Welcome to the website of
Knox Bronson, accomplished roué & cat lover.
I’ll be famous when I’m dead.
Recent POSTS
Epiphany
Epiphany
Free Love
Free Love
The Manual (on how to get a numbet one hit the easy way ) by the KLF
In 1988, The KLF, a British Duo, released a single named “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” an homage to the Dr. Who TV series (for a detailed history of the song, click here).
According to the Wikipedia:
“Doctorin’ the Tardis” is a 1988 electronic novelty pop single by The Timelords (“Time Boy” and “Lord Rock”, aliases of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, better known as The KLF). The song is predominantly a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” with sections from “Blockbuster!” by Sweet and “Let’s Get Together Tonite” by Steve Walsh. The single was panned by critics but became a commercial success, reaching number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and in New Zealand, and charting in the Top 10 in Australia and Norway.
After achieving the pop pinnacle of a number one hit, Drummond and Cauty, a very interesting pair in my book, decided to write the definitive guide on how to get a number one hit. It is the most hilarious and insightful takedown of the music business I have ever read.
Download the pdf of the book here. And here is a tiny scattering of excerpts. I highly recommend you read the whole book. I couldn’t put it down, ten years ago or today.
So how do you go about achieving a U.K. Number One? Follow this simple step by step guide:
Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run. If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument.
The myth of a band being gang of lads out “against” the world (read as “to change”, “to shag” or “to save the world”) is pure wishful thinking to keep us all buying the records and reading the journals. Mind you, it’s a myth that many band members want to believe themselves. So if in a band, quit. Get out. Now.
The best place to find the groove that 7” single buyers will want to be tapping their toes to in three months time is to get down to the hippest club in your part of the country that is playing import American black dance records. The unknown track the DJ plays that gets both the biggest response on the floor and has you joining the throng will have the groove you are looking for.
As we have already mentioned, the Golden Rule for a classic Number One single is intro, verse one, chorus one, verse two, chorus two, breakdown section, double chorus, outro.
Singers – good or bad – are invariably a problem. They not only make incredibly bad time keepers which can lead to disasterous consequences when you are facing a jam-packed schedule during the period when your record has entered the Top 30 but not yet made Number One, they also tend to confuse their role as singer of songs with that of would-be world leaders.
Videos are the disease of our time; adverts pretending to be art, made by arseholes pretending to be artists. Of course, the lovers of kitch in the next century will adore them, social historians dissect them. Shoot the lot we say.
Sunday evening. Five minutes to seven. You are now at Number One. This is forever. It is now totally out of your hands. Your body still looks the same but everything inside it is a million miles apart. Sunday evening. Twenty past seven. Rockman opens another bottle of Champagne. King Boy watches lapwings fly past the setting Sun.
You do what you need to do. There was nothing behind the green door but an old piano. So why? What have you learnt? If you can have a Number One, anything is possible. Don’t forget to sign on.*
*Sign on: for dole benefits.
A few thoughts as I fall asleep
Pacifica, a new book, free time, jellyfish
The Erotic Art Show
At The Erotic Art Show
Podcasts
Riding the Wild Bubble
FRISCO: The Secret History
BOOKS—Masterpieces All
FLAPPING
Chervil Orbane, a youngish man living alone in the San Francisco Bay area, has awakened flapping. And knows it.
Two agencies–one extra-dimensional, one a super-secret government entity – know it also. And they want Chervil, for the furtherance of very different agendas.
An allegory, Flapping hews to classic epic form (the call, the journey, the dying, and the rebirth) in bite-size chapters, with diagrams, charts, and graphs to assist the reader in grasping essential concepts underlying Flapping — Chervil Orbane’s saga, his moment of clarity, the great epiphany, the big ideas, the good guys, the bad guys, the gratuitous sex, the refreshing absence of name brand pop-culture icons, a predictably cinematic happy ending, the ipso and the facto, as it were, of nuevo-millennial metaphysical thought.
FLAPPING comes with its own cd soundtrack – Flight of the Atom Bee. This wonderful CD has been remastered for maximum fidelity. Flight of the Atom Bee is a haunting, beautiful, and otherworldly suite charting the erotic, tensile fields that bridge harmony, melody, and undiluted electronic sound.
PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION
The emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, inspired by, shot with, and processed on the iPhone.
Pixels At An Exhibition documents the unexpected emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, one based on the technology of the iPhone, its limited camera and buggy apps, to create a new kind of magical realism. Combining camera and darkroom, canvas and paintbrush in one tiny device, the iPhone inspired the birth of a global art movement. Pixels At An Exhibition features the best of the pioneering artists and galleries culled from the 33,000 curated images on the Pixels website, many available nowhere else.
I finished, after three-and-a-half years of curation, writing, design, layout, and production, my history of the early years of iPhone photography and art, PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION, 370 pp, 177 artists, 600+ images.
iBook for iPAD or Mac on the Apple Bookstore $14.95
Hardbound copy available at Lulu.com $99
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HONEYBUN EMPIRE
Riding the Wild Bubble Berkeley To Frisco To Hollywood To Las Vegas & Back; Intimations Of Immortality On The Technicolor Lam, Sober.
In 1999, I wrote a semi-naughty, mostly humorous article for Salon.com entitled “The Gentlemanly Art of Spanking” under the nom-de-plume Carson Fitzgerald. It became one of the fifty most-read stories of the year, generating a huge reader response.
