NYC's The Knitting Factory and the City Winery were - and are - keystones of the live music entertainment world in New York City. Michael Dorf explains his vision for both venues, and what he sees in live music's future.
In vino veritas, is a Latin expression which - when translated - means, “In wine, there is truth.” While that concept might be slightly romanticized, there’s no doubt that a little bit of truth, and a whole lot of vision - with nice cabernet - can influence an adventurous idea, or two. But, you’ve got to have the follow through the next morning to make all of those lofty thoughts reality.
With, or without wine, Michael Dorf is a visionary, someone who has the ability to see opportunities that others miss. It all started in the 1980s when he took a chance on opening the Knitting Factory in New York City. That club became a beacon of cutting-edge taste and style during the 80s and 90s at a time that was ripe for indie music to make its impact on the city’s larger cultural milieu. His next major venture was the City Winery food, wine, and performance space brand which - though originated in NYC - has since been expanded to several other locations nationwide.
While the success of those businesses no doubt make him proud, it’s the philanthropic angle to his imaginativeness that really inspires him. Michael Dorf Presents has produced several concerts with philanthropy in mind paying tribute to some of his favorite music and often featuring guest appearances by legends of the performing arts community.
March 26th at Carnegie Hall finds Dorf producing People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith which also happens to be the 20th anniversary of his concert series. 100% of net proceeds will go to music education for underserved youth, and concertgoers can expect to see Michael Stipe, Ben Harper, Kim Godon, Flea, and many other surprise guests on stage.
So, you might want to find yourself a safe space to listen to this episode and enjoy a glass of wine, and let Michael’s vision inspire your own. What are your dreams? What skills and interests do you have that can make the world a better place? Enjoy that pinot noir, but - like Michael - get ready to put in the work.
Evan Toth: Your journey began as someone who grew up in New York City. Well, I didn't grow up in New York City. I'm here in New Jersey, but someone who visited and played music as a musician in New York City for many years in the '90s and beyond, the Knitting Factory was such an important part of that scene in that world. That's really where your story begins. It became a really beloved hub for all music, much of it experimental. Maybe you could just start by talking a little bit about that moment where you said, "Hey, I want to make a club here, and this is what it became."
Michael Dorf: Well, I could talk for an hour on just that subject. It's a great chance to plug. I did try and remember about 50% of that time frame of my life in a book called Indulge Your Senses. My mom bought a copy, but there's still a few copies available out there. Basically, I was a frustrated musician. In fact, it's not even fair to say musician, I was a frustrated wannabe musician. I couldn't play guitar. My friends were all natural. I grew up in Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and they were natural artists. When they joined and created a band in high school, I had to become the sound guy and the promoter, because I sucked. I can't sing and I really couldn't figure out how to-- after two years, I could never even get the first couple of bars of "Stairway to Heaven." I just, "That's not my thing," but I wanted to be part of the band.
I got involved in the business to meet girls and to be part of it in high school. That led to the same kind of stuff in college. After college, I did some travel and wandering and started managing the band a little more seriously. New York became a real hub. The band was called Swamp Thing. They were playing CBGBs in the Peppermint Lounge and the occasional opening slot at the Ritz, what have you. Basically, I fell in love with the idea of live music and found an old Avon office on Houston Street in 87, and convinced another friend to help renovate it with me. We did it illegally by hand. We opened in February '87.
Wednesday was poetry and Thursday was jazz and Friday, Saturday was anything goes.
I got a beer and wine license, and then quickly took over a restaurant underneath us and got the liquor license, and expanded very quickly. It grew. The thing that had really going for me in the beginning of the Knitting Factory was because I was from the side of the musician really looking to put on shows and get some payday, if you will, from a gig, I knew all the deals in town. I did the simplest deal one could have. 75% of the gate goes to the artist. Just very simple.
ezt: Fair. Yes.
md: If 100 people paid $10, and that was $1,000, they got $750. It was just fair. Because I was from Wisconsin, perhaps, I was just green and honest. All of a sudden, the word spread around New York very quickly that, "Hey, there's this green guy from Wisconsin who actually pays you what he says he's going to pay you at the door." It was literally that just honest bookkeeping and sincerity around putting on a show and knowing we're all in it together. The synergy of the micro-economy of what we were doing.
