The following interview with Doug Fieger of The Knack was originally published in an entertainment industry newsletter I edited back in the '90s. Original Knack drummer Bruce Gary died of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in
2006 at the age of 55. Fieger died on February 14, 2010, after a
long battle with cancer. He was 57.
The Knack is back. Nearly 20 years ago, they became an “overnight” success with the release of their debut album Get The Knack, featuring the smash hit singles “My Sharona” and “Good Girls Don’t.” But their time at the top was brief. Plagued by an immense critical backlash (including a “Knuke The Knack” campaign) and the personal demons of lead singer/guitarist Doug Fieger, the band broke up after just two more albums (1980's ...but the little girls understand and 1981's Round Trip). Three fourths of the band reunited for 1991’s Serious Fun, but it disappeared beneath the swirling tide of the rising grunge rock movement. The timing should be better for their new Rhino Records album Zoom, a mature, rocking effort that constitutes their best work since their 1979 debut. And fans who never got to see The Knack live, will be happy to hear that the band — with original members Fieger, Berton Averre (lead guitar) and Prescott Niles (bass) and former Missing Persons/Frank Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio — will be hitting the road for a tour this summer that will include an L.A. date at their old stomping grounds, The Troubadour, on September 18th.
How did this latest Knack reunion come about?
A year and a half ago, I called [current Knack manager] Danny Sugerman up. He's been a friend of mine for 20 years. I was doing some recording on my own. Playing my stuff for Danny, he was very complimentary. And I said, “What should I do?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Doug, you should get The Knack together and go out and play live. I want to see you guys play."
So you did.
We played a surprise gig at The Viper Room. Harold Bronson, the president of Rhino, was there as a friend. Danny and him go back to high school. And Harold has been a fan of the band since the beginning. He called me up the next day, and said, "Doug, I've never seen a band fifteen years after their initial success be better than they were back in the day, and you guys were. If you're gonna do an album, let me at least bid on it.” I was so flattered.
Harold was instrumental in you and Berton writing one of the new album’s first singles, “Can I Borrow A Kiss?”
That song wouldn't exist if he didn't suggest it. I do this cable access show called "Art's Poker Party" with [rock journalist] Art Fein. We were talking about our childhoods, and I told this story about how when I was 14 -years old I saved up my money to visit a friend who'd moved from Detroit to the Bay Area. My parents had no idea that I was basically going out to San Francisco all summer long, unsupervised. I started dropping acid... mescaline. And this girl came up to me at this Be- In and said, "Can I borrow a kiss?" She was gorgeous. We stayed together the whole day listening to great bands, smoking dope and taking drugs and making out. Harold saw the show, and the next morning, he called me up and said, “That’s a song.”
Did you have the classic “saw-The-Beatles-on-‘Ed Sullivan’-went-out-and-bought-a-guitar" experience?
I was a trumpet player. But I always wanted to sing, and you can't sing and play trumpet. And that Louis Armstrong thing is a little goofy... And me and my sister watched The Beatles on "Ed Sullivan," and I said, “That’s what I want to do." My next birthday, my dad bought me a guitar. Then I met I guy named John Coury, and he had a band and he didn't have any room for another guitar player, but he said, “If you get a bass, you can be in the band." I had my dad rent me a bass... and I was a bass player for fifteen years. The Knack is the only band I've ever played guitar in.
Your first band Sky got signed when you were still in high school.
I wrote a letter to Jimmy Miller, who was the producer of Blind Faith, Traffic, the Rolling Stones. One night, we're watching TV, and my dad says, “There's a guy named Jimmy Miller on the phone.” I'm going," yeah, right..." it's John from my band putting me on. And it was [Miller]! He said, "I'm coming to Detroit to look at the Motown Studios, and I want to see your band." We picked him up at the airport and we drove him to Motown, then brought him back to my house. We sat around my ping pong table in the basement and played him all our songs, and he signed us the next day. A week after I graduated from high school, he flew us to London. We were in Studio A, while the Stones were in Studio B recording Sticky Fingers. I was 17-years-old. It was unbelievable.
The two albums you recorded with Sky didn’t set the charts on fire. But when Get The Knack hit stores in 1979, it was another matter entirely.
We were the fastest debut- to-platinum in the history of the record business at that time. We may still be.
Success was hard for you.
It was weird. I expected to hear the trumpets going "Da-da!" and they didn't. We were #1 in every category in all three trade papers. I expected to feel different. I was too young and too full of myself at that time to recognize that there were certain things that success doesn't give you. It doesn't give you a sense of self. Being comfortable in your own skin is an inside job, and I didn't know that.
