An article dated March 25, 1975, in The Milwaukee Sentinel tells about “one of the great evenings of a generation.” Angelica Houston was there; Jack Nicholson was there; Bill Murray was there. It was a party to celebrate the premiere of The Who’s film Tommy, and it took place in a closed-off subway station at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York. It makes sense that the afterparty was a riot, since the film’s plot sounds like something out of a JG Ballard novel: “A psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind boy becomes a master pinball player and the object of a religious cult because of that.”
Murray, in a new AMA on Reddit, recalls the party as the best he’s ever crashed (and he’s RSVP-ed to a lot), saying:
“Well, we crashed a famous party called the subway party to celebrate the premiere of Tommy, in the 70s. It was Gilda Radner, Belushi, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty, Brian Doyle Murray, and we were all plus 1, probably. It was (the) biggest party ever in NYC at the time. You couldn’t get into this party. It was an inner circle thing. It was at an enclosed subway stop, it was a roar. It was a scream. If you made an airport movie with everyone on the plane is a celebrity, it was like that times 10. We were doing a show in the restaurant cabaret, the guys catering were the same guys who gave us left over french fries, we went into the backdoor to the subway with everyone. Everyone saying hi, hello. And we felt like we didn't belong at all. It was so fantastic. I have compassion when people say dumb stuff to me. I said to Andy Warhol, ‘I love the soup can’, and he looked at me like, ‘You don't belong here.’ What a time that was.”
