“Rocket and a Bomb” by Michael Knott

Mike Knott’s second solo album, 1994’s Rocket and a Bomb, came in the middle of a truly historical run: Knott, by my count, released more than twenty albums and EPs between 1986 and 2001, not including a number of various artists projects he spearheaded, like the Alternative Worship album and the Brow Beat: Unplugged Alternative compilation from the previous year. For the most part, each of these projects has a pretty distinct vibe to it, such that it would not be possible to take a song from one of them and drop it, unedited, onto another. Knott was nothing if not ambitious, and nothing if not hardworking.

And yet, as Knott’s fans have often noted over the years, quality control tended to get lost amid all this quantity: Knott put out so many records, under so many different names and genres, that most of them have at least a song or two that a more fastidious artist would never have let see the light of day. Take, for example, 1992’s The Grape Prophet, his acknowledged masterpiece with his band Lifesavers Underground: It’s the closest L.S.U. ever came to a perfect album, but it’s only 34 minutes long, and even so, Knott easily could have pulled or substantially trimmed the experimental track “A Group of Prophets Predict the Pickers’ Future Without Them.” (The title makes more sense in the context of the album.)

One thing that makes Rocket and a Bomb so remarkable in the context of Knott’s career, then, is that it’s pretty much perfect, start to finish. And what’s more, it’s perfect even within the relatively tight lyrical and musical concept Knott sets for himself: the songs are all more or less set on a single city block on the seedy side of Hollywood, where Knott lived with his bassist Brian Doidge amid a frightening and pathetic cast of characters too broken for mainstream American society–let alone the Christian rock industry.

Rocket is a product of its time, to be sure: it’s hardly a grunge or an alternative metal album, but the influences of Seattle and the Sunset Strip are both readily apparent in its sound, which is stripped-back and folky until it explodes into guitar noise. The band is modest: Knott on vocals and guitar, Eric Coomes on bass, Ed Benrock on drums, and Knott’s co-producer/drinking buddy Gene Eugene on occasional Fender Rhodes. Rik Rekedal’s cello, perhaps the most 1994 element of all, pierces through on several tracks. (Nirvana’s use of a cello on Nevermind and In Utero caused a minor craze for the instrument in Christian rock.)

But the songwriting distinctly does not feel like 1994. Most of the songs here are really short stories, the sort that obviously dominate folk music but which had largely disappeared from modern rock in the 1990s. (If you wanted stories in 1994, you’d probably turn to country music, not to alternative rock.) I don’t know how long Knott lived at 1498 N. Orange Grove Avenue in Hollywood, but if his work here is any indication, he must have been paying very close attention to everything that was going on around him.

There was always a risk that these songs would turn into some sort of musical freak show. Knott tells the story of a ’60s burnout illegally subletting his apartment to an enormously fat man with ambiguous intentions (“Jan the Weatherman”); the wastrel scion of a famous acting dynasty, reduced to giving “acting lessons” in an apartment crowded with cats (“John Barrymore, Jr.”); a male victim of domestic abuse (“Adrian”); a man who promises to commit suicide if someone will only bring him a shotgun (“Serious”); and, most infamously, a woman who gives every indication of having killed her husband and cooked him into some sort of stew (“Kitty”). Only “Kitty” seriously risks being turned into a novelty; on all the other tracks, Knott shows a kind of divine affection for his neighbors. Whatever irony exists in his delivery (and it’s not much) is covered over by the warmth of the album’s production. Knott, for reasons known only to him and God, loves these broken people, and he invites us to love them too.

Special attention must be paid to “Bubbles,” one of the most horrifying songs ever released on a Christian label. (Rocket came out on Gene Eugene’s Brainstorm Artists International, a division of Word; Knott’s own label, Blonde Vinyl, had folded the year before.) Bubbles is an alcoholic homeless man whom Knott has made friends with. They make arrangements to meet in Plummer Park in West Hollywood so that Knott can take him to detox. But when Knott shows up, Bubbles is not there. A junkie tells Knott what’s happened:

He said a rich man in a limo
Dressed Bubbles up like a clown
Took him up into the hills somewhere
Now he’s nowhere to be found

By the end of the song, Knott has seen the limo for himself, with Bubbles, “torn up, beat up,” inside it.

