A Nearly Complete Oral History of the Pyramid Club
This is PAPER 1984: a celebration of the year we were born, edited by Mickey Boardman, in honor of our 40th anniversary. This series looks back on the important cultural forces at work in 1984, many of which are still reverberating today. The club, music, food, fashion and gay scenes all produced future legends that year, despite the creative community being decimated by AIDS.
The Pyramid Club is the stuff of downtown New York legend. In the 1980s, a tiny little dive bar on Avenue A near Tompkins Square Park became ground zero for the exploding New York drag scene. It was punk. It was rock ‘n roll. It was gay, straight and everything in between. It was New York nightlife at its best. It was the only place you could see the Beastie Boys one night, Steve Buscemi in an avant-garde performance art piece the next night and Lady Bunny wearing a dress made of room divider beads go-go dancing on the bar with RuPaul and Tabboo! the next. It was a time when apartments were cheap and creative misfits from around the world came to NYC to reinvent themselves among their own kind.
We spoke to the managers, the drag queens, the performers and the devoted customers who helped make the Pyramid a chapter in nightlife history. The images for this story are all from The Drag Explosion, a new book by Linda Simpson, a drag queen/writer/photographer/historian who was there for all of it. Simpson tells PAPER: “After presenting The Drag Explosion for several years as a slideshow and getting great response, it only made sense to display my photos in a book. I think my photos document a really exciting and vital part of drag queen history. I’d like the rest of the world to also experience and appreciate that special time.”
To document this special time in drag history, PAPER collected stories of The Pyramid Club from the people who made it: the managers, the performers and the patrons. Something they all agree upon is there has never been another place that incubated, perpetuated and celebrated kooky creativity and drag excellence quite like The Pyramid.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Sister Dimension, drag legend and manager of Pyramid
I had hitchhiked to New York with Bobby Bradley – and we got jobs at Interferon, which was owned by the owners of Danceteria. We kept saying, “We could do a club, we could do a club”. We were living in the East Village, so we were always trolling around there looking for an opportunity. We came upon the Pyramid Club, which, at the time, had a jukebox in the back and no customers. We were talking to the owner, Richie Hajguchik, about putting together a one-night party that was going to be about the buildup and breakdown of civilization. While we were negotiating this for weeks, throughout the process we would hang out at St. Mark’s Bar and Grill. We were coming out of St. Mark’s, and we found an envelope on the sidewalk, and inside the envelope was about $6,000. We thought it was drug money, but we ran home and ended up buying the sound system for the Pyramid and securing the deal with Richie.
John Kelly, performance artist famous for channeling Joni Mitchell
Bobby Bradley told me he was managing a new club on Avenue A, The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, and asked if I would perform something on opening night. I told him I was working on “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,” and he said okay. So, in December of 1981, The Pyramid opened with a huge party called “On The Range.” The Hostess was Anne Craig. There was a slide show by Ivan Galietti. The DJ was Walter Durkacz. Phoebe Legere and I performed.
The night seemed like more of a party than anything else. Artists and neighborhood people who loved art showed up for the birth of a new ship. It was electric. At that point there was no “stage,” just a runner-like platform with a black, wrought iron railing running the side and the back wall of the room in the back where the dance floor was. There was no dressing room, just a basement with a dirt floor. That would all soon change.
Sister Dimension
We hired Ethyl Eichelberger, John Kelly and a bunch of drag queens and punks to be our doormen, and then we reenacted the cryogenic resurrection of Walt Disney. The mission statement was to create a freak magnet.
Bobby and I had both come from South Carolina, and we were both rejects. We were determined to create an environment where we could be ourselves and feel safe. We didn’t relate to the gay culture. I mean, The Saint was literally three blocks away and we were perpetually denied entrance for being drag queens or freaks or non-determined gender. We were running around in skirts with tinker toys on top, so they hated us for that. We were punk and had too much energy.
Michael Musto, NYC-based journalist
The management was usually totally nutty and fun, whether it be Bobby Bradley or Brian Butterick (AKA Hattie Hathaway). Brian was especially encouraging to anyone who had an idea for a show, greenlighting any fabulous freak who had a dream. In contrast to the slicker uptown clubs like Palladium and Limelight, the Pyramid was a dress barn for out of town drag queens to try out new ensembles and new material.