A couple years later, I had the idea to make spanking kits and sell them online. It used to be that if one was first to the web with a product, one was guaranteed success. The HoneyBun Spanking Kit was the exception that proved the rule. Nonetheless, it was a cute product and, just as I was finishing the HoneyBun website, I was forced to leave Oakland under threat of death as a witness to some drunks firing their guns up the street from his apartment—no one was injured—so the book began as a road story.
I packed up a carton of spanking kits, his guitar and clothes, and headed south to LA and Hollywood. He then began writing email updates to all my friends in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
After a time, some friends encouraged me to turn the emails and the ongoing story into a book. This is the book. The book is a kaleidoscopic memoir—coming of age in Berkeley in the 60s, San Francisco in the 70s, a brief chapter about the 80s, and one about early sobriety in 90s. A fair amount of spirituality, commentary on materialism, the JFK assassination. Enjoy the ride!
Albums
Pacifica, released Nov. 10, 2025
Six gorgeous electronic/orchestral works. On all stream platforms except Spotify. Listen and download for free at Bandcamp.
Flight of the Atom Bee
My first cd, Flight of the Atom Bee, is a collection of instrumental pieces, strange and beautiful, featuring a lot of early analogue synthesizer technology along with an Emu SP-12 drum machine, a Jupiter 8x-P digital/analogue hybrid, and all sorts of outboard processors. To say I didn’t know what I was doing as I plunged back into modern music production is an understatement. But I heard sounds in my head I had to bring forth. It was an exhilarating time as I made my way by trial and lots of error.
Inspired by the weird fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Flight of the Atom Bee is a technicolor romp through the, bold, bright, and beautiful realms of analog synthesis.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Pop Down The Years
My first vocal cd, Pop Down The Years, garnered some good reviews. Eight original songs, one Donovan cover.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Flapping, The Official Soundtrack
Flapping—The Official Soundtrack, when it was first published as a paperback, came with a cd, my album, “Flight of the Atom Bee.” When I decided to publish it again as an e-Book on Apple Books, I thought I would release a new official soundtrack to go with it.
It’s really the greatest hits from Flight of the Atom Bee and Deus Sex Machina.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
One Man's Opinion of Moonlight
On Valentine’s Day, 2020, I released my second vocal cd. One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight.
It’s an album of cover songs, ballads from the sixties and seventies, with one jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, and one original, Pop Down The Years, which is a love song to all the songs and music with which I grew up. The album title is one line from Young Girl Blues, written by Donovan, from his 1967 classic album, Mellow Yellow.
The album includes some of the songs that shaped my romantic ideals in my youth, a collection of songs from the era when “love almost conquered.”
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
the seasons | remixed/remastered
some distance, now, from the original composing of the seasons i must say that my understanding of the dire situation in which i found myself and the subsequent resolution and release through the act of creation abides, stronger than ever. i rightly intuited, as i neared its completion, that the arc of the seasons followed campbell’s archetypal hero’s journey in a most wonderful way. i would ascribe the elements of the story thusly:
summer of ‘68 ~ the call & crossing the threshold
autumnal sun ~ the road of trials, meeting with the goddess & diving into the abyss
winter blue ~ death, rebirth, transformation & atonement
the forever spring ~ the magic flight, the crossing of the return threshold & freedom to live
Buy it on Bandcamp! (It’s available for free download, leftover from the COVID lockdown era.)
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Deus Sex Machina
Deus Sex Machina is another collection of electronic/orchestral works. I consider them to be mid-period works. I finally had a grasp on the technology and had gained a fair amount of confidence in my arranging abilities. A couple of these pieces—Ubi Mel Ibi Apes (where there is honey, there are bees) and 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled—are in the permanent collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a part of a multi-media installation that ran for six months in 1999, Glenn McKay’s Altered States.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Photography
Recent Works
You can find more in the Gallery section of the site.
Nudes
All sorts of naked women.
Flora
An astrologer told me once, “Knox, we know you love women and flowers. It’s all Venus.”
Referring to the fact that I have Venus in Scorpio in my astrological chart.
Fauna
Pictures of animals, lots of cats.
The Sun King series
I was looking at this picture and the thought entered my head, “You need to put a banana in the sky.” I rode my bike down to the produce market and bought a banana, the right banana, went home and put it in the sky. I’ve been putting the same banana into pictures for ten years.
Early Work 2010-2011
Still some of my favorites. I loved the iPhone 3gs, the terrible camera and all the buggy apps.
The Pierce Street Community Garden
I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.
Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.
Read the whole story of one of my proudest accomplishments here.
Videos
There are tons of videos on this site. Here’s a link to the “Music Videos page“. Here’s a link to the “Art Videos” page. Here’s link to the “Weirder Videos” page.
My cover of Marty Balin’s Coming Back To Me was on my album, One Man’s Opinion of Moonlight, just me and guitar. However, a year or two later I returned to the song and listened to the piano part my friend Rachel Efron had played for it during our late night session. Producer Rick Baretta and I had decided not to use it on the album release. I thought I would see what I could come up with in terms of a minimal arrangement, cello, strings and oboe. And Rachel’s piano, of course. What Rachel does as we go into the bridge kills me every time.
The Most Beautiful Day in the History of the World
I remember the day I received this cartoon from my friend, Gus, via email. I was immediately inspired and made a few over the next few weeks. I still make them from time to time. Available as limited edition archival prints or on a commission basis. Contact me if interested.