The Knack Zoom Back!

DON'T KNOCK
THE KNACK!!

When was the last time you played Get the Knack? Well, dig it out, friend, because the Knack are back with a new album on Rhino entitled Zoom and are in our town touring as we speak. Although the Mason Jar's flyer for their upcoming Phoenix appearance has "The NACK" with the letter K hastily drawn over it, many of you remember the Knack a little more vividly. After all, it was only four years ago when "My Sharona" bounced back into the Hot 100 for the first time since 1979, thanks to its inclusion on the Reality Bites soundtrack. Peggy Stanshall caught up with Knack leader Doug Feiger at the start of that tour to find out the inside story behind the rock's most misunderstood sneer. Here, never before published in its entirety is a Serene Dominic interview with Doug Feiger from 1994.

What happened to the girl on the picture sleeve of "My Sharona"? Was that the real Sharona?

Feiger: Yes. She's a real estate agent now.

Are you still in touch with her?

Feiger: I'm good friends with her. I talked to her last week.

Was "Gimme Some Lovin" in the back of your mind when you and Berton wrote "My Sharona?"

Feiger: Somebody pointed it out that it had the same octave thing, but no, it wasn't a conscious thing. Berton wrote the lick years before we actually wrote the song.

So many of your songs quote Sixties and Seventies hits. "Serious Fun" is a serious and fun swipe of the Rebel Rebel riff. Do you think it invites critics to label your writing as derivative by quoting older songs.

Feiger: Well, we tip our hat to influences all the time. I have no problem with that. Pop music is just a folk music form and if you know anything about folk music-people would just whole folk songs and just write new lyrics to them. The song "The Sinking of The Rueben James" is "Wildwood Flower," an Appalaccian folk song. On Bob Dylan's first four albums, many of the tunes he appropriated were folk songs that were in the public domain. Paul Simon took Bach for "American Tune." He just lifted the melody completely and wrote lyrics to it. We have done similar things for similiar reasons, sometimes in tribute and sometimes because that melody evokes a certain effect.

Can't Put a Price on Love" is obviously a homage to "Beast of Burden."

Feiger: Actually not at all. The reality to that is that it was a homage to any number of Steve Cropper songs which "Beast of Burden" was a homage to.

Yes, but people tend to give you credit as going to the second generation of rock rather than the first.

Feiger: I've been listening to music since I was eight months old. Both Berton and I have been students of pop music and folk since our earliest memories?

How old were you around the time the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show?

Feiger: I was about ten or eleven. I was listening to music well before that. I learned to talk listening to pop. My mother would buy pop records, they couldn't afford a baby sitter, so they'd seat me in a chair and put the records on. And when the records were finished she'd turn them over and play the other sides. So I knew all the pop tunes of the early Fifties when they were hits only because those were the songs I learned to speak to. I've been listening to pop music since Johnny Ray, Peggy Lee and Julius La Rosa. Dean Martin and Frabk Sinatra and then into the rock era. Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Little RichardI remember them when they were new even though I was a little kid. Even though I'm the age of a second generation rocker my interest peaked at the same time as the first generation.

Get The Knack was recorded for the low, low price of $18,000. Were you consciously trying to record it as economically as possible?

Feiger: No, that wasn't a concern. We had an amount of money to record that album and we could've used it all but we just didn't need it. We went in to record it live because that was the best way to record that record. The songs were our live show or part of our live show. What most people don't realize was that our second album were songs that were also part of our original live show. Most of them were, at least...

Everyone tends to think of the sophomore jinx thing where you have ten years to do the first album and six months to do the second...

Feiger: There's a lot of misconceptions about our second album. Our second album, for one thing, was more akin to what some later bands have done like Guns N' Roses and Nirvana, releasing odds and sods. Things that basically didn't make it to the first album, things that they had leftover. That's what our second album was. It was a continuation and a way to clear the slate so we could start fresh with our third album. It also was pegged a failure at the time and it sold two million copies, so I'd love to have more failures like our second album.

Your former producer Mike Chapman is less than charitable about that album.

Feiger: Our former producer's an asshole.

He's called you "a convincing con man."

Feiger: He's an asshole. Mike Chapman-I've never said this publicly, but since you bring it up, Mike Chapman is one of the bigger assholes that you'll ever meet on the planet. Nuff said.

He tends to think you blamed him for the album's failure.