The word spread. The jazz scene very quickly came to us, and the avant-garde Lower East Side scene. People like John Zorn or John Lurie from the Lounge Lizards. I got then the M-based crowd from Brooklyn, Cassandra Wilson, and Steve Coleman. Then some blue-chip avant-garde jazz cats like Henry Threadgill and Cecil Taylor. Even Ornette Coleman stopped in. Then because of that happening, but my background was being more on the rock of singer-songwriter side, whenever I could get somebody back for his first show or Sonic Youth, I worked really hard to get those shows, so it all mingled.
It was this just weird genre flow of stuff. Then that just kept actually accelerating itself. Then people like my heroes, like David Byrne, would come in to check out what was happening and get him into it. Then Lou Reed was another one who was just fascinated with what was happening. Lou was an idol to me. To be able to then convince them, "Well, boy, we would love to have you on the stage," and then actually have that come together. It just kept growing. I want to say organically, but it was just building on the momentum.
It was like a black hole that everything just started coming to us. It was incredible and definitely a fire hazard and just a remarkable thing. I wish I could remember most of it.
ezt: Right. Well, it's funny, the way that you describe it, at least the way that I'm hearing it, you make it sound easy like, "Well, we found this old factory, this old Avon thing, and we got a liquor license and then we just took it from there." Do you think that's possible? Maybe not in New York City now, but is there somewhere in the country where you think it's possible for a young person to go, "You know what? Let's take this thing and just turn it into a cool spot. If you build it, they will come and we'll serve some cool wines and charcuterie and stuff"? Do you think that's a thing people can really do nowadays?
md: It's not the same. It's another type of cool thing that somebody could do. I think there's some components, there's a lot of levels to the question. From a pure real estate standpoint, there's no way I could afford to start what I started with such a little bit of money in a market like New York City. That's number one. Yes, you could probably build it in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, or 30 miles out of Nashville past Franklin, you could find-- but then you need the product supply, which is artists to populate. You got to have some proximity to where the artists live and want to work.
Then you need consumers who are going to not just pay for tickets, but drink and eat. The reality of the entertainment business is the old axiom, the profits are in the popcorn. We give most, as I said in the beginning, 75% or more to the artists from tickets, so does Live Nation, so do movie theaters, so does Broadway. A disproportionate amount goes to the entertainment, where we can pay our bills and our rent is from the sale of food and beverage.
That was a hard lesson. You just had to pay attention to, if a club was so crowded that you couldn't get to the bar, that was to the point of inflection where it was no good. You always had to balance out, figuring out how to pay the bills. Then the other point is, just urban planning and safety, people have gotten-- when I started and it makes me sound really old and I am. In the early '80s, there was a transition and building code in New York City where the mob and certain people you could pay, and then you're all set, you're permitted and you're licensed and you're good.
ezt: Right, you're done.
md: In the early '90s into 2000, things got a little more realistic. People didn't want to live in a building that could catch on fire, or people vomiting on the street. Real estate pushed a lot of the creative arts out of Manhattan, into Brooklyn, out of Brooklyn, up to Beacon, out of Beacon, into parts of Poughkeepsie, to Nashville, out of LA, to Orange County. Real estate has got an interesting symbiotic relationship to where the arts actually get created.
Then technology dovetails on top of all of that. You can earn a living as an artist, somehow reaching your audience outside of the physical. We saw that for a little while. Now people are gravitating back as a reaction to being overly tied to their screens and live music. Thank goodness, is clearly seen as a very precious art form, and people are willing to pay for that experience of being in a crowded room with sweaty other people and enjoying something that is very special and precious.
ezt: Right. I like that idea of there being too many people. You can't get to the bar. Like telling a musician in a band, "Hey, you guys brought too many people here tonight."
md: There are many stories of that from venue owners who-- that's how they make their money. The band thinks they could get another 100 people in, but they get more money from that.
ezt: That's crazy. It would've never crossed my mind. With that background, and of course there are a whole lot of other parts of your career and parts of your story, but just to jump from the Knitting Factory to the beginning of City Winery, which has become such a standard place to see music and certainly created a sort of standardization of that experience. What were some of the thoughts that you had beginning the second chapter or third or fourth? What were some of the things you learned and what were some of the things you wanted to keep the same and some of the things you wanted to do differently? How did you get to that part?
md: As I said, I think I made so many mistakes with the Knitting Factory on so many levels. The most important thing from an operating standpoint was, needed a great team and knew that if we were going to build a brand and scale it and provide high-end experience for musicians and fans, that needed a just a killer team. I've put a lot of focus of my energy and thought into both compensation, but also inspiration and all the org structural things that are important to just building any kind of business.