Many critics labeled Get The Knack shallow, crass and misogynistic, but in many ways it’s a concept album the ultimate rock & roll expression of of adolescent, male sexual angst.
Berton always cringes when I say this, but I've always thought of The Knack as an art project. And we had a concept of how we were going to do this this art project, and it was going to start out with our remembered adolescence, because some of the songs that came after the first album pre date it... a lot of Round Trip. But they were too sophisticated for the first concept.
But most of the critics didn't understand it was a concept.
Because we never told them. There was the concept of not doing interviews, which was our management's idea, but we went along with it. Secondly, it was so pretentious, the whole idea of saying that.
In addition to the allegations of misogyny, many critics took offense at the Beatles-esque packaging of Get The Knack.
Had we only sold 50,000 records, everyone would have gotten the joke. It was tongue- in -cheek. "What's the next big thing?" "I'll show what the next big thing is gonna look like. It's gonna look just like the last big thing." It was very typical of what the punk acts of that time were doing. The only difference is, that our first album sold 6 million copies, and once you do that you can’t make that joke, because then you're trying to be them, rather than being these cheeky punks.
By the second album, the critics had turned on you completely.
Oh, man. One reviewer said my mother should have been sterilized before she had me. We got reviewed based on our success, not based on the music. Before we recorded the first album, a guy came up to me and said, “This is great, but you'll never capture this on record. " After we recorded the album, I heard from a person, “This record's great, but you can't do this live." We couldn't win. Yet we kept doing what we did. And, to quote Binky from "Life In Hell," “Mistakes were made."
What happened with your third album, Round Trip?
I didn't want to play with [original drummer] Bruce Gary anymore. I'd had it. We don't get along. We didn't get along. I'd had the fights, trying get him to play mine and Berton's songs the way we wanted them played. He always had some other idea, and it had nothing to do with what the song was about. And I was not in really great shape. I was drinking seriously, taking serious amounts of chemicals. I was a very difficult person to get along with. We had actually broken up, and the record company convinced us to get back together for one more record. So we did. We got Jack Douglas to produce it. It started out great. We recorded the [basic tracks] in about three weeks. [But] we did a lot of overdubbing. Vocals, effects, double -tracked drums... Serious production. It took five months to mix the album, for a lot of reasons. Chemical abuse was a big part of it. The album came out, we did a tour for a month. It was supposed to go on, but it all came to a head in Acapulco, Mexico, on New Year's Eve, and I just said, “That's it, I can't do it anymore," and we broke up for five years.
And you had a band in between, Taking Chances?
People tell me I did. After The Knack, there's about a year and a half period where it was like you fall asleep on a train at night during a thunderstorm, and every once in a while you wake up and you look out the window and you see a flash of lightning and a bit of scenery, then you fall back into this weird sleep. I'm not being coy when I say I don't remember. I was drinking extremely heavy. I had been addicted to heroin and had kicked that, but replaced it with tons of alcohol, ludes and cocaine... amyl nitrate. It was bad. Some guy told me he saw us play. He said, "You were pretty good, but you did this thing where you laid down on the stage and sang a couple of songs." I'm sure it wasn't voluntary.
When did you finally get cleaned up?
Eighty- three.
And then, in the mid-’80s, you resurrected The Knack.
There was a girl named Michelle Meyer who used to book The Whisky Au Go Go, and she was dying of cancer. Michael & Pamela Des Barres organized a benefit to help pay for her medical expenses. The Knack got back together for the first time in five years, and we did a short set and got a great response. People said, "You gotta go and play.” So, we started writing songs, and there was still the thing with me and Bruce. Within seven months, it was impossible, and he left again. Then Billy Ward came and we recorded the album [1991’s Serious Fun].
Bruce Gary played The Viper Room reunion shows, but for the new album, you brought in Terry Bozzio. He has a reputation as a super- technical, heavy rock/jazz drummer. Was he looking to do something more fun?
He said no one ever asks him. Everybody thinks of him as this jazz bo “serious” musician, and not that what The Knack does isn't serious... One of the things that's really wonderful for us, is to have a musician of the caliber of Terry Bozzio not only say "I'll do it," but want to join the band because the music is challenging, because the music is good. As he puts it, “This is real."
Speaking of real, most people don’t realize that “My Sharona” is about a real person, Sharona Alperin, who’s now a very successful Beverly Hills real estate agent.