Linda Simpson, drag queen, magazine publisher, drag historian
The best part of the Pyramid is that it was like a theater. There was a stage elevated several feet above the dancefloor with a good sound system and lighting. Plus, there was a basement dressing room that was quite roomy with big mirrors and lockers for people to store their stuff. In order to get to the stage, you would have to climb up a ladder. For a while there was even a phone that connected the dressing room to the DJ booth. It was very off-off-off-off-off Broadway.
John Kelly
It’s all in the name – Pyramid, as in ancient Egypt – landmark, tomb, iconic destination, place of worship. The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge attracted everyone: gay, straight, punk, rock ‘n’ roll, multi-racial, drag, trans. It was inclusive, non-ageist and devoid of attitude. It was at the core of the East Village scene of the early 1980s, a pivotal cultural moment that was really the last gasp of genuine bohemian culture in New York. The thing that allowed this to happen was that perfect storm of cheap rents and affordable local food that attracted artists, cultural outsiders and freaks. This was pre-careerism (what career?), pre-selfie era (and what Joni Mitchell refers to as “ego puke”) and before the gentrification that required artists without trust funds to become careerist – and the spread of what the novelist John Horne Burns referred to as the “Loathsome values of a civilization in which everything is measured in terms of commercial success.”
Sister Dimension
We consider ourselves multicultural and multi-disciplined, so it was first and foremost a nightclub. We were only doing Friday nights for the first four weeks, and then it went to three weekends, and then it became seven nights a week. So, we had seven nights of programming – Monday we would have theater, Tuesday we would have punk, Wednesday we would have art or tattoo clubs, Friday and Saturday were mainstream, and then Sunday was Whispers, which was our gay night. We would have drag clubs, and we also had the bar dancers. So, I think the whole seven years was equally memorable, but obviously Whispers was a very important part of the club, and that’s where so much of our integration with other nightclubs came through. We traced our lineage to Area and Mudd Club. We had the Beastie Boys debut there, we had the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we had the Bronski Beat. Once we had a night that was a tribute to Diana Vreeland, and she sent us a telegram, and I still have that telegram.
Barbara Patterson-Lloyd
It had this perverse and dark sense of humor that celebrated the trashing of everything. It felt like a clubhouse with a “let’s put on a show tonight” spirit from a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie and since it wasn’t Carnegie Hall, you could try anything. All these kooks with fabricated names and personalities were a part of it. It did feel like it defined its own little reality that sort of recognized and rejected the culture at large.
Scott Lifshutz, artist/co-founder of Wigstock, the annual drag festival in Tompkins Square Park 1984-2005
It was an awesome mix of dive bar, avant-garde theater, hipster hideout, drag club, gogo bar, live music venue, discotheque and sleazy gay/bi-curious pickup joint. It was literally all those things.
Sister Dimension
We just knew that if we were going to have a club, we needed to have drug dealers inside the club. They were right on the ready, right outside the door. [Laughing]. Heroin was very prevalent in Alphabet City at the time. I mean, my rent was $150 a month. Now mind you, anybody could break in and there were people living in the streets at that time. But, it was cheap and people like myself who had no place to be in their home state or town could hitchhike to get a job as a waiter, or artist, or freelancer, and be living the high life and doing the nightclub. We only charged $3 at the door.
Steve Buscemi, award-winning actor
The Pyramid was a hotspot for me and my friends because you could catch weird and brilliant performance pieces and amazing drag shows in a fairly intimate space, and then dance all night or hang out at the bar.
