Mudd Club

Overview

Four-floor downtown club, opened Halloween 1978 in a Tribeca loft owned by artist Ross Bleckner and co-founded by Steve Mass, Diego Cortez, and Anya Phillips. Through its 1983 close it was a downtown home for no wave and post-punk and a deliberate alternative to uptown's Studio 54.

The Mudd Club occupied the ground floor and basement of 77 White Street, a six-story 1888 brick warehouse in Tribeca, in a loft then owned by artist Ross Bleckner. Steve Mass (a Georgia native educated in philosophy and anthropology at Northwestern) opened it on Halloween night 1978, the B-52's playing for a reported $2.52, alongside art curator Diego Cortez and downtown scene figure Anya Phillips, who conceived the venture as 'an elegant place called the Molotov Cocktail Lounge.' Mass named the club for Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the physician who treated Lincoln's assassin, a joke about notoriety and complicity that fit the venue's sensibility. The space was unglamorous by uptown standards: a bar, unisex bathrooms, and a stairway running up through the floors. Within six months, People magazine called it 'New York's fly-by-night crowd' venue, comparing the atmosphere to 1920s Berlin cabaret. Talking Heads immortalized it by name in 'Life During Wartime' (1979): 'This ain't no Mudd Club, or CBGB'. The DJs on the ground floor, principally David Azarch, Anita Sarko, and Johnny Dynell, with Justin Strauss holding a weekly residency through roughly 1979–1980, played what they called the 'Anti Disco': punk rock, funk, James Brown, reggae, rockabilly, early rap, and early New Wave curiosities, with a sound system reportedly consulted on by Brian Eno. The sound was omnivorous and pointedly not disco — a rejection of the uptown, velvet-rope aesthetic. Live bookings ran to the full no wave and post-punk universe: DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, Rhys Chatham, Tuxedomoon, the Cramps, Klaus Nomi, Talking Heads, U2 (an early US show, reportedly fifteen people in attendance), Richard Hell, Bush-Tetras, and Jean-Michel Basquiat's band Gray. Performers included Screamin' Jay Hawkins emerging from a coffin. Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Basquiat painted the upstairs DJ booth for a party; Mass had it painted over the next day. The fourth floor hosted the most consequential program: a gallery space curated initially by Keith Haring, culminating in the landmark April 9–24, 1981 exhibition 'Beyond Words,' co-curated by Haring and Fab 5 Fred Braithwaite, which gathered outer-borough graffiti artists (Futura 2000, Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones) alongside downtown underground painters, one of the first institutional crossings of street art and gallery culture. Themed parties, including 'The Joan Crawford Mother's Day Celebration,' 'Combat Love,' and 'The Dead Rock Stars Rock N' Roll Funeral Ball,' anchored the calendar. Regular visitors included Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Madonna, William Burroughs, and Jim Jarmusch. Anya Phillips, co-founder, fashion designer (making pieces for Debbie Harry), and manager of James Chance and the Contortions, fell into dispute with Mass and left the venture. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1979 and died on June 19, 1981, age 26, her contributions largely unattributed for decades. The club declined as Mass found himself unable to compete financially with larger venues for live bookings; by early 1983, regulars noted 'hangers-on to the hangers-on.' It closed in spring 1983. In 2007 Creative Time erected a commemorative plaque on the building. The Stephen Mass Papers (MSS 592, 16.75 linear feet) (acquired by NYU's Fales Library in 2019) document the club in meticulous detail through calendars, notebooks, photographs, flyers, and Mass's unpublished memoir drafts; a separate Diego Cortez collection (RMM 8117) is held at Cornell's Rare and Manuscript Collections.

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