I'm so proud of her. She sold 47 homes last year. She's a terrific girl . She was one our first four fans. I was living with a girl, and I had been for almost ten years. I knew this girl from junior high school... moved out here together, and she introduced me to Sharona, and, literally, it was love at first sight. I broke up with the girlfriend, then chased Sharona for a year.
How long were you together?
Four years. And she's... the love of my life, probably.
While you can’t expect to recreate the success of “My Sharona,” the time seems ripe for the muscular melodicism of an album like Zoom.
I hope so. I’m just glad people are responding. People are telling me they really like this album. And whoever digs it, I’ll be happy for that.
How did this latest Knack reunion come about?
A year and a half ago, I called [current Knack manager] Danny Sugerman up. He's been a friend of mine for 20 years. I was doing some recording on my own. Playing my stuff for Danny, he was very complimentary. And I said, “What should I do?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Doug, you should get The Knack together and go out and play live. I want to see you guys play."
So you did.
We played a surprise gig at The Viper Room. Harold Bronson, the president of Rhino, was there as a friend. Danny and him go back to high school. And Harold has been a fan of the band since the beginning. He called me up the next day, and said, "Doug, I've never seen a band fifteen years after their initial success be better than they were back in the day, and you guys were. If you're gonna do an album, let me at least bid on it.” I was so flattered.
Harold was instrumental in you and Berton writing one of the new album’s first singles, “Can I Borrow A Kiss?”
That song wouldn't exist if he didn't suggest it. I do this cable access show called "Art's Poker Party" with [rock journalist] Art Fein. We were talking about our childhoods, and I told this story about how when I was 14 -years old I saved up my money to visit a friend who'd moved from Detroit to the Bay Area. My parents had no idea that I was basically going out to San Francisco all summer long, unsupervised. I started dropping acid... mescaline. And this girl came up to me at this Be- In and said, "Can I borrow a kiss?" She was gorgeous. We stayed together the whole day listening to great bands, smoking dope and taking drugs and making out. Harold saw the show, and the next morning, he called me up and said, “That’s a song.”
Did you have the classic “saw-The-Beatles-on-‘Ed Sullivan’-went-out-and-bought-a-guitar" experience?
I was a trumpet player. But I always wanted to sing, and you can't sing and play trumpet. And that Louis Armstrong thing is a little goofy... And me and my sister watched The Beatles on "Ed Sullivan," and I said, “That’s what I want to do." My next birthday, my dad bought me a guitar. Then I met I guy named John Coury, and he had a band and he didn't have any room for another guitar player, but he said, “If you get a bass, you can be in the band." I had my dad rent me a bass... and I was a bass player for fifteen years. The Knack is the only band I've ever played guitar in.
Your first band Sky got signed when you were still in high school.
I wrote a letter to Jimmy Miller, who was the producer of Blind Faith, Traffic, the Rolling Stones. One night, we're watching TV, and my dad says, “There's a guy named Jimmy Miller on the phone.” I'm going," yeah, right..." it's John from my band putting me on. And it was [Miller]! He said, "I'm coming to Detroit to look at the Motown Studios, and I want to see your band." We picked him up at the airport and we drove him to Motown, then brought him back to my house. We sat around my ping pong table in the basement and played him all our songs, and he signed us the next day. A week after I graduated from high school, he flew us to London. We were in Studio A, while the Stones were in Studio B recording Sticky Fingers. I was 17-years-old. It was unbelievable.
The two albums you recorded with Sky didn’t set the charts on fire. But when Get The Knack hit stores in 1979, it was another matter entirely.
We were the fastest debut- to-platinum in the history of the record business at that time. We may still be.
Success was hard for you.
It was weird. I expected to hear the trumpets going "Da-da!" and they didn't. We were #1 in every category in all three trade papers. I expected to feel different. I was too young and too full of myself at that time to recognize that there were certain things that success doesn't give you. It doesn't give you a sense of self. Being comfortable in your own skin is an inside job, and I didn't know that.
Many critics labeled Get The Knack shallow, crass and misogynistic, but in many ways it’s a concept album the ultimate rock & roll expression of of adolescent, male sexual angst.
Berton always cringes when I say this, but I've always thought of The Knack as an art project. And we had a concept of how we were going to do this this art project, and it was going to start out with our remembered adolescence, because some of the songs that came after the first album pre date it... a lot of Round Trip. But they were too sophisticated for the first concept.
But most of the critics didn't understand it was a concept.
