From RTT News:

“Oasis were young, fresh and writing good tunes,” McCartney told Q. “I thought the biggest mistake they made was when they said ‘We’re going to be bigger than The Beatles.’ I thought ‘So many people have said that, and it’s the kiss of death.’ Be bigger than The Beatles, but don’t say it. The minute you say it, everything you do from then on is going to be looked at in the light of that statement.”

Oasis’ Noel Gallagher has admitted that he was high during the now infamous interview.

Paul could have added, “And don’t let your record company market you as ‘the Next Beatles’.”

Several bands and solo artists have been tarred with that epithet but for different reasons. Bands whose music featured harmony-heavy, melodic rock-and-roll often earned a spot on the list, like Big Star, the Bee Gees and Badfinger. Some made the grade because adolescents lifted them to the top of the charts, like the Bay City Rollers and BTS. Oasis is the only entity I know that earned the comparison through self-promotion and saying dumb shit, for though they borrowed lines and melodies from the Beatles, they were pretty weak when it came to harmonies, which is why I always thought the comparison was utter nonsense.

The Knack came together in 1978 after Detroit resident Doug Fieger’s band Sky failed to catch fire. The band had relocated to Los Angeles to record with RCA, and while his mates chose to return to the Motor City after the break-up, Doug decided to stay put and try to form a new band in sunny California. Over the next few years, Doug would make several connections, including on-off relationships with some of the guys who would eventually form the Knack. Fieger eventually hit paydirt with the rhythm section, featuring the well-traveled Bruce Gary on drums, who had played with Albert Collins, Arthur Lee, Jack Bruce, and Mick Taylor (to name a few) and wanted to become the “Buddy Rich of Rock and Roll.” As Fieger decided to shift from bass guitar to rhythm guitar to increase his comfort with vocals, Bruce brought in the more-than-capable Prescott Niles, who could rock with the best of them while maintaining McCartney-esque sensitivities to melody and harmony. For the lead guitar slot, Doug gave the job to the exceptionally talented Berton Averre, his long-standing songwriting partner who could also provide harmonies in support of Fieger’s lead vocals. After several record companies rejected their six-song demo (including four rejections by Capitol Records), the band became quite a sensation in the Sunset Strip clubs, occasionally supported on guest jams by luminaries such as Tom Petty, Ray Mazarek and Bruce Springsteen. The buzz led to a bidding war among the labels and they eventually signed with Capitol . . . a decision that calls to mind a few lines from Sir Paul’s “Too Many People”:

That was your first mistake
You took your lucky break
And broke it in two

The problem was Capitol had been searching for the “Next Beatles” ever since the breakup, and the melodic, harmonic, upbeat rock delivered by The Knack inspired the marketing department to go whole hog on the “Next Beatles” angle. I’m sure the suits patted themselves on the back and poured the champagne after the early returns indicated that their marketing plan was a smashing success. From Wikipedia:

Get the Knack was released in June 1979 and became an immediate success, thanks in part to an intense promotional campaign by Capitol Records. The Knack’s image was largely influenced by the Beatles. The album cover imitates the Beatles’ first Capitol LP, Meet the Beatles!, and the back cover photo depicts a scene from the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night. To complete the Beatle imagery, the 1960s Capitol rainbow label adorned the LP, a detail the band had written into its contract. The album obtained a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in just 13 days, becoming Capitol Records’ fastest selling debut LP since Meet the Beatles! in 1964. In August, the album reached number one on the Billboard 200, where it remained for five weeks, and was certified platinum by the RIAA for one million copies sold. The lead single, “My Sharona”, also met with immediate success, becoming Capitol’s fastest selling debut single since the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and staying at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks.

