CHAPTER 14

The Untold Story of 1979

“My Sharona” and The Knack

All years have big news stories, and 1979 was no exception: the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the Tehran hostage crisis, the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, gas rationing causing lines at the pump, and inflation. But the story of the biggest record of the year, “My Sharona” by the Knack, was left untold because the members of the band clammed up.

To a rock music fan starved for the type of music that dominated the charts in the 1960s—bands like the Beatles, the Who, and the Kinks—the Knack were saviors. When the Knack’s first single debuted on the charts, there were no rock records in the top ten. “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer, “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, “The Logical Song” by Supertramp, and “Chuck E.’s in Love” by Rickie Lee Jones were the top five songs.

Get the Knack was the best-selling album in America for five straight weeks. Billboard selected the Knack for “Top New Artist of the Year.” Even though the members were music business veterans in their mid-twenties, with presumably more maturity and perspective than a band of impetuous teenagers, they still couldn’t prevent success from slipping through their fingers.

The Knack’s success would not have been possible were it not for lead singer Doug Fieger’s infatuation with a girl whom he couldn’t have: one he was so obsessed with, one who frustrated him so much that he couldn’t help but write songs about her, including a record that topped the American charts for six weeks.

In the late 1970s there was a proliferation of bands playing rock and a number of new clubs to cater to the increase. The main inspiration for these bands was the punk scene in England, primarily the Sex Pistols and the Clash. In Britain the music was an expression of frustration with social inequities; in America it was more of an artistic emulation. For the most part, the musicality of the American bands was lacking. They could barely play, they couldn’t sing, and their songs lacked the comparative sophistication of the English bands.

Doug Fieger was floundering. In his mid-twenties, his dream of having hits as a member of a teenage rock band was years in the past. As a member of Sky he had recorded two poor-selling albums for RCA Records, produced by Jimmy Miller, who had guided the Rolling Stones and Spencer Davis Group. He moved to Los Angeles in 1970 as a member of Sky with dreams of becoming the bass player in the Doors (they didn’t have one), and he was the only one who stayed when the band dissolved.

Doug grew up in Oak Park, a middle-class, mostly Jewish suburb of Detroit. His father was a labor lawyer and his mother a union organizer for the Michigan Federation of Teachers. He referred to his family as a violent one and consequently grew up “scared.” As a kid he was interested in drama and played the lead in Peter Pan at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He involved the neighborhood kids in his productions. Once he enlisted his older brother, Geoff, in staging a convincing funeral for his sudden and unexpected death. Geoff, as funeral director, appointed the pallbearers and gave a eulogy. Doug was buried beneath a pile of leaves. Later on Doug studied acting with Lee Strasberg and Jeff Corey.

He met his girlfriend, Judy Halpert, in a ninth grade English class. Two years later at Oak Park High School they became “lunch buddies,” and not long afterwards Judy moved into the permissive and progressive Fieger household. She joined Doug when he relocated to Los Angeles.

He was picking up a little money here and there as a bass player for hire. In 1974 he filled in for the bass player in the German progressive band Triumvirat. That same year he was paid to rehearse for three months with the Carpenters after Karen Carpenter broke up with her boyfriend, who had been the bassist. When Karen and her boyfriend reconciled, Doug was out. A few years later he played in local band the Sunset Bombers, but their record bombed. He also worked for a few months at the Licorice Pizza record store that was caddy corner from the Whisky a Go-Go on Sunset Boulevard.

He was disillusioned, but determined. No one was interested in his songs. A representative for the company that managed Jackson Browne seemed perplexed that Doug was writing about girls and dismissed his songs as “novelty music.” In January 1978 Doug and his writing partner Berton Averre (pronounced like of air) enlisted drummer Bruce Gary to record a demo tape of three songs. They submitted it to various record companies, but didn’t even get one to call them back.

Bruce met a manager from Elliot Roberts’ company who managed high profile acts Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Bruce told him about the prospective band, and he seemed interested in coming to see them play. Scott Bergstein, who worked for Casablanca Records, arranged for the group to use a soundstage Casablanca was renting in the Gower Gulch studio complex.

Bruce Gary was one of the first people Doug met when he moved to Los Angeles. With similar musical tastes, Bruce predicted that they would play in a band together some day. Bruce was struggling as well. When he was younger he was diagnosed with hyperactive disorder and ADD at a time where there was less understanding of its effect on learning. His parents had difficulty coping with their son and often directed their anger at him, to the point where he dropped out of high school to play drums professionally, originally touring with bluesman Albert Collins. Hustling for the next gig became part of his routine. His highest level of recognition was playing in a band with ex-Cream bassist Jack Bruce, ex-Rolling Stones’ guitarist Mick Taylor, and noted jazz pianist Carla Bley, but according to Doug he never made much money.

Berton grew up in the San Fernando Valley and was bright and talented, but lacked drive and hadn’t done much professionally. In the new band lineup, in order to be better able to sing the songs he and Berton had written, Doug wanted to play rhythm guitar. This meant they needed to find a bass player, and fast, as they had a showcase for a prospective manager little more than a week away.

Bruce knew Prescott Niles from the Los Angeles scene. The name sounded snooty, English, and upper class. He was born Prescott Niles Fine, but as a kid in New York he was simply Scott Fine. Prescott recorded an album in 1972 as a member of Hendrix clone Velvert Turner’s band, and he was a good enough bass player to be asked to join various ensembles, though none had been successful. Handsome with curly hair, Prescott’s look recalled that of 1970s glam rock star Marc Bolan.

Even though the four musicians didn’t have much of a history together, they had a lot in common. They were twenty months apart in age—from Bruce, the oldest, to Berton, the youngest—and they were all, coincidentally, Jewish. It wasn’t as if the members of the Knack were passed a secret formula for success. At this point, in their mid-twenties, being the next Beatles could hardly be an achievable fantasy.

Cream became the first rock “super group” when it formed in 1966. The idea was that each of the three musicians—Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums—was the cream of the crop. In their own way, as it related to the burgeoning late 1970s Los Angeles rock scene, the Knack was similar.

Berton was a real gem. Although he had been in bands, he mostly practiced in the confines of his family’s home, similar to Eric Clapton before he became known. Doug loved Bruce’s drumming because “he could play crazy like the Who’s Keith Moon, but with better technique.” Bruce loved the British bands of the sixties, but was good enough to add complexity to the commercial song arrangements the Knack were seeking. Doug thought Prescott’s bass playing was superior to his own.

Despite Cream’s artistry and commercial success, the members were not friends. Tension was rampant, to the point where Ginger Baker described the second of the group’s two years together as “agony.” The Who and the Kinks, heroes to the Knack, didn’t get along, either. The members of Knack were not friends, but were attracted to each other because of their musical gifts, as well as their shared passion for the music of the sixties. Doug was such a talent that the others put up with his “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude.

Doug explained his pushiness: “I wanted to be somebody and to have an identity. I didn’t think I was good looking. I would look in the mirror and be repulsed because I thought I was hideous. I felt I had to push myself in order to make up for it. I also thought the business was brutal. It was like going to war. It took me a long time until I realized that my life wasn’t my work.”

During band rehearsals Bruce often played something other than the part he and Doug had worked out together. Doug would give Bruce a stare, Bruce would nervously snicker, and they would have to start the song again. At times Bruce would sulk or be sullen. Doug felt that he was the only one dealing with Bruce’s attitude. He didn’t get any support from Berton or Prescott, and this added to his frustration.

As a consequence of Doug’s attitude, and in contrast to their music affinity, Berton didn’t relish socializing with him. “One day he called me up to come over to his place to write,” he said. “I needed a break from him. I told him I was going body surfing in Manhattan Beach. He said to pick him up; he wanted to go, too. I could have just got on the San Diego Freeway and driven straight to Manhattan Beach, but now I had to go into Hollywood to pick up Doug. He ended up on the beach covered in a towel so he wouldn’t get sunburned, and he wouldn’t go into the ocean because he was afraid that sharks might be lurking like in the Jaws movie.”

