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The Mudd Club
NYC’s notorious Mudd Club where art and music intersect with sex, drugs and the slumming glittering elite.
- GenresMusicHistoryNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
Published September 12, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 14, 2018
You can't read this book without thinking of the second chorus to The Talking Heads' Life During Wartime
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around
This ain't no Mudd Club, or C. B. G. B.,
I ain't got time for that now
Fact is it's a great song and I would fully encourage you to listen to it over and over again. To most of us it was just another throwaway line in a rock song, to David Byrne and the glitterati of 1979 and 1980, there were a few places in NYC to be seen and to see the ones that mattered. There was the disco inferno of Studio 54, which by 1979 was so yesterday. There was CBGB and there was the Mudd Club, where punk and rock and new wave raged. This book is about sex, drugs, and rock n roll and the club where it all happened and the Stars who partied there and the famous who even got turned away by a Richard Poche, the world's most powerful doorman. He speaks here of the excitement he experienced in an easygoing narrative voice and it's all quite interesting until you decide you had enough of the namedropping and you get what's being conveyed. It's not a plot driven novel, but vignettes of the experience.
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around
This ain't no Mudd Club, or C. B. G. B.,
I ain't got time for that now
Fact is it's a great song and I would fully encourage you to listen to it over and over again. To most of us it was just another throwaway line in a rock song, to David Byrne and the glitterati of 1979 and 1980, there were a few places in NYC to be seen and to see the ones that mattered. There was the disco inferno of Studio 54, which by 1979 was so yesterday. There was CBGB and there was the Mudd Club, where punk and rock and new wave raged. This book is about sex, drugs, and rock n roll and the club where it all happened and the Stars who partied there and the famous who even got turned away by a Richard Poche, the world's most powerful doorman. He speaks here of the excitement he experienced in an easygoing narrative voice and it's all quite interesting until you decide you had enough of the namedropping and you get what's being conveyed. It's not a plot driven novel, but vignettes of the experience.
August 2, 2017
Thanks Feral House... Great job putting it all together...and a special thanks to Steve Mass and everyone who walked thru the doors of 77 White.
August 2, 2017
Riveting. At turns hilarious, poignant, dishy and achingly beautiful. The inside outside guy, Richard Boch's memoir shines a light on a time when art, music and fashion were at their creative, collaborative best and anything and everything was possible. For some, these are our collective half remembered memories, for others, a way behind the ropes and up and down the stairs of that epoch called Mudd.
September 18, 2017
Vividly captures the scene. Closest you'll ever get to going back.
February 21, 2023
The subject of this book is right up my alley, filled with the personalities from 80s NYC that I adore, but it falls apart quickly. It could have been a great book but it’s SO repetitive, and the stories don’t have a lot of meat to them. Names are dropped (which I LOVE) but not much else. “X went in, drugs, drink, dancing, and then out” - it’s not enough. Richard is very tender with his memories, but there’s nothing that made me want to keep reading after 200 pages.
October 7, 2017
Late 70's/early 80's New York -- well, Manhattan -- is a source of endless fascination. From 1978 to 1981 or 1982, The Mudd Club was arguably the hub around which the no wave, art, drug, avant garde scenes revolved. Richard Boch was the doorman at Mudd pretty much from the beginning until 1981. He was an actual artist (painter) and a figurative artist (selecting the right mix of glam and weird to give Mudd its frisson.)
Boch more or less provides a chronological narrative of his tenure with interludes where he expands upon certain Mudd regulars. Boch captures the anarchic spirit of the times. I wish he would have spent more time describing some of the Mudd theme nights. I don't know if it was his intention, but he also captured the tedium as well. Even a seemingly glamorous job at the It club, what with rubbing shoulders with celebrities, ingesting mass quantities of coke, 'ludes, and smack, and engaging in causal sex on the job, even *that* could get old.
I had a few minor quibbles that kept me from giving this book 5 stars. I was a little overwhelmed by the number of people mentioned in the book. A glossary of names would have been helpful. I was baffled by Boch's decision to leave Mudd, which he doesn't explain. To be sure, these are minor gripes and should not dissuade anyone who has an interest in this time and place from devouring this book.
Boch more or less provides a chronological narrative of his tenure with interludes where he expands upon certain Mudd regulars. Boch captures the anarchic spirit of the times. I wish he would have spent more time describing some of the Mudd theme nights. I don't know if it was his intention, but he also captured the tedium as well. Even a seemingly glamorous job at the It club, what with rubbing shoulders with celebrities, ingesting mass quantities of coke, 'ludes, and smack, and engaging in causal sex on the job, even *that* could get old.
I had a few minor quibbles that kept me from giving this book 5 stars. I was a little overwhelmed by the number of people mentioned in the book. A glossary of names would have been helpful. I was baffled by Boch's decision to leave Mudd, which he doesn't explain. To be sure, these are minor gripes and should not dissuade anyone who has an interest in this time and place from devouring this book.
April 9, 2024
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.
February 12, 2025
I don't know Richard Boch, but we have 249 mutual friends on Facebook! I do or did know quite a few of the people he talks about. Cookie and Sharon, Gennaro, Nan and David i knew from the mid 70's when we all lived in Provincetown. I'd give anything to dance with Cookie at the Backroom, and hear her say oh Jan you know i think you're tho hot! And Gennaro, oh my God he was gorgeous. Scott Severin is a great kid, and fucking Spacely, I couldn't take at all. Smutty, who i love dearly, just to look at him, you'd melt he was so beautiful! Thomas Trask, from David Jo's band, looked like a Roman statue come to life! I first met him at the Rat.