Tabboo!, artist and drag performer
In the early ‘80s there was a huge movement in culture called New Wave/New Romantic. I was living in Boston, having just graduated from art school doing Xerox art and drag performance art shows with my friends… very au courant. I was working in a restaurant where the cooks were telling me about how they had gone to a hot new club in NYC called the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge that sounded like everything I was doing at the moment. This must have been December 1981. Six short months later, I had moved to New York, and on day one I met Jean-Michel Basquiat and Anne Craig doing very similar shows in a gallery. She said, “I book the shows at Pyramid on Sundays called Cafe Iguana. You should come by and check it out!” KISMET! I had come to the Big Apple a year earlier and tried to get into Studio 54 and the guy at the door took one look at my get up and told me to go to someplace called Hurrah, it would be more “up my alley” (meaning New Wave, not disco) So when a year later I show up to the door of the Pyramid, it was a completely different scenario. Anne was there chatting with Klaus Nomi (who I had heard of way up in Boston) who had just come off the aluminum foil-covered stage. I was home and they welcomed me in. I believe I performed there the very next Sunday!
John Kelly
The Pyramid was started and run by gay men. In 1981, it embodied the kind of drag that was more punk than traditional – really a reaction against the West Village disco clone thing. This reactionary aesthetic was also reflected in the huge diversity of the performers, the audience, and the people that just hung out. It was really more of an art scene than a traditional drag scene per se. It was drag for ourselves, not for hetero culture, not for money, not attempting to break into pop culture. It was drag as a punk gesture, not clown-like, very genderfuck, a sinister sisterhood of damaged glamor.
That changed somewhat when the southern contingent arrived: Lady Bunny and RuPaul. They contributed a perhaps more traditional drag aesthetic that was already hugely popular and this also made the club itself a bit more popular. It became more identified as a drag venue, and as a result a bit less renegade. Or maybe it was just the trajectory of any success.
Lypsinka, performance legend
Before the Pyramid there was Club 57 at 57 St. Mark’s Place. It’s important because Bobby Bradley – one of the creators of Pyramid – said he wanted it to be a cross between Club 57 and The Anvil. The Anvil was a gay club all the way west on 14th St. (Amazingly, the buildings for all three clubs are still standing.) The Anvil had drag shows on the first floor and “he-nanigans” in the basement. Club 57 had a different event almost every night.
I bumped into John Sex one day in 1984, and he encouraged me to perform again. I took him up on his offer to see his show at the Pyramid, a place I had heard about but never attended. I had seen ads and promotions for the Pyramid, primarily in The Village Voice, which I read every week.
At the Pyramid, John introduced me to “Sister Dimension” and I was given a booking on the spot, no questions asked, since they trusted John. That first trip to the club was a Saturday night, not the “gay night” on Sundays. The booking I got was for a Sunday. At that point the gay Sunday event was called Café Iguana. Later, it was called Whispers.
The Pop Tarts, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, pop stars turned TV producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race
It became a second home, really. We don’t remember how we heard about it. It was like a gravitational pull sucked us in! It was the ultimate hole-in-the-wall on Avenue A and 7th street. There was a sort of lounge in the basement. It had that rising damp smell. Behind the lounge was a cramped dressing room with a spiral staircase that performers would have to negotiate to reach the stage.
And it was a queer melting pot. There wasn’t a particular type. You aren’t even allowed today to use the words we inclusively called ourselves, but – trigger warning – it was the dykes, trannies, sissies, drag queens, gender-benders, punks, all together and thinking nothing of it. The all-out inclusiveness meant you’d just as likely be rubbing shoulders with an heiress as a hustler.
Sister Dimension
We had about 5,000 sheets of Superman acid in the safe, and after the club closed, we would pick people and take out the bubble machine and have acid parties, and that was how Wigstock was born. One night, we had the bubble machine, everybody was tripping, and we all went out into the safe there and said, “Let’s take it to the streets.”
Scott Lifshutz
Late one night in the spring of ’84, a drunken group of friends seeking more diversions closed the Pyramid Club and traipsed over to Tompkins Square Park a half block away, six-packs in tow. Brian Butterick, Michael “Kitty” Ullman, Wendy Wild, Lady Bunny and a few members of the Fleshtones were horsing around in the bandshell when someone (no one remembers who, it’s all such a blur) came up with the idea of putting on a show there — a day-long drag festival. Wendy came up with the name Wigstock, but it was Bunny who was foolhardy enough to take the idea seriously. She went recklessly ahead and got the necessary permits… then tried to figure out how to put on a festival.