Feiger: Not at all. It never happened that way. At all. Unfortunately, Mike Chapman was not in any psychological or physical shape to produce that second album when we really needed a producer. And he can say whatever he wants. There's enough blame to go around with two million copies. I'm a big fan of our second album. Again, those were songs from our live set that for one reason or another, not because they weren't as good songs as the ones on the first album. Mike Chapman basically picked the songs for Get the Knack- I will give him that credit- based on what would work from song to song. Because there were a lot of songs on the first album that weren't necessarily hit single type of singles like "Siamese Twins (The Monkey and Me)" or "Lucinda" ...

I'm surprised that Capitol never put out "That's What the Little Girls Do" as a single..

Feiger: We didn't want them to exploit the first album. Funny thing, we were always being accused of being this commercial venture and yet, in actual fact, Capitol Records wanted to exploit that first album and like, you know, release almost every song as a single and we stopped them. We said "lookit, we don't want that. For one thing, we're not going to cut any lyrics anymore." We let them do it for "Good Girls Don't" against our better judgement.

You changed the line on the single from "When she's sitting on your face" to "when she puts you in your place." How much pressure was there to change that? Where was the pressure coming from?

Feiger: The record company. I mean, you can't release a song that says "shit" and "sitting on your face." I changed it for that one song and I actually did it for "(She's So) Selfish" for Canadian radio. They begged us to do it. And I did it.

Did you have to get rid of "bitch" in that song?

Feiger: Well, no. There was a"shit" in that song and "no fucka-me fucka-me today." So we did for Canadian radio and that's the version that wound up on the American CD release of Get the Knack, which will tell you something about Capitol Records archives department. Because on the cover of that tape- I went there recently when we were doing the Retrospective album and saw it-the tape they wound up using was not the original master. It was a copy master and it includes the version of "(She's So) Selfish" with the changed lyrics. It says on the white cover of the box in big red letters NOT MASTER! NOT TO BE USED! ONLY CANADIAN RADIO!

Were you invited to the "My Sharona" remix? Did you make any suggestions?

Feiger: Yeah, just a couple. Dave Jerdens did a really great job. He was really wonderful to work with. Just a level thing, I wanted to hear more guitar in a certain part and he just tweaked it a little bit and it was great. It was great to begin with and it would've been fine either way.

Is there anything on this remix that you couldn't hear on the original version?

Feiger: The lead guitar in the front where he just hammers the bottom strings on the guitar- that's a little louder. Some of the bass drum figures that Bruce, our original drummer...see, Bruce plays a very different style than most rock drummers, he uses little accents on the bass drum like a jazz player and Dave was able to bring out some of the ones you can't hear on the original with the new technology. But they're very minimal. The only way you can really tell the difference is to A-B it against the original right there, have two machines running. Pretty much it sounds like the original only bigger and newer. I'm really happy with it.

"My Sharona" was personally chosen by (Reality Bites director) Ben Stiller as one of the cultural reference points that were part of his growing up experience. The question is, does it help the reunited Knack to be lumped in with the Planet of the Apes movies, Jimmie "J.J" Walker, "Disco Inferno" and Shaun Cassidy?

Feiger: I don't know (laughs). Doesn't hurt. I don't consider myself as a cultural reference point. I don't know how to answer that.

Do you think that people are still angry about the Beatle references on your record covers...

Feiger: As I've explained many times but I'll explain it again, the back cover of the first album was, one, it was a tongue-in-cheek statement by a bunch of cocky punks and two, it was a conscious artistic statement in the sense that we were appropriating an image to make our statement. Where we ran into problems was we got too successful.

Right, cause nobody got mad at the Roogalator for posing like Meet the Beatles.

Feiger: Exactly! Like if we had sold what we figured we would sell, at the very most we thought "maybe we'll sell 200,000 records if all our dreams come true." The back cover photo is where we were making a conscious statement. In 1978 when we started- the big question was "What's the next big thing gonna be?Punk didn't happen and disco is bullshit." And our comment was "Who fucking cares what's the next big thing is"-it's bullshit. How about if it looked just like the last big thing? That was the comment. And if we had sold 50,000 the critics even would have gotten that. They would have gone "Oh that's a wonderful, cynical take on the commercialism of the record industry looking for the next big thing.

I think what might have hurt them getting the joke was the fact that you didn't do many interviews when that first album came out.