Judy worked at Norm Tuch Hair Salon on West Third Street. She took breaks by walking in the area, which included looking at the trendy clothes selection in Denise’s Place across the street. The store sold Chemin De Fer jeans, New Hero outfits, Comfort Shoes, and Korkeze. She became enamored with the savvy sales clerk, high school student Sharona Alperin, who worked part-time. Judy was so impressed, she told Doug about her.

Shortly after the band coalesced in May 1978, Doug was on his way to band practice when he stopped by Di Fabrizio Shoes to have Pasquale make him a pair of the type of boots the Beatles wore. Judy’s salon was a few doors away, so Doug thought he would stop in and see her. She wasn’t there, but he was directed up the street where he saw her talking to an attractive young girl who was minding her bosses’ baby in a stroller. Judy introduced Doug to Sharona as “my husband.” She made a strong impression on him. He invited her to the band’s upcoming showcase.

For the rest of the day he thought about Sharona. Oak Park’s population was predominantly Jewish. Doug only dated Jewish girls, and was primarily attracted to those who were Sabra, born in Israel, like Judy. Sharona’s name was Israeli. Judy and Doug were both impressed at how self-assured she was, especially considering that she was only sixteen years old.

That evening, after rehearsal, when Doug returned home to the apartment he shared with Judy just down the street from the Whisky a Go-Go, he realized he had to make a move. It wasn’t that he and Judy were arguing. It’s just that, after ten years living together, they had grown apart. “Judy was like my mom,” he said. “She took care of me. If it wasn’t for her, I probably would have gone out without my shoes on, and I definitely wouldn’t have eaten.”

For the showcase the musicians invited their friends. Sharona came with some classmates who were very enthusiastic in response to the band’s performance. The band played well, but no one from the management company showed up. It was a disappointment, but the musicians enjoyed playing with each other so much they decided to keep going as a band. It would be a way that Doug and Berton could get their songs heard, and they could pick up some money in the process. Doug convinced Berton to quit his job hanging drapes in order for them to be able to devote more time to the band.

The Knack’s sound definitely harkened back to that of the rock bands of the ’60s, but it was edgier, influenced by the recent punk movement. The lyrics were more contemporary. As Doug said at the time, “We’re not living in the ’60s, we’re living in the ’80s. Little 14-year-old girls do not want to hold your hand, they want to hold your kazoo. They don’t want to fantasize about you as a dream lover, they want sweaty sex.”

Doug thought the band should have a look like the early Beatles did in their collarless suits and in subsequent matching dress, but the band didn’t have much money. Bruce’s girlfriend, Ellen Brill, suggested a look where everybody wore black pants, white shirts, and black ties. The pants and shirts were common enough, and could be bought cheaply at thrift stores. She worked for a company that repurposed tuxedos, and was able to supply the band with black ties and vests made from remnants. This was very helpful to Berton, whose hapless manner of dress inspired the description “Hippy Huck Finn.” These elements provided a unified identity for the band, but they weren’t the first to make use of black ties. Some of the English punks sported the look, as well as the Los Angeles band the Heaters, whose members also wore vests.

When Donna Summer needed rehearsal space to mount her new stage show, Bergstein, who offered to be the group’s manager, had to find another space for the Knack. They moved to a facility next to Bekins’ storage building at Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland, run by three dope-smoking Rastafarians who kept telling the Knack that they played “too fast.” Sharona and her friends often came by, fortifying the malnourished musicians with hamburgers from Carl’s Jr.

At that time in the late 1970s in Los Angeles and other major cities, many bands were striving to be seen on the club circuit in order to have a chance at building a significant enough following to attract a major label contract. That put the club owners in an advantageous position. It was no longer common within the business to pay a new performer, even minimally, to provide the entertainment for alcohol-consuming customers. A new scheme was adopted by club owners: the owner gave the act tickets to disperse that would grant the holder free entrance into the club to see that band. The non-paying admissions added nothing to the pockets of the musicians onstage, but the two-drink minimum requirement for every member of the audience would do wonders for the club’s revenue. In many cases the band got a share of paid admissions, but those tended to be minimal as a band was building a following. The motivation for a band such as the Knack was that it was a way to improve playing before live audiences, as well as a way to build a following that could help to launch a career. Given the club system, it took over six months before the Knack were paid anywhere close to what they should have made.

Danny Sugerman saw the band at their first club date on June 1, at the Whisky a Go-Go. “I never had so much fun at a show in my life,” he said. “And it wasn’t just me. Everyone in the place was on his feet, pressing toward the small stage. The band got four real encores. They were contagious and electrifying. No one in town had experienced this type of energy before.”

Sharona had attended a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, but for her senior year she transferred to the public school Fairfax High. Sharona’s ethos was expressed in the title of the Kiss song she had written in marker on her bedroom wall: “I Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll All Nite and Party Every Day.” Sharona was very important in creating a following for the Knack by passing out these free admission tickets to her classmates, abetted by her best friends Nicole, Robin, and Leslye. She loved the music and the excitement of the Knack, and she liked Doug as a person.

The more time Doug spent with Sharona, the more he became captivated. She was dynamic and self-assured, but also cool, “like a female Keith Richards,” as Doug put it. She also had a wild side. She did so much to promote the band that it would be easy to conclude that she was really into him. The main problem for Doug was that Sharona had a boyfriend, Marty Gurfinkel, which she reminded him about whenever he came on too strong. She later clarified that rather than being Doug’s groupie, which would have been typical for the time, “He was my groupie.”

Still, Doug tried to see Sharona as often as he could. They met for dinner at the Moustache Café across from the Improv comedy club on Melrose Avenue, or at Theodores next to the Starwood, or at Fuddruckers. At times they made out in the parking lot behind Pink’s hot dog stand. She invited him to her house for a pool party, where she and her girlfriends performed a provocative run-through of the song “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Show.

The Knack closed their set with a driving cover of the Rolling Stones’ rendition of “Not Fade Away.” They wanted to come up with an original composition to replace it. Berton suggested the music to a song he built around a catchy riff inspired by Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up.” They ran through it at rehearsal with Doug scat singing because there were no lyrics yet.

Back at the apartment, Doug got it in his head that Sharona might give him more time if he wrote a song about her. He was intrigued by the unique sound of her name. It soon became apparent that the end of Berton’s riff fit Doug singing “My Sharona” perfectly. To Doug, the push-pull nature of Berton’s rhythm represented the way Sharona seemed to entice him and then push him away. He had already written a song about his experience with her, “Frustrated.” As Doug and Berton were working on the lyrics, Berton felt uncomfortable because Judy was in the next room and he thought she would take notice. Doug was so possessed that he pressed on and came up with the stutter on “my,” similar to what Roger Daltrey sang on the Who’s “My Generation.”

The next day at rehearsal they ran through it even though the song hadn’t been fully developed lyrically. After all, the sooner it was finished, the sooner the band could play it and the sooner it might win Sharona over. Bruce didn’t like the song, thinking it was too simple. He refused to play it and Doug became incensed. This wasn’t merely his drummer refusing to contribute to a new song for the band, this was Bruce sabotaging his gambit to win Sharona over. Doug, a man possessed, darted to the drum riser, raised his guitar over Bruce’s head like an axe, and yelled, “I’m going to bash your head in if you don’t start playing the drums, right now!” Bruce backed down. He eventually came up with a great drum part, atypically minimizing the use of cymbals in favor of rhythms inspired by surfer stomps and the Miracles’ “Goin’ to a Go Go.”

