Chaos reigns backstage at Cornerstone '92's acoustic coffeehouse sidestage. Musicians and stagehands scurry busily trying to get the already late presentation of At the Foot of the Cross started. Mike Knott stands affably off to the side, trying not to get in the way and doing his best to steer clear of any heavy lifting. I pick a spot out of the flow of traffic close to where Knott is standing, and after taking a photo of him posing with a fan, I strike up the following conversation about his first solo outing, the stark and brutal sounding Screaming Brittle Siren: "I really like you new record," I say, "What inspires you to write this kind of stuff?"

"Life," he replies stoically as Choir drummer and lyricist Steve Hindalong blows by delivering some vital piece of equipment to the stage crew.

"Really," I add, "[Hindalong's] wife has a baby and he writes a record of drippy love songs [Wide-Eyed Wonder], and your wife has a baby and you write Screaming Brittle Siren.

"Yeah," he says laughing as he ponders the irony.

Knott has made a career out of pondering the irony. Knott burst upon the Christian music scene in 1987 when his band, L.S.U., release its underground classic, Shaded Pain. That album created quite a stir with record buyers and the press, and helped to establish a new level of credibility for Christian alternative music. But it also managed to alienate Knott from most of the Christian mainstream. In response, he formed Blonde Vinyl Records in 1990 to fill the void. The new label released several releases by new alternative artists in addition to three L.S.U. albums and a solo album by Knott. however in 1992, Blonde Vinyl fell victim to a loss of distribution and was forced to close its doors.

But with a little help from his friends at Broken Records, who released a compilation of Blonde Vinyl hits, and Metro One, who have re-released the classic Shaded Pain on CD, Knott is back on his feet and recording a total of four new albums for his growing public.

The first is a new L.S.U. album, Cash in Chaos World Tour on his own new Siren Music label. The second, also on the Siren label, is a new solo album titled Fluid. The third album, another solo recording, titled Rocket and a Bomb, is due out from Brainstorm and, finally the fourth album is a second L.S.U release on Alarma Records called Grace Shaker.

For the World Tour and Rocket and a Bomb albums, Knott relied heavily on his experiences living in a run-down apartment complex in Hollywood. The apartment he shared with L.S.U. guitarist Brian Doidge was rumored to have once been occupied by Iggy Pop when he was strung out on a heroin binge. The whole complex, says Knott, was filled with people either reaching for the stars or trying desperately to get out of the limelight.

"LA moves so fast," he says, "that if you live in the doldrums of Hollywood, in the hell of it all, the underclass people just decide they can't keep up with it. So they start moving slower and slower until finally they become part of the woodwork, and the brickwork, and the road, and the telephone booth. They become part of the whole makeup of Hollywood. Life moves by so fast that if you don't have a car and a car phone, you stop fighting it until you become nothing at all."

Under Knott's scrutiny, the "psychos" that lived in his complex become a metaphor for the problems facing the next generation of the modern church. "The whole album, just so you'll know," he warns, "is basically about sex. It's geared towards today's youth and making the church aware of them."

"'She Can Sell the Shell' on the new L.S.U. record is about the hookers that lived in our complex," he continues. "It's about how the cops started busting them so bad they started dressing like school girls, books and everything, so the cops wouldn't know who they were. And they would still get picked up and take their johns behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street."

In the title track of Rocket and a Bomb, Knott invites the church to seek ways to create opportunity and meet people's needs beyond merely giving them a handout and without placing hope in shallow prosperity teachings. "Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?/ Can she help me find a job?/ One that pays enough to take/ A rocket and a bomb."

"When I talk about a Mrs. God," he said, "I'm talking about the Body of Christ, the people who are supposed to the Bride of Christ."

The other solo album, Fluid, works on similar levels, but is intended more as a musical experiment. Knott said he has long been fascinated by the sonic textures of echo-delayed guitar and has long wanted to create and album with that same "liquid-type quality" to it. Fluid follows the story of a young woman who steals a friend's vintage Cadillac and crashes it. Then as she lies in a coma, her spirit crying out to God, Satan comes to try and claim her soul.

"It's about the struggle between light and dark," Knott says, "She's lying there near death, talking to God, and Satan comes to God and says, 'You can't help her. She's into the stars and astrology. She doesn't belong to you.' All the while she's crying out to God."

For all the other albums' stories, concepts and high artistic ideals, Grace Shaker may be the most puzzling release by Knott and L.S.U. It is a relatively straightforward musical treatise on the subject of grace, a subject which Knott feels there is a lack of understanding about.

I wanted to do a record on [grace] and how it applies to me in my life," he says, "and have it be something that when someone listens to it, they can definitely get some direct truths from the Word out of it. It's not going to be anything controversial other than me doing a very Christian record. The title song, for example, just talks about certain people who think that they can earn their way [to heaven] when the truth is 'It's not of ourselves lest any man should boast.'"

Michael Knott was recently called one of contemporary Christian music's "few true rock star personalities." He is driven by a relentless pursuit of excellence, a compulsion to always do himself one better. And through it all, he strives to maintain an uncompromising honesty about life's hardships and trials. There is a certain mystique about him erected by fans and record critics who see few others like him in the relatively small Christian recording industry. But, although he admits a secret thrill at the attention he receives as a result of his vocation, when he has the opportunity to play out live, he can usually be found hawking T-shirts after the gig and casually chatting with fans, doing his best to dispel these mythic images about him.

Originally appeared in the March 1994 issue of CCM magazine.

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