The Knack – My Sharona

It went gold in thirteen days and became the biggest single of 1979, and fifteen years later a gas-station scene gave it a second life

Thirteen days. That was how long My Sharona took to go gold in the summer of 1979, faster than any debut single Capitol had released since I Want to Hold Your Hand. By the end of the year, Billboard had ranked it the No.1 single of 1979. The Knack never came close to that again, and within a year the same success was being held against them. The video on this page comes from 1994, when a film comedy gave the song a second life.

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Doug Fieger was 25 when he met Sharona Alperin in Los Angeles. She has put her own age at 16 or 17 at the time, and he pursued her for about a year before they became a couple. She set off a two-month burst of songwriting. Fieger said he wrote the lyric in about fifteen minutes. Berton Averre, the band’s lead guitarist, co-wrote the song, but at first he didn’t want her real name in the title. Fieger wanted the song to say exactly what he felt, and Averre gave in. With Prescott Niles on bass and Bruce Gary on drums, the four-piece had been working the Los Angeles clubs since 1978.

Capitol signed them and paired them with Mike Chapman, who had just produced Blondie’s Parallel Lines. They recorded Get the Knack at MCA Whitney Studios in Glendale in April 1979, with David Tickle and Pete Coleman engineering. Tickle later recalled setting up the room and the drums before Coleman arrived. The first time Chapman heard My Sharona, he told the band it would be a No.1 record. Fieger’s lead vocal was cut in a single take. Capitol released the album on June 11 and the single on June 18, with Let Me Out on the B-side and Alperin herself on the US picture sleeve.

Number one, then the bill

Billboard’s Hot 100 picked up the single on June 23. The album got there first: Get the Knack reached No.1 on the album chart on August 11, two weeks before My Sharona took the top of the Hot 100 on August 25. The single held No.1 for six weeks and finished as Billboard’s No.1 single of 1979. In Britain it reached No.6. The follow-up, Good Girls Don’t, made No.11 in the US.

The scale of the hit turned into a liability. In Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh attacked the band’s songs as misogynist, and he was not alone in making the Knack a target. The second album, …But the Little Girls Understand, arrived in 1980, and its lead single, Baby Talks Dirty, stalled at No.38 on the Hot 100. The band that had owned the summer of 1979 could not get a second hit to stick.

The song got its second run fifteen years later. RCA released the Reality Bites soundtrack on February 1, 1994, opening it with a new Dave Jerden remix of My Sharona. The film, Ben Stiller’s first as director, followed on February 18. In its gas-station convenience store scene, Janeane Garofalo’s character begs the clerk to turn up the radio, and she, Winona Ryder and Steve Zahn dance in the aisles. Averre later recalled that the song was requested for Reality Bites and Pulp Fiction at around the same time, and the band chose the comedy.

RCA scheduled the remix as a single for March 7, and on the chart dated April 16, 1994, My Sharona was back on the Hot 100 at No.91, almost fifteen years after its first entry. The video on this page was made for that release. Directed by Alan Miller, it puts all four original members, Fieger, Averre, Niles and Gary, on an all-white set intercut with scenes from the film.

Fieger and Alperin were together for four years and were engaged at one point, but they never married. They stayed friends, and she went on to sell real estate in Los Angeles. She visited him during his final months, and he died of brain cancer on February 14, 2010, at 57. The backlash cost the Knack their career, but it never caught up with the song.