Boyfriend or no, Doug couldn’t possibly make a move while living with Judy, and the nitpicking between them increased. He expressed his frustration in writing “Let Me Out,” in which he called on Sharona (not by name) to rescue him because “I’m just a prisoner of your love.” Although Doug was an experienced, committed rock musician, he wasn’t a typical philanderer. As he put it, “Even though I can be a serious, selfish bastard, and I was back then, I have very strong, middle-class morals. I could count on one hand the number of times I cheated on Judy. But I didn’t feel comfortable doing it because it was against my personal moral code.”

In August, a week before his twenty-sixth birthday, Doug moved out of his and Judy’s apartment on San Vicente Boulevard and into Tim Prior’s basement. Prior comanaged the Knack. He worked at Island Publishing, and Doug thought he would be good for the band because of his international connections and knowledge of music publishing.

Through a childhood friend, Doug was introduced to Scott Anderson. Anderson was an acolyte of music industry eccentric Kim Fowley, who was most familiar as the manager and producer of the all-girl band the Runaways, and was played by Michael Shannon in the 2010 movie about the band. Fowley described Anderson as “a rich kid from Pacific Palisades, an heir to Kaiser Aluminum.” He appointed Anderson road manager of the band, but then had to fire him, which didn’t leave Anderson with the best reputation. Having absorbed Fowley’s confident spiel, he talked a good game.

Realizing that Scott Bergstein wasn’t going to take the band where he thought it could go, Doug welcomed Anderson to the team in late July. He thought Bergstein could do the day-to-day coordination, Prior the foreign deals, and Anderson more of the strategic overview.

A week later, for his August 20 birthday, in order to cheer him up, Scott Bergstein and Tim Prior took Doug out to dinner at the Palm Restaurant. Afterwards, they went to the Starwood to see Nick Gilder, whose hit “Hot Child in the City” was making its way up the charts. While there, Doug became reacquainted with Abbe Beck. He first met Abbe on Halloween night in 1976, when he was playing bass for the Rats (later Sunset Bombers) at the Amber Glow biker bar on Tujunga Canyon Road. At the end of the evening at the Starwood, Abbe asked Doug if he would like to come home with her, and he happily did.

Abbe became his girlfriend, but he was still obsessed with and frustrated by Sharona and was still writing songs about her. His latest, “(She’s So) Selfish,” clearly identified her as “she’s been working in the clothing trade.” And Judy was still in the picture: he went over to her apartment to seek advice and solace over Sharona.

Sharona and her girlfriends took Doug out to celebrate his birthday at Knott’s Berry Farm. All the while Sharona resisted capitulating, and this made Doug want her even more. “She made me feel like I was fourteen all over again,” he said. “She was probably more mature than I was at the time. She had a positive attitude, always up and supportive. I never saw her depressed or sad.”

A few nights after his birthday, on August 23, Sharona and her friends made the long drive to Monrovia to see the Knack play at the Woodsound cowboy bar. While watching the opening band, Bates Motel, Doug made out with Sharona. Marty was sitting on the other side of her, oblivious.

On September 30, the day of her seventeenth birthday, Sharona came to a rehearsal dressed in purple pants, a white shirt, and a purple beret. The Knack played “My Sharona” as part of their revised set. “The song was a metaphor for the sex I desperately wanted to have with Sharona,” Doug said. “The song’s arrangement had a climax and Berton’s euphoric lead guitar solo.” Sharona didn’t realize until after she had departed that Doug was singing a song about her.

With Sharona still resisting Doug’s overtures, he thought it would be less painful for him if he didn’t see her, so he banned her from coming to the band’s rehearsals. But he couldn’t restrict her from coming to their club performances. When he saw her in the audience he talked about her on stage, of the hard time she was giving him, without mentioning her name. Of course he wrote about this, too. “Go Away, Stay Away” was a good song, but it wasn’t recorded until the group’s third album and was never finished.

In October there was a blowup between Anderson and Prior that resulted in Prior stepping down. “The Wooden Nickel in Lancaster was a long way from Hollywood,” Berton explained, “but we owed it to ourselves to play as much as we could to build up the band’s name.” Unfortunately, the night erupted in two shouting matches. Although bands quite often play more than one set a night, the Knack had been contracted to only play one. “We didn’t want to play two sets that night because it made our one performance special,” said Berton. “After our set, Scott Anderson got into a shouting match with the owner of the club who wanted us to play a second set. On top of that, Scott got into a fight with Timmy Prior, who thought we should play the second set. It became so heated, Timmy ended up quitting right there. It was a crazy night. I don’t think I’m ever going to forget the club owner screaming at Scott, ‘Do you really think this band is worth $150?’”

Having three managers became unwieldy, but the Knack thought they needed all the help they could get. Anderson was the survivor. He expressed the division between manager and artist, according to Doug, with “The music and the band is your area. I won’t stick my nose there. The business end is mine, and you don’t stick your nose there.”

The Knack were getting a lot of people out to see them live, but many times it was Sharona and her friends and their friends who benefitted from free tickets. Bruce Ravid, an A&R man for Capitol Records, was a fan and usually there. But what got the other record companies interested was when famous rockers joined the group on stage. First it was Ray Manzarek of the Doors. Then Stephen Stills and Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. The Knack had worked up Eddie Money’s hit “Two Tickets to Paradise” as part of their repertoire. On the November evening when Money came out of the audience at the Starwood to join them on stage, rather than performing an old rock ’n’ roll song, they played Money’s hit.

Flush with all the attention from the jamming superstars and from the thirteen record companies now interested in signing the band, Doug was very boastful in an interview he gave to Kristina McKenna that ran in December in the Los Angeles Times: “We’re worth a lot of money and will be very big because the tunes are there and we play very well live. There’s no filler in our set; they’re all ‘A’-side hits.” He said that they wouldn’t be happy with just one number one hit. He felt they would have at least ten. Even though his boasts were a front for his insecurities, his predictions did have merit.

Early in the new year, Doug and Sharona had sex for the first time. Steve Stills invited Doug to jam with him at the Record Plant where he was recording a new album. Sharona met Doug there, and afterwards they went back to Prior’s basement. To Doug, Sharona’s attitude was, “I’ll do it with my body, but I’m not really doing it in my mind.” The second time was when she joined him in San Francisco for a Knack show. He was still with Abbe, and Sharona was still with Marty.

The group calculated that, ideally, they wanted half a million dollars. They figured that would give them the money to record two albums, tour the world, and help with their living expenses during that time.

Warner Brothers was American’s best label in the 1970s. Bob Krasnow, vice president of talent acquisition, wanted to sign the Knack. When president Mo Ostin came to see the band backstage after a performance at the Troubadour, he insulted them by asking how much they paid those shills to scream for the band. The insult was compounded when he made an offer that was less than the amount they felt they needed.

Freddy Hine from Polygram offered $4 million. He was such an over the top personality that they weren’t sure if it was a serious offer or if it was made under the influence of cocaine.

Capitol Records seemed to be surviving on the sales of one major artist at a time. In the mid-sixties, it was the Beatles, whose product was initially rejected as being unsuitable for America. Then it was Grand Funk Railroad, and then the Steve Miller Band and Bob Seger.

The staff wasn’t the hippest, either. Rather than music-obsessed record guys, upper management came across as beer-drinking, sports-watching, good ol’ boys who, in-house, were referred to as the Coors Club. In meetings at the company, Doug was surprised at how often the executives wore football and baseball logoed clothes. Bruce Wendell, the head of promotion, came to work wearing a Philadelphia Phillies uniform because he was the team’s batboy—a forty-year-old batboy—for two games when they came to town to play the Dodgers. But they were professional, and they were nice guys.

Rupert Perry, an Englishman who was head of A&R, felt that Capitol couldn’t compete with the sales or finances of other labels, so he reasoned that they had to try harder. He encouraged Ravid to attend as many shows as he could. When Perry showed up, after the band’s performances he would give Doug a quarter as a humorous installment payment indicating how much Capitol wanted to sign the group. But it was Ravid’s attention that made the difference. As a reflection of what a big deal it was for Capitol, the group signed their contracts on the roof of the company’s famous headquarters, the only time that’s been done. When they got their check, Doug gave Perry back his quarters.

