LA’s Knitting Factory closes — for now

“I heard this was the last show here. Is that true?” Chris Mojan asked an audience that was, in fact, gathered for the final show at the Knitting Factory Hollywood on Oct. 25. Like many of the musicians on the evening’s ticket, Mojan, lead guitarist for the Detroit-based group Fireworks, seemed unaware that his band was playing on the iconic LA venue’s closing night.

“Seems like a cool place,” he added dismissively, and launched into the next song.

Mojan’s on-stage riffing with the audience wasn’t the only indication that some of the scheduled bands learned it was the Knitting Factory Hollywood’s final show only minutes before taking the stage.

“I think we played the last Knitting Factory show in New York, too,” said Sparks the Rescue frontman Alex Roy.

Finding itself at the very end of its lease, which terminated on Halloween, the Knitting Factory left its problematic Hollywood Boulevard location the night of Oct. 25 not with a bang, but a whimper. The decidedly bang-less end-all featured Hit the Lights, Fireworks, Sparks the Rescue, There For Tomorrow and local band Oh No Not Stereo. The quasi-intimate concert space, which is reported to have turned a profit only one month in its nine-year residency in Hollywood, opted to not renew its lease when it expired Saturday.

Chris Diaz, a former talent buyer for the Knitting Factory Hollywood, said that talks regarding the club’s decision suggested a definite interest in maintaining a presence in LA while acknowledging the significant problems with the club’s current surroundings.

“It was pretty unanimous around the office that we wanted a club in Los Angeles, but we did not want to stay where we were,” said Diaz, whose job entailed booking the club, among other things. “It wasn’t really a question of shutting down the company as a whole in the city, it was more a question of just shutting down where we’re at right now so that we could be reborn somewhere else.”

In its almost 10-year tenure on Hollywood Boulevard, the Knitting Factory Hollywood has seen significant changes in the area, most notably the introduction of the high-end Hollywood & Highland shopping center. According to Diaz, the commerce-oriented developments changed the tone and atmosphere of the area to something less appealing to the club’s target audience.

“A lot of local people that wanted to come see shows … didn’t really like going up to a tourist-y section of Hollywood,” Diaz said. “They wanted to go to a hipper section, and we were really feeling the bite of that in our ticket sales.”

Although the club’s management initially hoped that sales to out-of-town visitors and tourists might compensate for the revenue lost from displaced locals, it was disappointed to find that not to be the case. Higher-ups in the Hollywood operation found that tourists were generally uninterested in seeing touring bands while on vacation, citing the fact that people who are vacationing typically already have plans set up for the nights they’re in town. Outreach efforts and marketing campaigns targeting area hotels sought to encourage guests to check out shows while in the city, but those were largely unsuccessful.

Knitting Factory Entertainment — a nationwide franchise that has other venues in Reno, Nev., Spokane, Wash., Boise, Idaho and Brooklyn, N.Y. — appears to be leaving no stone unturned in its search for a new home in Los Angeles. Neighborhoods considered include Los Feliz, Silver Lake, North Hollywood, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach, Pasadena, East LA and Downtown Los Angeles.

Lily Sims-Williams, a junior majoring in music industry and former Knitting Factory intern, remembers Silver Lake being discussed as a potential site.

“I think Silver Lake would be a good idea,” Sims-Williams said. “There’s a lot of young people [there].”

The LA Live complex has come up in relocation talks, but Diaz says he is wary of becoming part of an area that would likely equate to more of the same.

“I don’t think we would really want to be a part of the LA Live area, but that would be the general location that would probably benefit us the most,” Diaz said. “We would want to be a few blocks away, tucked away in the cool little corner, you know, just out of reach, but everybody knows that we’re there.”

Much like Knitting Factory New York’s recent move from the its home of 15 years in the Tribeca area to a Brooklyn location that needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, the anticipated LA relocation is expected to involve some site construction.

“We kind of want to do the same thing in LA, but we don’t want to build out as much,” said Diaz, who now acts as a talent buyer for the Knitting Factory’s Brooklyn venue. “We’re looking for sort of a building that already has what we need [so] we can just put the paint up, build a stage, plug everything in, and go.”

Any new venue will, like the now-defunct Hollywood location, almost certainly be all-ages as well. With its Vans Warped Tour-style musical offerings, Knitting Factory shows primarily draw a 16 to 25 demographic, so under-21 ticket sales are just as significant as revenue generated bar-side.

With Ohio-based Hit the Lights headlining, the venue’s final lineup stayed true to the venue’s target audience. For a last hurrah, however, the bands’ sets were surprisingly low-energy — only Fireworks, a five-piece pop-punk outfit from Michigan, managed to generate any semblance of earnest rowdiness.

And although local opener Oh No Not Stereo was a last minute addition to Hit the Lights’ Mana Tour when I Rival was unable to come along for the ride, the group was clearly grateful just to be there.

Not everyone could take the club’s closure with the same measure of nonchalance boasted by the bands booked for the night. Sims-Williams said she was sad as she took a final walk around the venue she came to know so well as an intern last year.

“It’s really weird for me to know that this is going to be the last time I walk around back here,” she said backstage.

With any luck, the transition to a new venue won’t take more than a year, but Los Angeles is losing — at the very least temporarily — an integral venue in the city’s music landscape.

According to Diaz, the expected relocation is necessary and going to be for the better.

“No one really wants to drive up to Hollywood, pay $8 for parking and spend their night in a mini-mall,” he said.

Only time — and frustrated concertgoers — will tell if Diaz is right.