For Doug Fieger, the secret of songwriting success was to stay in touch with his inner teenager. That meant raging hormones, unrequited love, and girls, girls, girls.
“When The Knack started, I wrote songs about girls,” the late frontman told me in 2008. “I think girls is really what rock’n’roll is about.” Indeed, every song on the band’s 1979 debut album Get The Knack feels like it burst out of some sex-crazed adolescent bedroom. And although Fieger was 25 when he wrote it, he told me he “felt sixteen”. And that was all down to his lust for a raven-haired muse named Sharona.
In 1978, when The Knack (named after Richard Lester’s film The Knack… And How To Get It) were rising through the LA club scene, Fieger’s then-girlfriend Judy casually introduced him to her friend Sharona Alperin. Sharona was 17, a stylish clerk who worked in a clothing shop. “It was love at first sight,” Fieger said. “Literally. I broke up with Judy shortly after and chased Sharona for a year.”
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It’s a good thing he didn’t catch her right away, because the thrill of that chase sparked the idea for the band’s biggest hit.
“It was a conscious effort for both me and Berton [Averre, lead guitarist and co-writer] to come at it from the point of view of our remembered teenage selves,” Fieger recalled. “We wanted to tell the story from that place, where it’s more raw and direct.”
Fittingly, Averre came up with the famous hammer-meets-chisel guitar riff. “He’d been listening to Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model album, especially Pump It Up,” said Fieger.
Although Alperin was in a relationship and put Fieger off, it didn’t stop him from writing even more songs about her (Frustrated and She’s So Selfish).
“Doug made it very clear he was in love with me,” Alperin told National Public Radio. “It wasn’t like my boyfriend and the world didn’t know. I always say that he was my groupie, I wasn’t his.”
Still, she couldn’t forget the first time she heard her namesake song: “One day, on my lunch break from the clothing store, I went to their rehearsal. And Bert and Doug were saying: ‘Should we play it? All right, let’s play it for her.’ Cut to: I’m driving back to the store, thinking: ‘Did I just hear a song with my name in it?!’ It’s a feeling I’ll never forget because I can’t even describe it.”
Indeed, for Fieger, that reveal soon turned into an indescribable mix of emotions. It was part torture, part flattery to see Sharona at Knack gigs, dancing in front of the stage to her song.
Meanwhile, by late 1978 The Knack had become darlings of the Sunset Strip, selling out shows at The Whisky and The Troubadour, jamming with established stars like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. “Bruce got on stage with us on a Friday night, and by Monday morning we had fourteen offers from labels,” Fieger said.
They signed with EMI/Capitol, partly because it was the home of their favourite band, The Beatles. They were paired with producer Mike Chapman at The Record Plant studio in New York. Chapman, who’d made his name as one half of the Chinn-Chapman songwriting/producing duo behind glam rockers The Sweet and Suzi Quatro, had jumped the fence into new-wave hit making with 1979’s other breakout hit, Blondie’s Heart Of Glass. He understood that The Knack’s appeal lay in their British Invasion vibe. So his approach was no fuss, no muss – cut the record like it was 1964.
“We were a tight live band,” Fieger said. “So we didn’t have to do a lot of takes. And Mike thought My Sharona was a huge hit. But for some reason Capitol wanted to release Oh Tara as the first single. We went along with it. That’s why the album went to number one before the single; My Sharona wasn’t released until a few weeks after.”
My Sharona became the soundtrack of the summer of ’79. It spent six weeks at No.1 in the US and was constantly on the radio, and made the Top 20 in many other countries. Every cover band playing school dances had a go at it. Pre-MTV there was even an early music video, the band looking fab with their skinny ties, Vox amplifiers and monogrammed bass drum head. That was in keeping with the black-and-white LP artwork that nodded to Meet The Beatles.
Predictably, some rock critics considered this hubris rather than hat-tipping. Creem called them “a carbon copy band of nothing particularly original”. Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh wrote: “The most salient characteristic of The Knack is their repulsive misogyny. Sexism pervades every song.”
Reflecting on the backlash, Fieger told journalist Todd Longwell: “I’d always thought of The Knack as an art project. The concept was to start out with our remembered adolescence on the first album, then we’d progressively explore other, more mature things as we went on.”
While The Knack’s subsequent six albums did develop their sound, they never recaptured the buzz of their debut. But My Sharona has continued to enjoy a healthy pop-culture afterlife. In 1982 it was the inspiration for Michael Jackson to write Beat It. And although Devo denied it, their hit Girl U Want owes a debt to it. It was also famously parodied in My Bologna, the debut single that launched the career of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. It’s been in an episode of The Simpsons and many films, including Reality Bites, Charlie’s Angels and Super 8.
Fulfilling the song’s hope, Fieger and Alperin finally did get together, and had a four-year run as a couple. They remained friendly until Fieger died from brain cancer in 2010. He called her “the love of my life”.
“And that song, and the whole beginning of The Knack was such a joyful experience,” he said.
