Doug Fieger (The Knack) Dead [Archive] - Soap, Drama and Spoiler Forums

Perdita

17-02-2010, 12:38

Written to woo an underage girl, My Sharona, sung by Doug Fieger, who died this week, has been linked to everyone from George Bush to Girls Aloud. How did a disposable song with hidden swearing prove so enduring, and who was Sharona?

First come the jerky loud tom-toms, then the leaping loud bass, then the choppy and very loud guitar. My Sharona was the biggest American hit of 1979 and remains instantly recognisable.

Lead singer Doug Fieger, then 27, had been in a series of groups and tended, he said, to write "nasty songs about girls I know". The debut single for his new band The Knack, one of these was for Sharona Alperin, a 16-year-old schoolgirl at Los Angeles's Fairfax High who was introduced to Fieger by his then-girlfriend. "She had an overpowering scent," he recalled in 1994, "and it drove me crazy."

With the age of consent being 18 in California, you might expect My Sharona to be one of those songs that hides its intentions in coded language. Not a bit of it. "Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind," goes the first verse. "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind."

Unlikely subject matter for a number one perhaps, but in 1979 Capitol Records had decided to develop a huge band, and The Knack were launched with every trick in the music biz book: tall tales of bidding wars, record sleeves that pointedly recalled The Beatles and a producer with a impeccable track record - Mike Chapman, the man behind Suzi Quatro, The Sweet and Blondie.

Chapman recorded the song fast and cheap, with one addition to the band: Sharona herself. "I thought she looked about 14," a studio engineer told Sound On Sound magazine, recalling how Alperin joined them and how Chapman sneaked in a swear word.

Everyone present was asked to add a chanted background vocal, very low in the mix, which consisted of the "F" word followed by "-a-me".

Capitol then made the recording ubiquitous; the single, with Alperin on the sleeve, went on to sell 10 million copies and The Knack toured extensively, during which Fieger sent Alperin a ticket to join him in Hawaii. "We were together for a long time after that," he told the Sydney Sun Herald. "We lived together in Los Angeles for four-and-a-half years and I wrote a lot of songs about her."

'Knuke The Knack'

Meanwhile, the song divided opinion. Like most monster hits, its influence spread beyond the charts, with "Honk If You've Slept With Sharona" bumper stickers adorning Californian cars. LA impresario Kim Fowley attributes its party anthem status to a hostility towards disco: "The Knack made it because the heterosexual white audience found out that everyone in disco was gay."

NOTABLE VERSIONS

'Weird Al' Yankovic (accordion)
Dead Kennedys (as My Payola)
Leningrad Cowboys (heavy metal)
Dandy Warhols (spoken word)
KT Tunstall (female duet)
The Knack (on revival show Hit Me Baby One More Time)

The music press was not kind to the band, portraying them as a marketing exercise in sanitised punk, and "Knuke The Knack" T-shirts began to appear and were briefly worn by the band before they decided the joke wasn't funny. "We were blamed for everything short of Jonestown," Fieger recalled during their 1986 reunion.

Despite the barbs, the song became a pop culture staple, endlessly parodied and reinterpreted. First up was indefatigable parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose accordion-powered My Bologna was the beginning of a stream of his food-themed re-writes.

In 1987, Run-DMC based their rap single It's Tricky around the My Sharona riff; 19 years later, The Knack were reported as seeking $150,000 from Yahoo, Amazon and Apple for distributing the hip-hop track on the basis that the sample was unauthorised.

The president's iPod

In the early 1990s two film studios, according to Fieger, approached him on the same day seeking to use My Sharona. Told he could pick only one, he opted to have the song soundtrack Winona Ryder dancing in Reality Bites. Fieger said that the alternative - the scene in Pulp Fiction in which Marsellus Wallace is sexually tortured - would have been "hilarious and wonderful", but that he was "hoping to meet Winona Ryder".

The Knack at the BBC, 1979
George W Bush raised eyebrows in 2005 when he announced that My Sharona was among the songs on his iPod; the president's detractors were quick to quote lines like "Runnin' down the length of my thigh, Sharona" to illustrate the absence of family values in this celebration of priapic abandon.

Its most recent revival was in Girls Aloud's No Good Advice, which critic Ben Thompson described as "cannibalising body parts from The Knack's My Sharona".

My Sharona has been back on the airwaves this week following Fieger's death and while it is inconceivable that anyone would hope for a massive hit in 2010 with a song about attraction to underage girls - or boys - that is not in the minds of most listeners or dancers when My Sharona blares out. What makes it so revivable is its army of hooks and riffs, from its stop/start structure to the Buddy Holly-style stutter.

"We call it the 'golden albatross'," said Fieger in 2007, "but it's been good to us and afforded me a wonderful lifestyle."

And what of Sharona?

The pair broke off their engagement, but remained close. Alperin is now an estate agent specialising in celebrities' homes and spent last weekend at Fieger's deathbed.

"Doug changed my life forever," she told ABC News. "He left on Valentine's Day, a day of heart and love and that was Doug - all heart and love."

BBC News