The sacrifice that I had to do with the Knitting Factory, I lived under my desk for two years with a futon. I went to go shower at the fitness club around the corner. Like that's a level of sacrifice that I didn't want to have to do, couldn't do mentally and physically with starting over. I wanted to build a real sustainable enterprise. It starts with a great team. It also starts with not just thinking in fantasy desires, but in an Excel spreadsheet. Does this pencil out? Can we do these kind of things with this amount of money and truly make a bottom line?
The only way to stay alive and compete with Live Nation and AEG and others is to have a real business. The capital that went into City Winery I had to show a real true plan that return capital to investors. By the way, I'm still not done returning capital to investors and to banks. We'll see, but it's a much more practical business than the Knitting Factory. I tried to take the reality of truly focusing on EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). I have a hat right there, EBITDA. I didn't know what EBITDA stood for at the Knitting Factory. I'm almost embarrassed that I know what it stands for today, but it's a financing term for cash-flow at the bottom line. Our team has to think about it.
At the same time, we recognize that our mission statement, if you will, is we're trying to provide joy to people coming into our space. The number one customer is the artists. We really have tried to create the most incredible experience for the artist on stage and backstage and pre-coming to the stage and when they leave. Then the same thing for the consumer. We want to have seats that when they order it with their ticket, they know which one they're coming to. If they want to pre-buy a bottle of champagne to be waiting at the seat, we can do that for you. We wanted high-quality food to accompany your wine choices. We wanted wine served in a real Riedel glass, not a plastic cup.
We just thought through how to elevate the consumption of music in the most elegant, comfortable way possible. Comfort is a really key word for us. We wanted it to be as comfortable as practically possible. Then know that our role in the equation is we're kind of the medium between the artists on stage and the consumer. When both of them are having a good time and they've been fed well, and they have a little bit to drink, good or bad, and the air conditioning is good for both of them, and the lighting is good, and the sound is impeccable. When all those things are working, they feeds off of one another. The artists put on a better show, the fans are putting more energy into the concert, and they're giving that feedback to the talent. That's what creates magic.
Just thinking about all of those details to create that magical moment, and we recognize the value and the importance of doing that and getting the whole team, everyone from the cleaners to the ticket takers, to our servers, to the folks in the kitchen, to our production team like that we're all working together to create this magical moment. I didn't really understand it as well. I was in it with the Knit, but I didn't analyze it in the same kind of methodology around it. I feel very lucky that I had a big failure. It wasn't big. The brand is great. I never really made money, if you will. I didn't sell it for anything, but I learned a lot from the Knitting Factory and feel lucky that I had that 15-year run that allowed me to think through a better, if you will, better mousetrap to bring to market.
ezt: It's interesting I keep hearing about this concept of finding success through ignorance. That the best way to almost get to that next point that you're describing with City Winery is to not know anything about what came-- and maybe with Knitting Factory you didn't know anything. That gives you the confidence and the bravery. That's what I've been reading lately, that you can just go ahead and do it. That if you did know something about the nightclub business, you might say, "Well, we're not going to try that. We're not going to do that because it's not going to work." If you don't know anything, you're like, "Yes, let's do this." Then you created something that we're talking about all these years later.
md: Okay. I think the naivety when I was 23 and 24 and started it, for sure. When doing City Winery, I was married and kids and had using other people's money as well. The responsibility level was so much higher that I had to be much more practical and realistic about it. I went into it with a much different mindset than starting the Knitting Factory. That's for damn sure.
Then also I don't want to forget the mashup of City Winery also being a very serious wine-making endeavor. We added to the complexity of the business, but I think it just reconfirmed the authenticity of what we were trying to do. Maybe a little naïve there as well on the wine-making side. But I brought in some real experts and took the process of wine-making very, very seriously in terms of getting some of the best grapes you can buy in the world from the best vineyards in California, and Oregon, and France, and South America and making high-quality product so that what we're doing is for real.
