I have publicly held my tongue when asked what i think of Tim Lawrence's book,Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983 . I decided to wait until his whirlwind publishing release and the events around it has been completed to break that silence and answer what many have asked me,
Tim's book reminds me of many a straight male outsider trying to get into one of my clubs. Given the criteria I had developed for the mix inside a club he would have gotten the hi sign from Houi, or Pat Wadsley or Chuck Nanny etc
Although I wish he had stuck to the original intent of his book: a documentation of the Rise of House music, he did not. . Yes, he gets many things right and also wrong. I had a very difficult time with his wanting to believe dead people as well as people whose substance abuse corrupted their memory as well as steady stream of confabulation.
Lawrence seemed to me to have an obsessive interest in Rudolf Pieper and the Mudd Club. He diminishes my conceptual input into a new nightlife first manifested at HURRAH and later when I asked Pieper to join me at Danceteria,1 and 2, BLITZ, Peppermint Lounge, Modern Classic Studio 54,,and post-Pieper ON THE THE WATERFRONT. He usually describes me as simply a booker of talent. Yes I was the booker of talent as well as art, music, performance art, spoken word and fashion. Yes I was the talent buyer as well as conceptualist and publicity and advertising point person in all of my clubs,
I had been introduced to Pieper by Sean Cassette, who with Mark Kamins , were the principal DJs at Hurrah. Cassette told me he had a friend who was trying to open a club in SoHo. He told me his friend was desperate to get his green card and to invest and open a business was one way. Pieper apparently could not legally go back to Berlin and did not want to return to South America where his parent had moved to in the last days of the Third Reich. I remember meeting Rudolf in the raw space of a manufacturing building on Crosby Street. We talked about the aesthetics. What he was trying to create was was based on the lighting and theatrical environment ideas of the Russian constructivist Karl Meyerhold. I knew of Meyerhold from my years of study with Lee Strasberg.
Pieper was having trouble getting residential community support because his business partner, a Soho based real estate developer had threatened the wrong person,.She was Lee Gillant, a lesbian opera singer who was a part of the Judson Church artist community, She lived in the building next door to the raw space,
I knew Lee and I knew people on the Community Board as had participated in public sessions on community issues other than nightlife.
I agreed to collaborate with Pieper on the concept for the club and also help with the neighbors and the Community Board. It was at our second meeting with Pieper I came up with the name for the club : PRAVDA based on the official Soviet newspaper. The word translated as TRUTH.
I succeeded in convincing Lee that the club would be an avant arts performance space and bar, But the real estate developer again physically threatened her. You don't do that to a butch opera singing lesbian. She complained loud and clear to the State Liquor Board and was successful in getting the liquor lic turned down. We had a two night run with PRAVDA . It became a legendary opening and closing.
Months later I asked him to join me at the first Danceteria when I was offered the space, I wanted him because I did not want any of my clubs categorized to be categorized as gay only clubs. Which they have been to this day by people like rock journalist Andy Schwartz. I know this because when Schwartz was writing about the history of nightlife in NYC and live music for the ROCK 'n' ROLL Hall of Fame, he excluded Hurrah, Danceteria the new Peppermint Lounge.
I knew Andy and asked him why they were excluded. He answered me : "Because we are not including gay clubs." "Really?" I said to Andy. I remeber telling that was never my intent. It was my intent to have clubs that were a mix of peple who shared the same cultural aesthetic and curiosity. I made it very clear to him I was conceiving of clubs that would have a mix of sexual orientation, gender and race.. I told him my door policy was based on creating a space safe for gay people and women and the men who liked to be with them. I told him I achieved this not onlu by who was admit to the club but how the same criteria was in place in the hiring of a employess from door people and bartenders to security that reflected that same kind of person I wanted as a customer. I told Andy because of the success of this formula we had no fights or sexual harrassement or rapes in any of my clubs, And I remember telling him many, many people found friendship, relationships and yes exual adventures in my clubs that were coinsentual. I asked him why he defined this as "gay"? He gave me no answer.
At first Pieper told me he was not interested "In going above 14th street." I knew I also needed someone who could deal with the "backroom boys". While the Mudd is important as an art world insider social club, the real creative people behind the Mudd conceptually who Steve Mass depended on in the beginning were Diego Cortez, the art dealer, and his best friend Anya Phillips, the partner of musician James Chance and It girl and art dealer Patti Astor as well as the original door people Richard Boch and Robert Molnar
Among the Insiders that I suggested to Tim to talk to were Francine Hunter (Jungle Red) and the photographer Dustin Pittman. Tim never talked to them .
I finally gave up on trying to explain to him his errors ,He had that academic attitude .. don't trust the original source but listen to the people around that source . He also had that outsider groupie bias that made him vulnerable for confabulation that comes with the turf.
I am not alone .. Blue and Glenn O'Brien and the real door people of the Mudd Club share, to different degrees, my critique of the book.
When the MoMA event was being put together , I asked to be on the panel . He said it was not possible. He blamed MoMA I think it says something about his pov that he did not see the importance of having a gay person on that panel.
As to Ruth Polsky, I hired her as my assistant at HURRAH because I needed someone when the unexpected success made my job as conceptualist, talent buyer and publicist too demanding for one person. Since I believe in mentoring women in jobs men usually turfed out, i hired her, She was a music journalist who shared a curiosity and ear for the kinds of music I did. Yes I think it is fact that I did a good job of training her , To her credit she always called me and told me she had been offered a job to replace me as a booker when I left or was removed from a club I had created: . Hurrah, Danceteria, Peppermint Lounge ..always. I said to her, as I did to other employees I had hired like Houi etc. "Thank you Ruth for asking , but you need a job . I trained you well . I have no desire to demand you quit, We both care about the music , I just hope if the next club I do, you will come and join me when it is ready." . I remember going to her burial service in Tom's River NJ.
Finally let me say I like Tim Lawrence personally which complicates my critique of his scholarship. I have problems based on my own personal experiences with this book and his previous one on Arthur Russell.
I also am not a person who lives in nostalgia.
But if a period of time which critically impacts my life is in fact reported incorrectly,I do feel an obligation to speak directly to the errors in the reportage of which I have personal knowledge and experience. I can only speak to what I know as misrepresentation from a personal observation and experience posiution.
I tried in a number of areas to give my experiential information to Tim eg: The hiring of Mark Kamins as a DJ at Hurrah, Afrika Bambaataa and Hurrah, The naming of Danceteria, the hiring of David King to design the Danceteria logo and signifier, the concept and design of the video lounge are just some of the examples. It became so frustrating to me that despite my telling him what was my experience of what actually happened with these example as well as others , Tim reject my explanations and relied on secondary resources.
Yes, Tim was confronted with a landscape full of subjective memory. I have chosen to not enumerate all the areas of factual dispute I have with Tim here.
Finally I asked to him to remove me from the book . Repeatedly. He refused.
I also recognize that from his position as an outsider who love dance clubs and in particular NY DJs of the period he dived into a very deep pool of conflicting memory and personal bias. Sometimes filter through conscious confabulations and self-aggrandizement and the human fact of how memory actually works. As a person who played a critical role in the period he covered and who was substance abuse free, I felt my recollection in many ways carried credibility more than a fragmentary memory, of a club goer or participant. Lawrence and you may feel differently.
The book Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983 exists , It makes real a very vital creative time in nightlife in NYC . It is his version. Not mine, Not, in my view, definitive.
Because Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983 does capture a critical time in NYC nightlife and the impact of the diversity of culture and participants, particularly the role of the DJ in NYC clubland in a moment of cultural and political importance, it is an important cultural history despite what ever flaws are contained in it.
