The YZA

I’m writing this as a warning to anyone who is in a band that is thinking of playing at The Annex in New York. I’m doing my best to propagate the well-deserved reputation that establishment has as one that baldly rips off bands who play at that venue.

My band played there on Monday 29 September 2008. We had booked the show through their booking agent, Xiaoting Luo, a few months in advance. Everything was prepped, and the door deal was as followed (quoted directly from Xiaoting’s email):

Payment:  Depends on the cover.  If the cover is $12, the first 10 paid to see the band goes to the club; the band will get 100% rest of the door based on their draw.  If the cover is $8, the club will take more heads – the first 15 paid.

So, in essence, the club was supposed to take the first $120, and everything else above that was supposed to go entirely to the band. The cover charge the night of our show was $10, so the club was supposed to take the money from the first 12 people who paid to see our band, and all the rest was the band’s.

We put on a strong show, and a lot of people came out (it was my birthday that night too, so lots of my friends came).

At the end of the night, Leon, the guy at the door who was supposed to be counting heads told us we had a count of 30. He then proceeded to tell us that there was an $80 promoter’s fee that we had to pay (though none of the other bands were paying it), and he ended up paying us $120. All of this was total bullshit, and I told the guy that he was wrong, and showed him the email that Xiaoting had sent us (on my Blackberry) with the specific details of what we were to be paid, and just kept saying that he didn’t know that, and that his instructions were to take the $80 promoter’s fee from our money.

Now. I kept my cool, and wrote an email to Xiaoting from my phone right then and there, telling her that Leon was trying to rip us off, and that we were owed money. She wrote back on Oct. 1:

Yes, Leon made a mistake, for 30 paid to see you, you guys should have
the first 12 goes to the house, then you will have $180 instead of
$120.  I’ll check in with the owners about this, and let you know
asap, cool?

In the meantime, I did a count of people who I remembered came to the show, and the list of people that I alone recognized and remembered was 37 people long. So, Leon had not only ripped us off with a bullshit “promoter’s fee”, but he’d also counted the heads wrong and pocketed that money too.

So, Xiaoting and I email back and forth for the next few weeks, each time she has a different excuse why she hasn’t settled this issue yet. Either the owner of the club was on vacation, or she didn’t have a chance to meet with him and get the sheet from the night of the show, etc. Eventually she CC’s the owner of the club, Jason Baron (a guy who has pictures of Barack Obama photoshopped to look like the Devil on his Myspace page), while responding to me, as if to prove that she’s being honest and that she hasn’t had a chance to settle the issue with the owner yet.

After a month of back and forth bullshit, I give her the ultimatum that she either immediately sends me the money and settles it internally on her own time (after all it was their “mistake” and not mine, so why should I have to wait?), or I was going to tell everyone that they’re running a dishonest business. So here I am, warning you all. I even wrote the owner directly, telling him that people in his organization were doing bad business, and he wrote back saying he’d look into it, but I never heard back from him (and neither did I expect to). At this point I don’t expect to ever see the money owed to us, but I am going to make sure everyone who wants to play a show there knows what they are getting into.

For me, the real lesson learned was to trust my band’s drummer. This is from an email he sent a few days before our show:

so it turns out that a buddy of mine from school is the roommate of one of the sound engineers at annex.

A few things we should be aware of. It is important we find out the exact details of the door. My friend told me that they will take a certain amount of of full paying guests, which is understood, but he also said that will take 6 out of the 10 buck of the remaining guests that come. Plus this xiaoting chick is known to promise more then she can deliver, and could show up and take a portion of the show as a booking agent percentage.

I ignored his wise words, thinking it was just some sour grapes someone had spread around. But it was prophetic and all true. So watch out! Fuck The Annex!