Michael Knott, whose music and influence helped cultivate the Christian alternative music scene of the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, died Tuesday on the age of 61. He is survived by his daughter, Stormie Fraser.
Knott was the founding father of the label Blonde Vinyl and later collaborated with Brandon Ebel to launch the highly influential Tooth & Nail Records, known for bands like Underoath and MxPx.
His raw, revolutionary, and controversial music pushed against the norms of the industry and laid the groundwork for contemporary communities around Christian alt music.
“Knott helped prove that Christian music may very well be something legitimate, reasonably than running two to 3 years behind mainstream trends,” said Matt Crosslin, who runs the location Knottheads and has grow to be an unofficial archivist of Knott’s work.
Even along with his status for bucking standards, Knott’s sense of mission was earnest and singular.
“He wanted people to return to Jesus and be saved,” said Nathan Myrick, assistant professor of church music at Mercer University. “He appeared to offer a way of holding faith and raw authenticity in tension.”
Knott was born in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up with six sisters in what he described as a contemporary “von Trapp family.” They were continually singing and immersed in music through their father, a folk singer, and their mother, a church organist.
When Knott was in second grade, his family moved to Southern California, where he began to take piano and guitar lessons on the YMCA. He began writing songs in his preteen years and would bury them in a folder in his backyard, convinced that nothing would ever come of his private creative life.
Despite his early shyness about his songwriting, Knott began fidgeting with bands in highschool and acting at local clubs and bars. After coming to faith, he began to feel just like the music he was performing didn’t offer anything meaningful. Through contacts at Calvary Church in Costa Mesa, California, Knott connected with the Christian punk band the Lifesavors and joined. (They later rebranded the group as Lifesavers, then Lifesavers Underground or L.S. Underground)
Throughout his profession, Knott performed with a lot of bands and released music as a solo artist; his discography is sprawling and varied. He was heavily influenced by fellow California rock bands the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction but dedicated himself to driving the scene forward reasonably than creating copycat music for the Christian market.
Despite remaining a fixture and catalyst within the Christian alternative scene within the ’80s and ’90s, Knott struggled to make his way within the music industry and to sustain an upward trajectory. He launched the groundbreaking indie label Blonde Vinyl in 1990, but when its distributor went bankrupt in 1993, the label folded.
Knott’s band, Aunt Bettys, signed to Elektra Records (a label owned by Warner Music Group) within the mid-’90s, joining the ranks of Metallica, Tracy Chapman, and The Cure. After a brief run with the label, Knott went his own way. There was speculation that Knott’s theatricality and eccentricities were worrisome for label executives.
In a 2003 article, HM Magazine described the numerous personas of Mike Knott: “a non-Christian,” “a liberal,” “a zealot like Peter,” “a Proverbial idiot who speaks too often and too soon with too little thought first.”
For a time, he performed 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 reportedly for encouraging the audience to bounce too). He also had a drinking problem, which he spoke and wrote truthfully about.
Knott had a status for being uncompromising and chronic. Artists like Keith Green and Larry Norman developed similar reputations within the industry for bucking corporate norms and ignoring business advice.
Knott’s convictions about unfettered musical creativity and blunt truth-telling made him an industry black sheep; he was self-aware concerning the incontrovertible fact that his candidness sometimes chafed those around him. He joked that his nickname within the Eighties was “Captain Rebuko”: “If someone did anything flawed, I might rebuke ’em,” he told HM.
But Knott wasn’t interested by rebuking people for his or her struggles with worldly vices like drugs or promiscuity; he was concerned about hypocrisy, deception, and spiritual manipulation.
His conviction and condemnation were on full, unapologetic display within the L.S. Underground album The Grape Prophet. The album, which Knott described as a rock opera, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a faith community’s encounter with Bob Jones, Mike Bickle, and their group of Kansas City–based prophets that traveled the US throughout the ’80s and early ’90s.
Jones (the “Grape Prophet”) is depicted prophesying in songs like “The Grape Prophet Speaks.” According to Crosslin of the Knottheads site, the song “The English Interpreter of English” depicts Mike Bickle, the founding father of IHOP, who has recently been accused of sexual abuse and other misconduct.
“Knott was calling out Mike Bickle within the early ’90s,” said Crosslin. “His music said, It’s okay to call these things out.”
Knott’s strident, painfully honest songwriting and musical experimentation was magnetic, even for Christian fans who sometimes wondered in the event that they ought to be listening in any respect.
Writer Chad Thomas Johnston grew up listening to mainstream Christian pop and rock like Carman and Petra. The son of a Baptist minister in Missouri, he encountered Knott’s music through the Wheaton, Illinois–based Christian magazine True Tunes News.
“I used to be fearful of his music once I first encountered it,” Johnston said in an interview with CT. “It was unflinchingly dark.”
Knott’s music addressed divorce, alcoholism, and drug use. He used profanity. “At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Christian artists were alleged to be singing Christian songs,” said Johnston.
When Knott helped found Tooth & Nail records in 1993, he attracted up-and-coming artists who were wanting to join a label helmed by someone with a powerful creative vision. In lending his credibility to Tooth & Nail, Knott laid the groundwork for the burgeoning Christian alternative scene of the 2000s, which saw Christian bands pull ahead and grow to be the industry standard-bearers in metal and indie rock.
Those who’ve followed Knott’s work see a transparent lineage from Knott to the spiritual and musical communities that formed around Christian alternative music through festivals like Cornerstone, and now Audiofeed and Furnace Fest.
“For many, the Christian alternative space is an extension of their church,” said Myrick, who’s currently conducting ethnographic research on the Christian alternative music community. “People feel accepted, right down to the core parts of who they’re.”
Knott wasn’t only committed to the health of the choice music scene—he was committed to the health of the singing church. He fearful that the worship of the church didn’t reflect deep, complicated faith.
His 1994 album Alternative Worship: Prayers, Petitions and Praise aimed to supply something needed and strange. The song “Never Forsaken” is a straightforward meditation on the Christian life that repeats the reassurance, Never left alone, never left alone.
“If you write a praise song and also you’re honest, that may last,” Knott told Christian Music Magazine in 2001. “If you write a praise song just to jot down a praise song, it’s not going to work. If you write a song a couple of tree, and also you’re honest, it’s going to work.”
