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Get Some, Go Again

Interview with The Knack's Doug Fieger

By Vinnie Apicella

The Knack was a shooting star on the rock scene in the late '70s, a time when we needed revitalization from politically driven problem peddlers and shiny shoed glitterati. The Knack was a power-popped, mop-cropped pretty boy foursome molded in the shape of success—a can’t-miss combination that didn’t. They were a witty Californian creation built of a Beatle-esque blueprint to counteract the blinding effects of the disco ball... and they were good.

Earning a contract with Capitol Records, their overnight sensationalism struck an immediate chord with fans, instantly garnering double platinum selling success with their 1979 breakthrough Get The Knack, led by their timeless number one hit "My Sharona." But the fickle finger of fate would play no favorites, not even for the well-groomed good guys. They would produce two more follow up records in the next two years, but the talented, though short-lived group would sadly go the way of The Monkees a decade earlier—by 1982 their "Next Big Thing" status quickly drowned in a sea of cynicism, successfully vanquishing them to the "Whatever Happened To" archives in the years that followed.

Embarking on this interview satisfied a curious urge for myself, a befuddled follower of the band from the beginning who only recently discovered they do in fact still exist in the "active" files after all this time. How perfect it would’ve been to throw up a quick, attention-grabbing header like "The Knack Is Back" and press the play button... But alas, the band settled that issue by reuniting a decade and a half earlier and have, probably to the surprise of some, remained fairly active ever since! And yet in a way they are back... back from relative obscurity for many but maybe the most ardent of followers.

While the mind-blowing success of their Get The Knack debut was no fluke, anchored by their two million-plus selling follow up, such is a near impossible feat to duplicate for anyone not named Michael, Madonna, Britney, or Backstreet... let alone a pop/rock band two decades removed from their prime. But there’s a vibe building up that likely hasn’t been felt since they first broke.

Currently underway is a brand new live CD and video entitled Live from the Rock and Roll Fun House, The Knack’s first since their classic Carnegie Hall performance some twenty years earlier. This month also saw the reissue of their first four records, Get The Knack, But The Little Girls Understand, Round Trip, and Serious Fun, all superbly remastered and repackaged with unreleased bonus tracks and revealing insights and images to serve as a spring sendoff for a summer long national tour.

So The Knack, in spite of conspiratorial label and press measures, resurfacing and recording inconsistencies, and an all around vagueness that’s plagued the band since their return, are hitting the scene in a big way all over again. They went away willingly at first, yet upon their return the band was for all intents and purposes, exiled in favor of forward looking, fashion trends that can propel superstardom in a moment’s notice, and turn its back the next.

The Knack opted to play their guitars instead of the game. They were a tight-lipped band that let their music do the talking... and talk it did, to the tune of nearly nine million in album sales within an eye-blinking three-year period. They broke big, broke apart, and took a four-year breather before officially reuniting to find themselves slightly out of place in the mid-to-late ‘80s. In 1991 they returned to form with the solid though underexposed Serious Fun release, their first in ten years. Surfacing sporadically throughout the rest of the decade, The Knack, still, for many, had to be considered a talented enigma. How and why could such a promising band disappear so quickly, later to return with little or no fanfare and empty shelf memories?

Behind the scenes, the story’s not quite so simple as The Knack’s founding guitarist/vocalist Doug Fieger will address. In a chronologically reversed set up, Fieger, the sly-eyed and smirking frontman, backpedals intuitively through a mile long list of questions designed to retrace a 23-year history from present to past, primetime to downtime and discourage attention deficit by nearly going the distance for the guts of the story. In May 2002, The Knack is back and they can be found playing in the Rock And Roll Fun House...

Me: "Pop is dead... bring your shovel?"

Doug: Out of my fertile mind... it’s an ironic statement. They’ve been declaring pop dead for a long time—especially pop music. The song is more about the whole sort of pop art movement. The Knack’s whole focus, songwriting-wise, has always been to keep our sense of humor... prominent (Laughs). And I don’t think a lot of people really, at least a lot of the critics, ever really picked up on that. We didn’t play the "angry young man" rocker role; we were more like the "goofy young men." So "Pop Is Dead" is just another in a long line of our songs that have irony, and a bit of humor behind a serious idea.

