When Knott was trying to “make it” with various bands, he and various bandmates (Bradford Salamon, Brian Doidge, etc) lived at an apartment complex at Sunset and Fairfax in Hollywood. It was a four level complex built around the 1920s. They would watch black and white movies until 5:30 am, and then sleep in until 2:30 pm. At one point, both Darby Crash and Iggy Pop were said to have lived at these apartments as well. In fact, Knott and Doidge’s apartment was rumored to be a place where Iggy Pop once stayed when he was once on a heroin binge.
This apartment complex was also where Knott met many of the people that became characters in the songs of Rocket and a Bomb and other albums. Straight across the hall from their apartment was Jan the Weatherman’s apartment. Next door to them was Kitty Courtesy’s apartment. Down one floor of stairs was John Barrymore Jr’s apartment.
You can also see how the apartment complex near the intersection of Sunset and Fairfax currently looks today by visiting the location on Google Maps. You can also see the website for the Villa Rosa apartments, with some pictures of the inside.
Originally Knott and Bradford Salamon moved to Hollywood in Salamon’s Dad’s ice cream truck. It had a large rainbow painted on the side. Salamon’s Dad was a art framer, but he also had an ice cream truck. When they got to Hollywood, the truck starts smoking. They had to pull over to put out the fire because everything they own is in there. The first night they stay at apartment, his Salamon slept in the truck while Knott slept in the room. Knott said that hundreds of small cockroaches were crawling all over his face while he slept. At some point, Salamon moved out and Brian Doidge moved in.
“The whole complex, says Knott, was filled with people either reaching for the stars or trying desperately to get out of the limelight. ‘L.A. 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. They walk the streets and become crazy. That’s why people prostitute themselves and that’s why people end up dead in 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.”
(Quote from “Michael Knott: A Life of Shaded Pain and Screaming Sirens” by Brad Caviness for the March 1994 issue of CCM magazine)
Brian Healy later referred to the apartment complex as the white building where every week was a “bring Mike and Brian sandwiches” event on Friday nights. Healy also recalled running into John Barrymore, Jr. in the halls.
At some point, Knott and Doidge decided to get out of the apartment complex before they became like the other people living there. The landlord was a tall scary man named Mr. White that lived on-site. Their contracts required a 30-day notice to move out, or they would have to pay the next month’s rent. However, they also didn’t have enough money for another month’s rent. So they came up with a story to tell the landlord to get out of the contract. They claimed that they were CIA or FBI secret agents that were getting called away on duty. This meant they had to move out right away, and asked him to not tell anyone about it. They grabbed all of their stuff and went to eat at Denny’s down the street.
Lyrics and Credits
To read the complete lyrics and credits for Rocket and a Bomb, please see this document. If anything is incorrect, please let me know.
Jan the Weatherman
Jan the Weatherman lived across the hall from Michael Knott. When Knott met him and asked him his name, he just said “Jan the Weatherman.” He looked, acted, and talked like Charles Manson. Jan would pound on the door when Knott would practice guitar. He had a coffee can or a pan with a stick and said he wanted to join the band. Knott and Doidge got along with him. Apparently he thought he could predict the weather (which is not hard to do in L.A.). He had a sister that had very dark hair with a very white complexion who talked really low. She would joke around with Jan and ask him “what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow, Jan?”
One time, Knott asked Jan if he was part of the Manson gang. Jan just said “we don’t talk about that” over and over again.
One day, a guy that was about 550 lbs. with a cold weather hat on comes out of Jan’s apartment – probably his roommate. About 15-20 minutes later he comes back with his arms full of 100 submarine sandwiches. Jan’s apartment had a drape hanging just inside the door so that you couldn’t see inside his apartment. The guy disappears behind the drape. A month later he does the same thing. When Knott asked him about it, Jan just said “shhh – I don’t want to get kicked out.”
(Summary of a concert story from March 29, 2000 at Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana.)
Jail
According to Knott, this song “is about a time I went to jail. I used to wear this military jacket I got at a thrift store, and it had stripes on it which signified it was a sergeant’s jacket. I would be driving around, and cops kept pulling me over and harassing me, telling me I couldn’t have on these insignias. To them, rank meant a lot, but to me it didn’t – it was just a jacket I liked. Still, the cops kept giving me all these tickets for ridiculous things. At the time, I was so poor I literally lived in someone’s closet, so I couldn’t pay for the tickets. They eventually turned into warrants, and I was arrested and taken to jail.
“So I went to meet the public defender, and he’s scratching his ear with a hundred dollar bill wrapped around his finger. Public defenders are supposed to be free, but he apparently wanted me to give him some cash so he’d help me out, but I didn’t have anything to give him. He told me that he thought I was on drugs, and then sent me away, saying each ticket was worth six months in jail so I’d probably be going away for two years.”
