Knack - My Sharona

The Knack was an American New Wave rock quartet based in Los Angeles that rose to fame with their first single, "My Sharona", an international number one hit in 1979.

The band's debut album, Get The Knack, was one of the year's biggest albums, holding the number one spot on Billboard magazine's album chart for five consecutive weeks and selling two million copies in the United States. Lead single "My Sharona" was a #1 hit in the US, and became the number one song of 1979.

Their follow-up album ...But the Little Girls Understand,was released in early 1980. Though the album went gold in the US and Japan, and platinum in Canada, it didn't meet with the same level of commercial success as their debut.

After nearly a year of relentless touring in the US, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, they released their third album, Round Trip. However, the record (which came out in October 1981) was a serious commercial disappointment, only reaching #93 on the US charts, selling a mere 150,000 copies.

With The Knack experiencing rapidly diminishing chart success, and mounting critical backlash against them the group broke up amidst internal squabbles on December 31st, 1981, mere months after the release of Round Trip.

In 1990 The Knack reunited and recorded the album Serious Fun which was released in February 1991. Lead single "Rocket O' Love" was a top 10 hit on US AOR stations, becoming the band's second best known song (behind My Sharona). Unfortunately, theu company Charisma collapsed after the death of the label's founder, Tony Stratton-Smith, and the group broke up again in 1992.

Several re-unions took place just for concerts up to 2006,when during a performance in Las Vegas, Doug Fieger became disoriented, developing a dull headache, and grasping for the words to the songs that he had written and performed for years.Diagnosed with two brain tumors, Fieger underwent surgery and radiosurgery and returned to performing.

However, he still continued to battle brain and lung cancer until his death on February 14, 2010, in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 57.

The riff of "My Sharona" was written by the band's guitarist, Berton Averre, years before he joined The Knack. He had played it and a drum groove for Doug Fieger, the group's lead singer and rhythm guitarist, who loved it and promised to make it a song. However, Fieger, with no lyric ideas to add, was unsure what to do with it beyond that.

When Fieger, who was 25, met Sharona Alperin, who was 17 at the time, she inspired a two-month-long run of songwriting, as well as becoming Fieger's girlfriend for the next four years.

Sharona herself appears on the picture sleeve for the single, and became a major booster of the band bringing many girls to their early shows.

"My Sharona" was ranked at #75 on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs in 2008.

When Fieger died in 2010, The New York Times called the song "an emblem of the new wave era in rock and a prime example of the brevity of pop fame."