As he was always broke I asked him to make some paintings and drawings so he could begin to make some money from his art. I then realised that he was a visual art genius. “We were friends for almost a year until I saw his SAMO graffiti. “He looked very unusual a black guy with a blond Mohawk and he was dancing beautifully,” Cortez recalled. It was on the Mudd Club’s sweaty dancefloor that Cortez met a young Basquiat, then spraying his spiky, pictorial graffiti under the moniker SAMO across the Lower East Side. Its atmosphere was captured by Frank Zappa in his 1981 song titled after the club: “They’re really dancin’, they’re on auto-destruct / On the floor, on the pipe, bouncin’ off-a the wall.” Yet what People magazine described as the “punks, posers and the ultra-hip” of the city turned up: the B-52s played the opening night and the Ramones and Talking Heads followed. In 1978 he co-founded the Mudd Club, a multistorey venue of exposed brick and shabby red velvet furniture in a downtown area considered a no-go zone. Diego Cortez, who has died aged 74, was a linchpin of the New York underground in the 1980s, and instrumental in the career of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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