‘Trash and Vaudeville’ Manager Jimmy Webb Spins off New Rock Boutique on Orchard Street
It’s now a rock-and-roll type of block.
With the ten-year-old Dressing Room months in the grave, its inevitable replacement at 75 Orchard Street has surfaced. Jimmy Webb, primary buyer for and longtime manager of Trash and Vaudeville, is heading south of the Delancey divide for a new retail concept. The new store is called I Need More, and seems to take a page from the East Village legend. Leopard-skin shades currently hang in the windows to obstruct the build-out within.
Take a look inside…
I Need More is leasing from controversial landlord Samy Mahfar, and is reportedly “backed by major influencers and movie stars.” By joining Great Frog and The Cast, it now bolsters a small cluster of punk-oriented boutiques just north of Grand Street.
Here’s a bit more about Jimmy Webb from a New York Times piece a couple years ago:
Lou Reed’s 1972 ode to hustlers, transsexuals and transsexual hustlers would alter Mr. Webb’s life. “A friend asked, ‘Do you know what it means?’ ” he recalled. “I did without knowing it. I knew I was a boy that had to leave to go somewhere.”
At 16, he ran away to New York with a pillowcase full of clothes. It was 1975. “Coming into Trash and Vaudeville my first time, I knew I’d found a home and I wasn’t crazy,” he said.
At first, Mr. Webb worked as a bar-back in a gay establishment on the Upper West Side at the height of the neighborhood’s Needle Park infamy, attended hair school (he flunked grandiosely) and was a regular at CBGB. He fell into heroin addiction for 20 years and lived in Tompkins Square Park, eventually returning upstate.
“It got worse before it got better,” he said. “They thought I was going to die. After rebuilding my body and spirit, I wanted to go back to the city I loved.”
Mr. Webb, who says he has been sober for 18 years, wrote a letter to the owner of Trash and Vaudeville seeking a job.
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