The dumbasses failed to recognize that it was just a sugar high. The shit would soon hit the fan and blow all over their tailored suits:

A backlash against the Knack’s overnight success formed among critics who found the band’s image too contrived and their attitude too brash. San Francisco conceptual artist Hugh Brown, who had designed the Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope album cover, started a “Knuke the Knack” campaign complete with T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers. Some music writers began to criticize the band for what they perceived as arrogance, hype and a misogynist attitude expressed in their songs. The band’s refusal to do interviews was also viewed negatively by the music press. One entertainment weekly, Scene magazine, refused to publish a review of the Knack’s concert in Cleveland due to what it called “attempts at censorship” by the band’s management. (ibid)

The “band’s management” obviously forgot that the Beatles quickly disposed of the perception that they were long-haired, unintelligent weirdos immediately after landing at JFK. They charmed the American press with their wit, responding confidently and playfully to every question posed by the journalists in attendance and earned their respect. By contrast, management’s decision to seal off the Knack from the press turned curious journalists into cynical enemies.

The sheer weight of expectations, the backlash, and a heavy touring schedule resulted in the disappointing commercial performance of the so-so follow-up album . . . But the Little Girls Understand. Though the album went gold based on fan assumptions that the second album would top the first, the two singles failed to make it into the top 30. After taking a year off due to a combination of souring group dynamics and utter exhaustion, they recorded a third album (Round Trip) that barely slipped into the top 100. Fieger quit the band at the end of 1981; as the years passed, the Knack made several attempts at a comeback, with varying lineups and middling success. Get the Knack would prove to be their artistic and commercial peak.

While a zealous record company and poor management deserve a good chunk of the blame for turning the shiny new thing into a dull old thing, the boys in the band bear some responsibility for the group’s collapse—especially Mr. Fiedler. From the 1986 article The Knack: Where Are They Now? by David Fricke on Rolling Stone:

To this day, Fieger, who just turned thirty-four, defends the Knack as “a legitimate rock & roll band from the streets of Hollywood. We came up through the club scene and had legitimate songs, real musicianship.” The fatal flaw, he says, was the poisonous, ultimately self-destructive cynicism evident in promotional gambits like the group’s blatant Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan pose in the photograph on Get the Knack‘s back cover. “I have to take responsibility for that,” he adds contritely.

Fieger traces the beginning of the end to as far back as the Knack’s first big hometown show in 1979, following the release of Get the Knack. “It was bedlam, girls jumping onstage. It was the first time we realized we were a successful group. But afterwards, I didn’t really want to enjoy the moment. I wanted to take drugs. We realized we were happening, but my self-destructive nature was also right there.”

“Doug created a massive cancer that was slowly eating the band up,” says drummer Bruce Gary. During one tour of Italy, Gary, bassist Prescott Niles and lead guitarist Berton Averre threatened to punch Fieger out because “he was being a real schmuck,” says Gary. “We pinned him against the wall and told him to shape up or we’d beat him up.”

As one who values her privacy and has a deathly fear of ever becoming famous, I completely empathize with the trauma Doug experienced in response to sudden fame, and I fully agree with his assessment that the band was blessed with real musicianship. The music on Get the Knack was clearly influenced by the British Invasion but except for a few spots where Fiedler’s vocals cross the line into over-the-top, the band consistently delivers the goods. Though the Knack can’t be placed in the same league with the Beatles and the Hollies, the harmonies are bright and well-executed. The lyrics are generally weak, sometimes problematic and largely about sex, but this was America in the late 70s, and according to Dwan Marie on Medium, “First dates were mostly about sex rather than getting to know each other, people had multiple sexual partners and the amount of open or non-exclusive relationships had increased.” The Knack simply gave the people what they wanted: sex, sex and more sex.

In that sense, Get the Knack could have been christened “The Soundtrack of the Late 70s,” and I’ll bet that many couples stopped fucking to faux-sexy disco music and started humping away to “My Sharona” at full blast.

*****

“Let Me Out” (Fieger-Averre): Fieger and Averre felt the band needed a strong opening track for concerts and their upcoming album, and instead of taking the taxi-down-the-runway approach with an introductory feint, they came up with what Averre called an “absurdly fast” song that begins at supersonic speed and never lets up. In the documentary The Knack: Getting the Knack, Bruce Gary said that the lyrics to “Let Me Out” helped make the song the perfect opener because it encouraged the band to “let it out,” while Prescott Niles noted that the song displayed the band “all of a sudden out of the box.” Videos of live performances validate their approach, as the concert-goers immediately jump out of their seats in rock ‘n’ roll ecstasy.

Take that, disco lovers!