Me: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the group and others like you—The Romantics, Cheap Trick, and so forth was there’s always that element of fun present in the words and music. It’s an aesthetic that’s agreeable to a free-spirited youth and even getting older I think you can appreciate it to a greater degree... I mean rock and roll’s about having a good time.

Doug: Exactly right. Guys like Pete Townsend did it really well. Certainly The Beatles, Ray Davies... people like that were our heroes, and still are.

Me: I’m going to stick to the video a little bit longer here—I think for many it’s been a while to hear new music let alone a performance video. Considering how I’m not overtly serious with my approach to writing or even questioning, there’s a lot to pick apart here...

Doug: Well we take what we do very seriously... we just don’t take ourselves very seriously (Laughs).

Me: So where’d you come up with this Jimmy Lemonjello character to host the "event?" Any relation to Peter by the way? I just recognized that name from somewhere.

Doug: I kinda remember that too… Well Jimmy is really a composite—he’s kind of based on a DJ from England in the ‘60s, a guy named Jimmy Seville who used to be a host of "Top Of The Pops." He was this big, tall longhaired blonde geek with glasses and a huge honker... and he wore these ridiculously outrageous clothes. He was a very clownish character. He’s also based on a couple of other people that I really won’t mention because they’re still alive! (Laughs) Although one might be, but doesn’t live in America.

Me: I like the set up. You’ve got this hour-long performance footage of about thirteen songs you reel off and within this close quarters set up of the four of you like what you’d see on a number of those old black and white musical/variety shows like American Bandstand or Ed Sullivan... going for that whole nostalgic kick.

Doug: That’s where we saw rock and roll for the first time when we were kids. I did get to see The Beatles play when I was eleven at Olympia stadium. But other than that I didn’t get to see a live band until my early teens. So for me, my first live experiences were always on TV. We had previously done a concert live at Carnegie Hall back in ’79 so we’d already done the three or four camera view in the concert hall. So what could we do that’s going to top that? We wanted to do something different so we built a set and did it like an old style TV show—like a Shindig or Hullabaloo or Ed Sullivan… when sometimes they’d actually have only one artist for the whole show.

Me: So then The Rock And Roll Fun House doesn’t actually exist as a theater or live club?

Doug: No, it’s our show; a show that we invented. Then we put out the word that The Knack was going to do a live TV show and so people just showed up.

Me: What about this parental advisory warning sticker on the package? Explicit lyrics? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Doug: Oh our first album’s full of them. "She’s So Selfish" has "shit" and "fuck" in it... (Laughs) And "Good Girls Don’t" has "...sitting on your face," you know, the sexual innuendos. On "Siamese Twins" there’s "shit" and "piss..."

Me: That’s right now I remember that, it used to crack me up when I was a kid... still the "R" rating doesn’t quite match, well, the image I guess...

Doug: (Laughs) Yeah and that was one of the knocks against us. We, at the time, were outrageous cause we used dirty words. And all we were doing was updating the same kind of outrage that our parents felt when they saw bands talking about... "getting some," (Laughs) and now we’re just describing what it is they were getting!

Me: And all of them, those artists, would talk or infer about it in one form or another anyway, so it’s just a matter of how much you’re willing to reveal.

Doug: By the time we came along we were very explicit. But I mean now, what we did then compared to what’s being said today, it’s almost... prudish. (Laughs)

Me: I grew up in the ‘80s with the whole advent of the warning sticker and the PMRC issue and yeah, today it’s almost second nature—maybe not so much from your era but hey, more power to you... it’s like use more expletives, sell more records, at least from a younger fan’s perspective maybe.

Doug: They made us do it because they... image sells a lot at places like K-Mart or Wal-Mart’s... they’re very, very particular. So you have to label it.

Me: So now I see you’ve gone from the busboy uniforms to wearing full suits in the video...

Doug: Well we were before busboys actually—if you really wanna get technical about it. We actually happened before they did so it was sort of our "look" but yet it really wasn’t. To be fair there was a band before us even called The Heaters in L.A. And we saw the way they dressed. Then they broke up and it was just a way for us to have a uniform that didn’t cost very much money. And now that we can basically afford to buy suits, we have them (Laughs).

Me: Yes the sweet taste of success...

