![]() Mudd Club building facade in New York City | |
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Location | 77 White Street, Manhattan, New York, United States |
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Coordinates | 40°43′3.57″N74°0′8.43″W / 40.7176583°N 74.0023417°W |
Owner | Steve Maas, Diego Cortez, Anya Phillips |
Opened | 1978 |
Closed | 1983 |
The Mudd Club was a nightclub located at 77 White Street in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It operated from 1978 to 1983 as a venue for post punk underground music and no wave counterculture events. It was opened by Steve Maas, Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips.
The Mudd Club was founded by filmmaker Steve Maas, art curator and filmmaker Diego Cortez, and downtown punk scene persona Anya Phillips in 1978. [1] Maas named the club after Samuel Alexander Mudd, the physician who treated John Wilkes Booth in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. [2] To secure the space for the venue, which was a loft owned by artist Ross Bleckner, Maas described the future venue as essentially an art bar cabaret, like Mickey Ruskin's One University Place, itself based on Ruskin's Max's Kansas City. [3]
Mudd Club featured a bar, unisex bathrooms, and an art gallery curated by Keith Haring on the fourth floor. [4] Live performances there included new wave, experimental music, performance art, literary icons Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and catwalk exhibitions for emerging fashion designers Anna Sui and Jasper Conran. Performers included New York no wave bands such as DNA, Rhys Chatham, Nona Hendryx's Zero Cool, the Contortions, Tuxedomoon and Jean-Michel Basquiat's band Gray. [5] In 1979, Talking Heads performed songs from their new album Fear of Music . Tim Page produced several concerts at the Mudd Club in 1981, in an attempt to meld contemporary art music with rock music and pop music. On the dance floor, DJs David Azarch, Anita Sarko and Johnny Dynell played a unique mixture of punk rock, funk music and curiosities. From the start it functioned as a post-punk "amazing antidote to the uptown glitz of Studio 54 in the '70s". [6] Six months after it opened, the Mudd Club was mentioned in People : "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". [7] As it became more frequented by downtown celebrities, a door policy was established and it acquired a chic, often elitist hip reputation.
After its first few years, Studio 54 celebrities like Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Michael Musto, and David Bowie began to show up. In 1981, the Mudd Club's Steve Maas began going to the more informal Club 57 on St. Mark's Place, and began hiring the Club 57 crowd (including Keith Haring [8] ) to help draw in the younger and hipper part of the downtown art scene. [9] As a result, the Mudd Club was frequented by many of Manhattan's up-and-coming cultural celebrities. People associated with frequenting the venue included musicians Lou Reed, Johnny Thunders, David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Arto Lindsay, John Lurie, Nico, Lydia Lunch, X, the Cramps, the B-52's, the Bongos and Judas Priest [10] artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his then-girlfriend Madonna; [11] [12] Colab members; performers Klaus Nomi and John Sex; designers Betsey Johnson, Maripol and Marisol Deluna; underground filmmakers Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Charlie Ahearn, Vincent Gallo, Jamie Nares, Jim Jarmusch, Vivienne Dick, Scott B and Beth B, Kathy Acker, and Glenn O'Brien; supermodel Gia Carangi; [13] and makeup artist Sandy Linter.
The Mudd Club closed in the spring of 1983. [14] [2] A regular noted, "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". [15]
Maas opened another 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. [16]
On October 28–29, 2010, a 30-year reunion of Mudd Club artists and regulars was held at the Delancey nightclub in Manhattan. Many bands and performers from the Mudd Club and Club 57 performed, including Bush Tetras, Three Teens Kill Four, Comateens and Walter Steading. The Mudd Club reunion was also attended by two of the three original doormen, Joey Kelly (Buddy Love, Magic Tramps, Dive Bar Romeos) and Richard Boch (author and painter) but not the actor/voiceperson Colter Rule, the first doorman (Halloween, '78- June,'79 with Joey Kelly as "security), who was quoted as stating, "I dislike organized partying these days". [17] A memoir by Boch, The Mudd Club, based on his nearly two years working the Mudd Club door, was published by Feral House in September 2017. [18] [19]
The club has been mentioned in various songs such as "Life During Wartime" (1979) by Talking Heads, "The Return of Jackie and Judy" (1980) by the Ramones, "New York / N.Y." (1983) by Nina Hagen, and "Off the Shelf"(1983) by Elliott Murphy. Frank Zappa included a song named after the club on his 1981 album You Are What You Is . In 2022, Judas Priest issued the CD Live at the Mudd Club ’79 as part of their box set, 50 Heavy Metal Years Of Music. [20]
Also mention on Schitt's Creek season 4, episode 4 where Moira mentioned to Alexis and Twayla that they reminded her of when she would go to the Mudd Club on the Lower East Side.
