The Mudd Club
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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 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: "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. No Wave and
Post-Punk artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers living in a nighttime
world on the cusp of two decades. 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 is a writer, artist and lifelong New Yorker. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island and studied printmaking and painting at The University of Connecticut and Parsons New School for Design.
Boch moved to NYC in 1976 after finding an apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Already obsessed with the music coming out of CBGB as well as the downtown art and club scene, he was more than eager to be part of it. In early 1979, after a move to the neighborhood known as Tribeca, Boch was offered a job at a recently opened club on a deserted stretch White Street. It was a life changing experience as detailed in his book The Mudd Club.
In November 2015 Boch served on the host committee of the Mudd Club Rummage Sale Benefitting the Bowery Mission, the first Mudd-¬related event in over thirty years. The New York Times referred to Boch as making "live or die decisions" as the club's "longtime alpha doorman."
Boch was interviewed and quoted at length for High On Rebellion, the story of Max's Kansas City by Yvonne Sewall ¬Ruskin, New York in The 70s by Allan Tannenbaum, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloe Griffin, This Must Be The Place by Jesse Rifkin and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor by Tim Lawrence. In addition, Boch has contributed to Tannenbaum's Grit and Glamour and Bobby Grossman's Low Fidelity: Downtown New York 1975 - 1985.
Exhibitions of his visual work include a group show at McDaris Fine Art, a suite of multimedia prints titled A Throwback Thrown Forward at CR10 and a series of "Page Paintings" as part of No Wave Heroes exhibit.
Richard Boch's Mudd Club archive is part of the permanent collection of HOWL Arts where he has been involved in several projects and presentations. Boch continues to write and paint in his Upstate NY studio where he is working on his next book. His "New York Stories" column, including interviews and articles covering the cultural history of NYC nightlife, appears regularly in Grandlife.com.
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