Because we never told them. There was the concept of not doing interviews, which was our management's idea, but we went along with it. Secondly, it was so pretentious, the whole idea of saying that.
In addition to the allegations of misogyny, many critics took offense at the Beatles-esque packaging of Get The Knack.
Had we only sold 50,000 records, everyone would have gotten the joke. It was tongue- in -cheek. "What's the next big thing?" "I'll show what the next big thing is gonna look like. It's gonna look just like the last big thing." It was very typical of what the punk acts of that time were doing. The only difference is, that our first album sold 6 million copies, and once you do that you can’t make that joke, because then you're trying to be them, rather than being these cheeky punks.
By the second album, the critics had turned on you completely.
Oh, man. One reviewer said my mother should have been sterilized before she had me. We got reviewed based on our success, not based on the music. Before we recorded the first album, a guy came up to me and said, “This is great, but you'll never capture this on record. " After we recorded the album, I heard from a person, “This record's great, but you can't do this live." We couldn't win. Yet we kept doing what we did. And, to quote Binky from "Life In Hell," “Mistakes were made."
What happened with your third album, Round Trip?
I didn't want to play with [original drummer] Bruce Gary anymore. I'd had it. We don't get along. We didn't get along. I'd had the fights, trying get him to play mine and Berton's songs the way we wanted them played. He always had some other idea, and it had nothing to do with what the song was about. And I was not in really great shape. I was drinking seriously, taking serious amounts of chemicals. I was a very difficult person to get along with. We had actually broken up, and the record company convinced us to get back together for one more record. So we did. We got Jack Douglas to produce it. It started out great. We recorded the [basic tracks] in about three weeks. [But] we did a lot of overdubbing. Vocals, effects, double -tracked drums... Serious production. It took five months to mix the album, for a lot of reasons. Chemical abuse was a big part of it. The album came out, we did a tour for a month. It was supposed to go on, but it all came to a head in Acapulco, Mexico, on New Year's Eve, and I just said, “That's it, I can't do it anymore," and we broke up for five years.
And you had a band in between, Taking Chances?
People tell me I did. After The Knack, there's about a year and a half period where it was like you fall asleep on a train at night during a thunderstorm, and every once in a while you wake up and you look out the window and you see a flash of lightning and a bit of scenery, then you fall back into this weird sleep. I'm not being coy when I say I don't remember. I was drinking extremely heavy. I had been addicted to heroin and had kicked that, but replaced it with tons of alcohol, ludes and cocaine... amyl nitrate. It was bad. Some guy told me he saw us play. He said, "You were pretty good, but you did this thing where you laid down on the stage and sang a couple of songs." I'm sure it wasn't voluntary.
When did you finally get cleaned up?
Eighty- three.
And then, in the mid-’80s, you resurrected The Knack.
There was a girl named Michelle Meyer who used to book The Whisky Au Go Go, and she was dying of cancer. Michael & Pamela Des Barres organized a benefit to help pay for her medical expenses. The Knack got back together for the first time in five years, and we did a short set and got a great response. People said, "You gotta go and play.” So, we started writing songs, and there was still the thing with me and Bruce. Within seven months, it was impossible, and he left again. Then Billy Ward came and we recorded the album [1991’s Serious Fun].
Bruce Gary played The Viper Room reunion shows, but for the new album, you brought in Terry Bozzio. He has a reputation as a super- technical, heavy rock/jazz drummer. Was he looking to do something more fun?
He said no one ever asks him. Everybody thinks of him as this jazz bo “serious” musician, and not that what The Knack does isn't serious... One of the things that's really wonderful for us, is to have a musician of the caliber of Terry Bozzio not only say "I'll do it," but want to join the band because the music is challenging, because the music is good. As he puts it, “This is real."
Speaking of real, most people don’t realize that “My Sharona” is about a real person, Sharona Alperin, who’s now a very successful Beverly Hills real estate agent.
I'm so proud of her. She sold 47 homes last year. She's a terrific girl . She was one our first four fans. I was living with a girl, and I had been for almost ten years. I knew this girl from junior high school... moved out here together, and she introduced me to Sharona, and, literally, it was love at first sight. I broke up with the girlfriend, then chased Sharona for a year.
How long were you together?
Four years. And she's... the love of my life, probably.
While you can’t expect to recreate the success of “My Sharona,” the time seems ripe for the muscular melodicism of an album like Zoom.
I hope so. I’m just glad people are responding. People are telling me they really like this album. And whoever digs it, I’ll be happy for that.