Doug: Yeah in the beginning we couldn’t afford them. That’s why we only wore the white shirts with the ties... cause everybody had a white shirt and Bruce’s (Gary - drummer) girlfriend bought everybody ties!

Me: That whole clean cut image on the outside yet it became pretty clear what was on your minds. So let’s begin our descent here from this point. We’ve addressed the new video and I also understand you’ve got a fairly recent studio record that came out at the end of last year called Normal as the Next Guy.

Doug: Image released it—the same company that just did our latest video and album. Smile Records is their imprint but it’s Image Entertainment overall and the album was released in September 2001. We recorded it at my home studio... and it’s just another Knack album (Laughs). It’s a collection of songs that I find to be very funny actually. It’s one of the funniest albums we’ve ever done; kinda like our "White" album in a sense that not one song relates to any other song on the album.

They’re all completely different from each other—we’ve got a country/western song; a sort of heavy metal/Devo-ish tune; a couple of traditional pop songs... a tip of the hat to Brian Wilson that Berton (Averre – Guitarist) wrote called "The Man On The Beach." So it’s the most eclectic album that we’ve made and also the most adult-oriented… although you know I still got a song on there called "Les Girls" which has got the double entendre of the French "Les Girls" and of course it’s about, well, "Les Girls..." (Laughs)

Me: Did it receive much press? I don’t remember hearing of it at all.

Doug: Yeah a little bit. It’s tough for bands that don’t get on the radio to get any kind of real press. We don’t have any hopes of getting on the radio anymore unless maybe we have a song in a movie that becomes a big hit or something like that. But otherwise, we don’t dance, you know, so... (Laughs)

Me: Well yeah, I think that point’s affirmed in the video...

Doug: Yeah we just kind of play our instruments and sing (Laughs).

Me: Now taking a step back from the last studio record, The Knack was still fairly active during the 1990s.

Doug: We’ve had a charting record in three different decades actually. Going into a fourth decade now, I don’t think we’ll chart with this one, but we did do a couple of things during the nineties. There was Serious Fun in ’91 and Zoom in ’98.

Me: Serious Fun we can address when we move on toward the latest reissued set, but what was Zoom all about?

Doug: That was on Rhino Records and we actually bought that back from them last year because they didn’t promote it at all. So we’re re-releasing it through Image at the end of the year and calling it Re-Zoom and it’ll have some extra bonus tracks to differentiate it from the Rhino release, but it’s the same album. In fact it’s my favorite album that The Knack ever made!

Me: Ah yes, that "under" promotion thing I’ve always wondered about. I mean when you’re the hottest thing going and the label feels they can pull back the free spending reigns, well fine. What’s the logic ten or twelve years later when you’re back to scratching and clawing for every inch, I mean, why release something without a marketing plan?

Doug: Right, it’s difficult to figure out. So that’s why we wanted to reclaim the record and give it a proper release.

Me: But not too long before that "My Sharona" resurfaced and The Knack was relevant again.

Doug: Well the Reality Bites soundtrack happened a few years after Serious Fun and that album sold 3 million copies. "My Sharona" re-charted and so we basically had a new career based on an old song... and a lot of kids never knew it, they thought it was new so we had a whole new audience based on a 15 year old song. So we would’ve put out an album right then around ’95 but we didn’t have to because "My Sharona" kinda took care of that.

Me: So then Serious Fun preceded that in 1991 and was basically your "comeback" album. I really liked this one actually—I mean it was some ten years removed from your last record and I thought picked up well from where you left off with a fresher sound and nice mix of material. My favorite track was "Rocket 'O Love" which, incidentally I was disappointed to find doesn’t show up on the new video.

Doug: A lot of people have asked us about that. I’ve only sung it once, actually, and I could never really sing it again. It’s just really high. The vocal on it is actually from the demo. You see, we did an album, and that’s how we got signed by Charisma. Then they wanted us to re-record the same album so we had to go back in and do it note for note basically. You’d have to ask them why. And I think they wanted a big name producer like Don Was to help market it. So when we redid the album and came to "Rocket 'O Love" I just couldn’t sing it. So we had to take the vocal off the original version and drop it onto the album version!

Me: Maybe you could change it to a lower octave or kinda "grunge" it up a bit.

