The closure of a popular music venue and what it means for the future of concert-going in Reno by Brad Bynum brad b@new sr ev i ew. c om
he Knitting Factory opened in Reno on New Year’s Eve 2009 to great fanfare and local excitement. The general hope, among local music fans, was that Reno was finally getting a proper concert hall, a venue for performers who were too popular to play regular ol’ bar gigs, but weren’t quite big enough to sell out a sports arena. The name Knitting Factory also added to the excitement because it was a company with a good reputation. It had started in the mid-1980s as a club for experimental rock and jazz—cool, weird stuff, like Sonic Youth and John Zorn—in downtown Manhattan, and had expanded to a small handful of locations across the country.
Passersby checked out posters for upcoming shows at the Knitting Factory during better times.
The Reno Knit’s grand opening was on New Year’s Day 2010 and featured the Roots, the great hip-hop group, who had never played Reno before. Previously, the only mediumsized concert halls in the valley were affiliated with casinos, which often limited the scope of music, genre-wise. Reno music fans started to hope that the days of needing to drive down to Sacramento or San Francisco to catch all the best acts would soon be behind us. Flash forward six years, and the Knitting Factory has left Reno. The company is still going strong, with concert halls in Boise, Spokane and Brooklyn, as well as an affiliated record label and promotion company. After being dark for most of December and January, the Knitting Factory announced via press release that it was leaving the Reno market.
photos by Eric Marks
During December and January, many shows originally scheduled for the Knit were moved to Cargo Concert Hall in the Whitney Peak Hotel. The Knit hosted almost no events during those months. Official sources said the venue was closed for renovations, but the rumors were already rampant that it would not reopen. The last concert at the Knitting Factory was a sold-out show by the electronic dance music act Excision on January 28. The next day, it was announced that Knitting Factory was leaving Reno and that the operators of RockBar Theatre in San Jose were going to renovate and take over the closed location, 211 N. Virginia St., right in the heart of downtown Reno. Over the years, the Knit hosted hundreds of concerts, across all genres of music—including rock, country, hip-hop, EDM, jazz and more. The press release announcing the closure mentioned some of the biggest names: Alice in Chains, Flogging Molly, Phoenix, Cake, Marilyn Manson, Willie Nelson, Primus, Social Distortion, Umphrey’s McGee, and the Roots. The announced closure was perhaps a bit surprising—especially considering all the population growth for which the area is supposedly due. Many local music fans were disappointed. “I really hope they aren’t closing for good,” wrote Facebook user Vanessa Whicker Larsen on the venue’s page. “But if so, I’ll never forget the awesome memories.” The surprise and disappointment was also shared by members of the Knit’s local staff. “At one point, I thought we were going into a remodel, so I got a little blindsided by that, as did most people,” said Preston Charles, the Knit’s lead sound engineer and production manager. “We were bummed, obviously. We were like a
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OPINION
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MARCH 24, 2016
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RN&R
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