Basquiat’s world: Downtown NYC and the Mudd Club

“Down-tooown!” blasted from the radio in 1964, as Petula Clark sang about the irresistible attraction of Downtown, particularly “when you’re alone and life is making you lonely”, and how “when you’ve got worries all the noise and the hurry seem to help”. Since the singer was British, she probably wasn’t singing about New York City, but the song expresses what, 20 years later, could only have applied to one downtown in the world: Downtown Manhattan or Lower Manhattan, which became a melting pot of the arts at the end of the 1970s and the place-to-be. It was not only DJs that the clubs hosted; there were also live bands, performances, exhibitions, film screenings and fashion shows – and the fashion was of course not just on the stage, but also worn in fancy outfits.

The Mudd Club was the first nightclub in New York that also functioned as a gallery. The first club that “institutionalized” the melting pot culture that surrounded it and brought it together in one place. It wasn’t actually planned that way; initially all Mass had in mind was a disco for punks. However, what was intended from the outset was that the Mudd Club would be a counterpoint, the downtown antithesis of the “uptown chic”. It even adopted the very strict door policy of 54th Street, but turned it on its head so the “rich chic” was not welcome, “poor chic” had to be represented. The club welcomed a mixture of “local loft-dwelling artists and new wave glitterati”, as Anthony Haden-Guest put it in his book “The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night”.

In constant change

The downtown crowd consciously set out to be unpretentious. And it was precisely this that drew everyone from lawyers to suburban punks. The Downtown Manhattan scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s comprised a world of its very own. And it was a transient one, as the journalist and columnist Michael Musto describes in his homage to the district: Barely did you discover a new club than it was transformed into a pizzeria. But you only needed to wait 15 minutes and it became a club again. Roller discos suddenly turned into “Arab-Biker-Sushi-Bars”. Just because it worked out. There was a demand for lasting stimulation. Clubs became showrooms, American Legion offices became clubs.

There was cross-fertilization between the party and art scenes. More than ever, the art scene of the day was about an interdisciplinary, cross-media approach. Jean-Michel Basquiat was the perfect example of this. During his short life, he found inspiration in such diverse areas as jazz and anatomy books and was active in a broader variety of media than virtually any other artist. He sprayed poetic messages on the walls of Lower Manhattan, created installations and collages, painted objects like fridges or door frames, designed postcards and T-shirts, worked as an actor, played music with his band “Gray” and performed as a DJ. He was part of a new generation of artists that mixed different styles and materials during the late 1970s and early 1980s, frequently referred to as Punk Art or synonymously also New Wave Art.

Club, Gallery and meeting point of the scene

The Mudd Club was the home of this new trend, and it was here that everybody came, be it from SoHo, Tribeca or the East Village. The stage hosted punk and new wave bands, while the DJs played reggae, punk and power pop; Blondie followed by Carl Perkins followed by James Brown. The artists, the creatives formed a world of their own. In the background the recession raged, New York was bankrupt, and the art and gallery scene was virtually inaccessible to young artists. So they founded their own galleries and clubs. Artists moved away from SoHo to the East Village, and Steve Mass recognized their potential. He understood that they might have little money, but that they made up the scene. He let them into the club for free. Reputations were made in Downtown.

Be it blond nights, monster parties or 1960s revival parties, the Mudd Club quickly became one of the established greats in New York’s underground scene. All the more so when it took the place of such venerable clubs as CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas after they closed. It was considered hip, often even elite. Many of those who are famous today met here. Alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, not to mention Nan Goldin, musicians David Byrne and Lydia Lunch, and counter-tenor Klaus Nomi. It was here that Jim Jarmusch showed his first films. Madonna was a regular, and David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and The Clash eventually switched from “54” to the Mudd Club.