It was 1989, and John Zorn had put this new band together called Naked City. It consisted of our house regulars-Fred Frith, Bill Frisell, Joey Baron, and Wayne Horvitz. John wanted us to produce five nights of rehearsal-concerts at the club, but as had been the case the first time I tried to schedule him, the club was already booked when he wanted to do it. I made a deal with the antique store next to us to rent it for five nights and put on Naked City at the Knitting Factory Annex. However, the day before the concert, after we had made posters and placed ads in the papers, the owner of the store bailed out. We had 36 hours to find a new venue for the concerts, which many people were already talking about. 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. She was out of her mind, but we were desperate. We finally ended up making a deal to buy her lease and all the equipment in her restaurant. The deal was finalized the day of Naked City’s world premiere.
The five day and nights Naked City played and rehearsed were amazing. The first morning John came in at 10:00 a.m. and passed out a booklet of his songs he had prepared for everyone. By the 8:00 p.m. showtime, the group had learned 25 songs and played them for a standing-room crowd in our new space. The next morning, the band came in, John gave them 15 new songs, and by showtime they had those down and played some of the old material. This went on each day. In five days they had a whole repertory and went on a European tour as if they had been together for years.
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? Within three months, we sold off all the kitchen equipment for about one- twentieth of what we had just paid for it in order to get the lease. We turned the kitchen into a small performance space called the Knot Room. It’s the perfect room for poetry and spoken-word pieces, performance art, and small musical concerts.
With all our press attention and with our recent expansions, it might appear as if we were making lots of money. Quite the contrary. New York City does not help small businesses. The city has this bizarre branch called the Environmental Control Board that raises funds by issuing tickets to commercial establishments for various things. Besides issuing tickets for posters on public property, they give them out for not keeping the sidewalks and the first 18 inches of the street clean. The law states that you cannot have anything on the sidewalk that will obstruct the flow of people. Many nights after we take our bags out, bums open them up looking for things and spill garbage out onto the street. The next morning, we will find a $75 ticket on our door. To complicate matters, the city picks up on our street only once a week, so in order to comply with the law, we’re forced to use the monopolistic private sanitation company.
To keep the street even cleaner, we built a beautiful box to keep our garbage bags in. The day after we built it, a city garbage truck came and took our bags and the box they were in, saying we had no permit for the box. They also spilled garbage 17 inches into Houston Street (our portion of the public street), which gave us another $75 ticket. You can’t win.
Which reminds me of Con Edison. With our growing electric needs, our bills kept getting bigger, topping off at about $2,000 a month. We pay our bills on time-well, most of the time. Sometimes we’re a little late. But when you are a little late, they ask for an additional deposit to cover the risk of a possible default. We had already given Con Edison a few thousand precious dollars when they asked us to give them another $800 deposit. I paid the bill, but not the deposit. Of course, a turn-off notice appeared. I sent in letters and formal complaints, and I even went to the Con Edison office, explaining that we didn’t have the money for them to sit on, even if they paid 6 percent interest. What good does that do us if we plan to stay in business? That afternoon, a Friday at 5:45, a Con Edison guy came into the bar and said he was here to read the meters. He secretly turned off our juice. With a show in three hours, and four refrigerators full of beer, we had to run lots of extension cords down from our office upstairs, which had a separate residential account in my name. (I had moved out by this time.) We couldn’t do anything to get electricity until Monday morning. There is not much one can do with Con Edison except to say FUCK YOU, which I did every day on our calendar for November and December 1990.
We had our first American tour on the West Coast in the spring of 1991. We took three bands – Sonny Sharrock, Third Person, and Chunk – on the road to San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. It was fairly successful. The bands got lots of press, played for audiences bigger than they could draw on their own, and made a little money. We actually made some money, too, selling T-shirts and CDs along the way. The European experience had schooled us well in the art of touring. We also made a CD before the tour – Knitting Factory Goes to the Northwest – and used it for promotion and marketing of the event. It helped, but we lost a few bucks on it. The CD was the first on our new record label, Knitting Factory Works, and the first outside of our A&M deal. In that sense, it was a milestone of sorts.
Currently we’re expanding the record company and making many different compact discs-from Defunkt and The Jazz Passengers recorded live at the Knitting Factory to Samm Bennett and Chunk recorded in a studio. Most of the next bunch of CDs have been presold or licensed to our Japanese distributor, which is essentially financing the production of these projects. Without Tokuma Japan Inc.’s interest in our music, I doubt we could be doing these things. They are essentially making the record company happen in our proposed A&M image.
It is very interesting that the recording side of the Knitting Factory has come full circle – from the days of Flaming Pie Records to Knitting Factory Works. Our ambition, however enlarged, is essentially the same-to try to get this unheard new music in front of an audience. Even as this is being written (December 1991 and January 1992), we are two months behind in the rent, the IRS is trying to collect on some unemployment insurance taxes, and Bob is leaving the company to work independently in production. It is a continuously changing, non-stop, creative struggle to keep the Knitting Factory above water. We continue to scramble. Even this book is an attempt to make some money. With any luck it will sell, and if you are reading it, that’s a good sign. If you are my mom or dad, I appreciate your buying a copy-you’ve always been a great supporter of my projects. See you in another five years.