Who is on the ‘My Sharona’ cover art?
A song so catchy that you’ll probably have that riff rattling around your head all day just from reading the headline of this article, The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ is an inarguable power-pop masterpiece. Like every great pop song, though, the single leaves some questions unanswered: namely, who on earth is Sharona?
Pop music has a habit of naming songs after seemingly intangible women, spanning the spectrum from ‘Peggy Sue’ to ‘Billie Jean’, but few offer quite such an obsessive tone as ‘My Sharona’. Indeed, if you take a passing glance at the lyrics, Doug Fieger’s declaration that he can “always get it up for the touch of the younger kind”, hasn’t aged particularly well.
Then again, it’s difficult to imagine the music-buying public of 1979 making such an overtly sexually-driven track one of the biggest-selling songs of the year, and yet it spent six weeks at number one in the US singles charts.
On this side of the Atlantic, the single reached a still impressive number six in the charts, making The Knack one of the most memorable one-hit wonders of the late 1970s, and giving them a career benchmark which they could never really recapture. You could certainly make the case that most pop-buying audiences don’t tend to pay too much heed to lyrical content, but it isn’t as though the single’s picture sleeve left any ambiguity over the song’s nature.
Featuring a lone woman, clutching a copy of The Knack’s debut album, Get The Knack, against a simplistic grey background, the picture sleeve wasn’t going to win any awards for art direction. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band certainly had nothing to worry about, but the woman on the cover still caught the attention of many would-be listeners, either due to the metric ton of hairspray it must have taken to achieve that distinctly 1970s effect, or the more or less transparent nature of her white tank top.
It’s a pretty sleazy cover in that way, but then sleaziness is no stranger to the pop music industry. However, the overt sexuality of the cover star becomes a little more uncomfortable with the realisation that the woman in question is the real-life Sharona.
Sharona Alperin was the girlfriend of Fieger at the time the song was written, having met when he was 25 (despite looking about 40) and she was 17. ‘My Sharona’ wasn’t the only song Alperin inspired during the four-year relationship between the pair, but it is certainly the most explicit. Of course, the fact that the 17-year-old was the one inspiring lyrics about “the touch of the younger kind” and “the length of my thighs” adds an entirely new dimension of discomfort to the power-pop classic, and the fact that she is provocatively placed on the single’s cover, too, doesn’t tend to help that fact.
Nevertheless, Alperin and Fieger reportedly remained close even after the demise of their romantic relationship, right up until the songwriter’s death back in 2010. What’s more, she was able to live a relatively ordinary life as a realtor in Los Angeles, with her various clients none the wiser that the person selling them their house was the very same, they had probably seen splashed across the ‘My Sharona’ singles lining the shelves of record stores all the way back in 1979.
