The Mudd Club

......"Nothing lasts forever, that I'm sure"....(ROXY Music).....So true, and thankfully RIchard Boch has written an excellent rememberance of a fantastic time and place....I loved this book and didn't want to put it down.....I rationed my reading of it to "entertain" my past psyche. The Mudd Club which brought back so many memories for me as I am sure for others. More than 40 years have passed and I can still feel, hear and yes, even smell the inside of 77 White Street and Richards words have crystalized it. It was like home. I had the pleasure to "work" the bar(s) here from the Spring of '79 to mid '82 or thereabouts. I never really considered it work at all...it was a privilege, grateful that Steve Mass hired me in his room full of manequins on the third floor....an "interview" that lasted about 5 minutes. The Mudd Club.....The entire scene....the dance floor, the debauchery, outright insanity.....the pounding music and live shows from Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Johnny Thunders to Sam & Dave and Carl Perkins. "It was far more than we realized at the time" just about sums it up. Mark Kamins, Anita Sarko and of course Abbijane, David Azarch (thank-you!)....the best DJ, who would lend me his LP's whenever I took a liking to a song....I'd take a dozen home and record to cassettes....which I STILL have. I am grateful that Richard wrote this book. He must have taken copious notes during those crazy times or he has the memory of Hemingway. So many names and his personal occurrences of the era which actually make the book and do not detract from it as some have opined here. "PROGRESS, DEDICATION, INITIATIVE AND INTENSITY"....was the motto on the Mudd Club ID card....."If you were there, you knew. If you weren't, it's a great story." So, again thank-you Richard....Glad you finally "hit that wall" and came through it all......all the best of everything for you...and also to Steve Mass, thank-you....for as you said "there would be no story to tell if it wasn't for Steve Mass".....have another Vodka and grapefruit Steve! Min or Bill will be more than happy to pour it for you. Yes folks, the Mudd Club, NYC......it was definitely NOT......the "Same Old Scene." Good times.

The Mudd Club is referred to as a democratic society in this book, and I think that means it was a sort of free zone where celebrity icons and paying customers could interact, back when a distinction between such types of people existed. Now, anyone can be a celebrity in their own life to the unfortunates in earshot if their clothes and meal check are pricey enough. I find it odd that there should be any apologies for politically incorrect behavior in the shenanigans depicted at the events of this venue given the overall proletariat spirit that it embodied for its time, paradoxically mixed though that was with a charmingly freestyle sort of glamour, but I guess a social conscience shows itself where it will. I'm just glad the author survived the myriad dangers of the day to share this with us, among those being the seemingly endless egg cream and hot dog meals he ate to get here.

Boch’s book chronicles a vanished, all too brief, flash in the pan moment in the late 70s Downtown NYC scene. His autobiographical perspective is unique in describing his life as a doorman at the Mudd Club, a late night Tribeca venue for the swirling, Bakhtinian carnival and cultural chaos of the time or, as he calls it, "the scene of the crime." Boch is remarkably droll about the virtually godlike power he wields in holding the chain that allows or denies access to the Club – he’s a Downtown Irma Grese. Dozens and dozens of names are dropped – over 50 in the first 30 pages alone with many of them getting multiple mention – mostly musicians and artists that comprise Boch’s constellation of worthy celebrities about whom he is, for the most part, admiring and uncritical. In fact, the book reads like a social network analysis of the times with all the connections that are documented. The narrative is nonlinear, veering between clinical reportage and self-indulgent pulp. The chapter headings suggest a kind of chronological sequence but that isn’t apparent or, perhaps, even relevant to the book’s unfolding. It lurches, starts and stops, reverts back to the beginning, jumps ahead and around like an experimental film from the 50s. All of this would be confusing if his subject weren’t so firmly nailed down in a tightly circumscribed time and space.One thing I really liked was Boch’s quality of self-effacing humility, e.g., while the book has many photos of its most prominent players, there are remarkably few pictures of Boch himself. On the other hand and nearly 40 years after all of this transpired, his reflections remain shallow -- that of a kid with his nose pressed to the momentary zeitgeist glass. While he does manage to avoid the pseudo-Spenglerian overtones of, e.g., Penelope Spheeris, the anthropologist and documentary film maker of LA’s 70s punk scene as in "The Decline of Western Civilization, parts 1, 2 and 3," Boch does little or nothing to put any of his experience into deeper perspective in finding communalities with other, similar Downtown moments and their analogues, e.g., 70s LA or London, much less the scene around Walt Whitman at Pfaff’s, fin-de-siecle Vienna, symbolist Paris in the 19th c, etc., but then and in all fairness, Boch is a chronicler, not a cultural historian.

Found author a bit annoying and self absorbed but loved reading about all the characters and NYC at that time