In 1987 in Brooklyn, N.Y., long, discordant saxophone cries
emitted from a once dilapidated and thoroughly reappropriated Avon
Products store on Houston Street: The Knitting Factory.
Founders Michael Dorf and Louis Spitzer originally had intended the
300-capacity venue as a café and an arts showcase. They
initially booked jazz concerts on Thursday nights, but, since New
York’s established jazz venues favored classic forms, eventually
the out-there jazz and the avant-garde took over the whole of the
Knitting Factory’s schedule. It became a place where you could
hear the new, the unhinged and the rabid forms of noise and performance
art. It harbored such enemies of traditional musical states as
free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, who considered the piano keys as 88
tuned drums.
This birthplace of new sound is appearing in Reno as the Knitting
Factory Concert House at 211 N. Virginia St. While the Knitting Factory
has long since expanded beyond its Brooklyn history, including to
houses in Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash., as well as a
recently-closed venue in Los Angeles, it still acts as a home for new
music.
“I don’t think we’re the same as we used to be,
with just avant-garde,” says Knitting Factory president Morgan
Margolis. “We’re trying to achieve what’s new in
music, but we’re also not against other music.”
Alice in Chains is one of the bigger names in the Knitting
Factory’s initial schedule—they perform on Feb.
10—but the venue will also stage the French pop of Phoenix on
Jan. 27, and to a likely smaller audience.
“The scene has morphed from what it was from back in the
’80s,” says Margolis. “I think also the community
changes. Before the internet, you didn’t know half these bands.
We’ve got Phoenix coming through, and I don’t even know how
it’s going to do. Who knows this French band?”
“We looked at the Reno market, and we feel like it’s
very under-served as far as the cutting edge kind of bands that come
in,” says Dean Hanson, general manager of the new venue.
“We feel like the bands that roll through here seem to be more
centered toward that casino demographic. … That doesn’t
mean Alice in Chains and AFI and shows like that aren’t
important. But again we’re going to see some things like the
Flobots and Paolo Nutini—some stuff that maybe doesn’t hit
here very often or at all, and we’re going to give them the venue
to play.”
The Reno location, according to Hanson, is intended for an audience
of about 1,200. Regardless of its size, Hanson says he intends to use
the venue to showcase the local scene and to provide a space where its
audience can grow.
“In the bars, I think most of the local bands, for the most
part, they get 40 or 50 people in there and they’re happy,”
he says. “Boise was like that three or four years ago, and now
we’re at the point where we get 1,000 people in for the local
bands.”
Hanson says he wishes to do the same here.
“There’s some great talent in Reno. I’m just not
sure they’ve had the opportunity we’re about to
offer,” he says. “That’s one of the foundations the
Knitting Factory is built on, is helping the creative scene, helping to
boost the arts.”
Some local band members have grumbled because the Knitting Factory
doesn’t pay local bands, but others see it as an opportunity for
exposure and potential merchandise sales. Locals Sol Jibe, Drinking
with Clowns and Jelly Bread, among others, will perform at the Knitting
Factory on Jan. 21.
“I think that Reno has been sorely missing a first-rate venue
of this size for a long time,” says Hanson. “It’s
been one extreme or the other. Either you’re playing the bar
scene or you’re getting to that 2,000-plus mark, there’s
nothing in that 1,000-capacity range that’s a quality venue. We
bring it.”