John Kelly
The invention of the Wigstock Festival in Tompkins Square Park in 1984 galvanized the true Pyramid aesthetic, at least for a few years before it became exclusively drag. The types of performances at the first Wigstock ran the gamut from rock ‘n’ roll and punk bands to the bizarre DADA-esque stand-up-comedy routines of Barbara Patterson Lloyd, but really I’d say it was maybe 50% drag. There was probably more drag — or at least wigs — in the audience than on stage. I wouldn’t call that showbiz, the whole thing felt like a more subversive gesture – more gender-fuck punk than drag race. Once drag became popular, it got watered down, lost its spice of menace and morphed into entertainment for heterosexuals. Subversive drag, like the idea of “camp,” was never meant to be understood by the masses. The Pyramid had invented its own version of the blues.
FIRST TIME AT PYRAMID
Barbara Patterson-Lloyd, avant-garde drag comedian and dancer
My friend and later “performance art” partner Byron Suber took me. The show included the Pop Tarts featuring International Chrysis and a beachball. I remember Tabboo! running around the club in a lime-green, scoop-back evening gown that revealed butt crack. I think it might have been the first time I saw Bunny, who was dancing on the bar in a mini-skirt made from room divider beads — although that might have been the second time I went.
Tangella, drag queen and Pat Field salesgirl
[My first night at Pyramid] was Pride ’84. I had just fell off the turnip truck from Texas. I had a cute outfit on & they swept me right in. I was in Wonderland. I’d never heard of it. I was just following a huge crowd that befriended me that day. Ethyl Eichelberger… and me! Someone put me up on the bar and said, “Dance, girl!”
Billy Beyond, DJ, model, gender illusionist
My first trip to Pyramid was for Whispers, which was the Sunday night party there. The year was 1985. This was a mostly gay night with DJ Sister Dimension playing a style of music that included Italo, Euro and classic disco along with somethings akin to sleaze and what some knew as “morning music.” Your emcees for the evening were the legendary comedy duo, Hapi (“I’m happy, you’re gay”) Phace and “T.A. Double-B Double-O ooh,” Tabboo! Joshua Jordan took me there the first Sunday after we met and if I was in town, I was there every Sunday after that.
David Ilku, actor and half of performance duo The Dueling Bankheads
What really stood out to me that night was in the basement there was a short film being shown with Tabboo! and Hapi Phace in it. Tabboo! kept shoving a piece of corn on the cob up her butt and repeating something like “Oooh, it’s so corny!”
THE EAST VILLAGE IN THE ’80s AND ’90s
Linda Simpson
There were a lot of artsy types living in the East Village back then, because the neighborhood had fairly cheap rents. So there was a creative spirit that was manifested in all sorts of ways, including drag, which in some ways was an off-shoot of performance art. But the drag scene wasn’t very cerebral. It was about having fun and dressing up in thrift-store outfits and entertaining your friends. Back then, drag was pretty much scorned everywhere else in the world, but the East Village queens were transforming something old and stale into a wildly creative form of expression.
Billy Beyond
The East Village was a dump. If you were poor or struggling, you could live there. When you don’t have money for a cab, you walk… to the Pyramid. Regulars and locals were probably let in for free and the beer was cheap. Generally, if you bought one, you got another for free with a wink. You didn’t need money to feel better when you left. As far as a “drag scene” there, the whole scene was so much more than just drag itself. Being in drag wasn’t really enough to get you over. I mean, you expressed yourself with your costume however you liked…male, female, gender-fuck, half pony — whatever — but it was your talent that brought you renown and respect, and that had to be earned. There were a lot more skinheads and punks than there were drag queens or gays in the East Village in the mid ‘80s.
The Pop Tarts
It was more about the absence of things than the presence of anything. There were no high-end stores. No aspirational lofts. The Christadora building was a burnt-out hulk. Rent was cheap. The emptiness was filled with possibilities.
