Biography
Born in Georgia and raised in Denver, Kenny Knight channeled an early fascination with the guitar into his first band, the 13th Street Exit, at the age of eleven. Around the same period he started composing original material and began frequenting neighborhood music stores, where he crossed paths with veteran players already active on the local circuit. By 1968 the mid-teen musician had assembled another garage outfit, Black Flag, whose appearance at a Nelson Rockefeller presidential-election rally inside Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel drew national attention. Exceptionally polished for their age, the members secured a junior-high work permit that allowed them to record sessions at a nearby studio and perform regularly in Denver clubs. Knight had already established himself as a fixture of the city’s garage scene when he joined the Marines in 1972; while stationed at California’s Camp Pendleton he kept writing songs and used furloughs to travel to Los Angeles in hopes of placing material with publishers. A promising deal ultimately fell through, forcing him back to Denver to assist with the family enterprise. Throughout the 1970s he continued crafting home demos while employed as a painter at his father’s auto-body shop. His cousins, formerly the successful ’50s-and-’60s duo Deb & Sylvia, returned to Denver in the late 1970s; Sylvia urged him to document his own songs and converted a disused carriage house on her property into a small studio. There, Knight and a circle of relatives and friends spent evenings capturing the tracks that became his debut album. Self-released in a tiny pressing in 1980, the collection Crossroads fused world-weary Americana with reflective, folk-tinged country-rock. Despite the strength of the writing and performances, the record made little impression, and although Knight kept playing privately it remained his only official release. Thirty-five years later the album resurfaced when North Carolina’s Paradise of Bachelors issued it for the first time in 2015.
Albums