Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

also produced by Eno) and the bass-heavy cut-andpaste
styles of early hip-hop acts like the Funky Four
Plus One and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five would provide sonic inspiration, appealing to
his eternal art school sensibility. Destri, the Blondie
keyboardist, and therefore a downtown Manhattan
New Wave god, would be his nocturnal tour guide.
“He had a driver named Tony and we’d go out to
nightclubs. It was a seedy underbelly of fun,” he says.
The pair and their respective entourages would hit
the uptown disco Hurrah and repair to the secret
back room, which housed a coke salon. But it was
downtown, in a year-old converted Tribeca loft called
the Mudd Club (a nod to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the
physician who treated Lincoln’s assassin, John
Wilkes Booth), where Bowie actually dug the new
breed in ’ 79, many of them stone Bowie disciples.
“All the people who graduated from CBGB’s would
take over the Mudd Club. That was just the period
when it was hopping. I was David’s ambassador to
these little bands,” Destri says. “He was really, really
interested in New Wave.”
“The Nomi thing was happening really strongly at
that moment that we first met Bowie,” Joey Arias
says today. “We were at the Mudd Club one night,
and we were upstairs on the top floor and everyone
was getting fucked up and drinking and laughing,
very after-hours. We were about to leave when
someone said, ‘There’s David Bowie sitting there.’
We just froze.”
“David saw them and said, ‘Oh, I gotta have these