Most importantly, there was no social media. I don’t think any of us really noticed at the time, but even though we were all doing our different things, we were all in it together. A queer hodgepodge. It’s just so different to today’s situation, where we’re fractured into splintered factions pitted against each other. Sometimes it seems the emphasis is on conflict instead of creativity.
Barbara Patterson-Lloyd
I think it was cheaper to live in the East Village than practically anywhere else in the city, and a group of gays with artistic leanings ended up there who shared similar stories and who were able to laugh at themselves and the culture we grew up in. Drag in those days really did seem radical and defiant. Ronald Reagan was president, and I couldn’t think of a better way to say, “No thank you.” It was hard not to thumb your nose at all the pious conservative nonsense of the time.
Scott Lifshutz
The East Village had been home to artists, squatters and radical hippies for decades, in no small part because rents were cheap. There was also a new generation of gays moving to New York, and though the West Village was still the hub of gay activity, none of the young, artsy gays could afford to live there. I think it’s as simple as that.
Lypsinka
Looking back, although it was a nightspot where there was drinking and drugging going on, it was also populated by smart people. Smart management, smart audience. Smart and sophisticated and hip. And, indeed, it did combine the “Mickey-Judy-let’s-put-on-a-show-with-no-budget” excitement that permeated Club 57, and the illicit, forbidden feel of The Anvil. It was very intelligent and even analytical to make that combo, and it worked. The neighborhood also was illicit and scary, which added to the fun and the danger. Danger can be intoxicating and thrilling. The East Village ‘80s scene has been compared to Paris in the 1920s, a time and place of exciting work in the arts and culture in general. I’m guessing that’s an apt comparison.
Dee Finley, club personality
I always said the island of Manhattan was already a special place, sacred native land, and the Pyramid Club was once a space where the “two-spirit people” performed powerful sacred ceremonies.
THE PERFORMERS
Michael Musto
A former Polish beer hall became a ragtag home for drag queens and performance artists way before the whole drag scene became slick and marketed. The shows catered to an audience that got the references–classic sitcoms, jingles, pop songs and occasionally politics, too. It was all very winky and lively, and all done with a wig and a prayer. There was also some serious performance art done there, for example by John Jesurun, whose serial Chang in a Void Moon changed the place’s tone and ran for about a year.
Steve Buscemi
I loved performing there in John Jesurun’s episodic Chang in a Void Moon with an always eclectic cast including John Kelly, Frank Maya, Valerie Charles, Ruth Gray, Anna Kohler, John Hagan, Donna Herman and Mark Boone Junior.
We’d do two shows every Monday night. The early performance was always a hair-raising experience, because in many cases we were barely ready for an audience, as John always had lots of fast-paced dialogue sprinkled with non-sequiturs and amazing visuals that required precise lighting cues.
During the break between shows, it was too easy to have a few beers at the bar, which made the second show even more interesting. It was exciting to do because John had us positioned throughout the whole space, not just the stage, and in many scenes we were on the floor right next to the audience — who usually had a few drinks in them as well.
Boone and I also appeared in Kestutis Nakas’ serialized production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with Ann Magnuson and the legendary Bill Rice. We did one act a week, blood bags continually bursting from violent deaths in midnight shows in front of a raucous audience.
Sister Dimension
Now, what set the Pyramid part apart from every other club I’ve ever been to in my life is that we treated our artists, once they were booked, with respect. We had a light person full-time and a stage manager full-time. When you came in you were greeted, hosted to the dressing room and provided for with drinks. As soon as you came down off that stage, you were paid – cash in your hand the minute you came off the stage, that was our guiding principle. Lady Bunny could come by and do an early set and then go off to do another later set at another club, and that was fine. We had proper lighting, music and sound for all the acts.
Michael Musto
Among the highlights were zany shows by the Now Explosion (a psychedelic Atlanta-based rock group who entered through “the world’s largest vagina”), RuPaul (singing “Sex Freak” and doing Diana Ross-style patter), Lypsinka, aka John Epperson, starring in “Ballet of the Dolls” (a Jackie Susann satire), John Sex bumping and grinding through his Vegas lounge lizard parody act and John Kelly as Dagmar Onassis, Maria Callas’ needy fictional daughter.
