(Found this review a long time ago, but it didn’t name who wrote it. If this is you, please let me know.)

Mike Knott Sucks Me in Again

Friday May 2, 2003 – The Storehouse

Mike Knott came through Houston and treated us to his unique brand of acoustic rock. I arrived late and I missed most of the first opening act. I caught the last couple of songs and she has a great voice, but I don’t remember her name. The next guy came up with his guitar and played. He was decent. I couldn’t understand his vocal most of the time and I am not sure if it was a mumbling issue or a mic issue or what. Then came the moment we were all waiting for.

Mike Knott walked up and sat in the chair that was to the left of the mic and he just started playing softly. He got up walked to the mic and went through a short rendition of “Christine on Crystal.” In fact, a lot of the renditions this evening were shorter than usual. The whole show was much shorter than I expected. And of course we all wanted it to go a lot longer, so that was fairly disappointing. He got the crowd into it when he broke out with “Rock Stars on H” and “Sugar Mama.” Both of these have parts where the crowd is supposed to fill in. There were about 60 or 70 people there, but only maybe 10 or 15 of us were ready for the crowd participation parts when they came. But once everyone figured them out, people got into it. We got to hear the Kitty Courtesy story before he played “Kitty” and also the John Barrymore Jr. story before he played the song about him. It was good because there were apparently a lot of folks there who were not familiar with a bunch of his stuff and so a lot of laughs were drawn out during the story times as well as the songs themselves.

This is the list of songs that I can remember that he played (not in this order):

• Christine on Crystal
• Rock Stars on H
• Sugar Mama
• Kitty Courtesy
• John Barrymore Jr.
• Double
• Shaded Pain
• Never Forsaken (I think he played this…there was one he played by request and I think this was it)
• Hospital
• Cool
• Chameleon
• Thru
• This is the Healing (one of my faves)
• Rocket and a Bomb
• Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane
• Cruisin’ Ride (I think he did this one…someone please correct me if I am wrong)

There may be others that I forgot. It’s weird…I write all these down and I think to myself, “That’s a lot of songs!” But it was still WAY too short, especially considering how much material he has to pull from. But it is forgivable I guess…. we can’t expect him to remember ALL the songs we want to hear… right? Anyway, some of the songs he did not do in their entirety and then of course there are several that I wish he would have done, notably “Halo.” So I was both satisfied and disappointed all at the same time. I could sit and listen to Mike Knott for hours. Heck… he could have just stopped at the end and done the whole thing over again and I’d have been happy. The songs were great, there just weren’t enough of them to satisfy my Knotty thirst. I still want to see him plugged in again…. his plugged in shows are some of the most rockin’ shows I’ve ever witnessed.