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Many of you may know me from heading up Shut Eye Records. The
label is on hiatus right now as I continue to build my new music promotion
venture, Pete Knapp & Company.
This page is called "Meet Pete", so I'll sing the body electric...
I cut my teeth in the music industry as a DJ at WGHR 102.5fm with
a weekend show called Knapptime which focused on local music.
It was 1990 and I was 14 years old. The higher-ups at the station never
bothered to ask me how old I was, and I never bothered to tell them.
It was a college station, so I guess I can thank my precocious puberty
for getting me in... or maybe they just needed a warm body at the controls
of the station for five long hours every Sunday afternoon.
In the six intermittent years I had that radio show, I played tracks
by all of the good local Atlanta and Athens up-n-comer music acts: Insane
Jane, Uncle Green, Smoke, Carmine, Big Fish
Ensemble, Joybang!, Marcy, Sunbrain, The
Union, Grumpy, Loudflower, Supermodel, The
Fountains, Hanging Francis, The Martians, etc.
Between my time at the radio station and working Shut Eye Records full
time, I had a lot of odd jobs: bar back (fun), telemarketer (boring),
customer service associate (soul-sucking), canvasser for a non-profit
(for one long hot Atlanta afternoon), inside sales for a specialty maintainance
chemical company (misogyny!), PES (Public Executive Secretary for the
Church of Scientology - no lie!, poor Tom Cruise, it's such a scam),
and more waiter jobs than I care to admit. I was a non-commital young
man; and as much as I hated all of these jobs, each taught me a skill
that I would bring to my current career.
I also had another career, one that didn't pay much; but I loved it.
I answered an ad in Creative Loafing's Musicians Exchange and got a
gig playing in a local mood-pop act called Painting Churches.
It was Kathryn Moye on vocals (an unruly, indisposed pale girl-woman
with long jet black hair chugging on a jet black Fender Strat), my friend
Chuck Strauss on bass and harmonies (playing with a pick like
Joy Division's Peter Hook), a parade of good and bad drummers -- most
notibly one of my favorite drummers Bob Owstrowski. Then there
was 18-year-old me pretending to be Thurston Moore from Sonic
Youth.
I wailed on my Fender Bullet H2. For you equipment nerds, it's a 7/8
scale strat style guitar that has two humbuckers and two coil taps.
I played it through a Music Man combo amp with two 10" speakers,
and an oversized Fender cabinet with two 12" speakers and my array
of effects pedals. My signature sound was that of a deafening theropod.
John Berryman, one of Kathryn's muses would have summed up our
little musical outfit as "screwed up lovely" as he did in
A Stimulant for an Old Beast. Look it up.
I loved playing, but I had a hunch that I would do better on the industry
side of music rather than on-stage. After three years of destroying
my hearing, I quit the Churches and figuratively traded my guitar for
a calculator and word processor. I calculated numbers and processed
words. So much so that I found the fortitude to start a small record
label called Knapptime Productions, later to be renamed Shut
Eye Records. Even though I busted ass, I didn't quite make enough
money to do it full time until the year 2000 -- until then, I still
had to work a day job.
I taught guitar to children and hipster-wannabes of all ages in East
Atlanta, and I even had a short-lived career as a credit union teller
thanks to Blake Rainey of the Young Antiques - he will
never let me forget about my inability to balance my cash drawer, yet
he and I would go on to work several jobs together over the years. Blake
even worked at Shut Eye for a year or so bringing on Jay Farrar
and Matt Pond PA for promotions projects.
Around
1997 (I was 21), I got a job selling advertising for local music and
entertainment magazines Stomp & Stammer and Atlanta Sideshow
(now defunct). I was no magazine ad salesman, but like my WGHR job I
had access to great music - local and otherwise.
In 1999, I became a consultant at the music technology company, GroovePort,
Inc. (it was a company much like Real Network's Rhapsody where you
paid a subscription for all the music you could stream - way ahead of
its time) where I worked with clients and vendors as diverse as London-Sire
(R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Guster, Morcheeba, Harvey Danger, Aphex Twin,
Orbital, The Tragically Hip and 40 Below Summer), J-Bird Records (The
Guess Who, John Enthistle, Billy Squier, Lee Rocker, Rockapella), Ubiquity
Records and its sub-labels, as well as over 100 other independent
labels in licensing and content acquisition. Around the same time, I
also worked at Planet Jam Media Group in business development,
Country format radio promotion, and content acquisition. I loved these
dot-com jobs until the bubble burst.
Working at a dot-com, especially a music dot-com in the nineties was
equivalent to living in the movie Animal House. Blake Rainey and I played
a lot of foosball: BURST went the bubble.
In the evenings, I still played in a bunch of great bands, including
CMJ-charting act, Atomsplit (2000 to 2003) - we even had a video
on MTV2! From 1999 to 2001, I played bass and shared vocal duties in
the multi-generational roots rock band called The Indicators (including
Dave McNair of Magnapop/Oh-OK fame). I was also a member of pop-rock
act Nillah on guitar (1998 to 1999). I'm currently in the planning
stages of my return to the stage, but don't plan on a live performance
until I finish choreographing my dance moves.
Shut Eye Records was a brilliant experience. We released and promoted
music by Jay Farrar, Norah Jones, Brian Jonestown Massacre,
BR549, Matt Pond PA, Lemmy Kilmister, Jeff
Black, The D4, White Light Motorcade, Kaki King,
Webb Wilder, Dios, Fiery Furnaces, Mary Lou
Lord, Nell Bryden, Young Antiques, Wonderlust,
and hundreds more. It's a varied lot, but each genre of music has its
own promotions idiom. I find these marketing parlances as fascinating
as the genres themselves.
Shut Eye has been around officially since 1996, the year the Olympics
came to Atlanta. There's an analogy in there somewhere, but I can't
think of one that doesn't sound cheesy.
We released a catalog of over 50 records, one of which is about to be
reissued: the self-titled Fiend Without a Face CD featuring the
mad guitar skills and strident vocals of Brent Hinds from Mastodon.
We manufactured just 1,000 of these records. I've heard of these records
selling in secondary markets for as much as $150 each if the shrinkwrap
is intact.
Whoopee!
These days when I'm not working with musicians and industry folk, I
spend most of my time in and around Atlanta. In the summer I spend my
free time in various human-powered watercraft on the great Chattahoochee
River. On the real hot days I soak in the East Point Umaquarium with
my brothers-in-hedonism. We solve the world's problems through conversation
and drink, taking action only when the weather gets a little cooler.
I go to as many of the Businessman's Specials at Turner Field as I can.
When I'm not in rooting on the Atlanta Braves, I'm racing around the
stadium competing in SOLO II Autocross. Vrooom!
When I'm not in Atlanta, you can find me where ever the business takes
me. I'm usually in New Orleans, Nashville, Knoxville, or in the Texas
hill country. Each one of these places is special to me except Nashville,
Knoxville and Texas. I have a sense that New Orleans will muscially
explode bigger than Seattle did in the 1990s; mark my words. I hope
to move my family and business there one day soon.
I am married to the beautiful Lanna Caroline Knapp. She's pretty and
has big green eyes. We spent our honeymoon in New Orleans back in 2002.
She is a integral part of my career. She keeps me organized and sane.
We like to travel, eat delicious foods, and daydream. We laugh, laugh
and laugh all day long. She's my best friend and my biggest supporter.
I believe I'm quite possibly the luckiest fella in the world.
Isn't that nice?
- PETE KNAPP
Updated June 10, 2011.
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