Doug and Berton were building a vast repertoire of songs and were pushing for their debut to be a double album. The execs informed them they would then have to charge more, and why make it more expensive for music buyers to take a chance on a new album? They said that sales of 50,000 would be good for a first album and would help to establish the group.

I was a friend of Mike Chapman, then the hottest producer in the world, having had hits with Blondie and Exile. I recommended that he see the band, thinking that he would want to sign them to his production company, but he never got around to it. Later, after they signed with Capitol, he read a news item in the Los Angeles Times that listed the producers the Knack were considering, and his name wasn’t on it. His ego was slighted and that motivated him. Of course, his pop sensibilities made him an excellent choice to produce their debut album. The musicians were so good and so well-rehearsed that the album Chapman produced was completed in eleven days, recording from April 1 to 11 with two days of mixing.

The recording cost was only $18,000, remarkable in a time when the average major label album totaled $150,000. Many artists spent much more. The latest album by Fleetwood Mac, Rumors, cost $400,000, while Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town cost $300,000.

While the group members were excited to be on Capitol Records, there were no rational expectations that the group would be selling like the Beatles, so the number of Beatles references on their record and elsewhere came from a sense of fun with these passionate record collectors rather than a notion that they were the second coming. Some references were coincidental. The album’s title, Get the Knack, was thought to be similar to the Beatles’ US debut Meet the Beatles, but “Get the Knack” had been a catch phrase used on the group’s flyers a year before their album was even released.

They wanted their album cover to be the photo that was taken when they first got together. Randee St. Nicholas was an artist friend of Prescott who had never taken a professional photo before. She borrowed a camera and the Knack chipped in to buy one roll of film. In the photo Doug has a demonic expression because Bruce goosed him, and he in turn grabbed Bruce’s crotch from behind, which resulted in Bruce having a much bigger smile than usual. At the time, only Doug liked the photo, but a year later they thought it best captured the band’s personality.

Capitol’s execs were perplexed as to why the group didn’t want a color album jacket like all the company’s other releases, but they agreed to the existing photo. The Beatles’ first American album cover was also in black and white.

The back cover was in color, capturing the group playing in a TV studio in a nod to a scene in the A Hard Day’s Night movie. The label on the record was the same style that was used by Capitol in the mid-sixties on Beatles records. The press kit featured question and answer sheets similar to those that were generated for teen magazines in the sixties. In this case, Doug fabricated the answers to make it more amusing to the reader. And, to top it off, Doug looked a lot like the Beatles’ John Lennon.

Doug moved out of Tim Prior’s basement and into the Via Valentino apartments on Highland Boulevard. “Sharona was a little drug addict,” Doug said affectionately. “She would show up with bags of pills. I, of course, supported and encouraged it.” Doug had her pose for the single’s picture sleeve. She wore her usual getup of Levi’s blue jeans and a white t-shirt that showed the outline of her nipples. Sharona held the Knack’s first album cover, with her hand positioned to cradle Doug’s photo.

After the band signed with Capitol, its ex-managers came with their hands held out. The band members acknowledged Scott Bergstein’s contribution for providing the rehearsal space and stipends and for getting them gigs. According to Doug, Bergstein declined a royalty on record sales, which would have made him a lot more money than the $50,000 the band paid him. Tim Prior was another matter. Doug felt he had done little. Doug even had to pay him rent when he lived in his basement. Nonetheless, in order to avoid a lawsuit, the band paid him $50,000 as well.

Capitol was pleased with the new album, and in order to spread the buzz beyond the United States, they booked the Knack on a promotional tour of Europe beginning the third week of May 1979. The band members were excited. Berton had never been out of the country before. Prescott had lived in England from 1973 to 1975 and was returning in a hot new group with a new record about to come out.

In 1975 Prescott and a bandmate were driving home from a night at London’s Speakeasy club. Their car was stopped by the police who were searching for bombs but found hash inside of a film canister. After spending the night in jail—with their Irish setter—they were allowed to leave after their lawyer failed to appear. Prescott thought he had a suspended sentence. When the Knack’s UK trip was planned, he told his manager who assured him there would be no problem.

Prescott takes up the story: “We arrive in London. We get through customs. I can see the Rolls Royce limos parked, waiting for us. It’s the biggest thrill of my life. I get a hand on my shoulder. ‘Mr. Fine, come with us.’ Apparently my situation had been worked out with immigration, but not with the police. The other guys were totally confused. I hadn’t told them about my problem, and they didn’t know my real last name was Fine.”

Prescott spent the night in jail, at the Cannon Row Police Station in New Scotland Yard. He was freaking out, especially when a roadie speculated that the tour might have to be cancelled. “I rehearsed our set playing air bass,” Prescott recalled, “moving up and back as though I were on stage. All the while I’m hearing the other inmates getting sick, groaning and screaming. The next day I went to a hearing and was fined 100 pounds. I got back to the hotel, quickly showered, shaved and dressed, and was ready for a day of interviews and photo sessions. I was relieved and very happy.”

As the 1960s faded into the 1970s, rock’s presence on the hit singles charts declined. In the early 1970s, soft rock (James Taylor, the Eagles) became popular. Later in the decade disco flourished. So when radio started to play the Knack it gave hope to rock fans everywhere. To provide some perspective, when “My Sharona” finally hit number one on August 25, 1979, it was the only rock record in the top five, the others being “Good Times” by Chic, “Main Event/Fight” by Barbra Streisand, “After the Love Has Gone” by Earth, Wind & Fire, and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer.

I was hired by Capitol Records to interview Doug and Berton for a tape that was to be circulated to radio stations in the United States. It was July 19, and “My Sharona” was number 34 on the Billboard singles chart. Sitting in Studio C at Capitol, Doug and Berton were in good spirits, having just returned from a brief tour of Europe. It was an informative, fun interview, and the only extensive one they conducted at that time. I attempted to set the mood and acknowledge the band’s Beatles parallels by injecting a few references for those listeners hip enough to get them. For example, in a press conference after the Beatles came to America the first time, they were asked, “How do you find America?” John Lennon replied, “Turn left at Greenland.” I gave them the straight line of “How did you find England,” so they could reply “Turn right at Greenland.”

In two separate press releases Capitol Records made more overt Beatles comparisons, indicating that “My Sharona” was the fastest record to be certified gold in the history of the label since the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964, and that Get the Knack was the fastest album to go gold—in thirteen days—since Meet the Beatles in 1964. The album eventually sold 2.9 million in the United States, but could have sold even more if the company hadn’t had difficulty finding available pressing capacity. Because the record was selling so fast, in Capitol’s pressing plants slower moving titles were displaced with the Knack’s album to get more records pressed. But Capitol had contracted with Warner Brothers Records to manufacture their records as well, and they couldn’t bump non-Capitol titles.

As much as the band, its label, and the fans were giddy with the Knack’s success, the seeds of discontent had already been sown. Anderson wanted to create a mystique about the band, so he didn’t want the members to do interviews, at least in the United States where they were more visible touring. He wanted to avoid Doug’s tendency to arrogantly mouth off, as well as the issue of the members’ ages, which, in their mid-twenties, made them much older than their teenage fans. This caused resentment among the press who had championed the band. In October, when Rolling Stone was compelled to run a feature article, the tagline noted “… this band shot to the top of the charts—without a word to the press.”

The visual manifestation of this backlash was created by Berkeley-based artist Hugh Brown. He had designed the poster for a concert at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall where the group opened for the Police in March 1979. He first heard about the Knack from a writer for BAM who was raving that the band were the second coming of the Beatles. Brown thought they were good, but not that good.