Doug: We tried to do it in different keys and it just doesn’t work. But it was a top ten AOR hit and that album sold really well until Charisma shelved it. And again you’d have to ask them why they did that.

Me: So that’s actually the last of the reissued set of your first four records and now that we’ve backtracked there with Serious Fun, I want to get your thoughts on a passage I read from the new Get The Knack liner notes. You mentioned, "Berton and I had always conceived of a band as starting from a certain place and following a certain progression." Which is to say then you’re coming from a more adolescent starting place and advancing with a more grown up model?

Doug: That’s exactly right. And Serious Fun was our... In ‘69 and ‘70 music, before they called it "heavy metal" they just called it "heavy music." Even The Beatles, you know, "She’s So Heavy," the song, they got into that "heavy" thing where it was this sort of really big sound… and then Humble Pie and bands like Uriah Heep ten years after and it was like the "heavy" thing. So Serious Fun is our "heavy" album. We got Marshall amps instead of the Vox and the Fenders, and I switched over from a Stratocaster to a Les Paul, and we wrote songs that sort of had that "heavy" thing happening like during our late adolescence.

So from a periodical standpoint, Get The Knack and ...But The Little Girls Understand started with our early adolescence when we were like fourteen; Round Trip was sort of the psychedelic period which was our middle adolescence and Serious Fun was later, like into our early adulthood. Then Zoom took it further into adulthood and now basically with our latest album we’re pretty much up to date (Laughs).

Me: And the sound on Serious Fun is noticeably "heavier" as you mentioned and you’re coming from a more mature lyrical perspective, but then we’re not talking only about this all grown up folk music type of thing or romance novel narratives either. I thought there was still plenty of looseness present there.

Doug: Well, Serious Fun... and that’s the whole idea. And that song in particular was about how people don’t read anymore, you know and that reading itself is "serious fun." Yet it’s the whole ethic of the band too. We’re serious about what we do and fun is a big part of it though... When I’m up on stage, I really am having the time of my life. I’m not miserable up there; I’m there because I love it.

Me: And I think fans feed off that enthusiasm. I think a rock concert should definitely be a release but I think there’s such a thing as being too serious and using the stage as a forum to preach pessimism rather than a means to get away from the monotony of the everyday... it should be a release but maybe a "relief" also, in my estimation.

Doug: Exactly, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that but we just don’t do it. People used to say, "Well how come you’re not more serious about it?" Well ya got Elvis Costello to do that during our time; You got The Clash to sing about it, the "serious" issues, so why do you need us to do it? We’re doing something different.

Me: And yet it doesn’t have to dominate your entire viewpoint or your entire record. If you’ve got a serious message to get across there, fine, say your peace and get on with it... I think under those conditions, more the exception to a rule, even in your case, it makes a stronger point.

Doug: Yes, and I always liked the bands that had very different or conflicting viewpoints as well.

Me: You look at a band like The Monkees... and you’ve all aged much better than they by the way...

Doug: Well thank you (Laughs).

Me: And they do what they do and they’re fun to listen to and you know there’s a certain style and consistency they’re known for.

Doug: We’ve never attempted to do anything other than what we started out as… although in my opinion we’re good at a lot of different things. We can record a song that’s very simple or we can record a song like "Africa" on Round Trip which is a very complex piece of music. We were trying to do something like Carlos Santana meets Chic and so it was that sort of funk thing along with the Santana influence… you know, and The Doors. I was kinda singing it like Jim Morrison. It was an amalgam but a serious piece of music at least.

Me: So now you’ve got the reissued collection of the first four releases happening, and they really did a classy job on them. I enjoyed reading a little on the band history and to get the "real" story behind your disappearance there, really in the midst of your hey day, if not shortly thereafter, but I think it’s a perfect way for fans to rediscover the band; although I’m surprised by the timing, ten or twenty years after the fact. Wouldn’t it have been timelier to strike with the reissues when "My Sharona" resurfaced a few years back?

Doug: Well Capitol wasn’t being run by people who knew what they were doing at the time (Laughs). And Andy Slater has recently become the president and I think he’s a lot more on the ball than the people who were running the label in 1995. Who knows why corporations do what they do? I’m continually amazed by the record business; it baffles me. I just make the music... it’s just really difficult for me to comprehend their intentions.

