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| In all her glory. (I'm pretty sure.) |
The Hit
“It seemed to us that there’s nothing more natural for a rock song than a teenage guy singing about trying to screw a teenage girl.”
And hold that thought. The Knack’s debut album, Get the Knack, went gold in just 13 days - a record at the time, and it’s too much damn work to figure whether that’s still a record - and it sold six million copies within seven weeks. Their label, Capitol Records, held the release of the album’s famous single for two weeks, but all the radio stations that received copies of Get the Knack picked out “My Sharona” almost immediately and without any prompting. Radio built it, in other words, and real damn fast.
For just about everyone except the young fans in Los Angeles who caught their shows at Whiskey and the Troubadour, The Knack’s monster hit came out of nowhere. It’s a funny song when you listen to it closely - even more so when you hear members of the band breakdown their parts in it, as drummer Bruce Gary does in a short video shot in 2004, and the rest of the members did across a three-part video titled, The Knack - About My Sharona (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). It started when backing guitarist/vocalist, Berton Averre, played the famous guitar riff out of the blue at a rehearsal; sooner or later, he slapped out the drum figure on his knees for The Knack’s front-man, Doug Fieger, one borrowed from Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go,” and they passed it off to Gary who made it heavier with some things he carried over from playing in surf-rock bands (e.g., the stutter on the floor and high tom beats). With Prescott Niles’ bass line following the drums in something close to lock-step (until the pre-chorus), all the instruments work to amplify the rhythm: it has melodic elements, of course, but “My Sharona” is a remarkably rhythm-driven song.
Among the young fans who noticed was a young woman named (yes) Sharona Alperin, then 17-years-old and part of an informal fan group that members of the band called The Knackettes. Fieger had a massive crush on her and acknowledges her as his muse for the single…so that’s a 27-year-old man singing about screwing a teenage girl, for those doing the math at home. As Alperin recounts in one part of the About My Sharona doc, the band played it for her one night. She doesn’t mention loving the attention or hating it; as much anything, she talks about it like something she had to take in.
Sharona Alperin was selling real estate when that mini-doc came out. And, according to Fieger’s interview with Classicbands, she was damn good at it. And she and Fieger did get together, but, in keeping with the song, it was more a rush of lust than forever (I kid, I kid. I don't know how long they lasted).
The Rest of the Story
The Knack’s seemed meteoric at the time - part of the (frankly stunning) backlash against them claimed they were built in a A&R lab at Capitol Records - but they’d formed in 1977-78 and shopped some demos that no one picked up. Their story actually starts in a Detroit suburb called Oak Park, Michigan, where Fieger grew up there in what sounds like a well-to-do family (his older brother, Geoffrey, would later serve as Jack Kevorkian’s attorney). Precocious, both personally and musically, he wrote Jimmy Miller, a man who had produced Traffic, Blind Faith, and a couple albums by the Rolling Stones, around the time he was 17 to invite him to hear his band, Sky, anytime he happened to visit the Michigan suburbs. Perhaps between projects, Miller showed up, signed Sky and produced a couple albums for them. Neither went anywhere, but that’s what Fieger calls his break into the music business. Feeling like he’d tapped Michigan out, he moved to LA.
Averre, meanwhile, had been bouncing between pick-up bands through the 1970s, blessed with more talent than ambition, as he toldThe Washington Times in 2015. He found paying work with a singer-songwriter, but that all changed the day Fieger came into that group as a bass player. Fieger approached Averre after the first rehearsal and asked if he wanted to do some songwriting with him. After building a fairly significant body of work (more later), they recruited Gary and then, one week before they started playing shows, Niles. They made the demos noted above, their first take on “Good Girls Don’t” among them.
With nothing coming together with a label, they just started playing shows. Fieger told Classicbands they never did the pay-to-play thing, but he also notes they almost never got paid to perform; the first time he recalls getting money (and fair chunk too) was at a venue called Starwood around Christmas 1978. In the interview with the Washington Times, Averre dated their first gig in June of ’78. Over the rest of that year, The Knack built a very robust local following that skewed young and brought the youthful enthusiasm. As the lines started stretching around the block, record executives took notice: by November of ‘78, there was a bidding war to sign The Knack. The labels weren’t alone: other musicians came to sit in with them, including Tom Petty and Ray Manzarek, but the session with Bruce Springsteen was the one Fieger talks about in every interview:
“Bruce Springsteen gets up onstage with us on a Friday night, and on Monday, we have 14 record offers.”
