Komet hunting

Lenny Kravitz liked plugging in and playing through it, but like a lot of celebrities, he was used to getting things for free.

No, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry was the first rock star to buy one in 2000.

Skim through the liner notes in the booklets of your CD collection. You won’t find too many that list recording gear like microphones and amplifiers used. But if they were a little more detailed, you might come across the name Komet, a German take on the cosmological phenomena, courtesy of Baton Rouge immigrant Holger Netzel.

Netzel, along with co-owner Mike Kennedy and engineer John Bossier, operate Riverfront Music off Choctaw Drive. There they custom-build Komet amps for a string of famous musicians, from Blink 182 and Chris Cornell, to Metallica and Mark Knopfler.

In the mid-1990s Kennedy worked as a repairman at BeBop Music Shop. He had met Netzel through a recording gear magazine, The Shopper, one of those great pre-Internet niche networking rags. One day Netzel strolled in on Kennedy and the BeBop owners eating lunch. “And he says to them, ‘Mike Kennedy and I are going to open a music store, and I just wanted you to know. I was kind of in mid-bite thinking, ‘Oh, God.’ And they said, ‘Oh, really?’ ”

But that is exactly what they did. In 1998, Holger and Kennedy leased a small space on Laurel Street and opened their own guitar and amp repair shop called Riverfront Music two doors down from where Red Star Bar stands today.

To have an amplifier that local musicians could test their guitars on, Holger and Kennedy decided to build their own. The result was the prototype Komet, or as Kennedy calls it, “a crude aluminum box.” Turns out guitar players loved it. Nearly everyone who came into the shop asked if they had one like it for sale.

Seeing the popularity of the homemade amp, Kennedy and Holger contacted their idol, Ken Fischer, a cutting edge amplifier guru revered by many musicians from the 1960s and ’70s. Fischer’s health was suffering at the time, and he wasn’t building many amps himself anymore, but they asked if he wanted to partner with them to build a new amp. Fischer said he was interested but wanted to see the amp first. So Holger and Kennedy shipped it to him in New Jersey. In short order, Fischer made a few tweaks, put his signature on it and sent it back to Baton Rouge. Fischer liked it and wanted to work with Komet.

“That’s when we set up a crude licensing agreement,” Kennedy says. “And it’s still crude to this day. We haven’t changed a thing.”

Fischer died last year of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but not before Komet’s big break. It came when a musician in New York brought one of the Baton Rouge-made amps to Ultra Sound Studios, a huge 21-room rehearsal complex next to Madison Square Garden. Ultra Sound owner Gene Sinigalliano loved the amp so much he called Kennedy in Baton Rouge and ordered a Komet for every rehearsal room he had. Also a high-end boutique amp dealer, Sinigalliano agreed to be the official distributor for Komet amps.

“It didn’t cost us a penny,” Kennedy says. “It was all word-of-mouth.”

The days of soldering with one hand and explaining the history and specs of Komet into a phone with the other are behind them. All Bossier, Holger and Kennedy have to do now is build enough amps to fill the distributor’s order sheet and ship them to Ultra Sound in New York City, or directly to the client. The painstaking process amounts to about eight to 10 amps a month. They build in a larger space they moved into off Choctaw Drive, and they still repair plenty of guitars.

“We’re all self-taught,” Kennedy says. “But the thing is, we decided to make our hobby our career. It’s a great feeling.”

Kennedy and Holger can rattle off a list of well-known clients, but they can’t say for sure how many renowned guitarists have played Komet amps. Still, Kennedy gets a thrill out of seeing their work on TV. “Mark Knopfler just finished up the Emmylou Harris tour,” Kennedy says. “And on PBS’s Soundstage there he was with his Komet on stage the whole time, and in HD. You couldn’t miss it!”