Me: The main thing is they’re here now at least and it’s a chance for people to hear The Knack again, for the first time so to speak, with the remastered sound and bonus tracks... plenty of eye candy and all that.

Doug: Well I think so and I hope so... The first two albums are of a kind—they were meant to be a double album. They came out separately but all of those songs were written at the same time. The third album was really supposed to be our second album and then the fourth was the next progression.

Me: And there’s one of the interesting things you learn in reading the liner notes... I never knew that. My misconception was I thought maybe the second record suffered in the wake of your debut, it didn’t really, but I was questioning the timing of its release when Get The Knack still seemed to have plenty of life left in it even considering the two big "My Sharona" and "Good Girls Don’t" singles.

Doug: You’ve got to also understand that was the period of time when "commercial" was a bad word. You didn’t wanna be perceived as being commercial, so if you milked an album for 5 singles you were being commercial. Then the press was going to hate you… and they hated us already cause we sold 6 million records! (Laughs) So it didn’t matter. So maybe we should’ve... hindsight is always 20/20. But the way it worked out is the way it worked out and I’m happy with it.

Me: So that was the plan then, hit with two quick singles then you’ve got basically another album of songs in the waiting...

Doug: Get out the songs that had already been accumulated so we could write more and sort of clean the slate. If you remember the Guns N’ Roses album, Lies, after their first record, they released this one with all these live and acoustic tracks—songs that didn’t make it onto "Appetite..." That’s basically what ...But The Little Girls Understand was, a cleaning of the slate.

Interestingly enough, we were out on tour with Journey a week and a half ago and Neil Schon said to me, "Your second album, when it came out, I thought it was a masterpiece!" You know, so here’s somebody who’s talking about our second album and not Get The Knack, and actually a lot of fans have said to me they like "Little Girls" better than Get The Knack.

Me: That’s got to be very gratifying to hear that from your peers, let alone your fans. And so much for any misperceived shortsightedness that suggests The Knack equals "My Sharona" and little else. 2.5 million in sales doesn’t lie!

Doug: Yeah and it was actually considered a failure! (Laughs)

Me: Successful by any standards except a six million selling predecessor I suppose.

Doug: So everybody goes, "Oh, they must be slipping." I remember when Prince sold like 15 million of Purple Rain and his next one only sold three million... and the same thing happened to Alanis Morrisette. There’s always somebody wanting to knock you down.

Me: And how do you even conceive of selling that many records in the first place... and then to be placed in such a precarious position to duplicate if not exceed the feat, you’re unwittingly competing with yourselves...

Doug: We didn’t even consider it would do that. As a matter of fact the reason they wouldn’t release a double album was because they didn’t believe the first one was gonna sell any more than 100,000 copies. They were hoping the record would sell maybe 200-300,000 so when it sold what it did... And you know what, the album was released and it went to number one before "My Sharona" went to number one. "My Sharona" wasn’t released until three weeks after the album was released because Capitol wasn’t sure that it was the single they wanted to go with. They were actually believing that "Oh Tara" was gonna be the first single!

Me: Get The Knack could realistically have yielded any number of hit singles up and down the line.

Doug: Capitol turned down "Good Girls Don’t" four different times before they signed us... "That’s What The Little Girls Do" they turned down as well. They just didn’t know.

Me: I guess in a way it’s like a blessing and a curse, this overnight success.

Doug: The golden albatross...

Me: So your first two records then sold in excess of 8 million copies but by the time you arrived at Round Trip in ’81, you were already on the way out. To reference my "Hear them again for the first time" suggestion earlier, I wasn’t even familiar with Round Trip until recently and what I hear is a more adventurous record that wasn’t as commercially successful, but probably could’ve been.

Doug: Although it did sell 300,000 copies... which was all they pressed up.

Me: That’s it?

Doug: Well we broke up about a month and a half after the record came out. So once they sold the initial run of that record, which sold out very quickly, they didn’t press up anymore. As a matter of fact Capitol records cut out the entire Knack catalog in 1983. So from ’83-’89 you couldn’t buy a Knack record... including "My Sharona."

Me: I’d like to know the logic behind that maneuver.

