Doug Fieger - Forever Together: Extended Liner Notes by Robert Wilonsky

Doug Fieger - Forever Together: Extended Liner Notes

By Robert Wilonsky.

Doug Fieger never did get the knock on The Knack – never understood it, sure as hell never appreciated it. 

Far as he was concerned, the sneers and loathing aimed at his power-pop combo were as unfathomable as a child hating ice cream. He spent a few months making one of the most popular records of the 1970s – as angsty as it is catchy, as aching and it is amiable – only to spend the rest of his too-short lifetime defending it. The man, and his band, deserved better.

I tried to tell him as much a long time ago, in the early winter of 1998 – our first and last conversation after I’d spent a few years as a rock critic occasionally sharpening knives on the neck of the 1972 Fender Strat he played on “My Sharona.” Tried to tell him the jabs were jokes wrought from loving a band I was supposed to hate. That I only wrote about him so much because I liked him. That Get the Knack was a teen-lust soundtrack about frustrated adolescence that wore its smirk well into middle-age.

But time and again the conversation turned to the backlash that made whipping boys of a band that had the misfortune (!) of selling more than million copies of their debut and spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. 

"I understand the idea in the Western world that you build up your heroes in order to tear them down," Fieger told me in February 1998. "But I was a little surprised at the vehemence with which we were attacked. It seems to me it was all out of proportion to what it was that we were and what we attempted to do, which was to play well-crafted, well-written, well-performed, fun pop music for an audience that might like it. The people who accused us of having some Machiavellian plan to make a lot of money were way off base, because it wasn't the truth. Certainly, we want to be working artists and make money so we don't have to get other jobs. But I think it came in proportion to the success we had.”

Fieger was a tough Detroit boy forced to trod the Hollywood walk of shame just for having a smash hit on a label eager too make fresh Fabs out of four men who just wanted to pop. 

He’d been close to fame before as frontman for his high-school band Sky, which sounded like it had been stuck in a Traffic jam. They released two records on RCA cut with Jimmy Miller, the Rolling Stones producer Fieger pursued like any good teenage crush; in 1971, Fieger can even be seen – wearing a jumpsuit! -- fronting the band during a Roger Corman-directed rave-up in the movie Private Duty Nurses, for which Sky provided the soundtrack. Skinny ties weren’t yet the fashion. Not sure jumpsuits were, either.

With guitarist Berton Averre, bassist Prescott Niles and drummer Bruce Gary, Fieger got the Knack in 1978. A year later came the debut record, made by Capitol Records to mimic the Beatles’ bow, and the single “My Sharona,” which blared from every radio station long enough to stick as a No. 1 single for six weeks – its first go-round as a hit single until its resurrection in 1994 on the Reality Bites soundtrack. 

But as you’ll hear (again) on the live cuts included here, “My Sharona” wasn’t even the best song on a record that sounded like Buddy Holly had he been enrolled at Ridgemont High. “Frustrated,” “(She’s So) Selfish,” “Good Girls Don’t” – those were the centerpieces, the songs about ache and longing written by men in their 20s for boys in their teens. “My Sharona” was merely the song that influenced Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” Kurt Cobain, the Strokes and countless other bands too cool to cite The Knack as the backbone for their backbeat.

Listening to Get the Knack and its hasty follow-up … but the little girls understand, along with the solo tracks and detours and outtakes included here for the first time, is to hear young men recalling the torment of being, well, younger men. These are songs about wanting what you can’t have – girls, yes, but also small wins and just maybe a little respect.

"We were a loud Buddy Holly and the Crickets, except it was a band more than a front guy and his side guys," Fieger told me in 1998. "I always thought of us as that. I got on a Stratocaster because of Buddy Holly. But people have picked up on the fact it was an album about teenage love. If we had announced that back then, people would have said, 'That's such a pretentious statement, who the hell do these guys think they are?' But it really was.

“It was a loose concept, a set piece Berton and I wrote from the point of view of our 14-year-old remembered selves. And since he was only 24 and I was only 25 at the time, it wasn't like we were stretching way back in our memories. But then again, some people wrote that I had to be in my late 30s at that time, too, so there was a lot of really weird hysterical writing about the band."

Fieger died in 2010 at the age of 57, claimed by a long and brutal battle with cancer. Surely he would have been amused by the idea of a boxed set documenting his work with and without the band that made him famous and infamous. And just as surely, he might have said he absolutely deserved it. 

“By any stretch of the imagination, The Knack has been a huge success," Fieger told me. "Just because 15 or 20 writers don't like us, what the fuck does that mean?"

Turns out, not a damned thing.

Forever Together is available now: https://dougfieger.bandcamp.com/album/forever-together