He originally designed the Nuke the Knack elements as a fun giveaway promotion for KSAN’s Outcast Hour radio show, which featured punk acts. While its alliterative title was appealing, the recently signed SALT II treaty limiting nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the United States inspired the “Nuke” part. The kit consisted of a t-shirt, sticker, and button in a Nuke the Knack Sack. Kits were awarded to winners along with tickets to a punk show.

He brought a small quantity to the monthly Hollywood record collectors swap meet. I was keeping Toby Mamis company at his table when Brown came by, and I had Toby make some room for him to sell his items. It was Sunday, August 5, and the Knack had just heard that “My Sharona” had broken into the top ten. Doug was lugging a cardboard Buddy Holly in-store standup display when he came over to the table. He seemed amused, and approached Hugh with “Greetings from the entertainer to the artist.” He bought a set for nine dollars, as did Bruce and Prescott.

Brown sold about two hundred of the kits. “I got mail from Knack fans asking why I hated them,” he said. “They all had spelling errors and hand drawn happy faces. I sent back their letters, correcting the spelling and adding a frowning face.” Only later, when Doug got wind that he was making “Honk if you slept with Sharona” bumper stickers, was Brown contacted by the Knack’s lawyers to cease and desist. He complied.

Brown’s biggest customers were the punks who resented the Knack’s success. Local punk groups like X, the Weirdos, the Go-Go’s, and the Germs now felt the major labels were only interested in the more commercial Knack-like ensembles, who were referred to as “skinny tie bands” after the Knack’s dress.

Sniffing after Knack-like returns, in 1979 major labels signed and released albums by a number of Los Angeles-based melodic rock bands: the Pop (Arista), 20/20, the Beat (both CBS), the Shoes (Elektra), and the Scooters (EMI, in early 1980). None succeeded. Only the Shoes’ The Present Tense album made it into the Top 100, crawling to number 50.

The week before “My Sharona” hit number one in the United States, the band was whisked away on a tour of the South Pacific: New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Despite generally positive reviews of the album, there were some writers, like Kristine McKenna of the Los Angeles Times, who were offended by what they considered to be sexist lyrics.

The prevailing impression of accomplished musicians who have massively selling hit records is that they’re cool. The members of the Knack may have been knowledgeable, passionate, and hip, but their star personas belied neurotic characters straight out of a Woody Allen movie.

In Woody Allen’s movie Take the Money and Run, there’s a scene where the young Woody, in anticipation of a bully ripping the eyeglasses from his face and stomping on them, preempts him by doing it himself. That desire to avoid confrontation is what Berton was like. He was smart, talented, and well-read, but lacked confidence and ambition. That’s why he needed Doug and his drive to make it so much, and that’s why he put up with Doug’s slights.

Doug described himself as being “a rather nervous character.” Although he could be charming, fun, and intelligent, often he communicated by giving orders or shrieking to his bandmates. While on tour, he would test the expediency of a hotel’s room service by ordering a shrimp cocktail before leaving for the night’s performance. After weeks on tour, at a prestigious concert in Seattle, his face broke out in giant welts and he barely finished the show before passing out and being rushed to a hospital. When it happened the next night in Portland, he learned that he was allergic to the iodine that had accumulated in his system from eating the shrimp.

The handsome Prescott, who always seemed to have a blond of the month on his arm (including actress Britt Ekland), seemed a bit odd. He was known to have hoarded food in his room. He carried his own tube of Hellmann’s mayonnaise into restaurants and peppered waitresses with many questions about the menu selection.

Bruce had issues with food, too. On tour he took advantage of any spreads the band wasn’t directly paying for, even to the extent of throwing up in the afternoon to make room for the hosted dinner that evening. If the band was paying, however, sometimes he ducked out early to avoid contributing to the check, even though he received a per diem for food while on tour.

On the band’s first tour of Paris, they booked a table at the well-regarded La Coupole. Doug was particularly excited, as many famous people had patronized the brasserie in the past: Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. When Bruce realized that he was paying for his meal, he declined the pleasure of more expensive items like grilled lobster and wine.

These were the band’s best days. The Knack were appreciating their newfound success and there was less tension. They could enjoy each other’s company and their shared experiences. Berton recounted an incident from their first Japanese tour: “We were fatigued and were consequently slap-happy when we arrived at a radio station to be interviewed. It was difficult to understand the Japanese-accented English, so we started free-associating. Doug said ‘Elvis Presley,’ then Prescott said ‘Elvis Costello,’ then I said ‘Lou Costello.’ At one point I said ‘Frankie Frisch.’ Prescott, who was drinking a Coke, almost spit it up. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He said if he hadn’t been sipping his drink, he would have said Frankie Frisch, too. The coincidence of two of us saying the name of this baseball player from the 1930s St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang, just because we remembered it from when we played the All Star Baseball board game at home as kids, has to go down as the strangest moment of my life.”

Robert Hilburn, writing in the Los Angeles Times, thought the Knack’s next single, “Good Girls Don’t,” was even better than “My Sharona.” Written about Bobbi Ernstein, a girl from Doug’s junior high school, the record debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart on September 1 at 82, while “My Sharona” still held the number one position. A demo of the song was on the tape that had been turned down by every label early the previous year. The record climbed to number 11, providing the group with their second hit.

Doug persuaded Sharona to meet him in Hawaii, where the band was playing the last show of the tour in early September. Marty told her not to go, that if she went, they would no longer be boyfriend and girlfriend. She went. Sharona and Doug became hot and heavy from then on.

It was remarkable what the Knack had accomplished after having been a unit for little more than a year. Rather than being elated, Doug had a different revelation: “Sitting on my kitchen counter with a number one single and a number one album, and realizing that it didn’t fix the emptiness I felt was one of the lowest moments in my life. I dreamed it perfectly. I got everything I wanted: I was at the top of the charts and I had a freaky little Jewess who would do practically anything I wanted. Instead of feeling like a king, I felt like a peeled zero.”

Doug gave Sharona a present of $10,000 and told her to spend it any way she wanted. He bought Judy a BMW and TV. He had taken recreational drugs since he was thirteen years old: pot, pills, and cocaine, mostly at the largesse of others. Now, record royalties flowing in, Doug had the money to buy as much as he wanted.

Doug and Sharona did the same things as other young couples: going to the movies, shopping, and listening to music. They also had dinner parties for their friends, but these were more like drug-taking parties. They vacationed at Big Sur resorts. When the Knack took an extended break the following year, Doug and Sharona spent two months in Paris, at the Hotel George V “at nearly $700 a day,” according to Doug.

On October 13 the Knack played their most prestigious concert, headlining New York’s Carnegie Hall, where the Beatles made their second US appearance in February 1964. The following month the group was paid $45,000 for two sold-out shows at the Arizona State Fair, the first big money they had received from a performance date.

When Doug was out on tour, he had Sharona drive around with a real estate agent looking at houses for them. “I would house-shop in the limo,” Sharona said. “I would choose five houses and then show him. One of the agents said to me, ‘I’ve never seen anyone show houses like you. You should be an agent.’” She found one that Doug liked, on Hedges Way in the Hollywood Hills. He bought it for $980,000, putting down $600,000 cash.

When Doug was recording with Sky at Olympic Studios in London, the Rolling Stones were recording Sticky Fingers in an adjacent room. He marveled at Mick Jagger’s car parked on the sidewalk, a 1963 cream-colored Bentley Continental S3 with oxblood upholstery. He dreamed that when he’d made it, he would get a car just like that. In December, after he received his first big royalty check from Capitol, he and Sharona drove to the O’Gara Coach Company in Beverly Hills. To Doug’s surprise, that car model had just been sold by baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays. “The car of my dreams, literally, pulled up in front of me at the very moment I was finally able to buy it,” he said.

At the end of the year the Knack’s “My Sharona” was awarded Billboard ’s #1 Single of the Year, based on sales and airplay. Overall, the Knack’s unexpected sales boon was even more significant to Capitol’s bottom line, as the Beatles’ catalogue sales had slumped to an eight-year low.

