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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).
“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).
