9"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

The legendary Mudd Club. You probably couldn't get in.
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons partied with David Byrne and Lydia Lunch.
Uptown cognoscenti flirted with the children of the outer boroughs as they
brought the Wild Style to the City.

The downtown New York scene was more than punk, it was a mad
brilliant chaos of cheap rent and experimental art. The Mudd Club was its
nexus, the place that birthed the Eighties. Keith Haring claimed membership, while Andy Warhol was only a guest.
Debbie Harry learned to rap from Fab Five Freddy while Klaus Nomi
practiced arias and served home-cooked pastries.

The decadence lasted from 1979 to 1983 but artist
Richard Boch was there for every single moment. As the doorman of the legendary
Mudd Club he saw everything and remembers it all: "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. No Wave and
Post-Punk artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers living in a nighttime
world on the cusp of two decades. 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. "

"More
than the well-known doorman of the Mudd Club, Richard Boch played a pivotal
role in why it was the coolest club in the world back then. Richard was the
crowd curator, carefully letting in the right mix of wildly creative downtown
movers and shakers who made it our hangout, leaving the squares and the unhip
outside in the cold. Richard is now letting everyone into the Mudd Club by way
of this well-written book that details the who's who and all the fun we had
while infiltrating, changing and disrupting pop culture."

-- Fab 5 Freddy

"Oh, The Mudd Club! I may be older and wiser, but how I
miss those nights on the dance floor and in the bathrooms. And the music!
There was no other place like it on earth."

-- Chris Frantz / Talking Heads & Tom Tom Club

"A
jaw-dropping, deranged must-have. Boch's The Mudd Club is a visual and literary
orgy of delight, packed full of striking images and tales of glory and excess
from the late 70s/early 80s nightclub where he was kingpin." -- Paul Gorman / paulgormanis.com