Doug: Yep, you could not buy a Knack record for almost seven years!

Me: So really after only a few short years, The Knack broke up during what should’ve been your prime. But you did get back together in 1986...

Doug: We were on tour from 1978-1982 and we toured constantly. There was a period there where we toured for two and a half years straight and we recorded two albums during that period. Round Trip took about three to four weeks to record but it took like five months to mix, which was really a drag. And there were personality conflicts going on, and there were a lot of drugs...

So by the time 1982 rolled around we needed a break... and so we took a four year break. And then we got back together and we’ve pretty much been active since then. But the music business has changed and the kind of band that we are has not been popular for a long time so regardless of the quality of our records we really haven’t had the same sort of support from record companies... but that’s not why we ever did it to begin with.

Me: You can’t go around chasing fashion trends… I think you risk alienation, and somehow you always end up left behind then later scrambling to get back to where you were before—the rightful place that got you going to begin with.

Doug: Yet the truth is we’ve made records that actually do sound different from one another. It’s still The Knack but you can actually hear a progression. In some ways I’ve likened us to an art project. In one of the liner notes I mentioned that, "The Talking Heads are lauded for doing what they do by critics... and we’re criticized for doing the very same thing." We’re supposed to be this spontaneous, you know, hey kids let’s just go and play and who cares if you can play your instrument or write a good tune? I mean you don’t wanna listen to bands that can’t play. And bands like The Ramones, who supposedly were like that, they were craftsmen.

Me: And they wrote good songs that were memorable and catchy.

Doug: Exactly right and they knew what they were doing and there was nothing haphazard about it.

Me: So why did it take you three albums before you became receptive to the press?

Doug: We just didn’t have anything to say. We were a new band and we wanted the music to speak for itself. And that’s really the truth. We thought it was very pretentious that a band with one record out would come and make these pronouncements. They would ask questions like, "What do you think about the war in Somalia" or whatever and you know, we’d laugh... because we’re like 25 year old kids playing rock and roll and so what are you asking us questions like that for? Who cares what I think about it?

Me: I think the quick success has a lot to do with developing sensationalism in the story... I mean when the smoke clears, you can ask about "My Sharona" or tales from the tour bus or whatever for just so long, yet it’s because of this lasting success and front page headlines that they search out another angle... what can you say about so and so to keep the readers interested while they wait for the next album? Why wouldn’t you guys have sought to address then, maybe some of the impending confusion, or "issues" let’s say, by the release of your third record?

Doug: By then nobody wanted to hear about it. It was, get out the razor blades... And we didn’t wanna talk or answer those questions either. Who wants to sit and be attacked for making a rock and roll record? There was no point in it so we just didn’t say anything. We weren’t much different than Zeppelin in that regard. They never talked to the press either. And Led Zeppelin was a hated band by the press right up until they broke up! (Laughs) After their second album, forget it. You know these are bands that are canonized now but I remember those times.

A guy like John Sebastian who did some great work with The Loving Spoonfuls didn’t want to be "tarred" with the brush by acknowledging his involvement with The Doors! He played harmonica on "Roadhouse Blues" and used a fake name in the credits. In the beginning they were the critics’ darlings but by the time of their third album when they became really successful with "Hello, I Love You," and those type songs, they’d become very uncool.

Me: I look at doing press very differently than what might be considered "junk" journalism or whatever. I think musically speaking, myself, and others involved in publicizing artists and bands, have a genuine sincerity to help bring the facts to the fans and re-establish real world contact. So for me, I look at this opportunity to speak with you as providing an underground channel of sorts to people not currently served in the mainstream market. And I’m glad you’re more receptive to speaking to the press now because I think you’d be doing yourselves a disservice at this stage of the game.

Doug: I’ll tell ya I think from my perspective it’s because I’m not or The Knack isn’t a current band. But the current bands have put up with the same kind of nonsense that we did at the time—Brittany Spears has to and N’Sync and those other successful pop stars today. They have to deal with the same bullshit that bands back then had to. Now I’ve got the luxury of not caring cause I’m not on the charts—and we don’t threaten anybody. So I can just talk about what we’re really doing to people who actually care about the music—and as you say to bring the fans up to speed.