The first time I went to NYC, was in 79. My boss at Goods in Harvard Square had set up an appointment for me with Neke Carson to possibly join his new modeling agency. I was such a rube, I sat at a restaurant called Spring Street, while he sat somewhere else on Spring Street, but not where I was! The bar tender was very nice and bought me drinks and dinner. I met up with Neke the next day at his place. He more or less was just doing Donald a favor, and didn't expect much. But, he was surprised, and said he'd take me on if I could get it together. I wasn't ready. I really wanted to go to The Mudd Club, but couldn't find it! I ran into another Provincetown friend and we went to Studio 54. It was fun, but I kind of thought it was the Booby prize. The summer of 80, I met a NY guy playing the Rumble at the Rat. He brought me to NY on the 4th of July. He brought me around and introduced me to bunches of people.
Rockets at the U.K. Club, Chris Bond, a clothes designer, Peter Crowley at Max's, and Richie, who managed Trash and Vaudeville. So, I know how it feels when you get a call that changes things for you. For me it was did I want a job at Trash. At that point, I think I only went to the Mudd Club once when my X husband's band was opening for Suicide, so I didn't have to worry about getting in or not! I didn't really go until Richard Boch was gone. I modeled for a nice and talented kid who called himself Ammo. I'm quiet until I get the lay of the land. One day I overheard Ammo say, ya, you think she's really quiet and then one day she goes Waaaah , I'm here! Me in a nut shell. I never belonged to any particular faction. Before NY I was Amy Arbus's muse. I had it going on in Boston, but NY can be beyond intimidating. I was so lost in the beginning I don't think anyone I worked with at Trash talked to me for the first month! I didn't really have to go out at night, it all filed past me during the day. I was a Puff, part of Ammo and the Puffs. We did performances at the Mudd Club for both of Regan's Innaugural Balls. Ammo lipsynched to the Star Spangled Banner while the Puffs danced in red white and Blue Toule costumes and then in big boxes that hung by string around our necks. We won $100.! I did the ball gown show on the 3rd floor by myself. Really by myself, I was the only live model in the show....I virtually had to stand there for 4 hours in nothing but heels and a ribbon that was a string of sequins, adding machine tape and white toule braided together. One in front, one in back with 3 pieces of thin white wire holding the front and back in place....I thought I was going to die! Mink Stole's brother George stood with me most of the night deflecting people! God bless him!
I was more of a Max's girl, I was comfortable there. I kind of think it's remarkable Richard Boch survived. Between the drugs, and random sex. I know I was sweating things when AIDS reared it's ugly head. I got married while i lived in NY, so I wasn't sleeping around.....but P Town. Anyway I'm glad he lived to tell the tale! He must have finally found himself!
The first time I went to NYC, was in 79. My boss at Goods in Harvard Square had set up an appointment for me with Neke Carson to possibly join his new modeling agency. I was such a rube, I sat at a restaurant called Spring Street, while he sat somewhere else on Spring Street, but not where I was! The bar tender was very nice and bought me drinks and dinner. I met up with Neke the next day at his place. He more or less was just doing Donald a favor, and didn't expect much. But, he was surprised, and said he'd take me on if I could get it together. I wasn't ready. I really wanted to go to The Mudd Club, but couldn't find it! I ran into another Provincetown friend and we went to Studio 54. It was fun, but I kind of thought it was the Booby prize. The summer of 80, I met a NY guy playing the Rumble at the Rat. He brought me to NY on the 4th of July. He brought me around and introduced me to bunches of people.
Rockets at the U.K. Club, Chris Bond, a clothes designer, Peter Crowley at Max's, and Richie, who managed Trash and Vaudeville. So, I know how it feels when you get a call that changes things for you. For me it was did I want a job at Trash. At that point, I think I only went to the Mudd Club once when my X husband's band was opening for Suicide, so I didn't have to worry about getting in or not! I didn't really go until Richard Boch was gone. I modeled for a nice and talented kid who called himself Ammo. I'm quiet until I get the lay of the land. One day I overheard Ammo say, ya, you think she's really quiet and then one day she goes Waaaah , I'm here! Me in a nut shell. I never belonged to any particular faction. Before NY I was Amy Arbus's muse. I had it going on in Boston, but NY can be beyond intimidating. I was so lost in the beginning I don't think anyone I worked with at Trash talked to me for the first month! I didn't really have to go out at night, it all filed past me during the day. I was a Puff, part of Ammo and the Puffs. We did performances at the Mudd Club for both of Regan's Innaugural Balls. Ammo lipsynched to the Star Spangled Banner while the Puffs danced in red white and Blue Toule costumes and then in big boxes that hung by string around our necks. We won $100.! I did the ball gown show on the 3rd floor by myself. Really by myself, I was the only live model in the show....I virtually had to stand there for 4 hours in nothing but heels and a ribbon that was a string of sequins, adding machine tape and white toule braided together. One in front, one in back with 3 pieces of thin white wire holding the front and back in place....I thought I was going to die! Mink Stole's brother George stood with me most of the night deflecting people! God bless him!
I was more of a Max's girl, I was comfortable there. I kind of think it's remarkable Richard Boch survived. Between the drugs, and random sex. I know I was sweating things when AIDS reared it's ugly head. I got married while i lived in NY, so I wasn't sleeping around.....but P Town. Anyway I'm glad he lived to tell the tale! He must have finally found himself!
November 20, 2017
I absolutely loved this book. I was at least 10 years too young to be a part of this scene and have lamented that since I was a child. Richard Boch has an easy style that makes you feel like one of his friends.
April 9, 2019
Endless name-dropping with little insight into the music or larger culture in this 1000th memoir by someone who participated in the late '70s/early '80s punk scene and become an addict.
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August 23, 2021Dishy!
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