1979 The Knack – Good Girls Don’t
Jimmy Miller produced music for the Rolling Stones, Traffic, and Blind Faith (he was the Mister Jimmy mentioned in the lyrics of You Can’t Always Get What You Want). He founded and produced the group Sky. Detroit native Doug Fieger played bass and sang for the group, which recorded two unsuccessful albums for RCA in 1970 and 1971. Sky broke up in 1973 and Doug moved to Los Angeles, where he met Berton Averre.
The two started their own group with Doug on lead vocals and rhythm guitar and Berton singing backup vocals and playing lead guitar and keyboards. They recruited drummer Bruce Gary and bass player Prescott Niles to complete the Knack. The band started performing live in 1978 and quickly built up a strong following in the clubs on the Sunset Strip.
Jamming with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Ray Manzarek brought enough attention to the group that at least ten record companies got involved in a bidding war to sign the group to a recording contract. The band selected Capitol Records, earning them the largest signing bonus in the label’s history.
Their first single, My Sharona, topped the charts in the US and Canada and helped their first album become one of the highest selling albums of 1979.
They selected Good Girls Don’t as the second single from the album. It peaked at #11 on the Hot 100 later that year.
The group’s second album followed in 1980 and struggled in part because of poor reviews and the early “woke” reaction to the lyrics of some of the band’s songs. Their first single from the album, Baby Talks Dirty, stalled at #38, and their second single failed to reach the top forty.
After the group’s third album failed to produce any hit singles in 1981, the group disbanded for nearly a decade.
Run-DMC sampled My Sharona in their 1979 hit It’s Tricky, and a lawsuit over using the sample without permission eventually got settled out of court.
In 1991, the band reformed and recorded a fourth album. The single Rocket O’ Love didn’t reach the Hot 100, but it did reach the top ten on the US Mainstream Rock chart in 1991.
The band toured off and on and recorded two more albums in 1998 and 2001 without attracting much of a following.
In 2005, the band appeared on the US version of the television show Hit Me, Baby, One More Time and performed My Sharona and Are You Gonna Be My Girl. They lost out to Vanilla Ice in the voting for best performance of the night. Ouch!
The band essentially ended when Doug died in 2010 after battling brain and lung cancer for four years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_(American_band)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Fieger
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