As popular as The Knack was, as
big of a splash as they made with their debut
album, my understanding is that they,
relatively soon after their meteoric rise to
rock stardom, got some extreme push-back
to lyrics that were pretty much blatantly
pedo adjacent. What am I saying? The
fact that “My Sharona” was written about
a seventeen year old, and “Good Girls Don’t,”
and “That’s What The Little Girls Do,” and
even the title of the second album,
…But The Little Girls Understand,
were much more like pedo-specific. Rightfully,
women were disgusted, but men during
this period were not yet out of their
Neanderthal phase. It is difficult to get
behind the hideousness of some of these
lyrics to see how truly great this band was.
They were great players and their songs
were fire, almost every one. Not to excuse
them, but they wouldn’t have been the
only rockstars of the day with sexist and
dangerously stupid lyrics about exceedingly
young girls. Danny Elfman from Oingo Boingo,
when he sang “I love little girls” was
being facetious and satirical (one hopes),
and in Fieger’s defense, as he
would probably claim, he was writing from
the point of view of teenage boys, not a
27 year old man. I’m not sure that’s an
effective defense, especially in light of
the lyric: “I always get it up for the touch
of the younger kind.” Yeah, Doug, sorry.
Ultimately, the Knuke-the-Knack
movement took most of the wind out of
their sails, and for the rest of their career,
they struggled to regain any of that initial
impact, until, at way too young an age,
Doug Fieger died from cancer in 2010.
First, I remember how The Knack took
hold of me as a fifteen year old boy.
I thought they were my Beatles. I mean,
they looked kind of like The Beatles
circa 1964. Even though they were
relatively clean cut, like The Beatles,
they were brash. A Ringo on speed,
this drummer simply cooked. Doug
Fieger had a super sweet, sugary
vocal delivery à la Paul McCartney
or John Lennon at his sweetest.
The bass player rocked, and that
guitar solo in “My Sharona” goes
down as one of the greatest solos
in rock guitar history. Listening now,
the musicianship is still stunning,
the melodies are still memorable
and fun to sing. This debut album
simply kicks ass. But Doug! Those
lyrics on those three or four songs!
Is the second album better? “Baby
Talks Dirty” is a terrific and rocking
opening track, but I could do without
Fieger’s moaning. Never did care for
that kind of thing on a vocal track.
And we assume that the “baby”
in these lyrics is a consenting adult.
Generally, this is also a great record,
not as consistently great as the first, but
also not nearly as cringey.
If it suffers from anything, it’s
maybe from trying too hard
to be a lot like the debut album.
Sonically, it sounds the same, so
either they were trying to recreate
that initial success, or they had just
found a way of recording that worked
for them. Why experiment? An
exception might be the Fieger song,
“The Feeling I Get,” which at first I
thought was a cover of The Crystals’
“And Then He Kissed Me.” That would
have been hilarious. And then there’s
the absolutely break-neck blues
romp “(Having A) Rave Up,” which sounds
like a love child between Chuck Berry
and Paul McCartney. But both of
these tunes hearken back, stylistically
and sonically, to an earlier era.
The Knack at this point did not seem
terribly interested in moving forward.
Great musicianship and bad lyrics:
this band is frozen in time.
Notes on the vinyl editions: Original copies lost during the great vinyl purge of 1988, I have used copies of the first two albums by The Knack: Get the Knack, Capital Records, 1979, black vinyl in good condition. And …But The Little Girls Understand, Capital Records, 1980, black vinyl in great condition.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 