The Knack responded with a list of demands and Capitol Records came back with the best answer. Because they’d built their reputation as a live band - they did the Rock Band thing, basically; as Averre said, “we had put in our 10,000 hours” - the producer Capitol lined up, Mike Champman, wanted to get that same sound on vinyl. They recorded entire album old school, for a pittance ($18,000) and in just under two weeks. By the time Get the Knack dropped, the band was lean, fit and hopeful they’d sell 50,000 albums. a sale for every dollar Fieger claims Capitol had to invest on promotion. But then they got real, real big overnight. The Knack unraveled almost as fast.
Capitol owns part of the blame: they decided to model the cover for Get the Knack after Meet the Beatles, something that fueled speculation they were a hyped-up product from Capitol; Fieger admits the choice was deliberate, but also tongue-in-cheek. In a much, much dumber move, Capitol advised them to refuse all interviews, literally all of them. A 2019 retrospective on Albumism faulted the thought-process and follow-through like so:
“If you’re managing a band that has a number one album, number one single and is on tour, the one thing you don’t do is deny all interview requests. The Knack gave no interviews that summer and their management did not allow them to go on American Bandstand.”
Absent give-and-take with reporters and critics, they started to write their own narrative - the one about the pre-fab band among them. Somewhere in the middle of the hype, a San Francisco-based artists named Hugh Brown decided he hated them enough to start his “Knuke the Knack” campaign - driven in part by what he considered their objectifcation of teenage girls, according to Wikipedia - which took off behind any expectations he had. Then came the internal struggles:
“We were No. 1 all over the world, we had it in the palm of our hands. And there were certain elements that brought it down. To be honest with you, I think I could chalk it down to drugs, and I could chalk it down to people who weren’t experienced enough to have been ready for that kind of overwhelming success...I can honestly say, without any doubt, that I was ready at that point.”
That’s Bruce Gary’s take on it - and it doesn't take much reading to find out who he meant by "people" - but it’s not exactly a lonely one. Chapman shared these thoughts in Part 3 of About My Sharona:
“And Doug had become larger than life. It was an extraordinary thing to watch this happening to him. He just felt like he could do no wrong.”
He also seconded Gary’s point about the drugs, most of which seemed to center on Fieger, but the entire band carried the pressure of creating the next “My Sharona.” Something else that comes up was the fact that the band wanted to release a double album for their debut, and they had the material for it, but Capitol refused. When that material came out as their follow-up album, …But the Little Girls Understand, in 1980, it sounded like more of the same (e.g., “Baby Talks Dirty”) for that very reason. Between that, the relentless touring (Fieger keeps citing “exhaustion,” but you can't escape the sense that other members would say, yes, but also drugs), and a mysteriously rabid backlash, the pressure on the band kept growing. After recording one more album, 1981’s Round Trip, and adding an additional keyboardist (Phil Jost) to make what they did on the album hold up live, The Knack took a break. Or, rather, Fieger took a break. As he admitted to Classicbands, he wasn’t wild about Gary either:
“Basically what happened is, I just didn't want to play with the drummer anymore. I'd had it pretty much with dealing with him. The other guys didn't feel that way and so we parted company.”
They wouldn’t play again until 1986, but Fieger called that a hiatus, not a break-up. A cancer benefit for Michele Myers, the woman who booked their first show, was the occasion for the first time, but they stayed together afterwards - without Gary - and kept on playing. They also went through drummers like Spinal Tap: I suppose the two most important would be Terry Bozzio, who played in their 1998 release, Zoom, and David Henderson, aka, Holmes Jones (for some reason), who drummed on 2001’s Normal as the Next Guy and Live at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Funhouse, but another drummer, Pat Torpey became the regular to the end…
…which started in 2006, at a Las Vegas performance when Fieger suddenly couldn’t remember the words to songs he’d played for, by that time, decades. Doctors found two brain tumors, but it would take another four years for brain and lung cancer to carry him off. Gary passed in 2006 from lymphoma and, without absolutely zero intention of making light of either man’s death…I’m curious how both of them took the news of the other’s troubles or passing. The Knack basically folded after Fieger’s death, regardless.
About the Sampler
First things first, and Wikipedia's master-list be damned (can't link to it, because spoilers!), The Knack simply don’t qualify as a one-hit wonder. Regardless of whether it was carried by Get the Knack’s runaway success, “Good Girls Don’t” reached No. 11, and that’s two hits in any book worth reading. Hell, even “Baby Talks Dirty” cracked the Top 40 (No. 38) and a later (frankly lesser) song, “Rocket o’ Love,” climbed to No. 10 on the AOR charts (that’s Adult-Oriented Rock, for the uninitiated, but what does “adult-oriented” in this context).