Knott’s friend Brian Healey dressed up in a suit and tie and went down to the public defenders’ office. “He tells the guy he’s my Pastor from Pasadena, and how I have this big Christian ministry. The guy takes my file and says, ‘No problem, he has a good attorney now.’ I got out of this with eight months of Cal-Trans, which is picking up thrash on the side of the freeway. No jail time.
“Actually, Brian also helped me get out early when they first arrested me. Kevin Anis, the drummer for Lifesavers at the time, puts up the nine hundred dollar bail for me, and the clerk says, ‘It’ll be another few days before we can let Mike Knott out because we have paperwork for three thousand people ahead of him.’ So Brian comes in and claims that he’s a warrant officer from the Pamona court, and that he needed me to be at an eight o’clock hearing. The guy digs through thousands of people, finds my file, and I get out of jail right away.”
(Quotes from “Michael Knott: The Dreams of a Junior High Nerd” by David Jenison for the 39th issue of Syndicate magazine in August 1994)
Make Me Feel Good
Knott didn’t talk much about “Make Me Feel Good,” but the lyrics are pretty self-evident: “when you’re down no one wants you around.” If you are having a rough time, getting angry and even screaming and shaking fists, no one is there for you. But the song then asks someone to “make me feel good like I’m something.” Is this a plea to a wife, a friend, a child, or to God? It could be all of these.
However, this is contrasted with how everyone wants you around when you are winning. Of course, then they want you to buy the drinks, but they never say goodbye when it is over.
Then finally, the song goes into how people will make a big deal every time you make a mistake. Or… they might ignore it if you have enough money.
Serious
According to Knott, “Serious” is about “just not taking life too serious. You know, everyone’s talking about how they lost this girl, or that guy, or they lost their house or their job… why do you take it so serious? You know there is hope at the end of this dark time, there is hope. That’s what I am saying in a nutshell, because there is hope, we don’t need to commit suicide, we don’t need to jump from the Empire State, we don’t need to hang from an oak tree. We don’t need to do that because there is a reason for us to be here, so let’s stay as long as we possibly can.”
(Quoted from a Facebook comment by Michael Knott)
John Barrymore Jr.
“One of Knott’s odd contacts was John Barrymore Jr., the illegitimate son of famous stage actor John Barrymore and uncle of Drew Barrymore. ‘He had sixteen cats and one dog that would all drink beer out of a bowl, and he wore around these spiked golf shoes like they were regular shoes – he was a very strange man. One time he wanted to give Brian and me acting lessons. He claimed he taught James Dean and Steve McQueen.'”
(Quote from “Michael Knott: The Dreams of a Junior High Nerd” by David Jenison for the 39th issue of Syndicate magazine in August 1994)
John Barrymore Jr. lived below Knott and Doidge. He would walk up and down the halls quoting famous lines with a booming voice in fancy Shakespearean robes and his spiked golf shoes. They didn’t really believe him that he was a Barrymore. One day, they saw Drew Barrymore come to visit him and realized he was telling the truth. Knott decided to go downstairs to get acting lessons first. He welcomes Knott in, sits on his bed, and pulls Knott over his knee to give him a spanking. Knott bolts out of there and goes back upstairs. When Brian Doidge asks him how it went, Knott said “it was good – your turn!”
(Summary of a concert story from April 24, 1999 at Houghton College in Houghton, New York.)
Train
Knott didn’t talk very much about “Train,” but some have felt that it was a substitution for falling off the wagon (the train taking the place of the wagon in the metaphor). In general, it speaks of not really knowing what might happen when one falls down – will you end up winning, losing, dying, hurt badly, or what? Knott just notes that everything looks fine and even “plain” when it is happening, so you can’t really tell which way it goes until you hit the ground. There is some hope in this, in that maybe he will learn to live, forgive, and see what he has missed. Or maybe he will just “just drink like a sieve.”
Bubbles
“Bubbles was an overweight alcoholic man who lived in the park and would come to our Sunday service. Bubbles wanted someone to take him to detox, so I was going to pick him up the next morning. I get to the park at a quarter to eight, and I can’t find him. I wake up this guy sleeping on a bench and asked where Bubbles was. He said, ‘A guy in a limo picked him up last night, dressed him up like a clown, and drove him off into the hills.’ I’m still looking around, it’s about eight thirty, and this limo pulls up. Bubbles gets out, and he’s beat up, bloody, and his face is swollen. He comes walking out of the limo like he can’t see two inches in front of him, walks right past me, and falls down on his face.
“Some very important psychotic media person dressed him up like a clown, took him to one of his little parties, and made him a sex object and punching bag. The rear of his pants was actually ripped open so they could have sex with him. And for all this, Bubbles got twenty dollars. That’s Hollywood for you.”
(Quote from “Michael Knott: The Dreams of a Junior High Nerd” by David Jenison for the 39th issue of Syndicate magazine in August 1994)
Knott had this to say in a Facebook post in 2018: “I was sitting in Plummer park in West Hollywood years ago waiting to take a guy named Bubbles to detox. He did show up, in a clown suit with a ripped open bottom end, saying ‘I have to tell them, I have to tell them.’ He ran to a pay phone and called someone with an astonishing message: ‘they are set to take over!!!’