In retrospect, the band suffered from a rash of poor management decisions that reeked of inexperience: declining all interviews from the domestic press, touring outside of the United States when the record was topping the charts, declining to appear at the Grammy Awards television show even though they were nominated in the Best New Artist category because they were on tour in Japan.

The band acknowledged that Anderson was good in the early days. But with the band becoming so successful so quickly, it was hard for him to adjust, and he didn’t realize that he needed experienced help. Ten years previously, Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant kept that band from performing on TV as a means to encourage fans to go see them in concert. Anderson tried the same strategy ten years later, but in this case, it only alienated the industry.

Doug gave these examples: “Dick Clark’s producer calls up and wants the Knack to appear on The American Music Awards TV show. Because ‘My Sharona’ was so big, we probably would have won an award. Not only did Scott decline, he also didn’t permit them to use a thirty-second film clip of the band performing the song. He also turned down an appearance on Saturday Night Live because they wouldn’t let us host. He alienated concert promoters, including Bill Graham. As a consequence, the only time we played San Francisco was before our first record was recorded.”

Rupert Perry recoils when he thinks of having to go with Capitol’s president Don Zimmermann to see Anderson at his office in a suite at the Chateau Marmont Hotel because Anderson said he was “too busy” to travel the two and a half miles to the Capitol building.

At the time Doug didn’t see these decisions as missteps: “We had a number one single and a number one album. We were touring the world a year after we started. I had two girls out on tour with me and all the alcohol and drugs I could ever want. So what could possibly be wrong?”

In the music business, when an artist had a couple of hits and a big-selling album, the strategy was to release additional singles that could become hits and get airplay to sell more albums. For example, Michael Jackson’s then-current album Off the Wall contained four top ten singles and so did Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. Capitol wanted to follow suit and release “(She’s So) Selfish” as the third single, but Doug wanted to record a new album to make up for the double album the group was denied for their debut. Don Zimmermann said that it was too soon to record a second album, but Doug got his way.

Doug was thinking about the release frequency of groups in the mid-sixties like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Kinks, all of whom released at least two albums a year early in their careers. He didn’t want to lose the songs he and Berton had written the previous year before the band moved on to a subsequent phase. The music on the Knack’s first album was played so much on the radio that releasing a second album eight months later with essentially the same sound was a miscalculation.

Mike Chapman invited me to visit him while he was producing at Whitney Studios in Glendale, usually to hear a prime track as it was being finished or mixed. Mike’s sessions were focused, productive, and usually fun. It was also a learning experience for me in how to produce records. I always called first because it was over twenty miles away and I wanted to make sure there were no problems before I left work. In mid-December I visited while the Knack were recording their second album.

When I arrived, Doug was in the studio with Sharona, singing, and I was told to wait. The other members were pacing in the lobby area. I felt a tension, and no one was talking. Even Bruce, whom I met a few times previously, was not his usual friendly self. It was atypical for a Chapman evening, and I didn’t stay long. What I took note of was their shoes, a type I hadn’t seen before. They were light, like a Capezio dance shoe. Instead of leather, the top was red canvas, while the bottom was molded plastic. I asked Prescott about them, and soon bought a pair of Crayons for my own.

I found out later that Doug’s obsession with Sharona resulted in the rest of the band being excluded from the recording of their own album. For example, when Doug recorded his vocals, he only wanted Sharona in the studio with him. When he was finished, Sharona went into the waiting room to summon the others to have a listen. When Chapman, wanting to get away from the troubles facing him in town, elected to mix the album in London, he, Doug, and Sharona—not the other band members—flew to London on the Concorde supersonic jet. When Sharona joined the Knack on tour, she and Doug shared a limousine; the other three shared a second one. Another Beatles comparison comes to mind: the intrusion caused by John Lennon’s obsession with Yoko Ono.

Get the Knack was such a success that the songs submitted for the second album weren’t evaluated for quality as much as they should have been. Chapman and the band felt they could do no wrong. Chapman, who was antidrug when he moved to Los Angeles three years before, now had a drug habit, and was further distracted because his marriage was falling apart.

Doug had a dual relationship with Berton. He valued their songwriting collaboration but at other times he was dismissive. Once, when Berton asked if they could have a week off between tours, Doug grabbed his arm, quivering, and said, “Maybe you don’t want to be in this band any longer.” He praised Berton’s guitar playing, saying he was “the most underrated guitarist in rock,” but at other times told him he could be replaced. Even though Berton co-wrote many of the songs, including “My Sharona,” quite often Doug talked about the songs as if he were the sole composer.

The title of the second album, … but the little girls understand, was a phrase taken from the Willie Dixon song “Back Door Man.” The full phrase, “the men don’t know, but the little girls understand,” refers to a sexual awareness. The Knack’s title implies that if the older rock critics don’t understand the band, the group’s teenage girl fans surely do. The front cover featured Sharona looking up at the very visibly phallic microphone stand, behind which Doug is presumably standing. Chapman, bloated with success and drugs, signed off on the credits as “Commander Chapman,” and was depicted on the cover of BAM magazine dressed as General Patton. The liner notes he contributed included “The record is very dear to me and my bank manager.” Everyone assumed the second album would also be a success, but compared with the first, it wasn’t.

While the album included repertoire that was rejected for Get the Knack, there were still some good songs. The problem was that there wasn’t a song strong enough to be a hit. “Baby Talks Dirty” was the first single, released in February 1980. The song, like many on the album, was inspired by Sharona, even though it featured Abbe on the picture sleeve. Built around a guitar riff, musically it was a poor imitation of “My Sharona,” though Doug didn’t see it that way. The other guys in the group were put off by the masochistic nature of the lyrics, but as Doug said, “The floor wasn’t open for discussion. Sharona liked to be spanked and hurt. It wasn’t my thing, but it was a very honest song.”

Chapman had been the hottest producer in America, but he was at the end of his run. The Knack’s second album sold a little more than 400,000 and was considered a disappointment. Although Chapman continued to have hits as a songwriter, as a record producer he had only one more big-selling album. Blondie’s Autoamerican, released later that year, sold over a million copies in the United States.

The band’s hubris in releasing a single with uninspired music and a theme too provocative for their teenage audience was a harbinger of their diminishing potency. Compounding the lesser sales, the band’s poor management decisions frustrated the Capitol execs. The previous year had been a tough one for the record industry. Because of the decline in revenue, hundreds were laid off. The Knack’s lackluster sales meant that Capitol now had to wrestle with its own financial reality. Still, among the newly recorded albums Capitol released in 1980, only Paul McCartney’s McCartney II and Bob Seger’s Against the Wind charted higher.

When the Knack should have been in the States promoting their new album, they were, once again, on a world tour. In February 1980, while the group was playing a number of dates in Japan, Prescott first felt that the bubble was about to burst. When the Beatles became successful, they were asked in a press conference, “What will you do when the bubble bursts?” In the ’50s and ’60s the career span of a teen-appealing recording artist was short. Three years was considered a long career, even for an artist as successful as the early Beatles. As the Knack’s first record scaled the charts, with their similarities to the Beatles, this question was bantered about.

“It was winter and bitterly cold in Japan,” Prescott recalled. “Our first time in Japan was a big success, but now we weren’t drawing that well. Our promoter told us that for this time of year, when the kids were back in school and studying, we were doing okay, but none of us felt that. We were in Japan only five months previously, so why were we back so soon?” It was February 28, 1980. Instead of being seen by thirty-two million viewers on that evening’s Grammy Awards TV show—where they were nominated in two categories—the Knack played before a few hundred in Sapporo.