As for the sampler, this counts as one my most thorough and democratic samplers of all time. The Knack put out a grand total of 7 studio albums, and I have songs from all of ‘em, even if I stiffed Rock & Roll Is Good for You: The Fieger/Averre Demos by giving it just the one song, “Corporation Shuffle (Daddy Turns the Volume Down).”
As for the rest, and beyond the songs already listed above, I pulled “Let Me Out” (and here's them playing it at Carnegie Hall in 1979) “She’s So Selfish,” and the ballad “Maybe Tonight” from their debut, “Hold on Tight and Don’t Let Go” and “The Feeling I Get” (which sounds like Tommy James) from ...But the Little Girls Understand, then “Soul Kissin’,” the rootsy “Pay the Devil (Ooo, Baby, Ooo),” and (the frankly left-field) “Africa” from Round Trip. Serious Fun turned out to be a serious departure - for what it’s worth, it sound three years too late to glam metal, which you hear on “Rocket o’ Love” - and I repped it on the sampler with the title track and “River of Sighs.” From their later period, which is interesting in context, I pulled the title track, “Spiritual Pursuit,” and “Dance of Romance” from Normal as the Next Guy, and, from Zoom, an album Fieger seemed particularly proud of, I threw in “Pop Is Dead,” “Can I Borrow a Kiss,” and “Everything I Do.”
To give a quick impression, pretty much everything after ...But the Little Girls Understand - a name that, understandably, fed charges of guys pushing 30 singing about teenage girls - doesn’t sound quite like The Knack you know - though "Soul Kissin'" comes damn close. Despite the repeated reference to the Beatles, members of the band cited The Kinks and The Who as bigger influences; Averre recalls listening to "a lot" of Elvis Costello (see "Pump It Up") when the bones of "My Sharona;" they get lumped in with new wave, and that doesn't seem unfair,. Zoom and Normal as the Next Guy, on the other hand, sound like something from a different band. Fieger had a very high opinion of his songwriting chops (“I think it's the music that we make and made is timeless. It may remind you of the time you heard it. All great music does that”) and, in his defense, I did like The Knack more than I expected. The more I listen to the sampler, the more I accept that Fieger/Averre knew how to write a decent song…and, golly, did I get the kind of story I wanted. Hence the length.
Till the next one…which is a song that heralded an entirely new age in music.
“It seemed to us that there’s nothing more natural for a rock song than a teenage guy singing about trying to screw a teenage girl.”
And hold that thought. The Knack’s debut album, Get the Knack, went gold in just 13 days - a record at the time, and it’s too much damn work to figure whether that’s still a record - and it sold six million copies within seven weeks. Their label, Capitol Records, held the release of the album’s famous single for two weeks, but all the radio stations that received copies of Get the Knack picked out “My Sharona” almost immediately and without any prompting. Radio built it, in other words, and real damn fast.
For just about everyone except the young fans in Los Angeles who caught their shows at Whiskey and the Troubadour, The Knack’s monster hit came out of nowhere. It’s a funny song when you listen to it closely - even more so when you hear members of the band breakdown their parts in it, as drummer Bruce Gary does in a short video shot in 2004, and the rest of the members did across a three-part video titled, The Knack - About My Sharona (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). It started when backing guitarist/vocalist, Berton Averre, played the famous guitar riff out of the blue at a rehearsal; sooner or later, he slapped out the drum figure on his knees for The Knack’s front-man, Doug Fieger, one borrowed from Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go,” and they passed it off to Gary who made it heavier with some things he carried over from playing in surf-rock bands (e.g., the stutter on the floor and high tom beats). With Prescott Niles’ bass line following the drums in something close to lock-step (until the pre-chorus), all the instruments work to amplify the rhythm: it has melodic elements, of course, but “My Sharona” is a remarkably rhythm-driven song.
Among the young fans who noticed was a young woman named (yes) Sharona Alperin, then 17-years-old and part of an informal fan group that members of the band called The Knackettes. Fieger had a massive crush on her and acknowledges her as his muse for the single…so that’s a 27-year-old man singing about screwing a teenage girl, for those doing the math at home. As Alperin recounts in one part of the About My Sharona doc, the band played it for her one night. She doesn’t mention loving the attention or hating it; as much anything, she talks about it like something she had to take in.
Sharona Alperin was selling real estate when that mini-doc came out. And, according to Fieger’s interview with Classicbands, she was damn good at it. And she and Fieger did get together, but, in keeping with the song, it was more a rush of lust than forever (I kid, I kid. I don't know how long they lasted).