The hyper-speed is reminiscent of early UK punk, so it should come as no surprise that the Knack were huge fans of the Sex Pistols and their “let-it-out” approach to rock music. The similarities end there, however, as the Knack employed chord patterns more common to the British Invasion—major-minor base patterns spiced with ninth and sus4 chords. Unlike the Sex Pistols, the Knack placed a greater emphasis on melody, in both the vocals and frequently in the guitar solos.

The tightness of the band is absolutely stunning. Chordal and rhythmic changes are executed to perfection while the band never takes their foot off the gas pedal. Fieger’s lead vocal combines belt-out intensity with complete command of the melodic movement and his rhythm guitar never misses a beat. Averre provides nimble counterpoints, a blazing lead solo that oscillates between melodic reinforcement and ripping heat, and a closing passage that adds a new melodic variation I would describe as surprisingly beautiful. Niles pumps away on the bass in tight cohesion with Bruce Gary, who . . . my fucking god that man is everything you’d want in a rock drummer, combining Keith Moon’s power with the right amount of discipline. His incredible drum rolls are delivered at blazing speed with zero overplay and make my heart go all a-flutter. The lyrics aren’t much, but they fit the mood and the music without a hint of misogyny.

We’ll deal with that issue a few songs down the road.

“Your Number or Your Name” (Fieger-Averre): Averre said that this song “was supposed to sound like a Hollies song” but Bruce Gary turned on the power switch and had the band “jumping and slamming and thrusting.” I don’t think Gary’s contribution diminished the original intent, as the Hollies’ influence is loud and clear in the melodies and harmonies. There was a reason why the Knack was labeled a power pop band, and completely toning things down after “Let Me Out” would have been something of a downer. From the article “Bruce Gary: Controlled Bombast with the Knack” on Modern Drummer:

It’s important to note that the drum sound on Get the Knack is markedly out of character with a lot of hit records that were being made in the late ’70s. Where the norm was to have a flat, fairly dead-sounding kit, Get the Knack sees Gary and Chapman going in the opposite direction with lively, open-sounding toms, a popping snare, and a substantial amount of sound-expanding room ambience.

It’s this unobtrusive recording technique that really lets us experience the full force of Gary’s drumming, especially on the album’s opening one-two punch of “Let Me Out” and “Your Number Or Your Name.” Gary once described the Knack as being “a very good, sensible pop band with a very bombastic drummer,” a notion evidenced by the barrage of gonzo fills that punctuate “Your Number” and bring to mind Who’s Next–era Keith Moon.

I will make the appropriate correction: “Who’s Next”-era Keith Moon with greater control of his impulses.

“Your Number or Your Name” is a perfectly pleasant pop piece (how’s that for alliteration?) where Fieger plays the role of a guy who locks on to a beautiful broad while looking through a window and continues to run into her while moving around the city, but he’s too shy to ask for her number or her name. The chords are simple enough for even the least experienced guitarist to master (G-C-D with an occasional F), and the pretty, singable melody allows the novice to sing and play at the same time in preparation for the first open mic gig. The song’s accessibility forms a large part of its charm, and Fieger never veers off his role as a distant admirer of female beauty and into horny-land. The jangly, slightly distorted guitars echo the glorious sound of the Invasion and the harmonies and backing vocals are the strongest on the album. The critics were (for once) united in their praise of the song, and my favorite reaction came from Beverly Paterson of Rock Beat International: “Charmingly chiming.”

Beverly is now my official alliteration buddy.

“Oh Tara” (Fieger): When Doug was playing with the proto-punk band the Sunset Bombers, they happened to open for the Chicago punk band Skafish, who were blessed with something of an anomaly: a beautiful, female roadie named Tara. I get the sense that Doug immediately fell in love with every beautiful woman he encountered, which isn’t a bad thing unless you’re a rapist. I am happy to report that none of Doug’s romantic partners accused him of forcing himself upon them, so I would view him as an aficionado of female beauty who found it hard to make the first move and got way too frustrated when a woman didn’t put out (an issue we will explore in a few minutes). In this song, he’s Mr. Nice Guy who can’t express his feelings well enough to move Tara’s needle: “Oh Tara, oh oh/You squeeze my heart/And then you let it go.” I don’t think she intended to squeeze his heart or play the dick tease, and eventually Doug had to admit defeat and move on.