“When we got back to the hotel, it started to snow hard,” Prescott continued. “Jeff, our roadie, told me that we didn’t win for Best New Artist. Rickie Lee Jones won. It was the most depressing day of my life. I had to get out of the hotel and take a walk. I hadn’t prepared for the weather on this trip, so I had no winter clothes. I put on three Knack suit jackets and trash bags over my Beatle boots. I walked through a blizzard. My legs were freezing, but I didn’t care. The new album wasn’t selling that well, and we weren’t on the Grammy TV show; things felt wrong. I thought of the great success and joy we shared in the beginning, and how that’s gone. I thought that if I took a turn here or there, no one might ever find me.”

Customarily the lead singer of a successful rock band took advantage of his appeal by having sex with any number of women while on tour. In this case, Doug chose to travel with his own harem of Abbe and Sharona. The girls liked each other, which made sexual threesomes usual.

The past two years of touring with too little time off, coupled with the excessive drugs and sex, took their toll. In early March, while the band was in London, Doug experienced a breakdown. Abbe found him passed out on the floor of their room at the Montcalm. She thought he was dead. “We had to leave early in the morning,” Doug said, “so I didn’t have time to see a doctor. I was wheeled onto the plane in a wheelchair. In Munich, I saw a doctor who shot me up with speed, or something similar. It was like, ‘Yeah, I’m back and better than ever.’”

As Doug became more egomaniacal and boorish, and more affected by the drugs he could now afford, one wonders why his band put up with him. As he was the lead singer and main creative talent, what could they do? It was very similar to the Doors, who had to accommodate an erratic Jim Morrison. More to the point, after Morrison’s death, the remaining three members—all talented musicians—recorded two albums together that were not considered successes (and in an effort to preserve the Morrison legend, have never been issued on CD).

After having released their second album too soon, the Knack took too much time before releasing their next album. Scott Anderson was pushing to have Bob Ezrin produce. Anderson had been a gofer for Ezrin prior to being hired away by Kim Fowley. An excellent producer, Ezrin had a good feel for working with rock bands and had produced albums for Alice Cooper, Kiss, and Pink Floyd. Upon further consideration, the group felt that Ezrin’s strong musical personality would result in more of a Bob Ezrin styled album than one that captured the Knack.

Doug was adamant about not wanting to work with Bruce and wanted to fire him. It additionally bothered him that Bruce always said what a nice guy ex-Cream bass player Jack Bruce was, but complained about him. “Jack Bruce barely paid him,” Doug said, “and playing with me he made a million dollars.”

Anderson was strongly opposed to firing Bruce because he considered him vital to the group’s sound. Doug now saw Anderson as unsupportive. He and the other band members were also angry that Anderson’s ambitious plans in management resulted in offices and overhead of $30,000 a month that the band paid for, now with diminished record royalties. As a result, Anderson was encouraged to resign as the band’s manager in December 1980.

On December 19 I ran into Doug and Abbe at the Roxy. We were there to see the Firesign Theatre, who had recently released their Fighting Clowns album on Rhino. I met them when I was a college rep for Columbia Records at UCLA. I had signed them to Rhino the previous year. Doug was a big fan of the surrealist comedy troupe. Todd Schneider and I sat with them during the show, and I took them all backstage afterwards to meet the Firesign members.

Bobby Colomby had been the drummer in Blood, Sweat & Tears, the first successful rock band to have featured a brass section. He was now in Capitol’s A&R Department. He placated Doug by committing to work with Bruce on his playing so that the group’s sound and chemistry would remain intact.

Jack Douglas, an excellent producer with credits including Aerosmith, the Guess Who, and Cheap Trick, was recommended by Capitol to helm the new album. Although the group’s first two albums had been completed quickly, this one was protracted because Douglas had developed a severe drug problem. He had produced John Lennon’s last album and was still reeling from the impact of Lennon’s murder six months previously.

Although the album only took three and a half weeks to record that summer, it took two and a half months to mix. Douglas’ time was also compromised because he had committed to produce an album with Graham Parker around the same time. “One night Jack said he was going to get a cup of coffee,” Doug said, “and he walked out of the studio. I remembered that I wanted to ask him a question, so I walked out the door looking for him. Through a window I saw him shimmying down a drainpipe and running down the street. I found out he ran home so he could get a couple of hours of sleep until his session with Graham Parker.” During the mixing sessions Douglas introduced Doug to heroin.

The album went way over budget, and Doug and Berton each had to forfeit $50,000 of their publishing royalties in order to get the album finished. The band members made themselves available for interviews, but it was a matter of too little too late, according to Berton: “The decision to give interviews—or stop not giving interviews—was at the time before the album’s release. It was borne in on us that some—maybe a lot—of the enmity of the press toward us was a result of our silence, which they interpreted as not allowing them to do their jobs when we were a big story. The tardy decision to let them in didn’t work. The newspaper or magazine invariably sent a lesser writer to conduct the interview. More often than not the slant on the piece was biased, not to say jaundiced.”

By the time Round Trip was released in mid-October 1981, it was almost two years after … but the little girls understand. Again, there was no hit single, and one was needed to reinterest the group’s teenage fans, who had largely moved on. The album sold 95,000 copies. The group played its last show on New Year’s Eve at Baby’O in Acapulco and broke up weeks later, owing Capitol the last album on their contract.

Doug didn’t take it too badly. He was free from having to play with Bruce, and he still had Sharona. He bought her a wedding ring in New York’s diamond district. They became engaged, they fought, they broke up, they got back together. “We were fighting all the time and it was no fun,” Doug said. “On more than one occasion, when we had one of our breakups, I would show up at Sharona’s house at 2 a.m. and bang on her front door. Her parents didn’t seem to mind because they thought of me as a nice, Jewish boy and one who was successful.”

A major issue was Doug’s extreme, controlling nature. “On the inside, I felt bombs going off,” he said. “Because I couldn’t control the inside, I had to control the outside. We fought about that a lot. We were doing so many drugs, I sometimes wonder why we didn’t die. Sharona rarely drank alcohol, but I drank constantly. And we didn’t eat very well.” Ultimately, their relationship was so intense that in Doug’s evaluation it “burned itself out.” They broke up in May 1982. “She never gave back the ring. She said it was stolen by a friend of hers.”

Doug submitted demos of new songs to Capital, but they weren’t interested in signing him to a contract as a solo artist. Because of rare, extreme rains in Los Angeles, part of the hillside behind Doug’s new house had slid into his living room. He spent lots of money trying to save it from the extreme damage, but he lost his entire investment. By the following year he was in a new house, and he was married, but not to Sharona.

In the fall of 1983 Doug returned home from a contentious cocaine-and-vodka fueled evening. He eased himself into a warm, comforting bath. He had lit candles around the room. He was ready to call it a night, to call it a life. He reached for the nearby razor blade, the one he always used to cut cocaine into thin lines, but this time he intended to slit his wrists. He was fatigued, and the over-used blade was now too dull. He only bruised himself. He heard a voice speak to him, but there was nobody else in the room. It said, “Doug, you’re a very sick boy and you need help.”

Doug emerged from the bath dripping water, put on the nearest clothes he could find—a pair of pants, his wife’s sweatshirt, and his pink boots—and had his wife drive him to the hospital. It was the start to turning his life around. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and realized for the first time that what he had was a disease. He learned more about himself, and he finally had the support that he needed. He established friendships, ones not based on the mutual need to score drugs. Looking back, he speculated that had his Hollywood Hills home not turned into a financial disaster, he probably would have died, as he would have had more money to spend on drugs.

Through the years he was still involved with music: writing, performing, and producing new artists. He counseled other members of AA. He enrolled in a class at Santa Monica City College and got a car mechanic’s license so he could rebuild cars and tend to his (non-vintage) Shelby Cobra race car. He renewed his interest in acting and appeared as one of Dan Conner’s poker playing buddies in a handful of episodes of the TV show Roseanne. In 1994 “My Sharona” broke into the Hot 100 off of exposure in the movie Reality Bites. The Knack regrouped—without Bruce—and toured.

