Michael Knott, whose music and affect helped domesticate the Christian various music scene of the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, died on Tuesday on the age of 61. He’s survived by his daughter Stormie Fraser.
Knott was the founding father of the label Blonde Vinyl and later labored with Brandon Ebel to launch the extremely influential Tooth & Nail Data, identified for bands corresponding to Underoath and MxPx.
His uncooked, progressive and controversial music defied the norms of the business and laid the groundwork for up to date communities round Christian alt music.
“Knott helped show that Christian music could possibly be one thing reliable reasonably than two or three years behind the mainstream,” mentioned Matt Crosslin, who runs the Knottheads web site and has change into the unofficial archivist of Knott's work.
Knott's sense of mission was severe and distinctive, regardless of his status for defying requirements.
“He needed individuals to come back to Jesus and be saved,” mentioned Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer College. “It appeared to supply a approach to maintain religion and uncooked authenticity in stress.”
Born in Aurora, Illinois, Knott grew up with six sisters in what he described as a contemporary “von Trapp household.” They sang consistently and immersed themselves in music by way of their father, a people singer, and mom, a church organist.
When Knott was in second grade, his household moved to Southern California, the place he started taking piano and guitar classes on the YMCA. He started writing songs in his teenage years, burying them in a folder in his yard, satisfied that nothing would ever come of his non-public artistic life.
Regardless of his early songwriting shyness, Knott started taking part in with bands and acting at native golf equipment and bars in highschool. After coming to religion, he started to really feel that the music he performed supplied nothing significant. Via contacts at Calvary Church in Costa Mesa, California, Knott related with and joined the Christian punk band Lifesavors. (They later renamed the group Lifesavers, then Lifesavers Underground or LS Underground)
Throughout his profession, Knott carried out with a variety of bands and launched music as a solo artist; his discography is huge and diversified. He was closely influenced by fellow California rock bands the Purple Sizzling Chili Peppers and Jane's Dependancy, however was extra devoted to driving the scene ahead than creating copycat music for the Christian market.
Regardless of remaining a fixture and catalyst within the Christian various scene all through the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Knott struggled to make his means within the music business and keep an upward trajectory. In 1990, he launched the pioneering indie label Blonde Vinyl, however when his distributor went bankrupt in 1993, the label folded.
Knott's band, the Aunt Bettys, signed to Elektra Data (a label owned by Warner Music Group) within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, becoming a member of the ranks of Metallica, Tracy Chapman and The Treatment. After a brief run with the label, Knott went his personal means. It was speculated that Knott's theatrics and eccentricities had been disturbing to label executives.
In a 2003 article HM journal described a lot of Mike Knott's personalities: “non-Christian”, “liberal”, “zealous like Peter”, “the proverbial idiot who speaks too typically and too quickly with too little thought”.
For a time he carried out along with his face painted white; in his early years with the Lifesavors, he was kicked out of Calvary Church for dancing too wildly on stage (and allegedly for encouraging the viewers to bop too). He additionally had a ingesting drawback, about which he spoke and wrote candidly.
Knott had a status for being uncompromising and chronic. Artists like Keith Inexperienced and Larry Norman have constructed the same status within the business for flouting company norms and ignoring enterprise recommendation.
Knott's perception in unfettered musical creativity and blunt truth-telling made him the black sheep of the business; he was conscious that his honesty typically irritated these round him. He joked that his nickname within the Nineteen Eighties was “Captain Rebuko”: “If somebody did one thing mistaken, I’d scold them,” he mentioned. HM.
However Knott was not interested by chastising individuals for his or her struggles with worldly vices like medicine or promiscuity; he was involved about hypocrisy, deception and non secular manipulation.
His convictions and convictions had been absolutely and unapologetically on the LS Underground album Grape prophet. Described by Knott as a rock opera, the album tells the semi-autobiographical story of a non secular group encounter with Bob Jones, Mike Bickle and their band of Kansas Metropolis prophets who toured the US in the course of the Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties. .
Jones (“Grape Prophet”) is portrayed as prophesying in songs corresponding to “The Grape Prophet Speaks”. In accordance with Crosslin of the Knottheads web site, the tune “The English Interpreter of English” options Mike Bickle, the founding father of IHOP, who was not too long ago accused of sexual abuse and different misconduct.
“Knott referred to as Mike Bickle within the early '90s,” Crosslin mentioned. “His music mentioned: It's okay to name these items out.”
Knott's piercing, painfully trustworthy songwriting and musical experimentation had been magnetic, even for Christian followers who typically questioned if they need to even be listening.
Author Chad Thomas Johnston grew up on conventional Christian pop and rock like Carman and Petra. The son of a Baptist minister in Missouri, he encountered Knott's music by way of a Christian journal in Wheaton, Illinois. True Tunes information.
“After I first met her, I used to be afraid of his music,” Johnston mentioned in an interview with CT. “It was unwaveringly darkish.
Knott's music handled divorce, alcoholism and drug use. He used profanity. “I couldn't wrap my head round it on the time. Christian artists had been imagined to sing Christian songs,” Johnston mentioned.
When Knott helped discovered Tooth & Nail Data in 1993, he attracted rising artists keen to affix a label led by somebody with a robust artistic imaginative and prescient. By lending his credibility to Tooth & Nail, Knott laid the groundwork for the burgeoning Christian various scene of the twenty first century, with Christian bands pushing ahead to change into business requirements in metallic and indie rock.
Those that have adopted Knott's work see a transparent line from Knott to the non secular and musical communities which have fashioned round Christian various music by way of festivals like Cornerstone and now Audiofeed and Furnace Fest.
“For a lot of, the Christian various area is an extension of their church,” mentioned Myrick, who’s presently conducting ethnographic analysis on the Christian various music group. “Individuals really feel accepted, all the way down to the core of who they’re.”
Knott was not solely dedicated to the well being of the choice music scene – he was additionally dedicated to the well being of the singing church. He apprehensive that the church's worship didn’t mirror a deep, sophisticated religion.
His 1994 album Different Worship: Prayers, Supplications, and Praises with the goal of providing one thing vital and weird. The tune “By no means Forsaken” is an easy meditation on the Christian life that repeats the peace of mind, He was by no means alone, he was by no means alone.
“If you happen to write a eulogy and also you're honest, it should stick,” Knott mentioned Christian Music Journal in 2001. “If you happen to write a reward tune only for the sake of writing it, it's not going to work. If you happen to write a tune a couple of tree and also you're trustworthy, it should work.”