There's something when you do it from scratch, when you bake that pie from scratch or bread at home, there's just something that elevates it. I think we're experiencing that in terms of what is our consumption, our popcorn, if you will, is really good wine made locally from high-end grapes. I think the connection to this old school, old world, so maybe the second oldest industry in the world before musicians were making money in Rome, like wine, has been around for a long time. I love that connection gives us a unique position in the world of entertainment production.
ezt: When did you fuse that idea? Everything has to have its own little angle, and I think you certainly found it with live music and wine in particular. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about the spark of when you discovered a passion for wine in the way that you do live music.
md: I've always liked it. As a fan, my joke is being Jewish and a male when you're eight days old, they do some snipping, and then they shove a rag in your mouth filled with really bad sweet Manischewitz wine. I've been a lush ever since, I guess. I just have always had a bit of a hankering for it, what was the spark for this business. I'll give credit to my family. I thought after the Knitting Factory, I was toying with the idea of actually moving to Oregon and really getting my hands dirty in soil and making wine. I took my young kids, twin boys now who are 26, but when they were eight years old on a field trip, due diligence with my wife to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I fell in love with this property.
They were all asleep in the car. It was noon we had done a tasting. They didn't taste, but I did. I was a little happy. They're asleep in the back and I saw a for sale sign in the Dundee Hills, and I got out and quietly closed the door to not bother them. I went into the hill and I'm like, "I think I really want to make wine." I think this is what I really want to do. Yes, I'm ready. I'm going to give up the entertainment world and I'm going to make wine.
I called the number on the for sale sign. Of course, it's Oregon, so they picked up the phone and they said how much the property was selling for and there wasn't a winery. It was 20 acres, beautiful Pinot Noir. I get back to the car and I open up the door and I slam the door real loud, and I'm like, "Family meeting everybody. Dad has made a decision. We're going to sell our apartment in Tribeca and we're moving here." My 8-year-old twin boys without skipping a beat and in unison as twins will do go, "No *** way, Dad." Now my wife is always mad at their cussing but we grew up in a jazz, rock and roll household. Normally she would get real mad at me at that moment when the boys swear, but she said, "Excellent intonation, kids. No *** way, honey, are we moving here?"
That forced the creation of the invention of the-- I'm into it. I got to stay in New York. The first incarnation of City Winery was much more just a custom crush private label wine-making facility. Then, as I started really thinking about the business, I was like, "You know what? I don't know why I am not combining it with what I really know how to do, really love to do." I just started thinking very hedonistic and selfishly, that boy, would I love to go sit in a intimate room surrounded by winemaking, beautiful wooden barrels and-- I want to sit now. I don't want to stand like I did at the [crosstalk].
ezt: Right. No standing.
md: You know what? I want a nice wine list. You know what? I don't want to drink out of a plastic cup. I want to drink out of a real Riedel piece of stemware. I'd like to be 20 feet from the stage and have some delicious hanger steak with my Cabernet while watching the show. Oh, and the ticketing. At the time, oh, I don't want general admission where I don't know because I got to work until eight minutes after eight o'clock, so I'm going to be a little bit late but I don't want to get a bad seat. I want to pay for that good seat. I want to know that that seat is for me.
We developed a ticketing program proprietary to ourselves to pick the seat because JetBlue was doing it 18 years ago. No music venue was doing it. I was like, "We can do that." I want people to be able to show up whenever they show up, but they know where they're going to sit. The idea is, if you will, almost a luxury concert set up. It was hedonistic. It was for me, it was like that's where my head's at. That's what I want to do. That was really the start of City Winery.
ezt: What's your go-to grape, Michael?
md: I'm a wine snob and I admit that. Pinot Noir to me can take on a lot of different flavoring. The French have this word terroir, which is all about soil and place and time and vintage. Pinot is just such an amazing grape Cabernet. It can really alter based on the terroir a hundred yards away from its same grape tasting very differently. Then it can be different year to year. Whereas like [unintelligible 00:25:29], I love all [unintelligible 00:25:32]. It's like asking me which of your kids is your favorite. It's impossible, but I would say Pinot will be my most versatile go-to. I love so much wine. It's embarrassing.
ezt: Pinot's tricky to get into sometimes because of those reasons you mentioned. I think sometimes you have one and you say, "Well, I don't know if I like Pinot." Then you have another and you go, "Oh, man, this is why am I not drinking this all the time?" Because they do feel different. Isn't that a challenge with that grape a little bit there? Yes, right?
