Weekend Poetry/Music Break: The Complications of “My Sharona”

[Video: The Knack, in a 1979 live performance of “My Sharona.” It’s not the performance described in the poem cited below, but it’s probably pretty close. Embedding YouTube videos can be a crapshoot, as they often end up getting taken down for copyright violation. But this video was uploaded to the account of The Knack’s lead singer, shortly after his death in 2010, so I’m counting on its being deemed legit for awhile yet.]

Let’s get this post’s inspiration out of the way right up-front: it wasn’t The Knack per se — or “power pop” generally — and it wasn’t that song. No, it was prepping for a recent whiskey river Fridays post here. It’s not uncommon for me to seek inspiration for those posts at The Poetry Foundation site, and that’s how I came across this poem: “…But the Little Girls Understand,” by Steve Kistulentz. It’s a mashup of relevant musical references:

• The poem’s title quotes “Back Door Man,” written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf…
• …and is also the title of The Knack’s second album (following on the heels of Get the Knack).
• The Knack’s “My Sharona” is the central focus…
• …but Ray Manzarek of The Doors (who also had a hit with “Back Door Man”) shows up, too.
• Not uncommonly in writing about The Knack, The Beatles make a glancing appearance.
• The Troubadour — an L.A. club instrumental in the careers of a lot of musicians in its 60-plus-years history — features as the venue for The Knack’s live performance of “Back Door Man.” (Aside: Ray Manzarek of The Doors joined the Knack onstage in 1978 at the Troubadour.)
• Leonard Cohen wanders in unexpectedly, sort of nods at the proceedings, and wanders back out again.

Well, as one does, I began trying to piece it all together. I never found a copy of the 1979 bootleg recording which inspired the poem itself. I did read a heck of a lot about The Knack (more on which, in just a moment). I read that without “My Sharona,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” might never have come about. I read about Phase II of “My Sharona’s” popularity, with the release of 1994’s Reality Bites (in which the young cast — Winona Ryder, Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo — dance happily and spontaneously to the song, while sad-sack Ethan Hawke watches)… although I’ve never (yet) seen that film.

Bottom line: I never could piece together a coherent single writeup of what it all says. For now, I’ll just offer you this playlist of (some of) the great music I came across while working on this post.

The summer of 1979 was “My Sharona’s” time. It was also a time when I myself pretty much stopped listening to music altogether — not out of rock-purist snobbishness about “music nowadays” or any such thing, no: I was simply flat-out preoccupied with my stuff.

Earlier that year I turned from whatever I was before I was a computer programmer, to, um, well, a computer programmer; it was also the year of probably my greatest non-self-inflicted* romantic heartbreak. The two events were linked, happily not inextricably; but taken together, they did make The Outside World hard to see sometimes.

Anyhow, The Knack never really registered with me. I vaguely remember the cover of their first album — the one on which “My Sharona” debuted; I probably — I like to think — made some kind of vague connection between it and any of several early Beatles album covers. (Shown here: the 1963 UK release, With by the Beatles — released in the US a couple months later with the same cover, under the name Meet the Beatles.) Many others did notice the resemblance and were not kind about the implication: that The Knack regarded themselves as a “new Beatles.” When “My Sharona” was released, as Wikipedia reports, it was Capitol Records’ “fastest gold status debut single since the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in 1964” — which probably did outrage some rock-music purists.

…because, face it, the song really has very little in common with “Beatles songs.” The band itself, sure: the clean-cut look, white shirts and skinny black ties, all those external trappings of rock celebrity. But the song’s lyrics are, well, nasty, and the band — at least the lead singer, Doug Fieger — had fun playing up the nastiness with suggestive onstage gestures and facial expressions, little build-ups-to-explosions in his voice, and so on.

At the same time, the song — I think — is also undeniably auriverminous (a word I just made up, meaning “having the character of an earworm”). The rhythm is propulsive, insistent, “hooky,” and the band seems to have been very tight and professional. (The lead songwriters — Fieger and lead guitarist Berton Averre — had been friends since they were kids, and never seem to have had the sort of falling out which many other songwriting teams experienced.) They clearly had been performing live for a good while, and to my (admittedly unpracticed) eye show the polish one would expect only with frequent rehearsal.

As performers, as musicians, and never mind the celebrity/demise angle, they’re a pleasure to watch.

