Doug Fieger R.I.P.

It was the summer of 1979 and my family and I were traveling to Michigan for vacation. As we were driving, the AM radio in our Dodge Aspen station wagon was tuned to the only tolerable station with enough watts to make it through most of the entire journey. The old man hated fiddling with the controls while driving-it was a job that he later delegated to me, but because I was only twelve years old at the time; he didn’t trust me enough to let me make the decisions.
WLS in Chicago was a Top 40 station back then, and by “top 40” I mean that they truly seemed to play just 40 songs over and over. It was designed for commuters, not for long distance travelers. And if your band was fortunate enough to have a hit in the top 10, then you were guaranteed that your song would be played enough times that it would be permanently engrained into the minds of station listeners.
There was one song in particular that captured my attention during that trip, not just because it was played every two-and-a-half hours, but also because it was so downright infectious. Early on in the trip, my Dad acknowledged that it was pretty awesome and my Mom could be seen in the back seat (she actually liked the back seat better so she could read magazines, thereby allowing me to be closer to the radio’s monophonic speaker that was hidden in the top of the dash) singing the chorus. By the end of the trip, both of them were sick of the song, and I vaguely recall one of the WLS DJs commenting that they were playing the song far too often.
“My Sharona” was the kind of hit that you just don’t see today. It was written by Doug Fieger, a guy that sweated through a bunch of anonymous L.A. bands for years before meeting up with three session players with similar talents. Something clicked, the quartet changed their name to The Knack and they found themselves with a massive hit that others would kill for.
It was so massive that “My Sharona” ended up killing them.
How do you repeat a success like “My Sharona?” You don’t, but you should be able to maintain a bit of its popularity for a while. The misconception is that The Knack were one hit wonders. They actually had a pretty big follow up with the awesome “Good Girls Don’t” and their follow-up contained “Baby Talks Dirty,” a complete re-write of “My Sharona” that managed to hit the top 20. Heck, there was even a song from their third album that reached the lower tiers of the top 40.
It wasn’t that Doug Fieger couldn’t write another hit song, it’s just that no one wanted to hear another hit song written by Doug Fieger. Much of the criticism the band faced during the fallout of The Knack was completely unfounded and undeserving, but Fieger did little to try to counter it. His silence was perceived as conceitedness, and when he did talk to the press, he sometimes came across as an asshole. The rock press wanted Fieger to come across as more grateful than he seemed, never mind that the band's newfound success was about a half-dozen years in the making.
It didn’t help that he was also a decade older than the rest of the New Wave crowd he was typecast with. And it was a bit creepy that the boners he got from “the touch of the younger kind” was something that most fellows his age wouldn’t be bragging about, let alone writing about in tight, three-and-a-half minute power pop songs.
In short, he was old enough to know better.
But he was also old enough to know that by continually playing, The Knack would get good. And they were beyond good-particularly on that first record-they were great.
I think the most telling thing about Doug Fieger’s character was that I never read an article where he seemed bitter about not being able to follow up “My Sharona” with the same amount of success. He seemed resigned to the fact that he knew “My Sharona” would be the only song people remembered him/The Knack by and that he’d spend the rest of his life playing that song to smaller venues and during countless nostalgia packages. It didn’t stop him from playing it well either; he was a professional musician before “My Sharona” and each gig was treated as a chance to demonstrate that.
Many people were surprised at how good that he and The Knack were during their performance on Hit Me Baby One More Time, but please, a talent like Fieger could knock out a rendition of Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” in his sleep.
Shortly after turning heads on that television competition, Fieger began a five-year long battle with cancer. He sadly lost that battle yesterday, but it’s fitting that the horn dog decided to pass on Valentine’s Day.
He was 57.