md: I really do find the overlap with music and wine really profound. One of my favorite things is to listen to a winemaker and a music maker. Sometimes go at it, especially an articulate winemaker. There's so much nuance to music. Ultimately, this is all very subjective. You might like a particular wine and I might not. You might listen to some song and I might like it a lot, and you might not. It's one of the more subjective sports out there. Yes, there are rankings and all that, but it's not a competition. It's very subjective and some things really connect and some things don't. That's what I love about it.
ezt: The other big leg of your legacy or what's going on with City Winery is the philanthropic part of it too that was also built into it, as I understand. I guess maybe that's a little segue into the tribute concert you have coming up early next year. Maybe you could just talk about how that part found its way into the story and maybe that brings us up to Patti Smith, the tribute.
md: Well, thank you for reminding me to talk about this because I'm not shy about the idea of really helping the world as much as possible. We still got to pay our bills, which isn't easy all the time. Being able to leverage what we have to take care of some problems that are out there and whether it is the war in the Ukraine or is another hurricane in the Caribbean or fires out west or floods in Asheville, or the school in New York City that needs money and can't pay its rent. There seems to be something. Forget all the medical challenges that we have and diseases. It seems like there's always issues. Why not use our space? If we happen to have a dark night coming up on our calendar, why not do a fundraiser for those affected by the war in Israel on both sides?
There are so many important courses to try and help. Whenever we can leverage our space, it is part of our DNA as a company. It was very important to be as active as we could for all kinds of courses. Again, the whole spectrum. One of the things I found and noticed over whatever last 25 years where I maybe had some attention on this, is that music education, in particular in public schools, has been the sad program that gets cut anytime there are fiscal challenges in a school. Your basic programs of math and English and history. Those don't get cut but gym doesn't get cut. The arts is the first to go when times get tough.
What I wanted to do at Carnegie was a series that really stayed as much as I'm always being approached by all these other courses. This one series every spring is a tribute to a living singer songwriter, and 100% of the net proceeds go to music education programs generally in underserved communities. Whether it's Mr. Holland's Opus, which is a famous one, or Music Saves, and some of the Grammy in the schools, those are the bigger ones. Then we also have some smaller programs that really are a single school, a Church Street School of Music for their scholarship program, or we have a Fixing Instruments program.
So many schools get donated instruments, and then two weeks later it's broken, and they can't afford to buy a whole new one for $30, but it has to be cash from the guy around the corner. They can't afford to pay and fix it, so like a fund directly for that. We're really trying to help music education programs for underserved. This series is 20 years old now. It's remarkable. We've exceeded $2 million of net money going to these programs.
ezt: Yes, unbelievable.
md: Yes, it feels great. It's always at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie is an expensive room, because it's such a beautiful room. I like to say it's the second-best venue in New York. Fine, maybe it's the first. Many artists have played bigger spaces, some Madison Square Garden, they never played Carnegie. They love the idea of actually getting on the stage and doing something. The series started with Joni Mitchell, again, 20 years ago. It was going to be actually all for a music education fund that was doling it out to other organizations. It was a bunch of the old music industry that was part of this group that was trying to do it. I was 20 years younger, but I was very much a junior around the tables. All these big machers from the music industry.
In 2000, after the internet was eating away at the record company's business at the time, the fundraisers to go into this fund were drying up. I suggested we do a show. Everyone was like, "Oh, my God, at Carnegie? We're going to lose money. Shouldn't do it." I offered, "I'll give 100% of the profits, and I'll cover 100% of the losses, but this is what I'd like to do, just please support it." It's just been a home run ever since. The only difference is the second year, I decided I'm not going to work with this group anymore. I'm going to give it directly to the organizations. There wasn't a reason to have an intermediary take anything out of the coffers.
It's been a great run. To have honor Bruce Springsteen and have him show up at his own tribute and surprise the audience was a thrill I'll never forget. Or R.E.M. or David Byrne coming and performing at their own tribute. Patti's performed on four or five of these over the years, obviously being in New York. She's been such a generous philanthropic person herself. She's very familiar with the series. I've been asking her for a couple of years if she would mind being honored, and she had been saying no. Something clicked on the last time. I cornered her here at City Winery and was like, "Please, baby, please, baby, please," like Spike Lee in She's Gotta Have It. I just begged her and she succumbed and said yes.
