Mudd Club
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| The Mudd Club | |
|---|---|
| Location(s) | Manhattan, New York, USA |
| Coordinates | Coordinates: 40°43′3.57″N 74°0′8.43″W / 40.7176583°N 74.0023417°W |
| Years active | 1978– 1983 |
| Owner | Steve Mass, Diego Cortez, Anya Philips |
The Mudd Club was a TriBeCa nightclub that was opened in October 1978 by Steve Mass, art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Philips, a figure in the downtown punk scene. The Mudd Club, located at 77 White Street in downtown Manhattan, quickly became a major fixture in the city's underground music and counterculture scene, until it closed in 1983.
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[edit] History
The Mudd Club was named after Samuel Alexander Mudd, a doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It closed in New York in 1983.[1]
In order to secure the space for the Mudd Club (a loft owned by artist Ross Bleckner), Steve Mass described the future venue as cabaret. Mass claimed to have started the nightclub on a budget of only $15,000.
The club featured a bar, gender-neutral bathrooms, and a rotating gallery curated by Keith Haring on the fourth floor. Live performances included new wave, experimental music, literary icons Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and catwalk exhibitions for emerging fashion designers Anna Sui and Jasper Conran.
From the start it functioned as an “amazing antidote to the uptown glitz of Studio 54 in the '70s”.[2] But as it became more frequented by downtown celebrities and a door policy was established it acquired a chic, often elitist reputation.
The Mudd Club was frequented by many of Manhattan's up-and-coming cult celebrities. Individuals associated with the venue included musicians Lou Reed, Johnny Thunders, David Byrne, Arto Lindsay, John Lurie, and, Lydia Lunch; artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, and (later) Keith Haring[3]; performers Klaus Nomi and John Sex; Designers Betsey Johnson, Maripol, and Marisol; underground filmmaker Amos Poe; Vincent Gallo, Kathy Acker and Glenn O'Brien. In the club it also created some of its own minor and local celebrities, like Tina Lhotsky.
The B-52's did their first New York concert at the Mudd Club. Its live music policy was best known for New York "No Wave" bands like DNA, The Contortions, and Basquiat's band Gray. The group the Talking Heads were relatively unknown when they performed songs from their new album Fear of Music to a packed crowd of punk rockers. Tim Page (music critic) produced several concerts at the Mudd Club in 1981, in an attempt to meld contemporary classical music with rock and pop. On the dance floor, DJ Anita Sarko played a unique mixture of punk, funk, and curiosities.
Six months after it opened it was in People magazine: “New York’s fly-by-night crowd of punks, posers and the ultra-hip has discovered new turf on which to flaunt its manic chic. It is the Mudd Club… for sheer kinkiness, there has been nothing like it since the cabaret scene in 1920s Berlin.”[4]
After its first few years the Studio 54 celebrities like Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and David Bowie began to show up. In 1981 The Mudd Club's Steve Mass began showing up at the more informal Club 57 on St. Mark's, and began hiring Club 57 crowd (including Keith Haring[5]) to help acquire part of that downtown scene.[6]
The Mudd Club was closed in 1982, when some regulars felt "at the end, it was not much fun anymore. I mean, it had just become--kind of like the hangers-on to the hangers-on at the Mudd Club."[7]
The Ramones mentioned it in the song "The Return of Jackie and Judy", Frank Zappa poked fun at it with a song titled after the club that appeared on his album You Are What You Is, and it is also mentioned by the Talking Heads in their 1979 song "Life During Wartime" and by Nina Hagen in her 1983 song "New York/N.Y." and by Elliott Murphy (who performed at the Mudd Club) in his 1983 song "Off The Shelf".
Steve Mass has since moved on to open the Mudd club in Berlin in 2001 (located at Grosse Hamburger Strasse 17); This Berlin club was considered an intimate venue for touring bands.
In 2007, the arts organization Creative Time placed a plaque on the NYC building to commemorate the club's existence.[8]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Blanks, Tim (February 25, 2001), "Mudd Quake", The New York Times Magazine, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/specials/20010225mag-muddquake.html, retrieved January 13, 2009
- ^ Micheal Musto, "Farewell, Queen of the Mudd Club," Village Voice Le Daily Musto Blog Aug. 17 2008.
- ^ Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography, by John Gruen, 1991, ref cited 2008/01/24
- ^ People, July 16, 1979.
- ^ Keith Haring. Keith Haring Journals. Penguin, 1997.
- ^ Hager, Steve. Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene. St. Martin. 1986.
- ^ Glenn O'Brien, "A Dialogue with Diego Cortez," Jean-Michel Basuiat 1981: The Studio of the Street, Chrata, 2007.
- ^ Touring Warhol’s Space, and 32 Other Art-History Sites - New York Times
- Musto, Micheal. Downtown. Vintage Books, 1986.
- Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University Of Chicago Press, 2002.
