Boch to the Future: The Mudd Club’s Doorman as Artist Today

Any trip down the memory lane of nightclubs must pass by the Mudd Club. It opened in October 1978 and was the best joint in town -- some say the best ever. When it closed in 1983, it had morphed from the chicest of places to a punk/hipster haven. Any visit to the Mudd, even as a memory, must go through a door manned by Richard Boch. Mudd was located below Canal at the end of an alley at 77 White Street. At the time it was unimaginable that people could live down there, as it was a domain of rats and bag people with frequent visits from the new culture of graffiti artists. The music was rock and roll, and the crowds were punks and rock stars and rock stars who were punks, plus an uptown crowd slumming for flesh or drugs. Movie stars came through with their apricot scarves and that rarest of commodities: cash. It was a time before we thought of AIDS, and only Betty Ford went to rehab. Orgies and drugs in tenement squats were a common end to an evening on the town. There were few designer labels, save for Trash & Vaudeville or Natasha or Levi’s. But everybody wanted to get into the Mudd Club.

The Mudd was packed out at 500 people, but it was really “the” 500 people. It’s hard to describe a time when you wouldn’t break a sweat when a David Bowie or Iggy or that ilk would walk by. I somehow managed to get in ... I was hanging hard with the Ramones back then. It was my bar rap and a very effective one. I made the place my home. Richard Boch let me in—maybe the only mistake he ever made out there. A downtown god for so many years, Richard has gone back to his passion—painting—and lives in upstate New York. He occasionally pops into New York City where he still maintains an apartment. We ate poor omelets while we poured through hours of memories. Richard helped define nightlife during an anything-goes era that seems as long ago as my youth.

When I did my top five clubs in New York, I got a lot of flak because I didn’t include Mudd Club. But if it’s not in my top five, it’s at least in my top seven. In my memory of the Mudd Club, the difference between it and the clubs now was that Mudd was a club based on artists and culture as much as any club that ever was. It was always based on the creativity of its crowd, which seems to be lost in the clubs today. You worked in the nightclub scene for a long time. How do you feel about what I’ve just said?
I think it’s true what you just said about the Mudd Club being very important to the art scene in New York, especially in lower Manhattan. I started working there in the late winter of ’79, and I stayed for about two years. I came a little less than six months after it opened. I had been working at a cabaret in SoHo and had been hanging out at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. going to shows and being in love with music all over again when CBGBs started happening. It was one of those happy accidents that I wound up at the Mudd Club.

There were many other people at the door at Mudd Club (you were the doorman) that I remember: Robert Molnar, Hattie Hathaway. Who else?
Gretchen, who took money on the inside; there was a guy name Joe Kelley who was a door/security person. ChiChi Valente. She was such a revelation. The first time I ever really met ChiChi, we just connected. I was so amazed by her.

When you were working the door, what was it you were looking for?
I was given essentially no direction by Steve Maas, the owner, when I started working there. My interview consisted of me coming to the bar one night and interrupting him. He had called me up to come and talk to him. So, I said hello, and he said, “Be here tomorrow night,” and he used me two nights a week, Saturdays and Sundays. He hired me because certain people weren’t able to get in, and he was under the impression that I knew everybody, which was not really the truth at the time. I knew who a lot of people were, and I had a lot of friends downtown, but I went the next night and I wound up working seven nights a week for the next two years. Maybe five nights a week after the first year.