The Mudd Club
by Richard Boch
Back in the 1970s, there were three nightclubs in Manhattan keeping the underground music and art scene alive. One was Max’s Kansas City, a hangout for Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, CBGB’s where punk rock grew and thrived, and then there was the less famous but equally important Mudd Club. That was a venue where the punk, new wave, no wave, and post punk music scenes grew alongside the works of underground filmmakers, painters, sculptors, fashion designers, spoken word and performance artists and others, finding the right balance between being exclusive and inclusive while maintaining an ever-changing atmosphere of innovation and excitement. Richard Boch, author of The Mudd Club, worked as a doorman there for about two years in 1979 and 1980. This book is his memoirs about that job and the lifestyle that went along with it.
As might be expected, Boch is an artist. He indulges in promiscuous sex and drugs. He loves rock and roll, brushing shoulders with celebrities, and the sense of power he gets from deciding who can and can’t enter the club. He is also a bit insecure. Boch starts off the whole book describing his anxieties and his desire to fit in, often worrying about whether he is right for the job of doorman to begin with. His self-consciousness is understandable at first, but after he keeps bringing it up throughout the course of the book, he starts to sound a little shallow and neurotic. He often worries about whether the clothes he wears are fashionable and when winter comes, he starts wearing a long tweed overcoat, something he is proud of and empowered by. It becomes a small nagging obsession as if wearing the coat is symbolic of his ability to fit in as a bona fide member of the underground music scene. This book will never be remembered as a quality bildungsroman.
Then again, it wasn’t intended to be. The writing is primarily about the people in The Mudd Club itself. It was originally the brainchild of Anya Phillips, artist and girlfriend of James Chance, filmmaker Diego Cortez, and Peter Mass. That latter man envisioned the club as a place with an anything goes ethic, the more outrageous the better. Such an ethic clashed with the practice of crowd control and that is where Richard Bloch comes in. As doorman, he has to use a variable, ambiguous, and ever changing metric of subjectivity to keep the crowd lively, exciting, and creative. Some nights it is a matter of how people are dressed or how they cut their hair, other nights it matters who you know or don’t know, then sometimes it matters if you have or haven’t been there previously. Sometimes tourists and visitors from the outer boroughs of New York City are welcome, some nights they aren’t. Celebrities are almost always allowed in, but not always. Meat Loaf gets turned away for being overweight and sweaty, Paul Simon gets rejected for acting like a jerk, and The Knack are considered unwelcome because Boch hates their hit single “My Sharona”. You can imagine the thrill the riff raff gets when being allowed entrance after seeing some big-name celebrity being rejected. It must also be a thrill when someone spends a few nights trying and failing to get in and then one night Boch clears the way and lets them through. That is the doorman’s art, making the club look exclusive even though eventually everybody gets a chance to be inside.
There is no shortage of name dropping in these pages. Big stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Talking Heads, John McEnroe (who went there to snort cocaine), and the cast of Saturday Night Live are frequent guests. Even Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis shows up one night with a friend, has one drink, and then leaves. That is interesting enough, but the highlights of this book, for me at least, are the passages about some of the more underground bands that rarely, if ever, get written about in other places. Bands like 8 Eyed Spy, Bush Tetras, and The Brides of Funkenstein get written up so we get an idea of what their few shows were like. There is even one passage about Nico giving a performance on her harmonium while singing in her droning, dour voice while a disoriented audience looks on not knowing what to make of her. There are also some interesting art shows and theme nights that are politically incorrect. One of them is a dead rock star tribute that has a shrine to Janis Joplin with a mannequin lying face down with a bunch of hypodermic needles stuck in its arm. The shrine to Mama Cass is covered with ham sandwiches and the one for Jim Morrison is a pair of leather pants with a four foot rubber snake coming out of its unzipped fly. Unfortunately, most of these events are described with very little detail and are a bit disappointing.
Richard Boch himself takes so many drugs that his life turns into turmoil and results in an existential meltdown. This crisis makes him question the direction of his life and he ends up quitting The Mudd Club even though it has become a prominent part of his identity.
But this book is not always a thrilling read. Aside from the afore mentioned shortcomings in description, a lot of what happens is simply about who the author allows to enter and who he rejects. There aren’t a lot of great stories about the celebrities who show up, or anyone else, and most of what takes place in the club is simply drugs, sex, drinking, and dancing. Richard Boch does equal amounts of Quaaludes and cocaine and I would say if one of those drugs is dominant in influencing his writing, it is the Quaaludes as the tone tends to be downbeat and slow. Without getting too technical about grammar, I will say that Boch’s sentence structures don’t vary enough to make the prose anything other than repetitive. Reading this feels like running up a hill with a bad of bricks slung over your shoulder.
