The Knack My Sharona

The LA band's stuttering rocker with the dirty m-m-mind, about someone who for co-writer Doug Fieger was "love at fist sight", was one of the biggest hits of 1979.

- Bill DeMain

For Doug Fieger, the secret of songwriting success was to stay in touch with his inner teenager.

That meant raging hormones, unrequited love, and girls, girls, girls.

"When The Knack started, I wrote songs about girls," the late frontman told me in 2008. "I think girls is really what rock'n'roll is about." Indeed, every song on the band's 1979 debut album Get The Knack feels like it burst out of some sexcrazed adolescent bedroom. And although Fieger was 25 when he wrote it, he told me he "felt sixteen".

And that was all down to his lust for a raven-haired muse named Sharona.

In 1978, when The Knack (named after Richard Lester's film The Knack... And How To Get It) were rising through the LA club scene, Fieger's then-girlfriend Judy casually introduced him to her friend Sharona Alperin. Sharona was 17, a stylish clerk who worked in a clothing shop. "It was love at first sight," Fieger said.

"Literally. I broke up with Judy shortly after and chased Sharona for a year." It's a good thing he didn't catch her right away, because the thrill of that chase sparked the idea for the band's biggest hit.

"It was a conscious effort for both me and Berton [Averre, lead guitarist and co-writer] to come at it from the point of view of our remembered teenage selves," Fieger recalled. "We wanted to tell the story from that place, where it's more raw and direct." Fittingly, Averre came up with the famous hammer-meets-chisel guitar riff.

"He'd been listening to Elvis Costello's This Year's Model album, especially Pump It Up," said Fieger.