The large white limo that kicked him out, drove off slowly…
I saw Bubbles disappear in the park, not a big park but he was through the fences at the upper side before I could think.
Then an older man came and sat down with me on the bench, I think he was one of the older guys playing checkers. He said to me with his eyes the same thing he said with his voice, ‘You can find your loved ones again if you just walk through the field of flowers…’”
Kitty
When Knott and Salamon first moved in, their next door neighbor came out to meet them and introduced herself as Kitty Courtesy. She lived with her husband and her daughter, who was incredibly skinny. She always had the door open and would talk to them whenever they walked by.
According to Knott, “Another song is ‘Kitty Courtesy.’ She was this skinny old lady that lived down the hall. She’d come pounding on our door, ‘They’re in my socks, they’re in my socks!’ ‘What’s in your socks, Kitty?’ ‘They’re in my socks, they know, they have a radio signal in the tooth of the dog. They’re in the front, they’re in my socks, are you reading it, do you hear the signal?’ I’d be like, ‘It’s okay, Kitty, go back to your apartment.'”
Then after several months, the husband is suddenly gone one day. Around noon that day, her door is closed and the most awful smell was coming from her apartment. They thought it was odd that her door was closed, so they went and knocked on it. She just yelled at them to go away. From then on, her door was closed whenever she was cooking and the awful smell cam out.
“Once every day, Kitty would cook something, and it would literally smell like human flesh burning. I’d smell her cooking, and I’d run to the bathroom dry heaving and vomiting. I’d knock on her door, ‘Kitty, what are you doing?’ She’d say, ‘Go away! Go away!’ Rumor had it that she was once married and her husband disappeared. I think she was cooking her husband!”
(Quote froms “Michael Knott: The Dreams of a Junior High Nerd” by David Jenison for the 39th issue of Syndicate magazine in August 1994)
Later at a concert at the Luna Lounge in New York City on July 30, 2000, Knott added this:
They saw Kitty’s husband for a while and then he disappeared. When they asked Kitty about her husband, all she would say was “Go away! Don’t ask me any questions!” They realized after the police came and took her away that she probably had killed her husband.
She was apparently so convinced that the Russians were going to get her that she packed everything up and became a street person. A few weeks later they saw her pushing her cart down the street. They tried to say “hi” to her but she wouldn’t talk to them.
Adrian
Knott didn’t talk very much about “Adrian,” so it is unknown who specifically this song is about. Two pieces of artwork with the album give some clue as to what he looked like. He is apparently someone that has disappeared, as Knott says that he has “been lookin’ for you like a stupid fool.” The lyrics imply that he did something awful and might be hiding due to that. There is also a “she” in the story that is described as someone that might have severe mood swings – possibly tied to this incident that might have driven him into hiding?
Skinny Skins
This song served as an ode to Steve Hindalong, drummer for The Choir and L.S. Underground’s The Grape Prophet album, who was nicknamed Skinny. The song starts off noting that “when he turns sideways, he disappears.” However, his skinniness is deceptive on how well he can play the drums: “when he beats that drum, it hurts my ears.” Knott notes that he owes Skinny money, so asks that he not be let in when he comes around looking for a smoke.
Rocket and a Bomb
“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 be the Bride of Christ.'”
(Quote from “Michael Knott: A Life of Shaded Pain and Screaming Sirens” by Brad Caviness for the March 1994 issue of CCM magazine)
However, Knott later had this to say at a concert at the Luna Lounge in New York City on July 30, 2000:
“It’s a song about things you wish you had and the simple things in life: a bus fare, a good job, etc. Then how hard that is to have a good job and a bus fare – it’s equivalent to actually wanting a rocket and a bomb. The second verse is:
Mr. Bill, is there a Mrs. Bill?
Does she tell you how you should feel?
Does she let you get away?
Will Sluggo come and make me pay?
Clinton became president when I wrote this. The second verse is talking about Bill and Hillary and all that. Sluggo is a take on the character from the Saturday Night Live Mr. Bill skit: ‘will Sluggo come and make me pay?’ But also George Stephanopoulos was Sluggo in the song – I believe he was somehow involved in the accidental death of the lawyer. That was why he quit the regime and wrote a book – my conspiracy theory about how he got away with things.
At the end of the song it says:
Mr. Life and Mrs. Life
Are you really in for life?
Are you planning to make a break?
Could it be a big mistake?
This is about marriage basically: ‘Mr. Life and Mrs. Life, are you really in for life?’ – basically are you in jail for life?
The one thing that messed up everything and is so hard to explain is the very last line:
Mr. God, is there a Mrs. God?
Could she help me find a job
One that pays enough to take a rocket and a bomb
I’m not asking God if there is a Mrs. God – I’m talking about the “gods” of our society, the ones that seem to be in charge of our lives. It’s a mockery of society.”