So The Mudd Club isn’t a great work of literature. But for those fascinated with Manhattan’s downtown underground scene in the 1970s, this may be the best account of this celebrated nightclub that exists. The Mudd Club frequently gets mentioned in other books and interviews. It even shows up in some films, but nothing as complete as Richard Boch’s work exists anywhere else as far as I know. So if you’re interested, be willing to take the bad with the good in this book and go with it. People from that scene are getting old, losing their memories, and dying off so we probably won’t get a better Mudd Club chronicle than this.
As might be expected, Boch is an artist. He indulges in promiscuous sex and drugs. He loves rock and roll, brushing shoulders with celebrities, and the sense of power he gets from deciding who can and can’t enter the club. He is also a bit insecure. Boch starts off the whole book describing his anxieties and his desire to fit in, often worrying about whether he is right for the job of doorman to begin with. His self-consciousness is understandable at first, but after he keeps bringing it up throughout the course of the book, he starts to sound a little shallow and neurotic. He often worries about whether the clothes he wears are fashionable and when winter comes, he starts wearing a long tweed overcoat, something he is proud of and empowered by. It becomes a small nagging obsession as if wearing the coat is symbolic of his ability to fit in as a bona fide member of the underground music scene. This book will never be remembered as a quality bildungsroman.
Then again, it wasn’t intended to be. The writing is primarily about the people in The Mudd Club itself. It was originally the brainchild of Anya Phillips, artist and girlfriend of James Chance, filmmaker Diego Cortez, and Peter Mass. That latter man envisioned the club as a place with an anything goes ethic, the more outrageous the better. Such an ethic clashed with the practice of crowd control and that is where Richard Bloch comes in. As doorman, he has to use a variable, ambiguous, and ever changing metric of subjectivity to keep the crowd lively, exciting, and creative. Some nights it is a matter of how people are dressed or how they cut their hair, other nights it matters who you know or don’t know, then sometimes it matters if you have or haven’t been there previously. Sometimes tourists and visitors from the outer boroughs of New York City are welcome, some nights they aren’t. Celebrities are almost always allowed in, but not always. Meat Loaf gets turned away for being overweight and sweaty, Paul Simon gets rejected for acting like a jerk, and The Knack are considered unwelcome because Boch hates their hit single “My Sharona”. You can imagine the thrill the riff raff gets when being allowed entrance after seeing some big-name celebrity being rejected. It must also be a thrill when someone spends a few nights trying and failing to get in and then one night Boch clears the way and lets them through. That is the doorman’s art, making the club look exclusive even though eventually everybody gets a chance to be inside.
There is no shortage of name dropping in these pages. Big stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Talking Heads, John McEnroe (who went there to snort cocaine), and the cast of Saturday Night Live are frequent guests. Even Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis shows up one night with a friend, has one drink, and then leaves. That is interesting enough, but the highlights of this book, for me at least, are the passages about some of the more underground bands that rarely, if ever, get written about in other places. Bands like 8 Eyed Spy, Bush Tetras, and The Brides of Funkenstein get written up so we get an idea of what their few shows were like. There is even one passage about Nico giving a performance on her harmonium while singing in her droning, dour voice while a disoriented audience looks on not knowing what to make of her. There are also some interesting art shows and theme nights that are politically incorrect. One of them is a dead rock star tribute that has a shrine to Janis Joplin with a mannequin lying face down with a bunch of hypodermic needles stuck in its arm. The shrine to Mama Cass is covered with ham sandwiches and the one for Jim Morrison is a pair of leather pants with a four foot rubber snake coming out of its unzipped fly. Unfortunately, most of these events are described with very little detail and are a bit disappointing.
Richard Boch himself takes so many drugs that his life turns into turmoil and results in an existential meltdown. This crisis makes him question the direction of his life and he ends up quitting The Mudd Club even though it has become a prominent part of his identity.
But this book is not always a thrilling read. Aside from the afore mentioned shortcomings in description, a lot of what happens is simply about who the author allows to enter and who he rejects. There aren’t a lot of great stories about the celebrities who show up, or anyone else, and most of what takes place in the club is simply drugs, sex, drinking, and dancing. Richard Boch does equal amounts of Quaaludes and cocaine and I would say if one of those drugs is dominant in influencing his writing, it is the Quaaludes as the tone tends to be downbeat and slow. Without getting too technical about grammar, I will say that Boch’s sentence structures don’t vary enough to make the prose anything other than repetitive. Reading this feels like running up a hill with a bad of bricks slung over your shoulder.
So The Mudd Club isn’t a great work of literature. But for those fascinated with Manhattan’s downtown underground scene in the 1970s, this may be the best account of this celebrated nightclub that exists. The Mudd Club frequently gets mentioned in other books and interviews. It even shows up in some films, but nothing as complete as Richard Boch’s work exists anywhere else as far as I know. So if you’re interested, be willing to take the bad with the good in this book and go with it. People from that scene are getting old, losing their memories, and dying off so we probably won’t get a better Mudd Club chronicle than this.
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