The real person behind ‘My Sharona’ by The Knack
The late 1970s was a brilliant time for music. Whilst new wave and post-punk were in their heyday, a strange sub-genre of rock ‘n’ roll was also starting to come together: power pop. With The Replacements and The Cars cutting their teeth during this period, another band broke through in 1979 and set the standard for everyone else who followed, The Knack. Their debut album, Get the Knack, is a cult classic, boasting their most famous song, ‘My Sharona’.
A catchy and dynamic piece, you can hear the origins of parts of Weezer’s sound within it, and the material is so lauded that the late frontman of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, listed Get the Knack as one of his 50 favourite recordings. A ubiquitous song in culture, even those who aren’t necessarily fans of rock music know and love the song, a testament to its potency.
Notably, ‘My Sharona’ is about a real woman. The eponymous woman is Sharona Alperin, who dated The Knack’s frontman Doug Fieger for four years and even toured with the band during their heyday. The songwriter later recalled of Alperin: “It was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat; I fell in love with her instantly. And when that happened, it sparked something and I started writing a lot of songs feverishly in a short amount of time.”
Fans of the band and song will remember that the sleeve of the single features a picture of Alperin herself. Looking back on the photo shoot, she revealed that it only took ten minutes to wrap up. She said: “That’s just what I would walk around in, a t-shirt and Levis… I guess it was considered raunchy since you can see my nipples through the shirt. Nowadays, that outfit would be considered tame.”
The song was so successful that it spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard chart in 1979, and then, in 1994, it was used in the soundtrack for the Winona Ryder film Reality Bites, and it had a resurgence. Despite the song’s popularity, Alperin has explained that she has had a largely positive experience of being the song’s subject.
There was a period when the song was so popular that she had to turn it off when it came on the radio. However, she’s now thankful that she had such a big hit written about her and always keeps it on. She said: “How many people have a song written about them?… I mean, who would I be to say ‘it’s too much’? I don’t tire of it… About 70 percent of the people I meet, as soon as I introduce myself as Sharona, they say ‘My Sharona’… And another 20 percent, you can tell, they’re thinking it in their heads. It’s so funny.”
Interestingly, Alperin is a successful real estate agent in Los Angeles and has capitalised on her use in the song. Her website takes its name from it, and it is bursting with references to the track.
One part even reads: “In what might be called an auspicious instance of synchronicity, that home search and also being immortalised in the song ‘My Sharona,’ written by her beau and made famous by his band, The Knack, contributed greatly to the launch and success of Sharona’s real estate career. Consequently, not only is she passionate about real estate and her commitment to her clients, many of those loyal clients are in the entertainment industry.”