Bruce Gary plays a more subtle role in this mid-tempo song, allowing Prescott Niles to shine with a performance somewhere between Entwistle and McCartney, combining rhythmic drive with solid counterpoint. Doug handles the nice melody with appropriate restraint and tones of regret, but the real highlight here is Berton Averre’s lead guitar, supplying jangly arpeggios throughout the song and providing an absolute knockout of a solo near the close that reveals his mastery of syncopation—knowing when to introduce a rest and when to let it rip.

“(She’s So) Selfish” (Fieger-Averre): For the record, I want to remind my readers that I found Mick Jagger and Keith Richards not guilty of the charge of misogyny in both “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb,” but I can’t let The Knack get away with it.

According to producer Mike Chapman, “She’s So Selfish” was one of his favorite songs on the album, a “teasing,  playful look” at Sharona Alperin. Doug was in a long-term relationship with another woman at the time, but when he met Sharona, “It was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat; I fell in love with her instantly. And when that happened, it sparked something and I started writing a lot of songs feverishly in a short amount of time.” (ibid) Unfortunately for Doug, Sharona was also involved in a long-term relationship, so he found himself in painful limbo. At the time, Sharona was 17 and under the age of consent in California, but I doubt that her status as jail bait would have cooled Doug’s passion. Unable to seal the deal, Doug found some release by employing Sharona as his muse, a tactic employed by many a horny poet throughout history, most notably John Keats:

Frances “Fanny” Brawne Lindon (9 August 1800 – 4 December 1865) is best known as the fiancée and muse to English Romantic poet John Keats. As Fanny Brawne, she met Keats, who was her neighbour in Hampstead, at the beginning of his brief period of intense creative activity in 1818. Although his first written impressions of Brawne were quite critical, his imagination seems to have turned her into the goddess-figure he needed to worship, as expressed in Endymion, and scholars have acknowledged her as his muse. (Wikipedia)

In most of the songs about Sharona, Doug expresses sexual frustration marked by a slew of contrary emotions ranging from self-deprecation to complete disorientation, and for the most part, I can empathize with his feelings. In “(She’s So) Selfish,” however, he crosses the line into “blame the broad,” which I find deeply offensive:

She’s been working in the clothing trade
She’s a rich little bitch
And she’s thinking she’s cool
When she tells you that she’s got it made
She make you weak in the knees
Like a love sick fool
Yes, you said she made your motor run
Now you know she’ll never give you none
It’s just me, me, me, me
She’s so selfish
She’s so selfish

Hey, dickhead, a woman has every right to give you none, and none is what you deserve. I’m not the only one who found the song gross; Jim Sullivan of The Boston Globe called the song “a tiresome, sexist rant,” while Robert Christgau extended his dismay to the entire band: “. . . if they felt this way about girls when they were unknowns, I shudder to think how they’re reacting to groupies.” I also find Doug’s vocals quite annoying, especially when he goes kittenish on the word “selfish.” Lyrically speaking, the song does not come across as teasing or playful.

Musically the song is a Bo Diddley piece with an interminable introduction and very few moments of interest. I have no objections regarding the use of the words “fuck” and “ass” (duh), but I am uncomfortable with the word “bitch” in this particular context. Soon feminists would confiscate the term and change its meaning to “strong, independent woman,” but it’s pretty obvious that Doug was intimidated by female self-confidence and it never would have occurred to him that a woman who chooses not to spread her legs may not be either mean-spirited or full of herself.

“Maybe Tonight” (Fieger): In reading the reviews published during the backlash, I noted a distinct pattern: critics who resented the comparison to the Beatles went out of their way to slam nearly every song on the album while providing little in the way of justification. The attitude was “How dare these punks put themselves in the same class as our beloved heroes!” In a scathing review in Trouser Press, Ira Robbins and Michael Sandlin pour it on, labeling the band “endlessly arrogant” and mislabeling Sharona as a “groupie.” What really got my dander up other than their lousy research and superficial listening habits was their complete dismissal of “Maybe Tonight” as “bottom-of-the-barrel sap.”

