I was only a wee tot back in the Knack’s heyday. From what I understand – and please correct me if I’m wrong – music critics pretty much universally panned the Knack back in their heyday.
Over the last year or so, I finally got around to checking out their debut album, Get the Knack. And you know what? It’s fucking great. One power pop treat after another. I mean, seriously great album with wonderful pop songs and great musicians. I really don’t think there’s a bad song on that album. Bruce Gary on drums just pushes all my buttons for what I love out of a drummer, and Berton Averre’s guitar was tastily melodic with great phrasing and tone, with one of the most iconic guitar solos in rock history (in “My Sharona,” of course.) And everyone tight as shit from what I’ve found online from their live performances (Carnegie Hall is a particularly good one.)
So, am I crazy? What the hell did critics think was wrong with this album?
Get The Knack was the first album I every bought, along with The Kids are Alright by The Who, so I’m probably a bit biased. But there were many positive reviews of their first album; many critics liked their energetic pop. Most of the backlash came from the huge promotional push and instant success of the band. They thought they were manufactured stars. Most of the criticism wasn’t really about the music.
They helped Weird Al Yankovic’s career get started, so they should be appreciated for that. They liked his parody My Bologna so much, they convinced their record company to offer him a contract.
There’s a decent documentary on Netflix or Prime. Basically, their manager withheld access to them in some key situations - not doing interviews, skipping a great TV show appearance or two - to foster some feeling of exclusivity that profoundly backfired. The fact that Doug Fieger was a bit of snarky, immature guy and I think the press read the worst into the tactic.
It’s so sad. Get the Knack, to me, is a perfect album. I love every track. Fieger’s immature boy impulses and horniness are more than fine in a song like Good Girls Don’t even if they don’t translate well to a persona.
And Burton Averre - man, what a player. That Sharona solo is amazing. But listen to his work throughout Good Girls Don’t, or That’s What the Little Girls Do - he laces in the tastiest lead fills and Byrds-like jangle fills like in Your Number or Your Name.
and Bruce Gary and Prescott Niles drive it - the songs have a rock edge to them that, coupled with Averre’s virtuosity, always keeps the band in the “legit musicians” camp. Kind of a power-pop Van Halen.
My guess is that the late 70s was a difficult time to be playing rock if you wanted to sound original and didn’t want to piss off the record-buying public.
Interesting, and probably little-known fact: Doug Fieger’s brother Geoffrey is a lawyer who represented Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide physician, and won his acquittal in every case in which he represented him. Kevorkian was convicted in the only case in which he represented himself.
I remember a lot of comparisons with early Beatles. The cover and title are reminiscent of Beatles. There was some push back about that and “yawn, another jangle band, this time they think they’re the Beatles”.
Every now and again, I’ll be driving around without my own playlist going. Sooner or later, My Sharona will come on. And if it’s the version with the abridged solo, well, it puts me in a mood that makes me understand the source of some of the worse road rage incidents. I just wanna start ramming cars off the road*…
This is not a good idea, ever, but especially not when I’m riding my motorcycle.
Yeah, that actually does remind me that they also had this reputation, rightly or wrongly, of being totally full of themselves and being commercial, “manufactured” rock or something b.s. like that. But being arrogant asshats or not, that debut really speaks for itself. I mean, hate the band all you like, but criticize the music on its merits. (Though it does seem the reviews I find today of that album are generally very good.)
I haven’t really listened through the follow-up albums yet. It seems that there is some consensus they didn’t really quite live up to their debut, but I’ve heard fairly positive things about them. I am familiar with “Baby Talks Dirty,” but that almost sounds like it’s trying a little too hard to recapture the magic of “My Sharona.”
The Knack arrived at a time when people were looking for the type of music that would follow the classic rock era of the 60s and 70s. It was being followed by all sorts of variations of rock that couldn’t satisfy everyone, and to a great extent that’s all the earlier rock era was anyway. So, on top of the more specific reasons given above, just about every new band and sound was derided by many critics, and the as John DiFool mentions, unable to follow up on their initial success the reputation of critics pans stuck with them. They seemed to me to be following in the footsteps of so many 70s one-hit-wonder bands. Personally, I found them just as good as any band of that time , although I am more of a general listener than an aficionado.
I’m not sure. From what I’m reading, the whole “Knuke the Knack” campaign started in July of 1979, well before the follow-up album or anything. The Knack hate had fomented by then.
I was pretty young when they appeared (10 years old in 1979), but from what I understand they were a band like Boston in that they did not emerge out of any particular regional scene or movement. They were the product of a corporate record-label boards carefully studying then-current trends, assembling a bunch of competent rather than talented musicians, and producing a prefabricated product meant for mass consumption. Nowadays, most of pop culture is very blatantly packaged for mass consumption to the lowest common denominator, but in the late 70s a band had to at least appear to be (if not actually be) “authentic”.
There was also a certain level of arrogance in the marketing of the Knack. Their Lp “Get the Knack” had a cover photo that obviously aped the look of early Beatles Lp covers as if to say “We are the new paradigm-shaping, standard-setting band which all future bands will have to be compared to.” If you’re gonna make a statement like that, you’d damn well better have the raw talent to back up the claim. And the Knack really didn’t.
Personally, the only Knack song I know well is “My Sharona.” While it does have a lot of energy, I find it simplistic, repetitive, and one of those grating ear-wormy songs that get lodged in the brain so that I would rather blow my brains out rather than hear it one more time.
Except, as musicians, they weren’t merely competent. They were pretty fucking amazing. And, also, they don’t seem to be a corporate assembly of musicians from the bios that I’ve read. It seems Doug Fieger arrived in LA, met Averre, and they started a songwriting partnership. Doug also knew Bruce Gary from years before. Not sure how Prescott Niles got into the band, but it all seems to be centered around Fieger and him assembling the band, not some corporate process.
The hate started well before the second album came out. I recall everyone loving Sharona, but it got played to death on the way to being the #1 song of the year. Add Fieger’s persona and the idiot manager and you have a Blurred Lines situation - good song that people ended up angry over.
It’s a strange position for me to be in, jumping to the defense of Boston. Every story I’ve heard about the recording of this album, up to and including the detailed breakdown on Wikipedia, tells a tale of clueless (and deliberately misinformed) record label execs that did not know that Boston was essentially just one dude in a basement, that the final tapes were not recorded in the booked studio in LA, and as far as I can tell, Scholz presented the entire album as a finished take-it-or-leave-it product.
cracked a formula that very few figured out.