A long way from the valley

Listening to the Knack's forgotten third album, Round Trip (1981)

Back in 2010 I wrote a book about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. The album had come out when I was an impressionable teen, and decades later I still loved the record. I wondered what that meant. Does my affection for the album and the band sit somewhere between earnestness and irony? (You’ll have to read the book to find out!)

I wrestled with a similar question after the Knack popped up on shuffle while I was at the gym recently. Get the Knack was released in June 1979, one month before Highway to Hell. That summer and fall was soundtracked in large part by the killer riffs and charged melodies of those two albums. Not to mention the breathy, smutty innuendos embedded in nearly every groove. Doug Fieger and Berton Averre’s songs for the Knack were stuffed with sex, the lyrics in some songs borderline porn. (“It’s a teenage sadness everyone has got to taste / An in-between age madness that you know you can’t erase / ‘Till she’s sitting on your face.” Ahem. Well, it was cleaned up for the radio.) Both Get the Knack and Highway to Hell scored the overwhelming rush of hormones I was daily assaulted by, providing the phrases and chord changes for my between-age madness played out in melodramas in the hallways and on the blacktop at Saint Andrew the Apostle School.

Forty-five years down the line, Get the Knack still sounds great to my ears. Mike Chapman (producer) and Dave Tickle and Peter Coleman (engineers) cleanly captured the band’s sound, neatly separating and balancing Fieger and Averre’s guitars, recording bassist Prescott Niles and drummer Bruce Gary’s playing with real punch. (Gary’s muscular drumming on the Knack records is among my favorite in rock and roll.) If I’d come to prefer much louder guitars on the records of bands I loved, the dynamics of the playing on Get the Knack still are precise and powerful, in ideal service to the band’s early-Beatlesy sound and arrangements.

And the songs still stick. “Let Me Out,” “Good Girls Don’t,” “That’s What the Little Girls Do,” “Frustrated,” the still irrepressible “My Sharona,” all charge hard with wide eyes and half grins, breathing heavy, in love with the the excitement that they generate. “Your Number or Your Name,” “Oh Tara,” the gorgeous “Lucinda” were slower, but no less charged with adolescent energy, drive, and confusion. Above all the album is really fun, still, and sounds great loud. I was in the eighth grade in fall 1979; the Knack were everywhere. Two months before Get the Knack was released my local radio station Q107 had changed format from AOR to contemporary hits, and it seemed for a while as if “My Sharona” was the station’s flagship song, entrenched in high rotation. (After Averre’s epic Chuck Berry-on-coke guitar solo, edited for radio, the station would presumptuously drop into the two-second silence a synthesized “lightning strike” sound effect. I hear it to this day. Damn you, Q107 program director!)

Against the “Nuke the Knack” backlash and ongoing charges of sexism, the band swiftly released their follow-up ...But the Little Girls Understand in February 1980. The album’s essentially the same party following a second-wind. The first single “Baby Talks Dirty,” a onerous tribute to rough sex, sounded so much like “My Sharona” that the more reprehensible lyrics (“my sweetie loves a real neat beating,” and the rest) went virtually unnoticed. Far better are the pop gems “I Want Ya” and “It’s You,” spirited, smiling songs where Fieger’s sexual preoccupations come off far less menacing and sleazy (though he can’t help but narrate a hand-job in “It’s You”). “Hold on Tight and Don’t Let Go” is another fantastic track; sex is just below the surface, but the Buddy Holly bounce and cheery harmonies keep any unwanted aggression at bay. And at a minute and thirty seconds, the song’s over before anything can get too weird or obnoxious. (The surprise track is a tight and rocking cover of the Kinks’ “The Hard Way” from their 1975 album Schoolboys in Disgrace.)

The Knack’s objectification of women was rank; their best rock and roll songs are great. That old dilemma. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the the sexism; a newly-minted teenager leading with my overwhelmed, pimply body, I was hardly an enlightened lad. Yet I must say that some of Fieger’s sexualized lyrics and his leering delivery did scare me a little back then. It was gross, and felt and sounded like complicated adult stuff. At Saint Andrew’s I wasn’t in the habit of having heart-to-heart talks with the space aliens posing as teenage girls; I wonder now what those girls thought of those albums’ sexual aggressiveness as they listened in their bedrooms.

We had images to ponder, as well. The cover of ...But the Little Girls Understand shows a young besotted female fan at the edge of a stage, her lips parted as she gazes upward at her Rock God. (In my feverish undergraduate literary/art history days I would’ve no doubt indicted the mic stand for Being Phallic.) On the inner sleeves we’re granted the honor of sitting in a limousine with the now-famous Knack as panting young girls crowd the candy store windows and Fieger and Gary drool. (Niles and Averre look wary and bemused, respectively.) The picture sleeves of “My Sharona” and “Baby Talks Dirty,” above, pretty much speak for themselves. I crushed hard on the girl provocatively holding Get the Knack; it turns out she actually was a Sharona—Sharona Alperin, a then-teenager who was briefly Fieger’s girlfriend before the band hit. “That was, like, my normal outfit, what I wore all the time, by the way,” Alperin laughingly told NPR. She remained friendly with Fieger until his death in 2010.

Delivered in three-minute pop songs with sweet harmonies and killer hooks, the Knack’s brand of sexism seems relatively tame now. But however playfully put over, it remains gross. Robert Christgau pulled wide in his September 1979 Consumer Guide take on Get the Knack: “I too find them unattractive; if they felt this way about girls when they were unknowns, I shudder to think how they’re reacting to groupies.”