She's been wonderful, helping. Actually, even with the artwork that we're using, using this Lynn Goldsmith, beautiful photography. She's a pleasure to work with. It's an honor to be able to-- Hearing my story, I came to New York, and there were these icons that were, to me, symbols of what New York art scene, music scene was about. Andy Warhol and Lou Reed and Patti Smith is one of them. Some of it feels like a dream come true. It also raises the bar for me. I got to put on a really, really great show and make sure the programming on it is as stellar as can be. It's an honor, but also obviously, super exciting.
ezt: Maybe you could just share with us those evenings just before a big show at Carnegie Hall and everything is together. You being an event guy, you being a connective tissue between musicians and audience members and people who are involved in donating. Maybe you could just share that internal feeling you have right before the big show starts. What's that like?
md: Unlike, say, throwing a party that you don't have RSVPs, and even if you have RSVPs, you never know if people are going to show. In this particular case, for the most part, we're usually sold out before the show. I'm not worried about the audience not being there. The caliber of artists at this point-- and we do a rehearsal show the day before, so we get some of the kinks out. At City Winery, we do a full-day rehearsal, and then we put on a show the night before, ticketed. Not everyone shows up, but the house band runs through the set, and we will have some stand-ins if some of the guest singers don't want to or can't make it.
At that point, we'll know if there's just going to be this epic performance and someone's really singing something in a-- what's amazing is different than a cover band, there's some great cover bands out in the world. The Fab Faux when they perform the music of the Beatles, you close your eyes and you go, "Oh, my God, this is the Beatles live." It's such a cool thing.
There's fun bands to hear playing some of your favorite stuff. I love a good Stones cover band. This is different than going to hear a cover of Patti or The Stones when we did The Stones. This is artistic interpretations by great artists in their own right. Many who either will or probably could be part of the series down the line, who in their own voice will do this music. Whether it's a different arrangement, instrumentation, or just to hear the words, song, so you actually hear them in a different way coming from another author, poet is one of the coolest parts of it because you're just getting this artist interpreting another artist, and you experience it in another way.
The magical performances you get the night before at the rehearsal, but then to see it in front of 2,800 people at Carnegie, it gets me excited right now just thinking about it. I feel so damn privileged to be a catalyst and be part of it, and be there at night. I would pay money to do this work. Actually, I do a little bit. It really doesn't feel like work. It is being a kid in a candy shop, curating your favorite artists to do the music of your favorite artists, and then see it live.
Then see the interaction between these great musicians backstage in a real almost festival, jovial way, but different than festivals backstage, where artists are going to do their whole set. This has another level of comfort because they're not doing their own song, they're doing the honoree's song, and it's one song. It's this opportunity to connect over the theme. The banter that you see between the artists backstage, it's magical, it's really, really cool.
ezt: You've been involved in several places, but New York City in the live performance world of the '80s, the '90s. Now here we are in the 21st century, you're doing this. If you could close your eyes and imagine, what's the future like for live performance? There's so many weird things with AI and a couple of these hologram concerts. If you had to kind of close your eyes and really envision and think about maybe 20, 30 even beyond 50 years from now, what do you think the experience of going to see live music will be then? Or will it be as you say, sort of a return to simplicity? Let's sit here and have a beer and watch this person.
md: I don't even need to close my eyes and fantasize about it. I've seen some holographic stuff, which is really neat, but it still affects Emily. The preciousness of live and using all of the senses. The smell and feel and touch in your eyes and your ears in the real true connection with other humans, there's no replicating that. There's no AI tool. Large language models are great, and they work really well with visual, with sound. You're getting some recreation. They work really well with obviously words. They have not gotten close.
Elon Musk is going to work on in it a lot of it, and the next generation will too, but they have not gotten touch, smell, taste, and feel. That is more than 30, 40, 50 years away, and then I'm convinced seeing the perfect robot do Patti Smith is never going to be the same. I have no worries for the live experience. I think it's going to be something that there'll be all kinds of options, but the actual live special event will never be fully duplicated, and therefore worth a lot in terms of value. I'm a big believer in that experiential.
ezt: It's interesting, and you see my records behind me, and I'm a pretty analog guy. I love my vinyl, and it makes me think about the live experiences you're saying. There's something about that analog, that physical, tactile thing. You talk about record jackets and sleeves and stuff, and we love those kinds of things. You can watch all these things on YouTube, and you can do it in the privacy of your home, and you can have all kinds of surround sound, but it's really not the same thing as being together in the same room. Is it?
md: It's not. Not even close. It can be close, but not the same.
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