After a number of proposals from other suitors, Sharona finally married, divorced, married again, and had children. The experience she had with a real estate agent looking for a house for Doug to buy eventually pushed her into become a real estate agent herself in 1986. She excelled and had a number of celebrity clients, including Leonardo DiCaprio, and was able to make a good living. Her professional website is mysharona.com, on which she uses an audio clip of the hit. While at Sotheby’s International Realty she was tops in sales for five straight years.

Danny Sugerman convinced Doug to reform the original band, intending to manage them. Danny set up a showcase at the Viper Room on April 7, 1997, and invited me to attend. The reconstituted band had only practiced a little, but the magic of those four guys playing that music was evident. I agreed to have them record a new album for Rhino.

The project soon ran into problems. Danny relapsed into taking drugs and ended up in rehab. Without Danny’s stabilizing influence, Bruce expressed his feeling that he should be given a portion of the songwriting royalties for “My Sharona.” As important as Bruce’s drums were to the success of the record, he didn’t contribute to the words or the melody, which normally forms the basis of writing a song. Reluctantly, Doug and Berton considered Bruce’s request—a requirement for his continuing with the project—but Bruce wasn’t satisfied and quit.

Although it wasn’t what I signed off on—a reunion of the original members—Doug’s willingness to work things out made it hard to relinquish the project. First of all, there was the material. Doug and Berton had a large number of songs written, and Doug was very open to the Rhino staff being involved in selecting which songs to record. It would be incorrect to dismiss Doug’s songwriting as ineffective after having parted ways with his muse Sharona, as his writing was at its best. As a result, the material chosen was very good. One of the stronger songs, “Can I Borrow a Kiss,” I had encouraged Doug to write after he told me of a chance encounter with a girl at a pop music festival.

In order to make up for Bruce’s absence, I felt we needed a drummer with prominence to add interest and credibility to the project. Doug settled on Terry Bozio, a respected drummer who had played with Frank Zappa and Jeff Beck, as well as having been a member of the successful new wave band Missing Persons that featured his then-wife Dale on lead vocals. Richard Bosworth, who coproduced the album with the group, summed up the feelings of many fans. “As excellent a drummer as Terry was,” he said, “I think it would have been a better album if Bruce had played. He had a better feel for the Knack.”

The CD package was designed by Hugh Brown, the mastermind of Nuke the Knack, who was now Rhino’s creative director. Zoom was released in July 1998, and the band hit the road for a tour of clubs. Attending a performance in August at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, I appreciated Doug’s sartorial dedication to the 1960s. He was wearing a blazer that was similar to the burgundy striped velvet jacket that George Harrison wore at the Sgt. Pepper’s launch party in 1967.

Many of us who were fans of the British rock groups of the sixties also envied their classy and imaginative dress. The way the Beatles appeared on the back of their Revolver album was the standard to which all groups should have aspired. Rather than becoming slovenly, or given to relaxed hippie or grunge garb, Doug, even in his later years, was one of the few who kept that standard alive. As part of his wardrobe, he had jackets and shirts, many custom made, that would have fit comfortably for a stroll down King’s Road or a rest at the Speakeasy in London’s Swinging Sixties, as much as they were uniquely contemporary. He dressed like a Beatles fan-come-rock star.

Rhino spent a lot of money promoting the album, but radio programmers didn’t care. Their decision was based more on the group having been out of the limelight, rather than one based on an evaluation of the music. With very little radio airplay, and with few of Bozio’s fans curious enough to see the band live, the club tour didn’t fare well. The last leg was cancelled when Bozio unexpectedly quit the band—even though Doug was paying him a guaranteed amount rather than a split of the take, whether or not the group drew well.

The album sold less than 10,000 copies, and Rhino lost a significant amount of money on it, but most of the loss was made up by the profits from Proof: The Very Best of the Knack with masters I licensed from Capitol Records. Despite its commercial failure, those of us at Rhino considered Zoom the best newly recorded album we ever released. Nearly twenty years after topping the charts, Doug had written his best songs and performed his best recording.

The Knack took another hiatus, and then regrouped—with a new drummer—for the occasional performance date or recording. In 2004 Doug learned he had cancer. Half of a lung was successfully removed. After a period, tumors were discovered in his brain, were removed, and then reappeared. He embarked on a healthy regimen of diet and swimming, while enduring radiation, surgery, and experimental trials. He had a positive attitude, and was able to play the occasional date with the Knack.

In 2000 I initiated production on a drama about the Monkees for VH1’s new rock movies series. As it was among their better-rated movies, I pitched the executive in charge, Michael Larkin, a few other ideas. I was surprised that he wasn’t interested in a movie about Sharona and the Knack. It was one of the few number one records with a girl’s name in the title that related to a real romance. In addition to the relationship between Doug and Sharona, there was the story of the band and the Los Angeles music scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Toward the end of 2008 I had lunch with Mark Helfrich. Professionally Mark was best known as director Brett Ratner’s film editor. Ratner had directed the Rush Hour series and X-Men, among many other films. Mark wanted to direct, and got his chance with the comedy Good Luck Chuck. It was a relatively low-budgeted movie that did well at the box office. Mark was looking for another movie to direct. He asked me what ideas I had and I told him about this one.

The most compelling reason for dramatizing the life of a music performer is the music. I thought the Knack had quite a few songs that would work cinematically. With Doug’s cancer, Sharona battling stage-four colon cancer, and Helfrich’s interest in directing, I thought I would try to make their story my next movie.

Doug was very open in expressing himself. I had Jeff Ressner write the screenplay, as he was an ex-staff writer for Rolling Stone and Time magazine and had majored in screenwriting at Northwestern University. Hollywood movie executives have had difficulty understanding rock dramatizations. The movies tend not to be very good and lose money. Just as our script was close to being finished, a run of failed rock movies—starting with Cadillac Records, starring Beyonce, and ending with The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning—indicated that it wouldn’t be the best time to pitch such an idea.

Doug succumbed to cancer on Valentine’s Day 2010. He was survived by his brother Geoffrey Fieger, an attorney based in Southfield, Michigan, best known for having represented Jack Kevorkian, and by his sister Beth Falkenstein, who had written for TV shows. In his last years he had been able to make annual visits to Paris, once taking his young nieces. He had good relationships, and remained in contact with those women whom he had been closest to as an adult, including Sharona. Abbe picked out the furniture for Doug’s last house. His first (and third) ex-wife Mia Klein—a Fairfax High alumnus like Sharona, but a year younger—helped to care for Doug when he was most ill.

At this point, thirty years later, it’s clear that “My Sharona” has transcended hit record status to join the ranks of rock’s most enduring songs. Although its impact was initially felt among teens in the summer of 1979, it had the same effect fifteen years later when enough people bought the record after having heard it in Reality Bites to cause it to break into the Hot 100 singles chart for a second time. It placed at number 75 on Billboard’s Greatest Songs of All Time list, compiled in 2008. It inspired Michael Jackson to write “Beat It,” the best song on his Thriller album, when producer Quincy Jones told him that “we need a black version of ‘My Sharona.’”

Nirvana and Pearl Jam performed it in concert. Sex Pistols guitarist and cowriter Steve Jones played the song countless times but felt his punk image prevented him from telling people. “Weird Al” Yankovic launched his career when Capitol Records released his first record, a parody of the song as “My Bologna.” The song has been sung in TV shows like The Simpsons and Full House. The music video game Rock Band included a cover version. President George W. Bush had it on his iPod playlist.

When Doug Fieger channeled his lust and frustration into a lyric to gain the attention of a sixteen-year-old girl, he never would have imagined that thirty years later three hefty truck drivers would be singing along to it in a British TV commercial—for Oatibix cereal—inspiring enough sales for the record to climb to 59 on the UK charts. Such is the unpredictability of rock. With “My Sharona,” Doug Fieger and Berton Averre had written a classic.