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They had recently signed John Zorn and Bill Frisell, and they had released work by the Kronos Quartet, the World Saxophone Quartet, and the Bulgarian Woman’s Choir. The New York music scene, from jazz to rock, was desperate at this time for a new venue. The “jazz clubs”-The Blue Note, Sweet Basil, The Village Vanguard, Carlos I, The Angry Squire, and so on-were all in line with the George Wein (Newport, Cool, and JVC Jazz Festivals) definition of jazz.
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We had to give back almost half the money they had originally advanced us, but we finally got the CDs into Europe. To this day, though, we haven’t been able to make back the money we lost paying A&M for the European rights – but we had opened up a lot of doors, anyway. Bob and I flew to Holland a few months later to see the place and make the final arrangements. After landing with a few hours’ sleep and slamming a few strong European espressos, we started to work.
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Fall music preview: A look at Spokane's upcoming concert calendar - The Spokesman Review
Fall music preview: A look at Spokane's upcoming concert calendar.
Posted: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 07:00:00 GMT [source]
I booked a tour of 24 European cities, using all the contacts I had made or borrowed from our friends-the family of artists from the club who booked their own tours of Europe and had accumulated a network of names over the years. The tour brought six bands-Sonny Sharrock, The Jazz Passengers, Curlew, Myra Melford Trio, Miracle Room, and Bosho – to play two-night festivals of three bands a night. Two tour buses crisscrossed and leapfrogged each other throughout Europe, with concerts taking place in two different cities each night. All of the Knitting Factory’s share of the money from the uptown shows went into the artist fees at the club and one month’s rent. While the festival seemed to generate a lot of press coverage, not many of the shows at Alice Tully Hall drew big crowds.
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I went down into Estella’s with Bob, asking her if we could rent her space for the five nights. We had been trying to persuade her for about three months to sell us her lease, but to no avail. Now she wanted $1,000 per night to use her space, even though she paid only $3,000 a month. We finally ended up making a deal to buy her lease and all the equipment in her restaurant.
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We received a lot of press attention, a lot of artistic support, and the community seemed relieved to have an alternative to the perennial JVC Festival. Even though we didn’t make much money, the attention alone made it a success. When Steve and I got together for our first meeting, I was very nervous. I thought, Here I am talking to a guy I’ve desperately tried to give Swamp Thing’s demo tape to, a guy who would never return my phone calls, and now I’m sitting here exchanging ideas.
Sam Barber - Till I Return Tour
However, by the time the tour was over, we were 30 grand in the hole. He made a number of deals that were reminiscent of Swamp Thing days-playing for the door in Helsingbourg, Sweden, was the craziest. Not only did the small pub hold only 30 people, but with three bands in the place each night, there wasn’t even room for the audience, if one had shown up in the firstplace. Meanwhile, I was freaking out that we’d taken in no money and the hotels were costing us more than $800 a night.
In New York City, we would invariably lose more than $100 every time we played a club, whether it was CBGB, the Dive, Peppermint Lounge, or the Pyramid. After paying to play, eat, travel, and self-promote through posters or ads, we were always in the red. Trax, an uptown club, had this unbelievable policy of making you predict the number of people within ten that would show up to your gig. If you were wrong, the club would keep most of the fairly large deposit you’d paid them when the date was booked. I estimated 100 or so would show up when Swamp Thing played; we had 9 pay and 15 on the guest list. The Northwest’s premier concert house, restaurant, and nightclub is located in the heart of downtown Spokane.
If you were to see Ray Ross on the street or in the halls of the building, you might mistake him for a smelly bum who looked like Jerry Garcia. Yet he has taken more than a million photos in his 68-year life, mostly of the great jazz artists in New York clubs from the late forties into the sixties. Clearly an eccentric, mad artist, he has piles of photos and negatives all over his apartment, scattered among the six inches of newspapers and magazines that cover the floor. He is obsessed with electronics and has 30 or so radios in his living room, antennas hanging out all over the place.
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We were given great food, put up in nice hotels, and found ourselves treated like dignitaries. Music is an art form in Europe, whereas in America it is simply entertainment. The band Swamp Thing and I started Flaming Pie Records out of necessity in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1985.
Five minutes later, half of them came out covering their ears. Wayne put together this poster and introduced all these unknown-to-me-artists. The shows were very cool and attracted just enough people to cover the guarantee. They also started to get the attention of a few other musicians. The first night, I was introduced to John Zorn, whom I luckily had heard of. He was working on a new project called Hu Die, which, he explained, consisted of two guitar players and a narrator reading in Korean over the sound of the guitars.
We also made a CD before the tour – Knitting Factory Goes to the Northwest – and used it for promotion and marketing of the event. The CD was the first on our new record label, Knitting Factory Works, and the first outside of our A&M deal. We connected the two floors with a staircase in the back and again did most of the rennovation work ourselves. We tried for a few months to run a restaurant, using the equipment from Estella’s. Bob had been a waiter in Wisconsin during high school; how hard could it be?
This improved the recordings enough that we felt compelled to start our first Live at the Knitting Factory radio series. The Knitting Factory Spokane is a spacious location of the concert chain venue, in downtown Spokane, WA. This is a 1,500 capacity venue that hosts performances by top musical acts and also offers dance club nights. Knitting Factory has been a growing concert chain since 1987 and is expanding with added locations and merchandising. Knitting Factory Concert House is the Northwest's premier concert house, restaurant, and nightclub, located in the heart of downtown Spokane.
We are happy to make special arrangements for you when you contact us in advance and then arrive at the venue 15 minutes prior to doors. We will offer you one of the premium seats in the house.
It seemed to me that if we called something a festival, especially around the time of the ominous New York City festival-the JVC Festival-we would get more attention for the shows. It was also a way to try and get some money through a sponsor for posters and ads. A small record store in the West Village-Vinylmania-was willing to support our festival and help cover the expenses of advertising.
I was told to listen to lots of tapes of indigenous musicians and decide which of them would play with our 30 or so cats from New York. After 36 hours of improvising, we flew back to New York and didn’t know what had hit us. Two months later, the festival turned into a great showcase for the New York music scene and illustrated to us the respect Europeans have for music.
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