By this point it was clear that we’d be doing a lot of non-subway travel in the future, too. The worldwide press attention had started. The Japanese press and music industry were watching us particularly closely. After a couple of articles on the club appeared in Japanese jazz magazines and a special on us appeared on NHK (Japan’s biggest TV station), we noticed more tourists coming into the club from Japan. One night while I was taking tickets at the door, a bus pulled up in front of the club and fifty Japanese tourists walked in to see the latest in “jazz.” I tried to explain to the leader that we had a hard-core rockband playing, but they all paid and went in anyway. Five minutes later, half of them came out covering their ears. The other half came out after the show exclaiming “Omoshiloi-des”, which after a few year’s of Japanese lessons I’ve learned to mean “It was very interesting.” Jazz is more popular in Japan than in the U.S.; we knew we would be flying there sometime soon.
However, it was the flights to Europe that earned us the most frequent-flier mileage. Given our success in Holland and the fact that jazz and new-music artists in general do better in Europe, a full European tour seemed in order. We had started to meet a few other promoters in Germany and thought a comprehensive tour of the major cities would help promote our upcoming CD releases in Europe. But wait…. A&M Records, distributed by Polygram in Europe, wasn’t planning-and couldn’t be persuaded-to release our stuff there. Who would be interested in this? they thought. Three months before the tour, feeling very cornered and in need of our CDs to help legitimize what we were trying to do, we bought back the European rights from A&M in order to license the CDs to a much more interested European label, Enemy Records. We had to give back almost half the money they had originally advanced us, but we finally got the CDs into Europe. To this day, though, we haven’t been able to make back the money we lost paying A&M for the European rights – but we had opened up a lot of doors, anyway.
I booked a tour of 24 European cities, using all the contacts I had made or borrowed from our friends-the family of artists from the club who booked their own tours of Europe and had accumulated a network of names over the years. The tour brought six bands-Sonny Sharrock, The Jazz Passengers, Curlew, Myra Melford Trio, Miracle Room, and Bosho – to play two-night festivals of three bands a night. Two tour buses crisscrossed and leapfrogged each other throughout Europe, with concerts taking place in two different cities each night.
I was there the whole six weeks, and Bob came over to manage one bus for the last three hellish weeks. Not only was the tour losing money, but the schedule was burning everyone out. In a serious lapse of judgement, I trusted a first-time agent in Belgium to handle some of the contracting and logistics. He spoke German, French, Flemish, and English and was a very nice guy. However, by the time the tour was over, we were 30 grand in the hole. He made a number of deals that were reminiscent of Swamp Thing days-playing for the door in Helsingbourg, Sweden, was the craziest. Not only did the small pub hold only 30 people, but with three bands in the place each night, there wasn’t even room for the audience, if one had shown up in the firstplace. All the bands played great and had a fun time. Meanwhile, I was freaking out that we’d taken in no money and the hotels were costing us more than $800 a night. (Back to the Visa card.) That was just one of the 15 concerts this guy from Belgium booked.
But not all my deals were so great, either. I had arranged to play in East Berlin just before the Wall came down. The concert was going to take place in a beautiful 500-seat cultural center in the heart of old Berlin; tickets would be sold in the West and the East. We would receive the West German Deutsche marks and the promoter the East German marks; I figured that if at least 200 people paid 25 deutche marks-about 15 bucks at the time-the $3,000 a night would be sufficient.