John "Bunny" Knutson

 

That's me. I'm a professional musican, composer, producer, and audio tweaker, specializing in rock, pop, electronic, experimental, and incidental/soundtrack music. For the past couple years, I've been earning my living as an independent producer, working with clients like Motorola and Verizon, as well as independent artists and collaborators.

I live with my wife and our two sons in the San Francisco East Bay Area.

I grew up in Oregon and attended the University of Oregon in Eugene as a fine arts major. I also studied jazz guitar there for a couple semesters, often jamming with a friend of mine who played trumpet and introduced me to the music of Miles Davis.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1989 to pursue a career as a rock musician. I played in numerous Bay Area bands throughout the 1990s, and produced three internationally distributed independent albums; two of them with my main band, Puzzlefish, and the third with Budderball, a Zappa-esque rock-hybrid SF band. To release these records, I started a record company with my partners which, in 1996, came to be known as 4:20® Records.

In 1993, I toured Europe with Fat Wreck Chords punk rock band No Use For A Name, as their new lead guitarist/background vocalist. We toured mostly through Germany, with a few shows in Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland. Memorable shows from the NUFAN tour include sharing the stage with seminal punk bands DOA and MDC.

In the U.S., I played a few shows with NUFAN before I left the band to focus on Puzzlefish's first album. One of those shows was in front of 15,000 people in Phoenix, Arizona, with Veruca Salt. Another memorable show was at the Velodrome in L.A. with Bad Religion, NOFX, and Lagwagon.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 
 

Other highlights from my career so far include being joined onstage in San Francisco by Oingo Boingo bassist John Avila, and later recording four Puzzlefish album tracks with Avila in his L.A. studio. John is the real deal. Recording with him was a blast, despite the fact that we experienced a rare Los Angeles flood in John's studio during the session.

We were thrilled to play on the same bill with Mr. Bungle, one of our biggest influences, early on in our existence as a band. We also played several times with an insane band called Deli Creeps, whose guitarist was the legendary Buckethead, who has gone on to terrorize audiences with Axl's new version of G'n'R.

Puzzlefish also had the pleasure of sharing the stage many times with notorious Northern California bands like Deftones, Papa Roach, and the infamous pop-punk kings Green Day.

I have had three songs that I produced featured in independent films. Budderball's song "Arturo Has No Hands" was featured in the soundtrack of the 1997 Jon Moritsugu film Fame Whore. The 2000 Jason Phillips film Left-Overs featured two songs from Puzzlefish's debut album, 4:20.

My song "Wake the Whole Neighborhood" has been adopted by Red Bull pro cliffdiver/stuntman Dustin Webster as his theme song. I'm happy to lend a little loony music to his extreme lifestyle.

When Puzzlefish recorded our first E.P., we were between drummers, and needed to hire someone for our drum tracks. We ended up getting local drum legend BRAIN (Brian Mantia of Limbomaniacs, Primus, Praxis and Guns'n'Roses) to track our drums. That raised our standards considerably as a band, and lead us to work with several very talented professional drummers over our nine-year life as a band.

Soon after Puzzlefish disbanded, I formed a jam band with the remaining members of P-Fish and a rotating roster of supporting players. One of these players was Prince Lasha, a semi-legendary '60s & '70s acid-jazz saxophonist/floutist who found us by chance playing in our studio in downtown Oakland. We jammed many a night, some of which is captured on ADAT somewhere. I should really try to find that stuff. It's very exciting and strange to jam with a guy who used to hang with huge jazz cats like Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter.

OK, I think that's enough name-dropping for about 10 bios, so I better stop. Did I mention John Lennon?