If you can imagine an alt-universe where the backlash never occurred and the Knack had more time to work on their lyrical skills and vary their offerings, “Maybe Tonight” might have been viewed as the gateway to a brighter future. As the only ballad on the album, the song provides a welcome change of pace while showcasing signs of versatility. The composition is quite varied, with multiple off-key chord changes within patterns and a cleverly executed full-key change that leads to the closing verse. Doug swaps aggressiveness for vulnerability in his vocal tone, supported by beautiful splashes of vocal harmony from Berton, who also makes major contributions on guitar in the form of sweet sustained notes during the vocals and a nimble, sensitive and swooning lead guitar solo towards the end of the piece.

Bottom-of-the-barrel-sap my ass.

“Good Girls Don’t” (Fieger): It’s important to note that Doug wrote this song seven years before its appearance on Get the Knack, for two reasons: he was only twenty when he wrote it (which explains the high school memories orientation); and after featuring it on several rejected demo tapes in the intervening years, he was sick to death of the song by the time the Knack gave it the full treatment.

And that’s what makes the song work!

Doug envisioned a Johnny Cash vocal for the song, and his Cash-like delivery combined with his repetition-driven weariness gives his voice the hangdog tone of an adolescent male whose hope for something better than a wet dream never seems to come true . . . until a faint voice reignites his aspirations:

She’s your adolescent dream,
Schoolboy stuff, a sticky sweet romance.
And she makes you want to scream,
Wishing you could get inside her pants.
So, you fantasize away.
And while you’re squeezing her, you thought you heard her saying . . .

“Good girls don’t,
Good girls don’t
Good girls don’t, but I do.”

Though he visits the girl while her parents are away and starts to make his move, the consummation is never depicted in the song. Instead of describing the “Is it in?” part or the delight of a warm, wet vagina, Doug inserts a bridge that reflects the true theme of the story:

And it’s a teenage sadness
Everyone has got to taste.
An in-between age madness
That you know you can’t erase
‘Til she’s sitting on your face.

When Doug was called to task for this allegedly smutty piece of work, he responded, “All we were doing in songs like the naughty ‘Good Girls Don’t’ was reflecting the way 14-year-old boys feel. And there’s a little 14-year-old boy in all of us. I think that’s why the record did so well.”

It should come as no surprise that the Knack’s many detractors cried “Misogyny!” in their fervor to obliterate the band. A more intelligent and thoughtful response came from anthropologist Joyce Canaan in the chapter “Why a Slut Is a Slut: Cautionary Tales of Middle-Class Teenage Girls’ Morality” from the book Symbolizing America. Canaan argued that the line “Good girls don’t . . .  but I do” “succinctly captures the transformation of teenage girls’ representations of their sexual practices; while they want to be seen as ‘good girls’, even good girls may engage in practices not corresponding to established moral standards.”

I’ve always thought of myself as a good girl and my parents told me I was a good girl, but the thought that “good girls don’t” never crossed my mind. As soon as I started menstruating and began taking the pill, this good girl did and did and did. I saved many a teenage boy from experiencing “teenage sadness,” and given the many frustrated teenage boys today who become incels, breeding hatred of women and engaging in acts of violence against the fairer sex, I consider that period of my life as one devoted to an essential public service that should earn me a shot at sainthood.

My father, who also first got laid at the age of fourteen, swears that the Catholic high school girl who robbed him of his virginity initiated the pairing by whispering, “Good girls don’t, but I do” while tonguing his ear. As that blessed moment occurred several years before Get the Knack, I’m pissed off that he failed to recognize a great song title when he heard one and blew his chance at superstardom. I could have retired at twenty-one!

Despite the underlying sadness, the music is exceptionally bright and upbeat, and I love the takeoff moment when Prescott plays a quick run on the bass to signal it’s time to rock out. The chorus harmonies are exceptionally strong, reflecting the joy of hearing “but I do.” Bruce Gary handles the double backbeat without breaking a sweat and Berton’s jangly chords ring with good vibes.