The Rest of the Story
The Knack’s seemed meteoric at the time - part of the (frankly stunning) backlash against them claimed they were built in a A&R lab at Capitol Records - but they’d formed in 1977-78 and shopped some demos that no one picked up. Their story actually starts in a Detroit suburb called Oak Park, Michigan, where Fieger grew up there in what sounds like a well-to-do family (his older brother, Geoffrey, would later serve as Jack Kevorkian’s attorney). Precocious, both personally and musically, he wrote Jimmy Miller, a man who had produced Traffic, Blind Faith, and a couple albums by the Rolling Stones, around the time he was 17 to invite him to hear his band, Sky, anytime he happened to visit the Michigan suburbs. Perhaps between projects, Miller showed up, signed Sky and produced a couple albums for them. Neither went anywhere, but that’s what Fieger calls his break into the music business. Feeling like he’d tapped Michigan out, he moved to LA.
Averre, meanwhile, had been bouncing between pick-up bands through the 1970s, blessed with more talent than ambition, as he toldThe Washington Times in 2015. He found paying work with a singer-songwriter, but that all changed the day Fieger came into that group as a bass player. Fieger approached Averre after the first rehearsal and asked if he wanted to do some songwriting with him. After building a fairly significant body of work (more later), they recruited Gary and then, one week before they started playing shows, Niles. They made the demos noted above, their first take on “Good Girls Don’t” among them.
With nothing coming together with a label, they just started playing shows. Fieger told Classicbands they never did the pay-to-play thing, but he also notes they almost never got paid to perform; the first time he recalls getting money (and fair chunk too) was at a venue called Starwood around Christmas 1978. In the interview with the Washington Times, Averre dated their first gig in June of ’78. Over the rest of that year, The Knack built a very robust local following that skewed young and brought the youthful enthusiasm. As the lines started stretching around the block, record executives took notice: by November of ‘78, there was a bidding war to sign The Knack. The labels weren’t alone: other musicians came to sit in with them, including Tom Petty and Ray Manzarek, but the session with Bruce Springsteen was the one Fieger talks about in every interview:
“Bruce Springsteen gets up onstage with us on a Friday night, and on Monday, we have 14 record offers.”
The Knack responded with a list of demands and Capitol Records came back with the best answer. Because they’d built their reputation as a live band - they did the Rock Band thing, basically; as Averre said, “we had put in our 10,000 hours” - the producer Capitol lined up, Mike Champman, wanted to get that same sound on vinyl. They recorded entire album old school, for a pittance ($18,000) and in just under two weeks. By the time Get the Knack dropped, the band was lean, fit and hopeful they’d sell 50,000 albums. a sale for every dollar Fieger claims Capitol had to invest on promotion. But then they got real, real big overnight. The Knack unraveled almost as fast.
Capitol owns part of the blame: they decided to model the cover for Get the Knack after Meet the Beatles, something that fueled speculation they were a hyped-up product from Capitol; Fieger admits the choice was deliberate, but also tongue-in-cheek. In a much, much dumber move, Capitol advised them to refuse all interviews, literally all of them. A 2019 retrospective on Albumism faulted the thought-process and follow-through like so:
“If you’re managing a band that has a number one album, number one single and is on tour, the one thing you don’t do is deny all interview requests. The Knack gave no interviews that summer and their management did not allow them to go on American Bandstand.”
Absent give-and-take with reporters and critics, they started to write their own narrative - the one about the pre-fab band among them. Somewhere in the middle of the hype, a San Francisco-based artists named Hugh Brown decided he hated them enough to start his “Knuke the Knack” campaign - driven in part by what he considered their objectifcation of teenage girls, according to Wikipedia - which took off behind any expectations he had. Then came the internal struggles:
“We were No. 1 all over the world, we had it in the palm of our hands. And there were certain elements that brought it down. To be honest with you, I think I could chalk it down to drugs, and I could chalk it down to people who weren’t experienced enough to have been ready for that kind of overwhelming success...I can honestly say, without any doubt, that I was ready at that point.”
That’s Bruce Gary’s take on it - and it doesn't take much reading to find out who he meant by "people" - but it’s not exactly a lonely one. Chapman shared these thoughts in Part 3 of About My Sharona:
“And Doug had become larger than life. It was an extraordinary thing to watch this happening to him. He just felt like he could do no wrong.”