I won’t claim to be the most worldly person alive, but I’ve been listening to Rocket and a Bomb for 25 years, and I still have no idea what the hell that rich man is doing to Bubbles in the back of that limo, and I’ve always been a little scared to find out. When I was in high school, I once went up to Knott after a concert and asked him about the bridge of “Jan the Weatherman”:

Once a month, a big fat man walks out of Jan’s door
Comes back twenty minutes later with a hundred sandwiches or more
I said, “Hey Jan, what’s this all about?”
Jan just said, “Shhhh, I don’t wanna get kicked out”

Knott’s answer was to basically rephrase the lyric, as if he didn’t understand why anyone would be confused by it. I bring this up to point out that I could have asked about “Bubbles” instead, but I was too afraid of what the answer might have been.

Knott had seen the darkest parts of human experience; no doubt he saw many of them in himself, through his decades of wrestling with his own alcoholism. (As Michael Roe of the 77s wrote on Facebook upon Knott’s passing earlier this month, “He loved Jesus and his fellow man deeply while betraying both on the turn of a dime when his blood alcohol level reached an ungodly level.”) He never sugarcoated and only rarely glamorized; he tried to tell the truth as he saw it, with compassion and a little bit of humor, when it was available. He makes no commentary on that rich pervert’s experiments on the homeless, except in the instrumental coda to “Bubbles,” a kind of wounded, angry funk.

Knott gets autobiographical four times on Rocket and a Bomb. “Skinny Skins” is a song about Knott owing money to Steve Hindalong, drummer from The Choir and legendary producer of Chrindie classics. In “Jail,” he tells the story of a time he went there, I believe for wearing a policeman’s badge illegally. This is the least folky (and most “alternative”) song on the album and probably the most politically valent: every step of the way, Knott learns how crooked the American justice system is, from judges who “don’t care / What I have to say / Only what I have to wear” to public defense attorneys accepting bribes. “What am I supposed to learn?” the chorus sighs. “I haven’t learned it yet.”

The title track and “Train,” on the other hand, are less narrative than the album’s other songs. Both of them deal with a subject near and dear to Knott’s heart: failure. “Rocket and a Bomb” is the best song he ever wrote. Its lyric is cryptic and funny, a series of addresses to distant figures (Mr. Bill, Mr. Bank, Mr. God, Mr. and Mrs. In), asking for a break. And then the chorus:

All I ever wanted was a good job and some bus fare
And a rocket and a bomb

Knott’s narrator seems to long for something reasonable, something maybe everyone in a successful society ought to expect–and then something terribly unreasonable that he had no right to expect would come to him. And, for that matter, it’s something that we probably wouldn’t trust someone like him to use safely even if he got it. And maybe he is bound to the other Hollywood burnouts on this album by his inability to tell the difference between these two things.

“Maybe I’ll learn to forgive,” Knott sings near the end of “Train.” “Maybe I’ll learn how to live.” Then the twist of the knife: “Maybe I’ll just drink like a sieve.” It was never a pleasant lyric, but now that Knott has died at the age of 61, no doubt of something related to decades of alcoholism, it’s crushing.

Around the turn of the millennium, Knott’s output slowed to a trickle, and the work he did release became less consistent. I doubt anyone who knew his music was surprised by his early death, but listening to Rocket and a Bomb again, it’s impossible not to feel that the world lost something irretrievable when it lost Knott, the man who reminded Christian rock fans that Christ himself would probably have spent a lot more time in the bad part of Los Angeles than most of us would be comfortable doing ourselves.

Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, 2020). His essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic and Current, among other places. He teaches high school history in Atlanta.