Love Conquers the Dread of the Poor: The Lenten Odyssey of Michael Knott

I have never published something in memoriam, nor have I published much about love for the poor. The former is because I have only honored those close to me in short pieces written for funerals, circulated among family. The latter is because the poor—homeless, ragged, and oft-demented—have deeply frightened me. I did not know the joy of encountering and serving them, nor the laughter and tears one can share with them, until, in 1997, a friend turned me on to the music of Michael Knott, who died on March 18, 2024.

This essay is both in homage to this great rock musician and an invitation to listen to his 1994 album Rocket and a Bomb (link to a live version of the album, hereafter RB). Please hear this masterpiece, and do not let your device shuffle the tracks. A fallen part of me wants you to read this article, and does not care if you listen; please treat that inclination like you would one to stop for a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

You might need this album, because RB is true therapy for the incubated suburban soul, sweet suffering from a Christian musician who was born Catholic, became an Evangelical, and then died Catholic. It may bring tears to your eyes; better, it may bring you with longing to the soup kitchen for service and interpersonal communion. Leon Bloy said that, “there are places in the heart which do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be.” St. John Paul II said that, “suffering is present in the world in order to release love.” RB is artistic proof of these conceptions. It is a gift for Lent, and it is Grade A Choice rock n’ roll.

RB is from Knott’s Evangelical period, but the personal circumstances surrounding its creation and creator are far more enlightening than denominational referencing. In the early 90s Knott was going through a divorce and was nearly penniless, living with bandmate Brian Doidge in a dilapidated building near the corner of Sunset and Fairfax, a seedy part of West Hollywood, Los Angeles. The units were so tiny that most doors remained open most of the time. He was also in the grip of alcohol addiction, very much the cause of his lost marriage and his new poverty. As his friend Mike Rowe recounted after his passing,

To call the passing of Michael Knott a well-rehearsed tragedy seems almost prosaic at this late date. His musical peers and others close to him figured this would have happened decades ago . . . I had thought that Michael would live his years out kind of like Sly Stone has, oscillating between periods of sobriety and vitality to inertia and squalor . . . I’ve . . . seen Michael roll around like a Bowery bum in a parking lot after being ejected from an establishment for unruly behavior, then turn around and share the Gospel with some unfortunate that he truly had compassion for. 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. Yes, Michael was a desperate alcoholic in the truest sense of the word. He loved and hated his tequila passionately, knowing it was his master while wanting Jesus to be his Lord. It was a painful thing to watch year after year, knowing that the longer the liquor won out, the more likely it was to take the man who wanted only to be free of it.

But this recounting of circumstances is only necessary for this article. A few journeys through the album make all of them clear, and make any recounting of them anemic by comparison.

RB consists of eleven songs. Three of them (tracks 2-4) are clearly desperate and sometimes border on self-pity, but are no less honest than many personal examens which, at least, in my case, are always been “very helpful and misleading,” in the words of Thornton Wilder. Six tracks (1, 5, 7-10) are tributes to the people with whom he lived (and one who visited him) in the complex. Two of them (track 6 and title track 11) defy categorization. The latter are moments of conversion of self into neighbor in which Knott clearly rediscovers himself in the marginalized lives and psyches of those around him. But they make more sense and reveal their deepest meaning only when considered in the order in which they are given.

Straight across the hall from Knott lives Jan the Weatherman (1), friendly enough but prone to violence when triggered with the wrong kind of question (“I asked him ‘bout his past one day, nearly lost my life that way”). You can feel the relative newness of the circumstances facing Knott; new, because he grew up in the suburban safety of Aurora, IL and then Huntington Beach, CA; relative, because as a habitue of the LA punk scene and a lush, he was certainly no stranger to the streets.

Jan, it seems, has a weird monthly routine involving sandwiches. He tries now and then to join Knott’s band (the Aunt Bettys) as a percussionist, but only with “a stick and a pan” to audition. Curiosity dominates the lyrics, but it is commingled with dread, the neighbor who lives where the poor should be in my soul.

