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The Mudd Club

$24.95

I was a Long Island kid that graduated college in 1976 and moved to Greenwich Village. Two years later, I was working The Mudd Club door. Standing outside, staring at the crowd, it was “out there” versus “in here” and I was on the inside. The Mudd Club was filled with the famous and soon- to- be famous, along with an eclectic core of Mudd regulars who gave the place its identity. Everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and Robert Rauschenberg to Johnny Rotten, The Hell’s Angels, and John Belushi: passing through, passing out, and some, passing on. Marianne Faithful and Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, William Burroughs, and even Kenneth Anger― just a few of the names that stepped on stage. No Wave and Post- Punk artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers living in a nighttime world on the cusp of two decades. This book is a cornucopia of memories and images, and how this famed wicked downtown club attained the status of midtown and uptown. There was nothing else like it― I met everyone, and the job quickly defined me. I thought I could handle it, and for a while, I did.

— Richard Boch

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Description

The legendary Mudd Club. You probably couldn’t get in. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons partied with David Byrne and Lydia Lunch. Uptown cognoscenti flirted with the children of the outer boroughs as they brought the Wild Style to the City.

The downtown New York scene was more than punk, it was a mad brilliant chaos of cheap rent and experimental art. The Mudd Club was its nexus, the place that birthed the Eighties. Keith Haring claimed membership while Andy Warhol was only a guest. Debbie Harry learned to rap from Fab Five Freddy while Klaus Nomi practiced arias and served home-cooked pastries.

The decadence lasted only from 1979 to 1983 but artist Richard Boch was there for every single moment. As the doorman of the legendary Mudd Club he saw everything and remembers it all.

320 pages.