Me: Especially important because of the perceived obscurity of the band… I mean you guys have been operating as a unit again since ’86 and really how many people knew about it? Luckily today there’s the internet to produce an alternative to those traditionally favorable outlets like TV and radio and still there are the mainstream markets and journalists preoccupied with what’s hot...

Doug: And it’s nice for people to know what’s going on but you know it doesn’t keep me up at night. I have nothing against people who write about music, that’s their gig. The people who wrote about music seemed to have something against what I did; it wasn’t the other way around. So it always surprised me there was always this vehemence to their approach... it was as if we were a political party or some kind of government agency. And we’re just playing rock and roll and trying to entertain people!

Me: Plus now 20 years after the fact, there are so many more bands in existence and tastes change and fashions come and go so you’re afforded the opportunity of dealing with a lot of "niche" publications that cater specifically to a given audience. So you combine this with so many up and coming young bands that are hungry for press and it maybe lessens the degree of focus on one or two or three primary acts. I think at this point it’s all about listener awareness and that’s all it needs to be about at the end of the day.

Doug: There was a point where rock music became very politicized and I don’t mean politically, but it was like if you aren’t a "punker" or you aren’t a "serious" musician, if you’re talking about having fun and you’re trivial, you don’t matter. If you’re a pop or rock band and you’re not playing heavy music then you’re trivial... and it was like that. It became an "us against them" philosophy where this punk ethic took hold and if you’re making money you’re a sell-out and all that crap.

Me: I think this is all the more remarkable considering how many big names of the time, well-respected musicians even today, who you were associated with and admired by—like Springsteen and those types.

Doug: All the musicians always loved us.

Me: So now The Knack’s back on the scene probably with more visibility than at any other time since your breakthrough debut all those years ago—you’ve got this great reissued set hitting the shelves concurrent to a brand new live CD and video... and this less than a year after releasing a new studio record. 75% of the original lineup’s still intact, a new label, new management... so any plans for touring?

Doug: We play pretty much every weekend. We go out for three to four day weekends and then we come back and have a normal life during the week. Some months are heavier than others but we play at least seven to eight times a month during the summer. We play festivals and we play theaters; rarely will we play a club, unless it’s maybe a House of Blues type thing… and we’ve got The Rock And Roll Fun House going now, which is our package show that we take to the sheds. For instance we’re playing in Detroit at the D.T.E. Center, which used to be called Pine Knob and that’s a 15,000 seat place where it’ll be us and The Smithereens and I think one or two other bands...

Me: Are these packages generally set up with similar bands from your era or do we see The Knack playing with various local bands?

Doug: No, we see The Knack playing with Missing Persons or The Smithereens... or Tommy Tutone or The Fixx...

Me: (Laughs) Tommy Tutone? Is he still playing?

Doug: He is and they’re really good.

Me: So it’s modeled as one of those "retro" packages, for lack of a better term, and better for fans who can catch some of the good ones all in one place like you guys, or Journey, who you mentioned earlier, maybe Boston… many of us were never afforded the opportunity to see them the first go round.

Doug: It’s okay to call it "retro..." that just means I can play my instrument! (Laughs) And yeah we would love to do that. We’ve been trying to get Cheap Trick to do it but they won’t tour with anybody else. They just tour on their own. They’re funny guys, I dig them...

Me: It’s great to hear The Knack remains very much an active band and fans can look forward to seeing you later this year.

Doug: We tour every spring, summer, and fall and we’re currently at the very beginning of our spring tour. We’re on a very manageable schedule today. We get to pick and choose where we wanna play, how we wanna play, and they pay us to do it. It’s wonderful that people can come to see us and we get to entertain ‘em. They don’t pay me to play... they pay me to leave my house and to travel and stay in a hotel room. Cause I would pay them to let me play in all honesty. We love doing what we do and I think we’re doing it better than we’ve ever done it.

www.theknack.com

Discography:

Get The Knack - 1979
...But The Little Girls Understand - 1980
Round Trip - 1981
Retrospective - 1991
Serious Fun - 1991
My Sharona - 1992
Proof: The Very Best Of The Knack - 1998
Zoom - 1998
Best Of The Knack - 1999
Normal As The Next Guy - 2001
Live From The Rock And Roll Fun House - 2002