Feiger: No, we didn't.

Was that a management decision.

Feiger: It was, but, you gotta understand-it happened so fast."My Sharona" went from not being on the radio to being the number one requested record and played record on every radio station in America overnight. Literally.

And then it was number one for six weeks.

Feiger: Yeah. But I'm talking about before it went to number one on the charts. It literallywent from not being played to being the most played song on the radio in a day. Because of that, it became a real phenomenon. Without any promotion. People think that Capitol spent all this money promoting our band. The whole promotion budget for the first album was $50,000 which is peanuts.

Were you going for a kind of Cheap Trick schizo/effect on the front cover because two guys are smiling on one side and the two guys aren't.

Feiger: It wasn't even that. Bruce had grabbed my butt at that moment and I had hit him in the ribs with my elbow. It was a real photo and it happened that way. It wasn't posed. The only pose was stand together, you know?

Were there any other outtakes from that session?

Feiger: No, that was the only photo that literally came out. All the rest were unusable. We did one roll of film. That was the first photo ever taken of the band and we used that photo to promote all our shows. People think that Capitol spent all this money promoting our band. The whole promotion budget for the first album was $50,000 which is peanuts.

They probably spent more than that in 1963 to promote Kyu Sakimoto.

Feiger: Yeah. Exactly. (sings snippet of "Sukiyaki"). Whatever the fuck. "Sukiyaki," I love that. Y'know, Berton has an album by him. It's a really wonderful record actually.

I believe it. It's a shame that it's such a depressing song when you hear it translated.

Feiger: (laughing) It's really a depressing song.

Somebody said naming that song "Sukiyaki" was like naming "Moon River" "Beef Wellington."

Feiger: Because they thought that was the only Japanese word people could pronounce. But anyway, the reality is that Capitol Records didn't release "My Sharona" until three weeks after the album was released. Because they weren't sure "My Sharona" was the single.

Didn't the album go gold thirteen days after release?

Feiger: The album went to number one before the single. The second day after the album was released they knew what the single was but bewcause of corporate things it took them three weeks to get the single actually out and into the stores. Which is another thing. People wanted to believe a certain thing about us because they couldn't believe the truth which was this was something that happpened for real, on its own. Without any high-powered promotion, without any high-powered management, without any high-powered record company even. We were a street band who used to play the Troubadour and the Starwood and from there we build a huge following in town and from there we got all these record companies, actually we got all these stars interseted to come down and see us. They came up on stage with us, asked us if they could jam with us.

What stars?

Feiger: Well, we had Ray Manzerek from the Doors, Eddie Money and Tom Petty, Stephen Stills and Bruce Springsteen- all within a three week period played with us. This isn't something we manufactured. They came to us and said " I love what you're doing, can I sit in?" With Ray, we did a couple of Doors songs, with Eddie Money we did "Two Tickets to Paradise." With Tom Petty we did a couple of blues tunes. With Stephen Stills we did "Bluebird" and with Bruce Springsteen we did a couple of Bo Diddley songs. And then the record companies started to get interested because that validated us. We had been packing the clubs for four months. We had "My Sharona" three or four months before a record company was even interested in us. We were doing the same show that became Get the Knack but they don't know. They never do.

Who was behind those Knuke the Knack kits?

Feiger: (sigh) I don't know. And I didn't care . That was a commercial venture again, you know, somebody trying to make money off of us and we thought it was funny. Until he started making personal attacks on people and then we informed him that he could no longer continue to make money off of us.

What was in them?

Feiger: A T-shirt, I dunno.. And again, the press made more out of that guy than was real. As if it was some movement. Just nonsense. It was a guy who used to go to these swap meets who'd set up this card table and sell T-shirts. And buttons. He might have sold a hundred of them.

Do you think the press overreacted when they labeled you a "sexist" band?

Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, "sexist?" Go and listen to "Under My Thumb."

Do you regret certain lines like "Call Chicken Delight, cause there's flesh on the bone and she ain't giving you a bite?"

Feiger: I regret nothing. Absolutely nothing. The lyrics that I write, at least for that album were based on my remembered adolescence and the way I remembered 14 year-old boys desiring girls. And that's all it was. It was not a political comment or statement. And in the grand tradition of rock n' roll, it certainly was about lust. But again, I've never written a song anywhere near, if you want to talk about sexism in rock music, anywhere near as sexist as "Under My Thumb" or "Stupid Girl," which both occurred on the same album.

