As I've mentioned several times here before, while I was too young to ever visit the place during its heyday, I've always been romanced by the story of The Mudd Club at 77 White Street. I've posted about it multiple times of course, everything from spotting James Chance sitting on its fabled stoop last year to tracing back the strange performance by Judas Priest on its comparatively intimate stage to finding out a former neighbor was now living in the iconic building's fourth floor. I routinely walk down Cortlandt Alley on my treks to work (often documenting same), and I'm always searching for that vanishing "sense of place" about the location.
Today, I noticed three arguably alarming developments.
- While it's always been in a shifting state of repair, the stretch of Cortlandt Alley between Canal Street and White Street is covered with the lattice-work of scaffolding, suggesting a rigorous makeover is underway, and probably one that will further erase the byway's signature mystique
- Evidently, there is a fuckin' musical about the halcyon days of the Mudd Club in production. Stop me if I'm wrong, but commemorating the Mudd Club in the form of musical theatre seems like the swiftest possible means of sucking any semblance of remaining coolness out of it.
- It seems that Seymour Stein, the music industry pioneer behind Sire Records and the forward-thinking individual who singularly fostered the careers of Mudd Club-regulars like Talking Heads, Madonna and the B-52s (among many, many others) is out of a job at Warner Bros. after 51 years.
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