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Resources consulted, if that’s the word, during the writing of this post:

• Rough Edge (“hard rock/heavy metal/punk recorded music reviews”): “The Knack aren’t even close to heavy metal and it’d be a hell of stretch to call them hard rock. But they are a guilty pleasure of mine.”
• Blinded by Sound: interview (2015) with lead guitarist and “Sharona” co-writer Berton Averre. “A good way to describe power pop is ear candy but still slamming it out. I’ve never considered the term ear candy an insult and I’ve never been overly interested in what was considered cool or hip. I would always tell people, completely seriously, that I love the Sex Pistols and I love Abba and I’d sit back and watch their heads explode.”
• The Ratass Gazette (“now known as the Riverside Times” (!)): an appreciation of the “My Sharona” guitar solo. “I’m almost appalled that this song is not mentioned in Guitar World’s Top 100 Guitar Solos list. I mean, what the hell?! I’m sorry, but the ‘My Sharona’ guitar solo is better than the solo in ‘Honky Tonk Woman,’ ranked #96. It just is. You know what? It’s better than the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ guitar solo that they ranked #26.”
• Classic Rock Revisited: another interview with Berton Averre (also 2015, I think). “I heard this clip on the Internet. It was BBC radio interviewing a person. I’m going to give you the name afterwards, so you’ll understand why I’m so tickled pink about this one. The person who was being asked what 5 albums would he take to a deserted island. One of the songs he made a point of mentioning was ‘My Sharona.’ It was Ray Davies.”
• The Washington Post: A Fan’s Notes: an admiring lookback, from 1994, at The Knack’s arc. “…in my opinion the question isn’t, ‘What do you see in the dictionary when you look under “one-hit wonder”? but ‘Who saved rock-and-roll and never even got thanked?'”
• classicbands.com: Garry James’s interview (circa 2005-06) with lead singer and “Sharona” co-writer Doug Fieger. About the Get the Knack album cover: “It was a tongue in cheek joke. The band was really much more influenced musically by The Who and The Kinks than we ever were by The Beatles… We were tarred with that brush and we’ve had to answer these questions for twenty-seven years. (laughs)”
• The Phoenix New Times has run a couple of good 20+-year-old pieces about The Knack:
  • Knackrophelia Lives! (1994), by Serene Dominick. About the sexism of “My Sharona” and other songs by the band: “It does seem a double standard. The Knack never tied up and bruised a woman black and blue to promote an album like the Stones did in 1976, yet Fieger took far more abuse, and all he did was sing about a girl sitting on his face. When you compare the Stones’ battered spokesmodel to the ‘adolescent dream’ in ‘Good Girls Don’t,’ at least the Knack heroine got the upper hand, er, cheek.”
  • Frustrated (1998), by Robert Wilonsky. “As far as Fieger and his bandmates were concerned, they were a throwback to 1950s pop-and-roll, to a time when Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers wrote little rock ‘n’ roll songs about young boys’ sexual awakenings. Get the Knack would even feature one of Holly’s old standards, the Norman Petty co-write ‘Heartbeat,’ and it’s a heartfelt homage. Indeed, the whole of Get the Knack wears well after all this time; it’s hardly the sound of four antichrists counting their paychecks.”
• REBEAT Magazine: “Into the Slipstream: The Best Album of the ’80s — Released in the ’70s.” “Maybe it isn’t best album of the decade. Or decades. There is, however, an argument to be made that it’s the best album of the cusp. The time between decades. Listen to it in all its skinny-tie glory. Listen to the magic of Get the Knack.  If you are a teenager, go do something your parents are going to hate.”
• “About My Sharona”: three-part mini-documentary, featuring interviews with the band and others (including the real Sharona).
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
• LA Weekly: “The Story of The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ and the Real-Life Romance Behind the Song.” “Many years after The Knack became a punch line, ‘My Sharona’ had a comeback in 1994 in the movie Reality Bites. Quentin Tarantino also wanted the song to be used for the infamous ‘gimp’ segment in Pulp Fiction. The band were offered both movies on the same day. As Averre recalled on the band’s official website, ‘One was this hip comedy starring Winona Ryder, and the other was for the homosexual rape scene in Pulp Fiction. Hmmm, that’s a tough choice.'”
• Music Aficionado: “The Real Story Behind the Knack.” Berton Averre remembers: “I’ll tell you, when we went to see the previews of Reality Bites, and Winona Ryder was dancing to my guitar solo, it was like, ‘Oh, my God. I can die now.'”
• The Troubadour (L.A. rock club). Item, November, 1978: “The Knack, who were then unsigned, headline with special guests Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Stephen Stills, and Ray Manzarek.”
• TheKnack.com: more or less the band’s “home page”

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* non-self-inflicted: well, as far as I know, anyhow. Yeah — one of those heartbreaks.