That was before there was any sort of women's movement...

Feiger: But so what? If there going to pillory us in 1979, two years after the Rolling Stones did "Some Girls." C'mon. Gimme a fuckin' break! Those kinds of things are ridiculous and really what I believe it's about is when anybody gets too successful too fast and people don't feel like they had a hand in creating it, they're bound to bring it down a peg or ten if they can. You watch tabloid press. And I don't think rock press is any different than tabloid press. It has to do with the writer's personal opinion. It has nothing to do with any objective overview.

You did have a big champion in the press with Robert Hilburn. He once said, as did my editor that your LA Forum homecoming show was one of the best rock concerts he's ever seen. What do you remember about that night?

Feiger: Yeah it was a great show. But the funny thing about Robert Hilburn was that he would say those things in the last quarter of his review. The first three quarters of his reviews he would cast aspersions on what he perceived-his opinion-of what we were doing. Without any idea of what we were doing. Lookit, I'm an artist. I do what I do and I put it out there. Whoever likes, likes it, whoever doesn't, doesn't. I'll stand and fall with my work. I believe you do the work and you stand back. And you let the work speak for itself.

Was "Baby Talks Dirty" part of your early live set around the same time as "My Sharona?"

Feiger: No, but it didn't come very far after it. We're doing "Baby Talks Dirty" in our set now and our new drummer, well he's been our drummer for six years now, but, our newer drummer said "I can't believe everybody thought this sounded like "My Sharona." Because it really doesn't. It's got a rhythmic G note that goes form G major to the seventh of the G. Other than that it has nothing to do with "My Sharona."

Can you settle an argument about "Mr. Handleman?" Is that song about guy pimping his wife?

Feiger: Yeah, it was the first song Berton and I ever wrote. Berton and I have a perverse sense of humour. And we wrote another first song "Siamese Twins" which is based on a John Barth short story about a pair of siamese twins, one of whom was this little, shriveled creature who was stuck on the back of this big, burly brother. He wrote this story from the perspective of the brother on the back, and how when the big, burly brother would pick up girls, the guy on the back would know deep down that they were really in love with him. It was a very funny and poignant but very pathetic story. We took the story and said let's write it from the big, burly brother's perspective. That's how that came to be. Yes it's perverse, but so what?

So are 2 Live Crew.

Feiger: Well, I wouldn't lump us together with 2 Live Crew. So is the artist Robert Williams. Stanley Kubrick, for Chrissakes, making movies. He makes perverse statements sometimes. And I, as an artist, don't feel constrained from the opinions of critics. "Mr. Handleman" was just a lark. Of two kids...when we wrote that I was 22.

That songs strikes me like a note you pass around in class.

Feiger: Right. And rock and roll is supposed to be about thumbing your nose at convention.

People want the perversion of "Sweet Little 16" but they don't really want to hear about the two-way mirrors at Berry Park.

Feiger: I don't know about that, that's somebody's personal life. I'm talking about their work. The idea that an artist's life is fair game to criticism in relation to his work is this modern tabloid focus-gossip is the new pornography as far as I'm concerned. Frankly I'm not interested.

Around the time of Round Trip, the Knack posed with their wrists slashed in Creem Magazine. What was that about?

Feiger: They had this feature called "Stars' Cars" so we had "Stars' Scars."

Did you know the Knack wouldn't be long for this world at this point?

Feiger: Well, we had already broken up at this point. Our original manager left and Capitol convinced us to get back together and do one more record.

What was the atmosphere like?

Feiger: It was awful. It was really, really awful. We'd spent too much time together and it happens to the best of bands. I had a serious personality conflict with the drummer Bruce Gary and it was not resolvable. I love Bruce and he's a wonderful drummer and we're friendly. But when we work together, it just isn't good. It's a very bad situation. And the other two guys, Berton and Prescott, wouldn't fire him. That's why the band broke up.

Was it just "artistic differences?"

Feiger: Yeah, it just wasn't fun. I write a song and I want it a certain way. And if I have to fight somebody every timeI come in to show a new song I've written, it just becomes a drag. You just can't create in that atmosphere.

At one point the other members of the group reunited with Steve Bower.

Feiger: They did, actually.

SD: Were you working on a solo project at that time?

