The Mudd Club

"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

“As Mr.Boch describes in short, vivid, diarylike entries, the clubgoers danced, drank,snorted coke, watched live rock bands and held theme parties like the PubertyBall in an anything-goes environment that seems impossible to recreate today.” — StevenKurutz, NYTimes

“Ajaw dropping, deranged must-have. Boch’s The Mudd Club is a visual and literaryorgy of delight, packed full of striking images and tales of glory and excessfrom the late 70s/early 80s nightclub where he was the kingpin doorman andcommuned with the good, the bad, the deviant of popular culture.” — Paul Gorman / paulgormanis.com

"As the gatekeeper of the Mudd Club, Richard Boch now opens the gates of memory to lift the curtain on a magical time in downtown Manhattan, after-hours with a passion, and a cast of characters that seem fantastical even as you leave the club blinking in the morning sun."  —Lenny Kaye

"Morethan the well-known doorman of the Mudd Club, Richard Boch played a pivotalrole in why it was the coolest club in the world back then. Richard was thecrowd curator, carefully letting in the right mix of wildly creative downtownmovers and shakers who made it our hangout, leaving the squares and the unhipoutside in the cold. Richard is now letting everyone into the Mudd Club by wayof this well written book that details the who’s who and all the fun we hadwhile infiltrating, changing and disrupting pop culture." — Fab 5 Freddy

“The Mudd Club was theBrigadoon of the late ’70s New York City scene. It appeared out of the mistsor, in this case, the then-nearly abandoned steam-filled streets of Manhattanbelow Canal Street, entertained us all mightily for a few years, and thenvanished, almost never to be heard from again. Until now.” — Paul LaRosa, NY Journal of Books

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.

"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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