Capitol forced the band to make a pathetic attempt at a clean version, replacing “‘Til she’s sitting on your face” with “When she puts you in your place,” and changing “Wishing you could get inside her pants” to “Wishing she was givin’ you a chance.” Oh, for fuck’s sake . . . take your puritanic orientation, shove it up your ass and GROW UP!

“My Sharona” (Fieger-Averre): Okay! You take one part Roger Daltrey stuttering on “My Generation,” add the tom-tom drum part from Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go” and turn things over to Bruce Gary (who didn’t care for the song when he first heard it) to spice up the beat with flams (staggered stick hits common to surf music) and voilá, you have a monster hit!

Oops! I forgot the most important part: the recipe will only work if every member of the band gives it everything they’ve got.

“My Sharona” is one of the most intensely rhythmic compositions in rock history, with every member contributing to the stutter-step syncopation. Doug’s lead vocal is locked into the rhythm, Berton’s stuttering guitar riffs intensify the syncopation, Prescott comes through with solid punch and Bruce Gary is the man who provides the solid foundation that holds it all together. From the opening passage of drums and bass to the first appearance of the punctuating passage that will turn into “my Sharona” when they get to the lyrics, my ass always follows the same pattern: left cheek-right-cheek-repeat-repeat-shake-shake-shake-shake. The sheer intensity of the performances from all the band members keeps me grinding away . . . and I believe that was Doug’s intent. “I had this idea of it being sort of a metaphor for sex . . . for the sex that I wanted desperately to have with Sharona . . . and then there would be this climax, and this euphoria. . . this euphoric lead guitar solo.” (ibid, TKGTK).

When the crashing chords announce a rhythmic shift at 2:39, I give my ass a rest while anticipating Berton’s solo. When the beat becomes a straight, steady drive, I go into mosh pit mode while drenching myself in one of the hottest guitar solos on record. “When it came time to record it, Doug just . . . I remember he goes, ‘just burn,’ but it was cool because I knew he was just saying ‘let go’.” (ibid)

And baby, did he ever!

The lyrics should be interpreted through the lens of intense horniness—more expressionistic than poetic. The only concern I have with the words comes when Doug sings, “Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind/I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” The concern is “Fuck, dude, are you trying to get arrested?” Fortunately for Doug, the LAPD paid no attention to the lyrics, and Sharona would not have pressed charges because the two wouldn’t initiate an intimate relationship until long after she had crossed the age of consent.

Though Doug and Sharona’s romantic interlude only lasted four years, the two remained friends, and Sharona frequently visited Doug when he was dying of cancer. This was a relationship between two adults who formed a lasting connection with each other; Sharona served as his muse, but she was also one of Doug’s closest friends. Dismissing her as a groupie is beyond the pale, to say the least.

“Heartbeat” (Montgomery-Petty): This modernized cover of the Buddy Holly hit is a winner on many levels. The pepped-up speed gives the song a brightness missing from the sweeter Holly version, but the melodic strength of the song remains prominent. The Knack is as tight as ever, and avoid overplaying their hand by sticking to what the song needs and no more. What blows my mind is Bruce Gary’s contributions—he’s all over the kit, doing all kinds of rolls, hits and kicks, but somehow manages to remain unobtrusive. That’s discipline.

“Siamese Twins” (The Monkey and Me) (Fieger-Averre): Meh. I think it was too early in their career to indulge in psychologizing and the music is distinctly unmemorable. Oh, well.

“Lucinda” (Fieger-Averre): The classic expectation of girls is that they’re supposed to be sugar and spice and everything nice, so it may surprise you that women can be nasty, sadistic cunts. In this song, we learn that Lucinda is one of those bitter, vengeful broads but the lyrics never come close to explaining how she wound up that way, leaving us with an incomplete character sketch and not enough musical interest to compensate. Oh, well.

“That’s What the Little Girls Do” (Fieger): Love the Invasion guitars, love the combination of bouncy rhythm and the switch to subtle syncopation in the verses, and revel in the tightness of the band . . . but the lyrics are bloody awful. The basic theme involves the ever-present threat of emasculation via the lying, deceiving, ego-destroying female population. This hoary display of male insecurity is made all the worse by an obvious rip-off from the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown”: “Then you’re really not a man at all.” Oh, yuck!