The Pop Tarts
Christina, a German trans artist, was a very “altered states” queen. She was always staggering around out of her mind on drugs with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Anyway, one night she was performing. As usual it was a very recherche performance and, as usual, not to the audience’s taste. Suddenly she takes the microphone stand and smashes it on the head of one of her hecklers. Blood everywhere. Police. Think she left the stage in handcuffs. Marilyn Manson played her in “Party Monster.”
Sister Dimension
The bands would come and bring their tapes in, and there were always more tapes than we could ever accommodate. So, when someone got closer in the running, we would give them what we called “The Disco Test.” Most of our bands were “punksters” and “rocksters,” as you know. We would get them to come down into the basement during office hours, and we would lock them in this tiny closet with Bryan and I, and we would have strobe lights and a disco ball in there, and we would make them stand in there and listen to Donna Summer while we sprayed them with obnoxious perfumes. [Laughing]. If they passed that test, they would get into the final running for the booking.
Billy Beyond
Flight 101 had six of us as stewardesses onboard an imaginary Saturday night flight that was interrupted by the bloody beating down of protesters in front of the club during the legendary Tompkins Square Riots. Stewardess Hattie on the mic explaining that we were “not yet cleared for landing and would be circling for another hour” in order to keep the crowd inside from panicking due to the fact that the front gates had been locked by the police and we were all now trapped. That’s a pretty clear memory. Again, blood being a factor as we sat in the windows watching policemen with their badges covered bashing bloody heads in beyond the glass. Bunny posing with the mounted policemen afterwards, simultaneously hilarious and hideous.
Steve Buscemi
My absolute favorite memory of the Pyramid was watching the beautiful, statuesque, and hilariously funny Ethyl Eichelberger periodically dancing in full drag, impossibly tall wig and eight-inch heels — on top of the bar. It was completely joyful, mesmerizing and awe-inspiring.
Lypsinka
I came to realize that the Pyramid was the 1980s equivalent of what the Continental Baths had been for Bette Midler in the early 1970s — a springboard to something bigger. I don’t remember what I performed at my first performance, however.
“Ballet of the Dolls” played the Pyramid in December 1985. When “gay cancer” was in the news, I got focused on various goals I had wanted to achieve. One of those goals was to write that show and get it produced. I wrote the book, music and lyrics, played the piano in the
wings, and made a cameo in the show as “Jonathan Susann.” I financed the production and it was presented under the auspices of TWEED. It played 6 performances: two Thursdays, two Fridays and two Sundays. We thought it wise to avoid the Saturday night crowd, even though we played early in the evening. Sister Dimension was eager to have theater at the space and purchased “gold” folding chairs with red “velvet” seats. She was so pleased with how it went she asked me to write another show. I was happy to be asked, because it meant I was no longer going to her with my hat in my hand! So, I wrote Dial “M” for Model, which played in the fall of 1986, also early evening. In 1987 it moved to La Mama ETC for four performances, and at that time it was also featured on “Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes,” was reviewed by a theater critic at The New York Times, and I got a one-night gig at La Mama to do a full-length Lypsinka performance, so you can see how I saw Pyramid as a springboard.
Linda Simpson
One of the most fantastic parts about the Pyramid is that there were go-go dancers on the bar, who were often just as big an attraction as the main performers. Most of them were drag queens, and they treated go-go dancing as an art form, each with their own style. Bunny was especially hysterical with all sorts of ridiculous expressions. Because the place had high ceilings, it allowed for even tall queens like RuPaul to dance. I got up on the bar a few times, but I always found it very harrowing. One false move in your high heels and you’d land head-first on the ice machine.
Scott Lifshutz
I saw what I think was Todd Haynes’ first screening of his first film, The Karen Carpenter Story, all stop-action animation with Barbie Dolls. I remember it feeling important at the time, like he was going somewhere.
The week The Now Explosion arrived in town was memorable because they had RuPaul and Lady Bunny in tow as backup dancers. They all drove up from Atlanta in a van. I missed their show that week but half of them stayed in town and they all became a part of the scene: Larry Tee, Lahoma Van Zandt, Lady Clare, Russ Trent and Eloise “Champagne” Montague Mellencamp.
