“My Sharona” Exploded, The Knack Fizzled

by Kevin Burton

   This song was headed for the top. No two ways about it.

   It was d-d-destiny, to borrow a stuttered word from the lyrics.

   The first time The Knack played “My Sharona” at MCA Whitney Recording Studios, producer Mike Chapman told the band it was going to be a number one hit, according to SongFacts.

   Around this time in 1979, My Sharona was ending its six-week stranglehold on the top position of the Hot 100.  It was the song of the year, reaching gold status (half a million units sold) faster than any Capitol Records song since “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles in 1964.

   And the Beatles comparisons did not stop there.

   “Ever since The Beatles ushered in the era of modern pop, record company talent scouts have been searching for a successor,” wrote Fred Bronson in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits.

   “In 1979 potential heirs surfaced in the form of a Los Angeles quartet, The Knack. Comparisons started immediately as the Knack’s music was rooted in the original British Invasion and was not part of the predominant disco scene.”

   The band featured four lads, Doug Fieger on lead and backing vocals and rhythm guitar, Berton Averre on lead guitar and backing vocals, Prescott Niles on bass guitar and Bruce Gary on drums.

    In the photo from the back of their album Get The Knack the four of them posed in front of television camera “in what looked like an outtake from A Hard Day’s Night,” Bronson wrote.

   Fieger said the band was aiming for a 60s sound, not necessarily a Beatles sound

   “The music of the song echoes many elements of songs from the 1960s,” reads the song’s Wikipedia entry.

   “According to a Trouser Press reviewer, the song’s main melodic hook is “an inversion of the signature riff” from “Gimme Some Lovin’”, a 1966 song by the Spencer Davis Group. 

    Fieger acknowledged that the song’s tom-tom drum rhythm is “just a rewrite” of “Going To A Go-Go”, a song by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles from 1965.

    Dick Nusser of Billboard remarked on the song’s “catchy, deliberately awkward, stop-go drum and guitar breaks, quirky lyrics and “suggestive tone.”  Cash Box said it begins with “slamming drums and rock steady, building guitar work.”

   That stop-and-go action was evocative of teenage sexual frustration, as are the stuttered lyrics, which Fieger said were written from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy.

   That would explain the lyric – which I didn’t decipher until much later  – “I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.”

   There never was, never will be or can be another band like the Beatles. At some level people know this, but looking for the “next Beatles” has proved irresistible to some.

   Though My Sharona retains its place among the most successful rockers, the band soon floated back down to earth.

   The follow-up to My Sharona, “Good Girls Don’t” hit number 11. “Baby Talks Dirty” from their second album reached number 38, but that was it. The Knack broke up after their third album.

   So much for the next Beatles.

   Fieger and Averre wrote My Sharona after a girl Fieger met and fell for. No, not a woman, a girl. She was only 17 at the time.

   “When Fieger was 25 years old, he met 17-year-old Sharona Alperin, who inspired a two-month-long run of songwriting, as well as eventually becoming his girlfriend for the next four years,” according to Wikipedia.  “Fieger recounted that ‘It was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat; I fell in love with her instantly.’”

   “Fieger was in a long-term relationship when he walked into the clothing store where a high school student named Sharona Alperin (who had a boyfriend), was working,” according to SongFacts. “The age difference (he was about eight years older) and relationship status didn’t deter Fieger, who was immediately lovestruck.”

   “With his girlfriend looking on, he invited Sharona to a show. Not long after, he broke up with the girlfriend and professed his love for Sharona, creating a weird dynamic where he would come on to her even though she had a boyfriend who often attended Knack concerts with her. It got pretty heavy when Fieger started writing songs about her – they weren’t together when he composed “My Sharona.”

––“About a year after they first met, Sharona gave in and they started dating. She joined the band on tour and watched as the song Fieger wrote about her elevated them to stardom.”

   The couple was together for about four years (and engaged at one point) before the rock and roll lifestyle and Fieger’s alcoholism became too much for Sharona, and they called it off,” according to SongFacts. But the two remained lifelong friends.

   And yes, that is the real Sharona on the sleeve for My Sharona holding a copy of the Get The Knack album.

   “My Sharona” has retrospectively been viewed as a symbol for the fall of the 1970s’ disco and the rise of the 1980s’ new wave,” SongFacts wrote. “The New York Times called the song ‘an emblem of the new wave era in rock and a prime example of the brevity of pop fame.’”