“Frustrated” (Fieger-Averre): Get the Knack appropriately closes with another song inspired by Sharona where the boys get back to the basics, kicking rock ‘n’ roll ass along the way. As noted in the documentary, this piece is more Stones than Beatles, an R&B-influenced rocker with a consistently strong beat heightened by Doug’s punchy rhythm guitar that mirrors his intense frustration about (what else?) not getting laid. The song is revealing in terms of power dynamics, as it seems Doug oscillates between submission and domination. In the first verse, he sings “Oh I wanna serve you/oh no I don’t deserve you,” then devotes two couplets to domination fantasies: “Oh I wanna hold you/Oh and bend and fold you” and “Oh I want to lead you/Oh I want to feed you.” I will now take a moment to explain why Doug had to shit or get off the pot and decide who he is while simultaneously taking pleasure in a new study that concluded that BDSM practitioners like yours truly are anything but sick fucks:

A new study published in the Journal of Homosexuality has found that individuals who practice BDSM tend to have healthier psychological profiles than those who do not. Compared to non-practitioners, BDSM participants were more likely to have secure attachment styles, lower rejection sensitivity, and higher levels of well-being. These findings challenge the persistent social stigma that often links BDSM with emotional dysfunction or psychopathology.

For the record, the study included both gays and straights. Translating the findings from whips and chains to the more common practice of vanilla sex, the truth is that any intimate relationship is more likely to be successful if the partners know who the hell they are and who the hell their partner is. It’s difficult to relate to anyone who lacks self-awareness because they wobble between who they’re expected to be and who they truly are (hence the inherent difficulties of adolescent mating). That said, I respect Doug for sharing those contradictory feelings that nearly everyone in the listening audience could relate to. Self-discovery is a very challenging experience and people need all the help and validation they can get.

I found the closing lines completely baffling (“Call her chicken delight/But the flesh is on the bone/And she ain’t giving you a bite.”), so I asked my father for his take since he and Doug came from the same generation. He laughed and explained that Chicken Delight was a restaurant chain that specialized in delivery and take-out services, then sang their slogan for me, “Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight.” I looked it up and found out that they’re still in business but had reduced their presence in the USA, which is why I never heard of them.

Now I understand, and I think it was a dumb way to end a great rock ‘n’ roll song.

*****

Get the Knack came out a few years before I was born, so I have no memories of the shooting star phase or the polarizing backlash. To my ears, The Knack were an exceptionally talented group of musicians with tremendous potential. Though there are a few songs on Get the Knack that fail to tickle my fancy, the same could be said of Please Please Me and its reliance on weak cover songs to fill the album.

When marketers and critics compare a band or solo artist to the Beatles, the point of comparison usually involves the youthful energy and bright harmonies of the Beatlemania era. Those pundits completely ignore the fact that the Beatles were musical explorers who continued to grow as songwriters and musicians, introducing new sounds and greater lyrical sophistication beyond the boy-meets-girl routine while still maintaining their melodic and harmonic emphases. None of the wannabes have come close to achieving anything like that (and no, I do not consider the Bee Gees’ embrace of disco a growth experience).

We’ll never know if the Knack could have been something more than a throwback Invasion band under different circumstances. Their story is loaded with “what-ifs.” If they had hired a manager with enough brains to realize that performing at the Grammies and displaying their talents to an audience of 30 million was more important than playing meaningless gigs in faraway lands . . . if they had found a mentor like George Martin to encourage their musical development . . . if they had signed with a label who had no interest in marketing them as the resurrection of the Beatles . . . if they had been given more time to develop their songwriting skills . . . if they weren’t forced to spend most of their time on the road instead of exploring possibilities in the studio . . . if they hadn’t existed during a time when cocaine was all the rage . . .

Even if all those what-ifs had become reality, it’s highly unlikely that The Knack or anyone else could have become the “Next Beatles,” and that assertion is even more true today. Given the fragmented music market and the ridiculously abundant number of television channels, there’s no way in hell any artist can dominate the music scene like the Beatles did in a three-channel, radio-dominant, no-internet universe, even if they possessed the talent, creativity and near-universal appeal of the Fab Four.

There will never be another Beatles, and I wish people would give up the search.