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
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.