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By the time ...But the Little Girls Understand faded from the Billboard charts, I’d pulled away from the Knack. When they released their third album Round Trip in the fall of 1981, I was far more interested in the Police, the Cars, and on the far horizon, the Go-Go’s, too busy obsessing over the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You (I would see them in concert that fall, my first show), singing along to “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic,” and pondering the meaning to Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” to pay much attention at all. In retrospect, Round Trip seemed to have shipped directly from the pressing plant to the cut-out bin. By 1981, remarkably, the band was dried up. The Knack were Nuked.

About a decade ago I picked up the album for cheap. I’d always been curious to know if it’s as much of a washout as I’d imagined it to be. It isn’t, not entirely, anyway. Recorded and mixed at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, produced by Jack Douglas (Miles Davis, Aerosmith, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Cheap Trick, et al), the stylistically varied Round Trip benefits from splitting the difference: of its dozen songs, about half deserve attention. “She Likes the Beat” is a familiar story about a rock and roll loving girlfriend who presumably gets down every night, a slow-paced cousin to Get the Knack’s “(She’s So) Selfish,” if with a slightly fussier arrangement. “Just Wait and See” is a classic Knack pop song, the changes and melody sprightly and cheery—the sun comes out during this one—a track that had it been released a two years earlier might’ve dashed to the top of the charts.

The second side begins with “Boys Go Crazy,” yet another tired blue balls/cock tease lament—Fieger sure holds his grudges!—with a half-hearted response to the band’s critics—

I ain’t a chauvinist
But the girls are a different breed
I hate to tell you this
But you ain’t gonna get what you need

—that does little to suggest that the band has evolved all that much. Turns out that the Knack were throwing us off the scent, because as the album continues a slightly different band emerges. “Lil’ Cals Big Mistake,” “Another Lousy Day in Paradise,” and “Pay the Devil (Ooo, Baby, Ooo)” are all rich, engrossing, sophisticated (!) pop songs.

“Lil’ Cals Big Mistake" is pure LA noir, a morality tale about thieves, murder, vice, and the lure of dangerous shadows where deals go down and go awry. Fieger and Averre’s chord changes are slippery and anxious; the song itself sounds as if it’s on the lam. (Iconic “LA session cat” Tom Scott blows a sax solo that dramatizes the milieu.) Fieger sings the tale with a wink, sending up the whole thing while wagging his finger at the protagonist’s naiveté. There’s also a reference to Bobby Fuller in the bridge; Fuller died under mysterious circumstances, found dead in a car parked outside his Hollywood apartment. (Fieger sings: “Calvin thinking he was Bobby Fuller / Squealing and swinging, Don swore he was singing / A verse or two of ‘I Fought the Law’.”) As police car sirens wail at the song’s close, closing in on the crime scene, you realize that it’s refreshing to hear Fieger sing about other people rather than about his own dick.

A second song set against LA/Hollywood culture, “Another Lousy Day in Paradise” is the rare Knack tune that observes things from a woman’s perspective, not a pantingly horny girl, but an earnest wannabe model who’s chasing success against great odds, putting up with empty parties, brutal rejections, and soul-damaging relationships of all sorts in the hope that she’ll become “this month’s model.” Fieger’s sympathy for, or anyway his clear-eyed observations of, the woman’s plight is appealing, reaching poignancy in the bridge where he sings, “Just close your eyes and keep repeating you’re getting what you’re needing,” adding the kicker, a line worthy of peak-era Elvis Costello: “Paradise is pleasing if it has a reason.”

The album’s penultimate track, “Pay the Devil (Ooo, Baby, Ooo),” written by Averre, is one the Knack’s finest, an indication of how they might’ve developed in the 1980s had they kept at it. Intricately arranged, a compliment not often bestowed on Knack songs, “Pay the Devil” is a thoughtful, piano-based ballad set against the band’s rapid rise to success. The first verse laments bad press, with some indication that the devil’s simply paying back what the heedless band had borrowed; the second verse is more intimate, a cry of loneliness, but then again the pined-for girl may be another metaphor for values eaten up by success. The music is pretty, offered as a mid-paced waltz with heartrending changes and a lilting, bittersweet melody that Fieger sings with real conviction. Country music veterans Tommy Morgan (harmonica) and Sneaky Pete (pedal steel guitar) accompany the tune, adding an eternal breeze of melancholy.

Great stuff. Had Fieger and Averre retained their focus, these incisive songs about the promises and heartbreaks of Hollywood, pulled wide to incriminate all who head wide-eyed to southern California to cash in their dreams, suggest a mature, insightful direction in which the Knack might’ve headed. (This is also suggested to me by Fieger’s portrait on Round Trip’s inner sleeve, above, in which he strikes a pensive, singer-songwriter pose complete with acoustic guitar, open notebook, and glass of wine.) The anonymous reviewer in the October 24, 1981 Billboard seemed to get it. “No, this isn’t ‘My Sharona’ for the third time,” they wrote. “Instead, the Knack appear to have taken the time and effort to develop a broader focus,” adding, “Previous teenage-oriented themes have been replaced by subject matter relatable to more than just the sweet 16 set.”

In the event, Fieger split following the release of Round Trip. The band reunited in the mid-1980s with Billy Ward replacing Gary, enjoyed riding the modest commercial wave following “My Sharona”’s appearance on the 1994 Reality Bites soundtrack, and released the albums Serious Fun (1991), Zoom (1998), and Normal as the Next Guy (2001). I paid a bit of attention to Serious Fun at the time, but to my ears the band was more or less in recycle mode. Plus, I missed Gary’s drumming. (Gary died in 2006.)

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For a poignant and humorous glimpse of the Knack poised at their commercial decline, dig the satiric video for “Another Lousy Day in Paradise.” A contract signing at the top of the iconic Capitol Records building! Champagne bottles waiting to be uncorked! But also: pies in the face and dated skinny ties.

And most tellingly, Fieger mouthing, “Where’s the money?”

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