Earlier this month, out of town and sleeping in a hotel bed in the middle of downtown Louisville, KY, I woke at 4:00 am and could not go back to sleep. So I found some hotel coffee and went out to the street to smoke a cigarette. While I was standing there, a young man dressed in black sweatshirt and black pants approached me and, with perfect diction and an earnest but deadpan expression, asked me if I could measure his feet, “because I need to know whether I wear a size 13.” When I told him I did not know how I could do that, he murmured something and walked on. I turned my tense body to watch him walk away until I could not see him anymore.

You may not have my cowardice, but savor its unpleasant aftertaste—it becomes important as you listen.

The next three songs are reflective, they are introspective and emanate confused self-pity (“Jail”), a dawning realization of alcohol-induced alienation (“Make Me Feel Good”), and vengeful suicidal ideation (“Serious”). The trio are a kind of musical “rock-bottom” for Michael, who offers to us a classic indictment of the U.S. prison system (he went to jail for impersonating a police officer) that any socially aware Catholic will ruefully appreciate. But the one that surpasses the others is “Make Me Feel Good,” in which he reflects on his addicted experience of others:

When you’re down
No one wants you around
And when you shake your fist
It’s tough to get a kiss
And when you scream
It’s easier to be seen
But it’s harder to be missed
When you’re down

The third and final verse brings us back to fear, and turns the tables (no pun intended—RB is not yet on vinyl) on me. It shows how those who are down and out (and it seems Michael is realizing that he is) might experience those among us who are not:

When you spill
Someone might make a big deal
Someone might sweep into the trash
It all depends on the cash
And when you’re scared
You’re gonna act like you don’t, but you care
You wanna get out fast
When you’re scared

The first time I lost a close friend to overdose, he was someone who had been really close, a younger member of my college brotherhood (In His Image household, Franciscan University) and one whom I had served as a youth minister all through his high school career. He was therefore a kind of spiritual legacy of mine to IHI, to put it in fraternity terms. When he graduated he had already had his license suspended for multiple DUI charges. After his wife left him with their young kids, after he was completely overtaken by alcohol and pills, I caught only glimpses of him. Our shared suburban existence no longer was shared—when you’re down, no one wants you around.

One such glimpse was on national TV, CNN in 2005—he was in a rehab program at a downtown New Orleans hospital when Hurricane Katrina hit, and the news crew found him sitting around completely sober but unattended. After the interview he walked out and made his way somewhere, ultimately to his mother’s house. He went into a rehab program, and rode his bike every day to meetings, and for two years things were looking up. Then he overdosed in his childhood bedroom where his mother found his body at the dawning of the new day. What fears might have driven him back to the bottle of pills no one will ever know. But there is no doubt in my mind that he was gripped by it—when I did bump into him once, he was trembling with dread, I think because he knew that I knew and was afraid of the shame.

If Jan the Weatherman is our Charon into Michael Knott’s new realm, the fourth track introduces us to his Francesca, a man who calls himself John Barrymore Jr. A self-alleged scion of the famous Barrymore British-American dynasty, he claims to have taught Steve McQueen how to act, and offers lessons out of his apartment (where he lives with sixteen cats and a dog that he nourishes with beer). After repeated offers, Michael finally takes him up on a lesson, at which point the neighbor turns him over, spanks him, and ends the lesson, “like Jimmy Dean, your sweet Jimmy Dean.” Michael does not entirely believe that he is who he says he is until, one day, his daughter Drew comes to visit him. Doing research for this article, I found pictures of him and some recollections from Drew Barrymore herself. It all adds up. By the way, one of Barrymore’s early movies is the 1958 film Never Love a Stranger. It was Steve McQueen’s third movie and, along with the leading role in The Blob, his first major cinematic role. Michael never says this in any interview that I have found, but I think the realization that anyone can end up where Michael finds himself “when you’re down” is what is at play here.

