temperature was stuck on a permanent ninety and the scene outside was chaos. Aldo was on security and Gennaro was on the door. From the look of it, I was glad I had the night off.
Jesse and I pushed thru the crowd, grabbed Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, and opened the chain. Gennaro’s reaction was delayed, surprised and grateful; he was in a jam, past the point of seeing faces, and only seeing a crowd. People began calling my name and I started pointing, letting them in one or two at a time. It was my job, and in some strange way that crowd was mine too. I had to step in. I couldn’t help it.
When I got inside, Talking Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” was bouncing around the room. Loud and heavy, the dance floor seemed caught in a slow-motion whiplash. Jesse, waiting with two Budweisers, looked at me and said, “Richard to the rescue.” He shoved me toward the bar, I ordered two more, and we walked upstairs to the bathroom. It was nearly empty but for two Russian girls nodding out, trying to put on lipstick. I smiled, said hello, and locked the door. I lit a cigarette, sucked down the first beer, did a line of coke and looked over at Jesse. He handed me the second beer and we started laughing.
Locked inside that little room, leaning against those dirty walls, I was still high from the First Avenue connection. The coke and beer kept me going, and Jesse kept me talking. We were hanging out in a Mudd Club bathroom on my night off. I thought it was the right place to be.
We finished the beer and I was out of coke when one of the Russian girls tipped over. It was a nothing yet indelible moment—and it could’ve been me.
At some point, she got up off the floor and finished putting on her makeup. Jesse and I grabbed two more drinks and jumped in a cab. Sunday morning, almost 4 A.M., we kept going. I was tired but I couldn’t stop, and it was too early to go home. I looked over at Jesse. I wanted him to say something, to tell me where he was going and what he was looking for. Maybe he was waiting for me to do the same. I wish I could ask Jesse if he remembers any of this. I wish he were still here.
Call Waiting
Being there and remembering. Today people keep saying, “The Mudd Club felt like home,” but really what was it about the place? Was it the bar or the dance floor, the bathrooms or the often Punk-informed fuck off! door policy? The low-key, art bar, performance space vibe, mentioned in the lease-acquiring lie of 1978, surely couldn’t be it. As an institute of higher learning, the Mudd College of Deviant Behavior offered a bit of everything.
Without even trying I remember it all, the cool of dirty white tile and the scrape of brick where the tile ended. The bathrooms alone were a small faraway world of comfort and distraction: a sometimes last resort, a home away from home.
Nine blocks south, the extra bedroom at Murray Street was twice the size of any Mudd bathroom. Darker, slightly more private, the room made its own offer of homey comfort. Even so, Lounge Lizard Steve Piccolo didn’t last very long as a roommate. His brief residency was more of an extended crash with phone, bathroom and kitchen privileges. He might’ve thought paying rent was merely an option, our friendship loosely based on music, drugs and being there.
Laura Kennedy, the Bush Tetras’ bass player, was next in line. She made it thru the revolving door and stayed long enough to establish tenure. To keep up with our busy lives we added the new call waiting feature to the phone, changing our number to accommodate the advanced technology. My days of unplugging-the-phone escapism were over.
A roommate who actually paid the rent, and I loved her for it; I loved how tough Laura thought she was, and I loved how she played a bass line you could feel in your gut. We were kids, twenty-two and twenty-six. We thought we knew everything that was going on and we did. Laura became my friend and partner in crime—the scene of the crime, wherever we landed.
Who Shot J.R.
I ran around with Laura and she was running around with Claudia. Gary was either running ahead or behind. The Bush Tetras were rehearsing in their East First Street studio or planning their next gig. The in-between moments were spent at the Mudd Club.
Between the bathrooms of White Street, the bedrooms of Murray and the rest of the world, summer 1980 was a busy time. I was fully aware of the United States’ boycott of the Moscow Olympics but oblivious to the Great Grasshopper Plague of South Dakota. A propane-leaking tanker in the Hudson River fucked up New York City traffic and even shut down the George Washington Bridge, but it had little effect on late-night cab service and even less effect on me. Charles Manson was let out of solitary again, and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz was back in court to determine his competency to do anything at all.
El Salvador was falling deeper into political turmoil while Mexico’s heroin trade only added to the endless supply trafficked across the Silk Road of the Far and Middle East. The American hostages, and their three hundred days and counting of captivity in Iran, had already damaged Jimmy Carter’s chanc
e for re-election; the stalled U.S. economy killed it.
Ronald Reagan, the former B-movie star governor of California, was gearing up for his run against Carter but few people I knew gave a shit. The bigger news was the Hollywood actors’ strike, jeopardizing the long-awaited answer to 1980’s burning question, “Who shot J.R.?”
Back in New York, the Democrats, in need of friendly territory but not knowing which way to turn, chose Madison Square Garden as the site for their convention. Danceteria, on nearby West Thirty-seventh, became the drunken delegates’ destination of choice, and for security’s sake the Feds paid a visit. They ignored Danceteria’s illegal hours and liquor status but discovered fire exits blocked by a stage. A quick reconfiguration followed and the club stayed open, but the episode bore the warning of things to come.
Pom-poms
The world was changing, people were adjusting and so was White Street. Hard news, pop culture, politics, gossip—what mattered was a matter of opinion. I tried to be open-minded and keep things light at the Mudd Club door, even offering a former reject a second chance.
A year earlier, when Bianca Jagger attempted a Mudd Club invasion in a two-limo caravan, Louie had turned her away (invoking Steve’s no Mick Jagger types rule or his own freewheeling sense of doorman discretion). Tonight she arrived by cab, wearing a white pantsuit, carrying a long-stemmed red rose. Opening the chain with a welcoming hand I let her in, and ten minutes later she’s six deep in the crowd. The pantsuit still looks white and she’s dancing with Gary.
Shortly after, and light as a summer breeze, Teri Toye showed up at the door and slipped inside. Recently returned from a family visit to Iowa, she had new clothes, a fresh attitude, and her little sister Tami along for the ride. I’m not sure if New York was ready for two Toyes, but the sisters Toye were ready for New York—and White Street, of course, ready for anything.
