Book Review

 

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.

Book Review

20th Century Boy:

Notebooks Of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah

I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.

Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.

Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.

One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.

One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.

Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.

A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”

This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.

While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.

 

Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.

 

Book Review

Serpico:

The Cop Who Defied the System

by Peter Maas

     

     Most Americans want to like the police. It’s just that so many of us have had bad experiences with them and that makes it difficult. If you grow up in a city, especially one with a moderate or high crime rate, you will learn not to trust the cops from a young age. For most of us, it starts in our teenage years. It’s even worse if you aren’t white or dress somewhat unconventionally. Yes we’ve all heard it said that not all police are bad and it’s unfair that a few bad ones tarnish the reputation of the whole institution. We all know that’s true. That line of reasoning doesn’t go so far when you get harassed, surveilled, and bullied on a weekly basis by the jerks in blue when you aren’t doing anything worse than walking to the corner grocery store or going to school. All that is just surface level annoyance though. There are deep problems with corruption in polic forces all across the country; NYPD is especially notorious for playing dirty, taking graft for allowing gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, and all kinds of crime. This isn’t something the media made up; any New Yorker will tell you it’s real and many of them know from experience.

Then a man like Frank Serpico comes along and tries to blow the whole rotten pustule open for all to see, but in his case, the little that got seen did nothing to stop the rot which was feeding on all levels of the law enforcement system. Peter Maas’s Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System gives the full run down on this singularly courageous man who tried to fix what had gone wrong. Written like a novel, it is a compelling biography that succeeds because he makes the protagonist a character that is easy to relate to.

Frank Serpico, like so many other great Americans, was the son of immigrants. His family were hard-working Neapolitans who came over from Italy. As a boy he developed a precocious interest in guns and a fascination for police which was partly influenced by their heroic portrayals in the movies and television. He also loved reading and developed an intellectual side that is rare among people who seek employment as police officers, most of which tend to be blue collar with low levels of education.

When Serpico realized his dream of becoming a cop, he exceeded in his duty, courageously making arrests that other policemen were too lazy or scared to get involved with. He immediately became an outsider on the force, not only because of his desire to be the best, but also because he started to see all the corruption; his partners routinely accepted bribes and many of them found places to sleep when they should have been out patrolling the streets. Even worse, Serpico grew a beard and long hair and began looking a little too bohemian for the other cops who thought he was gay or else some kind of hippie radical.

After being transferred to different departments, the corruption got even worse. He realized that the NYPD were actively working with criminals and encouraging crime for the sake of taking bribes. Many of these cops even chose their jobs for that reason alone. This was nothing new; the number of men seeking employment as cops during the Prohibition era spiked for the exact same reason, for example. When Serpico tried to fight the corruption by taking his case to the highest levels of the police department, he was met with nothing but cold shoulders. He eventually took his story to the media and testified in court on the issue of police corruption, but very little was done to stop the problem. Then during a drug bust gone wrong, he got shot in the face. Although he survived, there were sympathy cards he received in the mail from members of the police force who said they wished he had died.

This is a very accessible and visually stimulating book. What really works though is the way the author makes you feel Serpico’s frustrations and disappointment. You know from the start that Serpico will lose but the writing style really brings you close to his emotions and states of mind. The downside of this descriptive writing is that at times Peter Maas veers into purple prose with excessive use of adjectives that becomes slightly annoying. And while the anecdotes about Serpico’s early years as a cop are true, Maas writes about him as if he is a superhero, larger than life and a little cartoonish as he fights for truth, justice, and the American way. It comes off as too good to be true, even though those stories are true. Fortunately, these weaker parts of the writing are at the beginning of the story and don’t continue all the way through.

Serpico is a great book. In fact it was so great that it got made into a classic movie starring Al Pacino around the peak of his career in the 1970s, which is one hell of a credential. The book is somewhat better because Peter Maas makes Serpico so easy to relate to. If you have ever had big dreams of doing something great and then getting disillusioned after you got there, this biography will strike a cord with you. You don’t have to be an honest police officer to relate to Frank Serpico. I myself have been a teacher for twenty years and my experiences with the educational system have been similar to what he went through. I reached a point where I no longer want to have anything to do with such a dirty business. Frank Serpico’s dream was to work for a police force in which the bad cops feared the good cops and what he found was something the opposite way around. He failed in his mission but that fact that he tried is enough to restore a dash of faith in humanity. At least there are some people out there who want things to be right. Frank Serpico was heroic and that is why his story deserves to be remembered.