The Knack formed in May 1978. In June the band made their live debut. The Knack were very much in demand at the various clubs along the Sunset Strip, to the point that they played over 50 gigs in six months. Even established rock stars took notice of The Knack, with Ray Manzarek, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen all attending their shows. The record labels even took notice of The Knack, with thirteen labels offering them contracts. Eventually they signed with Capitol Records, who paid them the largest amount of money for singing in the label's history.
Get The Knack was recorded in only two weeks and for only $18,000, this at time when recording an album could take literally months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The tracks on the album, as well as those on their second album (...But the Little Girls Understand) were all written while they performing at various clubs in Los Angeles.
As mentioned earlier, Get The Knack would prove to be a success almost immediately. So too would the first single from the album, "My Sharona." The genesis for the song grew out of a riff created by The Knack's lead guitarist Berton Averre. The band's leader, lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist Doug Fieger then wrote lyrics for the song. Its inspiration was Sharona Alperin, who would eventually become Mr. Fieger's girl friend. Even after the two broke up, they would remain friends for their rest of their lives. Like the album, Get The Knack, "My Sharona" proved to be successful immediately. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 23 1979. It hit no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 25.
Initially Get The Knack would receive some good reviews, but the success of both the album Get The Knack and the song "My Sharona" would lead to backlash among critics and others. Conceptual artist Hugh Brown would even begin a "Knuke The Knack" campaign, which soon grew out of all proportions. Chief among the criticisms that arose from the backlash against The Knack was that The Knack were aping The Beatles. This was largely due to both Capitol's marketing of the band and The Knack's British Invasion-inspired image. The front cover of Get The Knack was a black and white photo evocative of The Beatles' second album With The Beatles. The back cover of the album was a colour photo that evoked scenes from A Hard Day's Night. The Knack's fashion sense was decidedly retro, with the band outfitted in suits, white shirts, and skinny ties. Even their musical style evoked the British Invasion.
What the critics of the time were apparently missing were three things. The first was that The Knack had little control over how Capitol marketed them. Most bands in the Seventies had little say as to their album covers or even the songs selected from their albums to be released as singles. Even if The Knack had objected to the cover of Get The Knack, Capitol could have gone ahead and used it anyway. The second was that The Knack were a power pop band, a subgenre of rock music that draws heavily upon the sounds of the British Invasion and often utilises the imagery from that era as well. Earlier in the decade the power pop band The Raspberries had dressed in suits evocative of the early to mid-Sixties while performing songs evocative of the era as well. Other power pop bands, from Cheap Trick to Shoes, would often utilise a Sixties aesthetic. For that matter many New Wave artists (New Wave being a closely related subgenre to power pop) also dressed in styles evocative of the Sixties, from Blondie to Elvis Costello. Third, The Knack's sound actually owed less to The Beatles than it did The Kinks and The Who. "My Sharona" is closer in sound to "You Really Got Me" than "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The claim that The Knack were ripping off The Beatles then seems to hold little weight in retrospect.
Another source of the backlash were claims that many of The Knack's songs expressed misogynist attitudes. Admittedly, this criticism is harder to dismiss. On Get The Knack there are about three songs that could be at least considered sexist, if not downright misogynistic. That having been said, an argument can be made that critics may have been unfairly singling out The Knack for criticism in this regard. Sadly, misogyny was all too common in rock music in the Seventies and the Eighties. Never mind that The Rolling Stones had produced songs that could be considered misogynistic in the Sixties, in the late Seventies one can find several examples of misogynistic songs from bands ranging from AC/DC to Van Halen. What is more, some of The Knack's contemporaries produced much larger numbers of misogynist songs than The Knack ever did. While I have no wish whatsoever to condone misogyny in rock music, I think attacking The Knack for misogyny while ignoring the many other bands that featured it in their songs at the time is a bit hypocritical.
A final source of the backlash was one that was very much under The Knack's control and seems to have been a mistake on the band's part at the time. Quite simply, The Knack refused to do interviews. This certainly did not endear them to the music press, and could explain why many critics were downright hostile towards the band. It also explains why the critics of the time fully embraced other power pop bands who sounded similar to The Knack, while finding fault with The Knack themselves. Quite simply, other bands would do interviews.
Ultimately the backlash against The Knack would hurt the band. Their second album, ..But the Little Girls Understand, only reached no. 15 on the Billboard album chart. The singles did not perform as well as their earlier work either. "Baby Talks Dirty" only went to no. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100 while "Can't Put a Price on Love" peaked at no. 62. Their third album, Round Trip, performed even more poorly. It only reached no. 93 on the Billboard album chart. To a degree the backlash against The Knack would even affect power pop itself to a small degree. Following "My Sharona," there would be a few power pop songs that would be hits: "Turning Japanese" by The Vapors; "Jessie's Girl," ""I've Done Everything for You," and "Don't Talk to Strangers" by Rick Springfield; "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone; and "Talking in My Sleep" by The Romantics. That having been said, for the most part the boom in power pop that had begun around 1976 was over. Even Cheap Trick, considered by many the quintessential power pop band, would see their fortunes decline in the early Eighties. While their albums continued to do relatively well into the decade, none of them saw the success of At Budokan and Dream Police.
While Get The Knack would result in an enormous amount of backlash, the album would prove to be historic, as would the song "My Sharona," and not simply because they topped the charts. It was Get The Knack that signalled the end of disco craze, which had lasted nearly three years at that point. For much of 1979, the no. 1 albums were disco, including Rod Stewart's disco-flavoured Blondes Have More Fun, The Bee Gees' Spirits Having Flown, and Donna Summer's Bad Girls. Following Get The Knack, for the next several years the only disco album to top the chart was Donna Summers's On the Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes I & II, which was no. 1 for only one week in 1980. That The Knack signalled the end of disco is even more noticeable when looking at the Billboard Hot 100. In 1979, until "My Sharona" hit no. 1 on August 29, only three songs that were not disco had hit no. 1: The Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes," Blondie's "Heart of Glass,"and Peaches & Herb's "Reunited." For the remainder of 1979 only one disco song would hit no. 1; "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" by Barbara Streisand and Donna Summer hit no. 1 and remained there for only two weeks.
The success of both The Knack and their initial album, Get The Knack, would also have a lasting influence. Power pop bands from The Plimsouls to Material Issue to Teenage Fanclub appear to have some influence from The Knack. The Knack would even have an impact on bands outside power pop. Kurt Cobain once said of Nirvana, "I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath."
The Knack would never again repeat the success of Get The Knack or "My Sharona." The band's leader Doug Fieger died of cancer in 2010, effectively bringing The Knack to an end. While their success with their first album and their debut song would lead to a great deal of backlash, the album Get The Knack continues to sell well and "My Sharona" still receives a good deal of airplay to this day. Despite attacks from critics in 1979, The Knack would have a lasting influence.
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