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He gained wider recognition in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
John McLoughlin, better known by the stage name John Sex, was an American cabaret singer and performance artist in New York City from the late 1970s until his death in late 1990.
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Club 57 was a nightclub located at 57 St. Mark's Place in the East Village, New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was originally founded by Stanley Zbigniew Strychacki as well as Dominic Rose. Then enhanced by nightclub performer Ann Magnuson, Susan Hannaford, and poet Tom Scully. It was a hangout and venue for performance and visual artists and musicians, including The Cramps, Madonna, Keith Haring, Cyndi Lauper, Charles Busch, Klaus Nomi, The B-52s, RuPaul, Futura 2000, Tron von Hollywood, Kenny Scharf, Frank Holliday, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fall, April Palmieri, Peter Kwaloff, Robert Carrithers, The Fleshtones, The Fuzztones, Joey Arias, Lypsinka, Michael Musto, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Fab Five Freddy, Jacek Tylicki, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Maripol is an artist, film producer, fashion designer and stylist. She has had an influence on the looks of influential artists such as Madonna and Grace Jones. As part of the 1980s New York downtown scene, she captured the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry with her Polaroid camera. Maripol also produced films, most notably Downtown 81.
Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.
Anya Phillips was a Taiwanese fashion designer and the co-founder of the New York nightclub the Mudd Club. Phillips influenced the fashion, sound, and look of the New York-based no wave scene of the late 1970s. She was also the manager and girlfriend of musician James Chance.
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Tier 3 was an influential but short-lived 300-capacity no wave art nightclub in New York. Founded by Hilary Jaeger in 1979, Tier 3 was a major venue in the city's underground music and counterculture post-punk art scene, along with the Mudd Club. Live performances showcased punk rock, no wave, ska, noise music, free jazz, new wave and experimental music. The club was located at 225 West Broadway in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
SAMO is a graffiti tag originally used on the streets of New York City from 1978 to 1980. The tag, written with a copyright symbol as "SAMO©", and pronounced Same-Oh, is primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was originally developed as a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz.
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Underground U.S.A. is a 1980 American underground film directed by Eric Mitchell and starring Patti Astor, Rene Ricard, Jackie Curtis, Cookie Mueller, Tom Wright, John Lurie, and Taylor Mead. Future director Jim Jarmusch was the sound recordist on this film.
Gray is an American experimental band formed by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and filmmaker Michael Holman in 1979, of whom filmmaker Vincent Gallo was also a member. The group was influenced by the members' artist backgrounds and the sonic experimentation of their contemporaries in New York's No Wave scene. Gray performed at venues such as the Mudd Club and CBGB which were the epicenter of New York's underground scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Fun Gallery was an art gallery founded by Patti Astor and Bill Stelling in 1981. The Fun Gallery had a cultural impact until it closed in 1985. As the first art gallery in Manhattan's East Village, it exposed New York to the talents of street art by showcasing graffiti artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Dondi, Lady Pink, and ERO. Contemporary artists Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring also had solo exhibitions at the Fun Gallery.
The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.
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The Offenders is a 1980 American No Wave color Super 8 film directed by Scott B and Beth B that, as a punk melodrama, post-modernly refers back to the 1921 melodrama film The Offenders directed by Fenwicke L. Holmes. It originally was presented as a serial that screened at Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club whereby each week the attendees paid for the making of next week's episodes.