CELEBRITY SPOTTING AT PYRAMID
Michael Musto
Nelson Sullivan was there all the time, documenting things with his camera, and Tom Rubnitz showed his witty videos starring rising artists like Ann Magnuson. Drop-ins included Warhol, Debbie Harry and Sylvia Miles, but they were hardly stampeded; everyone was a star at Pyramid.
Linda Simpson
A friend of mine who had made a movie with River Phoenix brought him one night. He seemed amused to be meeting drag queens and be at a gay party. Another celeb spotting was the lead singer from the band Right Said Fred, right after their big hit “I’m So Sexy” had come out. But I guess the place was too much of a dump for him because he only stayed a few minutes.
John Kelly
We were the celebrities. When the place started to get written up in press like The New York Times and any celebrities showed up — they weren’t worshiped or treated differently, but were simply welcomed to join in the revelry. I recall that one night, Nina Hagen was turned away at the door, not sure why. Other times I recall seeing her there, and she even mentioned us in one of her songs. Madonna used to dance there before she became famous because her friend and roommate Martin Burgoyne was there a lot.
Billy Beyond
My best memory is of coming into the basement one afternoon for office hours (5 PM to 8 PM), unlocking the door and finding a gorgeous German woman staring into a TV with no reception that was all snow and blaring white noise.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Nina Hagen?”
“Yes.” She sat, not moving, still staring into the screen. She must have been locked in there all night since I was the first one down there that day..
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Communicating vis zee aliens.” She said, still staring.
I left her to it, and not long after that she was gone.
Barbara Patterson-Lloyd
I once saw Judd Nelson. I also saw Allen Ginsberg in the dressing room completely thrilled by Olympia. The crowd was different on different nights. Although a lot of the time it was possible to find the whole spectrum — from queens to nihilistic post-punk squatters, and from straight-edge people to persons with serious substance abuse issues.
Scott Lifshutz
Andy Warhol came a few times. His personal assistant Benjamin Liu was a regular so he brought him around.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Sister Dimension
Club promoter Chip Duckett killed us with his “Mars Needs Men” party at Mars. That was the end, the total end. We just lost our customers. Our engine was Sunday night, and everybody went to Mars. We still had loyalty from people, but we were no longer trendy. We had been open for seven years. All good things have to come to an end, I guess.
Lypsinka
When Sister and Hattie left the Pyramid, in 1989, the built-in Sunday night audience disappeared. I stopped performing there. I seem to remember going to the Pyramid in the ‘90s a couple of times as an audience member – to see Flloyd perform with Blacklips Performance Cult. But the last time I was onstage at the Pyramid was in 1990 or 1991 and it was not for a performance. Probably 1991. Steven Meisel wanted to do a fashion photo shoot for Allure and Italian Vogue. The idea was: who would be in the Warhol world now? So he asked me to be in it, along with Christy Turlington, Zaldy, George Wayne and others. There was a model named Ingy, who was a ringer for Edie Sedgwick. Formidable Polly Allen Mellen (from Condé Nast) was the wardrobe stylist on the shoot. I was getting ready in the dressing room downstairs and she came in and demanded, “Lypsinka, what are you going to wear?” I loved that. It was so odd to see her and other Condé Nast-types in this place where a couple of years earlier you were more likely to see around midnight denizens such as The Lady Bunny and Tangella DeVille. But this was an early morning photo shoot. I think Francois Nars was there, and Garren. The hottest people in the fashion photo biz at the time. Steven had the stage covered in silver foil like the old Warhol Factory. RuPaul (who had been a Pyramid regular) heard about the shoot, and came in and sat on the floor behind Meisel and said, “It’s so glamorous.” And, indeed, it was.
Photography: Linda Simpson
This is PAPER 1984: a celebration of the year we were born, edited by Mickey Boardman, in honor of our 40th anniversary. This series looks back on the important cultural forces at work in 1984, many of which are still reverberating today. The club, music, food, fashion and gay scenes all produced future legends that…