With hopes of bringing avant-garde and cutting edge music to a new home in Los Angeles, the Knitting Factory Hollywood got off to a long-delayed start with a lavish grand opening party on Monday night featuring a special performance by New York avant-rock luminary Arto Lindsay. Following a series of postponements caused by construction delays, the venue's originally scheduled opening date in June was pushed back until Aug. 11, when the venue finally launched with an acoustic set by Seattle rock band the Posies. Tonight's event, however, marked the official opening. Confusing? Yes.

Michael Dorf, founder and CEO of the original Knitting Factory in New York, was on hand, of course, schmoozing with a number of well-wishers throughout the course of the evening. The club was abuzz with technology, as a stream of television monitors transmitted footage from the New York Knitting venue, while an unnamed combo blared jazz in the smaller performance space, the Alterknit Lounge. As guests of the private party buzzed through the bar area downing free drinks and gobbling down trayfuls of stuffed mushrooms and pastry delights, many were overheard giving their opinion of the new space. One gentleman, after taking a good look around at the interior, grumbled to his buddy, "How 'New York.'" Steve Pross of Los Angeles-based indie label Emperor Norton Records was slightly less cryptic with his own observation: "Out of business in twelve months. It looks too much like a mall."

After the crowd was herded into the larger showroom -- the Main Space -- Dorf appeared onstage to give the usual round of thanks to those involved in helping the club to get off the ground. L.A. Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, looking slightly out of place, welcomed the club to town, to which Dorf gave a typical New York reply of "[Mayor Rudy] Guiliani never did this kind of shit for us." Dorf continued with a brief history of the orginal thirteen-year-old New York Knitting Factory, adding "We hope that we can keep this venue going for thirteen years, until they kick us out for not paying rent or something else." The celebration closed with a set by Arto Lindsay and his band. Upon exiting, guests were given Knitting Factory gift bags loaded with goodies such as ping-pong paddles and ring pop candy that no doubt reflected the experimental nature of the club.

Dubbed the first "smart club" in the world, the Knitting Factory Hollywood is truly a facility unlike anything else in Los Angeles, and its lavish amenities include touch-screen interactive kiosks and a continuous feed of video footage/link with its sister club, the New York Knitting Factory, and two performance spaces wired with state-of-the-art recording studio technology for both audio and video broadcasting, live Webcasting and high-speed Internet connections. There's also a full restaurant with a limited menu that offers what they call "fusion food."

Before it even opened its doors, the club received scores of criticism from the Los Angeles press, but has nonetheless gotten off to a good start. Much of the bad ink stemmed from the fact that the venue's ultra-swanky interior --- banks of computer monitors, a bar with a sports pub motif -- is a turn-off to many of the purists who claim the club doesn't have the "experimental edge" of the New York venue, and that the club's location along a tourist-infested stretch of Hollywood Boulevard is hardly a place to attract avant-garde music.

So far, however, the club has hosted a number of exciting shows running the gamut of musical genres, encompassing everything from former Throwing Muses chanteuse Kristen Hersh and the way-out jazz stylings of the Sun Ra Arkestra, to acclaimed Los Angeles-based acts such as the Negro Problem and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Young Democrats of America held a Karenna Gore Schiff-hosted bash at the Knitting Factory Hollywood. The Goo Goo Dolls performed and the event drew 1,100 guests, including celebrities like Jimmy Smits and Dule Hill of The West Wing.

With upcoming performances by legendary fringe-rock pioneers like Pere Ubu and Suicide and some of the most adventurous artists in the jazz community, the club hopes to establish itself as a viable new force in the local music scene.

JIM FREEK
(September 21, 2000)