It is after this that we reach the first song that defies categorization, something like a pearl of great price—“Train.” We have all heard about falling off the wagon, but when you do that in real life you only get a concussion or break your arm. Falling off a train is closer to the reality of relapse, because when you do that much worse things usually happen. The lyrics should be savored, but to my mind the key transition of Self to Other begins in the refrain:

Everyone looks the same
Everything seems so plain
When You’re falling off the train

In the first half of St. Augustine’s Confessions, as he recounts his life in Africa, he offers no human names except one: Jesus Christ. In the magnificent “Structure and Meaning of Augustine’s Confessions,” the late Frederick Crosson explains this:

The first half of the story does not tell us the name of any of the people he encounters (with one single exception): not his mother or father or brother, not the friend whose death overshadows his life, . . . not his common-law wife or son . . .

The silence about names in the first half results from the overall movement there toward his increasing estrangement from God and man. . . . The second half is not only an ascent toward God; it is a progressive return to community, measured by the arrival of Monica, Alypius, Nebridius, and the friends who gather together in Milan and Cassiciacum and culminating in what Augustine will call, in the very last sentence of his narrative, his “fellow citizens in that heavenly Jerusalem, which your pilgrim people sigh after from their setting forth even to their return.”[1]

And just as in Augustine’s case, the names begin to flow after “Train,” ceasing to be the exception and becoming the rule on RB as the next four tracks bear human names as their titles. There we meet “Bubbles,” a drunk wants to go to detox but is senselessly humiliated and beaten by “a man in a limo”; “Kitty,” a spunky lady who accidentally kills her husband and then does something nauseating and horrific; “Adrian,” who is either a child or a boyfriend abused and neglected by his mother or girlfriend; finally, “Skinny Skins,” about a fellow musician that Michael is hiding from because he owes him money. This last one is fascinating because Michael now seems to have made the full transition from suburb to slum. He is afraid of an old friend (Steve “Skinny Skins” Hindalong, percussionist for The Choir) because of his incapacity to pay him. It is very revealing of Michael’s state that, according to Hindalong, he actually owed the money to someone else.

These four tracks are not shameless voyeurism; they contain heartfelt homage. In three of them haunting and beautiful cello solos by Rick Rekedal offer long connections between the verses. You can meditate and pray and think about each biography. It is a transcendent experience.

And now we come to the final track, in which Michael no longer expresses dread, or anger, or confusion. Instead, he prays a litany. It is a litany of persons and personifications sometimes fictional and real. Here are the first two verses:

Mr. In and Mrs. In
Can you please tell me what’s in?
What is wrong with me?
I’m never in your company

Mr. Out and Mrs. Out
What is this all about?
Before you know it, you’ve come in

He adds a query addressed to Mr. Life and Mrs. Life, culminating in a petition to Mr. and Mrs. God. But the artistic proof of his transformation in the midst of utter failure is the refrain in which, despite not having sobriety or resolution, he has a foot planted firmly in the door of the kingdom of God. He wants a good job and some bus fare. But he wants two more things just as much, and it is that desire which, like so many desires that separate suburbanites from poor young men walking the streets at 5:00 am, is (to quote Wilder again), “separated him from other people.” He is one with Jan, John, Bubbles, Kitty, Adrian, and nameless others who have become his community.

Is there anything to take away from the drunken odyssey of Michael Knott? In Book 6 of the Confessions, St. Augustine gives us a hint:

I observed a poor beggar, then, I suppose, with a full belly, joking and joyous . . . He verily had not the true joy; but yet I with those my ambitious designs was seeking one much less true. And certainly he was joyous, I anxious; he void of care, I full of fears. But should any ask me, had I rather be merry or fearful? I would answer merry. Again, if he asked had I rather be such as he was, or what I then was? I should choose to be myself, though worn with cares and fears; but out of wrong judgment; for, was it the truth? For I ought not to prefer myself to him, because more learned than he, seeing I had no joy therein, but sought to please men by it; and that not to instruct, but simply to please. Wherefore also Thou didst break my bones with the staff of Thy correction.[2]

The takeaway from RB for me was the realization that dread of the poor was dread of myself, not a holy fear. It is a fear of self-examination of my petty (and not so petty) goals and concerns. In utter poverty Michael Knott possessed something I do not have enough of, but thanks to him, have now had a few sweet sips. May perpetual light shine upon him as he drinks the fruit of the vine which only satisfies.

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