Feiger: I took a number of years off just to clear my head. The other thing that was happening during the third album was-I'd always gotten high, but as our success increased, the amount of chemicals I was putting into my body also increased. And it got to a point where I either had to go the way of the number of people before me and after me, unfortunately, or stop doing that stuff. And I did stop doing it ten and a half years ago. And when I stopped I sorta had to reevaluate my whole life. So it took me a number of years. And thank God I had been successful enough to do that. Basically, I just lived life. I wrote occasional songs. I wrote a couple of songs for the Manhattan Transfer that won a Grammy Award for them. I worked with Was (Not) Was. I've known Don since I was 9 yeras old and David since I was 11.

SD: You've also been spotted playing cards with Dan Connors on Roseanne. How often have you been on?

Feiger: I've done three Roseannes. It's been great fun. Tom and Roseanne are good friends of mine and wonderful people. And they love to have their friends on the show. See, I'm a cigar smoker, so they said I could come smoke cigars and play cards. I jumped at the chance. See,I was an actor before I was a musician. I studied with Lee Strasberg, Jeff Corey. I was a Shakespearean actor when I was a kid and that's an area that I'd like to get into when I have more time.

Are there any plans afoot for a new Knack album?

Feiger: Possibly. We have some songs a-brewing. I have a solo album that I finished with Don Was that we were just about to make a deal before this Knack thing happened and so it's been pushed aside while I'm concentarting on doing this Knack thing. We do two songs from my solo album inthe live show and they don't sound like they do on the solo album because it's the Knack playing them. Cause the Knack has a particular thing.

Hello, ducky, We're the new (sniff), more mature Knack. Maybe (sniff) you've heard our latest, "Swell Girls Shant", hmmm?"

"The truth of the matter is we weren't a new wave group. We wre arock and roll group that happened to come out in 1979. And because we wore skinny ties, they lumped us in with all these other groups. We had nothing to do with that scene. We were our own scene. I would hope the body of work the knack has left, and hopefully will continue to and hopefully we'll make another record, who knows, stands on its own. The reality is that for whatever carping the critics hang on us, we pleased many, many many, many many, more people than we displeased. A million to one, I would say, would be the ratio. Unfortunately that million doesn't have a voice beyond buying our records.

We're a live band and if I do say so myself, a damned good one. A really fun rock and roll experience. I'm not going to say coming to see the Knack or putting on a Knack album on necessarily is going to change your life but I'm not sure any rock experience isgoing to change to do that anymore.

Why do you think that is? Do you think rock audiences now are too scattered to have any unified impact?

Feiger: I think rock had its day. When rock was something that was different, when it was a reaction to something, rather than a sort of self perpetuating narcissistic exercise, which I feel it's become, it had a value and an effect. I think people believed the world could actually be changed by something like music, when there was a naivete and not a cynicism- I don't really think anything has changed. To believe it really can't change the world is a more realistic assessment of its impact. You can say it's less hopeful; but hey, that doesn't mean I don't work toward something different.

What was the first record you ever bought?

Feiger: There were two."Return to Sender" by Elvis Presley and "Goodbye Cruel World" by James Darren.

What is your least favorite song of all time?

Feiger: By anybody? Wow, no one's ever asked me that before!

You know, if you had every copy of that dreadful song in front of you and you also had a sledgehammer...

Feiger: (laughs) You know, no one's ever asked me that before. Ever. I'll find value in just about anything. In fact, the worse things seem to be, the more I tend to like them. I've got that perversity.

So do I. The room clearing pleasure you get from doing "Honey" is incredible.

Feiger: Well, see, I happen to like that one. I dunno I think "Seasons In the Sun" or "Billy Don't Be a Hero" are two room clearers. But you know, the guys who did them must've thought they had some value to them and somebody liked them, so I have a problem with least favorite songs and best songs.

What's your favorite album cover?

Well, it was an EP by a group called Single Bullet Theory out of Washington D.C. or Virginia. This was back in 1977. And the album cover was an Etch-a-Sketch, where somebody had Etch-a-Sketched the famous frame from the Zapruder film of Kennedy reaching for his throat. That was pretty powerful.

Do you think the Knack are really "A way of life?"

Feiger: No. (laughs) Absolutely. Read the fucking liner notes (the Second album). "This album is a bargain at half the price?" "My bank manager thanks you?"