He also seconded Gary’s point about the drugs, most of which seemed to center on Fieger, but the entire band carried the pressure of creating the next “My Sharona.” Something else that comes up was the fact that the band wanted to release a double album for their debut, and they had the material for it, but Capitol refused. When that material came out as their follow-up album, …But the Little Girls Understand, in 1980, it sounded like more of the same (e.g., “Baby Talks Dirty”) for that very reason. Between that, the relentless touring (Fieger keeps citing “exhaustion,” but you can't escape the sense that other members would say, yes, but also drugs), and a mysteriously rabid backlash, the pressure on the band kept growing. After recording one more album, 1981’s Round Trip, and adding an additional keyboardist (Phil Jost) to make what they did on the album hold up live, The Knack took a break. Or, rather, Fieger took a break. As he admitted to Classicbands, he wasn’t wild about Gary either:
“Basically what happened is, I just didn't want to play with the drummer anymore. I'd had it pretty much with dealing with him. The other guys didn't feel that way and so we parted company.”
They wouldn’t play again until 1986, but Fieger called that a hiatus, not a break-up. A cancer benefit for Michele Myers, the woman who booked their first show, was the occasion for the first time, but they stayed together afterwards - without Gary - and kept on playing. They also went through drummers like Spinal Tap: I suppose the two most important would be Terry Bozzio, who played in their 1998 release, Zoom, and David Henderson, aka, Holmes Jones (for some reason), who drummed on 2001’s Normal as the Next Guy and Live at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Funhouse, but another drummer, Pat Torpey became the regular to the end…
…which started in 2006, at a Las Vegas performance when Fieger suddenly couldn’t remember the words to songs he’d played for, by that time, decades. Doctors found two brain tumors, but it would take another four years for brain and lung cancer to carry him off. Gary passed in 2006 from lymphoma and, without absolutely zero intention of making light of either man’s death…I’m curious how both of them took the news of the other’s troubles or passing. The Knack basically folded after Fieger’s death, regardless.
About the Sampler
First things first, and Wikipedia's master-list be damned (can't link to it, because spoilers!), The Knack simply don’t qualify as a one-hit wonder. Regardless of whether it was carried by Get the Knack’s runaway success, “Good Girls Don’t” reached No. 11, and that’s two hits in any book worth reading. Hell, even “Baby Talks Dirty” cracked the Top 40 (No. 38) and a later (frankly lesser) song, “Rocket o’ Love,” climbed to No. 10 on the AOR charts (that’s Adult-Oriented Rock, for the uninitiated, but what does “adult-oriented” in this context).
As for the sampler, this counts as one my most thorough and democratic samplers of all time. The Knack put out a grand total of 7 studio albums, and I have songs from all of ‘em, even if I stiffed Rock & Roll Is Good for You: The Fieger/Averre Demos by giving it just the one song, “Corporation Shuffle (Daddy Turns the Volume Down).”
As for the rest, and beyond the songs already listed above, I pulled “Let Me Out” (and here's them playing it at Carnegie Hall in 1979) “She’s So Selfish,” and the ballad “Maybe Tonight” from their debut, “Hold on Tight and Don’t Let Go” and “The Feeling I Get” (which sounds like Tommy James) from ...But the Little Girls Understand, then “Soul Kissin’,” the rootsy “Pay the Devil (Ooo, Baby, Ooo),” and (the frankly left-field) “Africa” from Round Trip. Serious Fun turned out to be a serious departure - for what it’s worth, it sound three years too late to glam metal, which you hear on “Rocket o’ Love” - and I repped it on the sampler with the title track and “River of Sighs.” From their later period, which is interesting in context, I pulled the title track, “Spiritual Pursuit,” and “Dance of Romance” from Normal as the Next Guy, and, from Zoom, an album Fieger seemed particularly proud of, I threw in “Pop Is Dead,” “Can I Borrow a Kiss,” and “Everything I Do.”
To give a quick impression, pretty much everything after ...But the Little Girls Understand - a name that, understandably, fed charges of guys pushing 30 singing about teenage girls - doesn’t sound quite like The Knack you know - though "Soul Kissin'" comes damn close. Despite the repeated reference to the Beatles, members of the band cited The Kinks and The Who as bigger influences; Averre recalls listening to "a lot" of Elvis Costello (see "Pump It Up") when the bones of "My Sharona;" they get lumped in with new wave, and that doesn't seem unfair,. Zoom and Normal as the Next Guy, on the other hand, sound like something from a different band. Fieger had a very high opinion of his songwriting chops (“I think it's the music that we make and made is timeless. It may remind you of the time you heard it. All great music does that”) and, in his defense, I did like The Knack more than I expected. The more I listen to the sampler, the more I accept that Fieger/Averre knew how to write a decent song…and, golly, did I get the kind of story I wanted. Hence the length.
Till the next one…which is a song that heralded an entirely new age in music.
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