The Knack – Most Underrated Band of All Time???

I happened to stumble across a couple of ‘instant watch’ gems on Netflix a few nights ago – a 2004 documentary feature and a (debatably) live 2001 concert video, both featuring The Knack. After inundating myself for two and a half hours with the music and myth of Doug Fieger & company, I remembered how much I loved their songs and how utterly abused they were in their heyday back in the late 70s & early 80s...

Everyone has a band or two, or a singer, who they consider their ‘secret’...not necessarily an obscure act, but a performer or group who hang around on the fringes of success, never quite becoming blockbuster icons. For Agent 5150, those acts include Living Colour (look beyond “Cult of Personality”, my friends), Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, Zebra, and The Rainmakers. However, the one ‘guilty pleasure’ group whose half-dozen studio CDs I always seem to turn to escape the same old, same old (yes, I admit it...there’s only so much “Panama” I can take!!!) are The Knack...

Laugh if you will, Frickers (and you know who you are), but the fact is The Knack were much, much more than a Beatles knock-off. “Get The Knack”, their mega-selling debut, may be one of the best albums of the rock era…period. From beginning to end, one infectious song after the next, the disc gets in your head and never leaves. Sure, “My Sharona” may be widely acknowledged as one of the greatest songs of all time by fans and haters alike, but little known gems like “Siamese Twins (The Monkey And Me)”, “Frustrated”, “Your Number Or Your Name”, and “(She’s So) Selfish” are far better than most of the ‘hits’ on your iPod today. Even the follow-ups that ultimately doomed the band in its first go-round, “...but the little girls understand” and “Round Trip”, are solid. When The Knack launched a comeback with three more albums (“Serious Fun”, “Zoom”, “Normal As The Next Guy”) from 1991 to 2001, the public was indifferent (with the exception of the minor hit “Rocket O’Love”) but the music was still excellent...

Hard to believe, but time has been harder on the band than the critics were. Original drummer Bruce Gary died in 2006, and singer & primary songwriter Doug Fieger has been battling cancer for years. The most important thing is Doug’s health, but I have to admit that it saddens me that we’ll probably never hear from The Knack again beyond the occasional nostalgia gig. With that in mind, let’s cherish the music they gave us, pompous critics be damned. Go ahead, crank up “My Sharona” but don’t forget to groove on “That’s What The Little Girls Do”, “The Hard Way”, “Africa”, “Lil’ Cals Big Mistake”, “Won’t Let Go/Aces & Eights”, and “Pop Is Dead” as well...

It’s never too late to “Get The Knack”, kids!!!

Working on a Scheme?

So Bruce Springsteen thinks Ticketmaster & Live Nation are engaging in questionable business practices. Nothing to argue with there...they are. In my humble opinion, so are brokers like StubHub who buy up the best tickets for concerts & sporting events and then immediately try to resell them at three or four times their face value...

However, as a recent article in Billboard Magazine points out, there may be some indirect hypocrisy being put forth by Springsteen and his reps. In the piece written by Ray Waddell & quoting sources in The Newark Star Ledger, Bruce’s uber-controlling manager Jon Landau claims that there’s nothing wrong with holding 90% (yes, 90%) of the best seats at a Springsteen concert for friends & industry pimps. In the same breath, he then has the audacity to rail against Ticketmaster for “bait-and-switch” maneuvers. Both parties are deeply at fault here, but Ticketmaster has never claimed to be anything other than a business purely concerned with maxing out profit. On the other hand, Springsteen has always claimed to be our rock & roll savior, a New Jersey siren who will help lead us to the promised land...

What does it all boil down to? Ticketmaster is the devil we know. Bruce Springsteen is the dusty devil we don’t, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. He pretends to be ‘one of us’ but is so far removed from the dealings of everyday life that he has become, like Bono & Eddie Vedder, a talented musician who purports to be a commoner but is actually a pampered prince. Ironically, The Boss’ moral decline can be traced directly back to the mammoth success of his “working man” megahit, “Born in the U.S.A.”; after selling tens of millions of records while singing about the loss of the American Dream, Springsteen became that which he (supposedly) abhorred…a narrow-minded, money-grubbing charlatan who talks out of both sides of his soul-patch-adorned mouth...

(And don’t even get me started on that piece of crap Bruce put out earlier this year, his love letter to Barack Obama called “Working on a Dream”. If you plunked down $10 for a copy, then surprise, surprise…you just flushed your money down the toilet for an album that is embarrassing and insultingly sophomoric both musically and lyrically)

Meet the new Boss. Much, much worse than the old Boss.

(For the full picture concerning the Springsteen camp’s battle with Ticketmaster, check out Ray Waddell’s article at http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/springsteen-ticketmaster-war-escalates-1003986457.story#)