The Knitting Factory was founded in 1987 and over the years has grown into Knitting Factory Entertainment (KFE). Though primarily known for their venues—both clubs and concert houses located in Brooklyn, Boise, Spokane and Reno—KFE also promotes national tours, produces the hit Broadway musical Fela!, operates The Federal Bar Gastro Pub in North Hollywood and is a partner with record labels Partisan and Knitting Factory Records. Another venture, High Adventure Management handles the careers of emerging and critically acclaimed recording artists both in the U.S. and overseas. It is the West Coast artist management wing of KFE.
Below is an account of the original New York club’s first years, written by company founder Michael Dorf.
IN THE BEGINNING
By Michael Dorf
When I started the Knitting Factory in 1987 with Louis Spitzer, we had no idea what we were doing! We had found an old, dilapidated Avon Products office on Houston Street between the Bowery and Broadway. The rent was $1,800 per month for 2,000 square feet on one floor in a four-story walkup. The place was really a mess: yellow painted plaster chipping off the walls, a rotted wood toilet, and piles of Avon products scattered all over the floor. When we were trying to come up with a name, our friends suggested calling it the Dump. The initial idea was to have an art gallery/performance space that sold coffee, teas, and a small assortment of foods. As Louis and I said in our first press release (all my misspellings included), “The Knitting Factory is primaraly a showcase. Our aim is to weave strands of art mediums into a congruent whole, from the Wednesday night poetry series to the works on the walls. The Knitting Factory is also a cafe. It serves interesting forms of food like a fondue with fresh fruit. The Knitting Factory considers many things art and is open to suggestions. Hope to see you soon.” But my real motivation at the time was to earn enough money to live and to cover the rent for Flaming Pie Records.
The band Swamp Thing and I started Flaming Pie Records out of necessity in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1985. I’d gotten involved with the band when my longtime friend Bob Appel, the guitar player, asked me to manage them. They had just borrowed money from their parents to record in a small studio. I made copies of their tape and went on a road trip to New York to make the band a giant success and, to be honest, to stay with my girlfriend in Queens. After giving the demo tape to and being rejected by every label — major and independent, big and small — we decided to finish the recording ourselves and manufacture the record. With 1,000 copies of the record, Learning to Disintegrate, we went through the existing independent channels of distribution to get it into stores. At the time, the five big distribution companies (three are no longer with us today, the other two still owe us money) on both sides of the country had no problem taking 50 copies each on consignment — that is, free, with a chance we could persuade them to pay if the records sold.
But to us in Madison, Wisconsin, the band was really “making it.” As long as we knew that some stores around the country had it on their shelves, and we were selling a few copies in Wisconsin, we were satisfied. All the members of Swamp Thing and I worked diligently at finding the names of radio stations, music press, and clubs-anywhere and anyone who would listen to the album. It was the summer of 1985, and the five of us-Bob Appel, Steve Bear, Michael Kashou, Jonathan Zarov, and I-went on our first road tour, destined to become “rock ‘n’ roll stars.”
This first one-month tour lost about $1,500, and if Visa hadn’t extended my credit line and given me a cash advance, we would have been stuck on the East Coast. 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.