When My Sharona exploded onto radio stations in 1979, it became one of the biggest rock songs in America and turned The Knack into overnight stars. But behind the iconic guitar riff and unforgettable chorus was a real woman named Sharona Alperin. In this installment of our Story of a Song series, our own Greg Hengler shares how a chance meeting inspired one of rock music’s most recognizable hits, featuring reflections from Sharona herself and songwriter Doug Fieger.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
This is Lee Habeeb and this is our American Stories.
For a very brief period in nineteen seventy nine, the
band The Neck looked like the future of rock and roll.
It was the summer of the infamous disco demolition night
at Comiski Park in Chicago, and many old school rock
fans were ready to embrace a new band into this void.
(00:32):
Stepped the Neck and their song, My Sharona. Here’s our
own Greg Hangler with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Even now, multiple decades after the biggest single of nineteen
seventy nine, Sharona Alprin can’t escape it. Almost any time
someone hears my name, Miss Alprin says, they say, oh,
like my Sharona, and then they say, oh, I’m so sorry.
I didn’t mean to say that. You probably hear that
(00:59):
all the time. I’m They have no idea. She’s not
just a Sharona, She’s the Sharona, the object of the
knacks bopping nineteen seventy nine hit My Sharona. The band’s
lead singer, Doug Figer, wrote the song’s lustful lyrics about
her when she was seventeen and he was twenty six.
(01:23):
Here’s Doug Figer.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It is a song that has a life of its song.
It’s not just a song, it’s a cultural icon, if
you will.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
The song became Billboard’s number one single of nineteen seventy nine.
Here’s the next basis, Prescott Niles.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
People do know the name of the band, but my experiences,
they go, yeah, you know my Sharona. Oh yeah, that’s
my favorite song, and my kids and my wife and
you know, and all of a sudden, everybody’s got a
story about My Sharona.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
My Sharona has never gone away. Ben Stiller built a
memorable scene around the song in his nineteen ninety four
directorial debut Reality Bites, claiming it for Generation X. Nirvana
did a grunge version, and the tune was reported to
be on President George W. Bush’s iPod in two thousand
and five. Here’s Sharona, Alprin.
Speaker 5 (02:17):
People stay like My Sharona, and very very often I say, yes,
I’m the same girl that the song was written about,
and they can’t believe it.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Lead singer Doug Figer explains how My Sharona all started
with lead guitarist Burton Avere.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Burton had a drum figure that he played me. Now
he’s since told me that it was only months, but
I seem to remember it was a couple of years
before we actually wrote the song. He beat it out
on his legs, showed me this drum beat. It was
(02:59):
before he told me, you know what the riff was
going to be, even he just said, I have this beat.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Here’s Burt.
Speaker 6 (03:15):
I’d been listening a lot to this second Elvis Costello
album and there was this this this appeal of this
kind of demented a broach in the rock and roll,
you know, to this kind of balls to the wall
and slamming. And I had this riff and I brought
it into one of our rehearsals and I just started
playing it. I didn’t even say, you know, hey, here’s something.
(03:38):
I just started playing the riff and I was telling
Bruce I imagined no symbols, just kind of a tom snare
kind of thing, and he came up with the riff.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Here’s drummer, Bruce Gary.
Speaker 7 (03:51):
My roots are very much surf music. My first band
was a surf band and there was surf stormps and
I can show you you know, a surf stomp is
like a flam things like which is which is basically
he wanted it to be in a country, and I
interjected the flam thing, which gave it its own characteristic
(04:15):
to it.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Here it is the only my Sharona rehearsal tape in existence,
and it’s Burton’s like of course, this is where we
fueled everything off of the main ref. We have been
playing around locally for a couple of months and there
(04:38):
were a couple of girls that used to actually three
of them, we used to uh kind of affectionately call
him the Nacatz, you know. They used to come down
to hear his perform and one of them was named Sharona,
and my lead singer Doug had quite a crush on Sharona.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Here again is Sharona Alpern.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
One time I went and I remember I think it
was Burton or Doug or someone’s like shill we play
it should? We played for her and didn’t even know
what they’re talking about. I was sitting on the couch.
It could have been anything. It was a normal day
like any other day. And then the next the next
memory I have, I was in my car thinking did
(05:17):
I just hear a song with my name in it?
Speaker 3 (05:20):
I was recorded at MCA Whitney Studios on Glendale Boulevard
in Glendale. It’s not there anymore.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Here’s producer Mike Chapman.
Speaker 8 (05:29):
They played the song right there and then and I said,
well stop and they said, well you don’t like it,
and I said, of course I like it. I said,
that’s number one. Absolutely, You’ve got to know you have
a number one song.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
You’re ready.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, okay, let’s do it.
Speaker 6 (05:48):
He said, start the tape. I don’t mean that in
a slighting way. Mike’s contribution was saying, I think the
way you should record this album is as if you
were playing your club set.
Speaker 8 (06:02):
Probably my main contribution was to leave it alone, and
my job was to put it on tape and to
make it sound the way it sounded when they did
it live.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Within months of their live debut, popular club gigs on
the Sunset Strip, as well as guest jams with musicians
such as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and ray Manzeric, led
to the band being the subject of a record label
bidding war. The band was pursued by ten record labels,
but decided on going with Capitol Records. Here’s Doug.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
They didn’t release the single until two weeks after the
album had been released, but the day the album was
released to radio, My Sharona became the most added record
as an album cut in the world. It went from
nobody ever having heard it to being in heavy rotation
(07:00):
in one day. It was a phenomenon.
Speaker 5 (07:04):
It was on every single minute, no matter where I went.
The minute it was on the airplanes. Then I get
off an airplane, I get in a limousine or cab.
It was in the limousine or cab. I get to
the hotel. It was in the hotel. We would go
on vacation, the top forty band who was playing in
the lobby or in the piano bar played My Shurana.
(07:27):
You couldn’t escape it. At one time I would turn
it off. Sometimes I even think that they might have
made it music and dentist’s officer in the grocery stores
without the words I.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Got the girl Sharona did become my girlfriend. It took
me a year, you know, after I wrote it. You know,
having it become a hit again in the nineties was
a remarkable thing. Getting to tour America with a whole
new audience of young kids that didn’t know it had
(07:59):
been a hit fifteen years earlier.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
That was remarkable.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
And there are people, you know, my age who it
was their youth too, because we all had that experience
when when it first happened.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
And now I mean people play it. I mean, you know,
all over the place. They play it at sporting events. So
I think because of the youthfulness of it, and because
it’s not so much restricted stylistically to the seventies or
the eighties or the nineties, I just think it keeps
reinventing himself. And and I’m happy about that because it
doesn’t sound like it’s nineteen. You know, it’s this particular year.
(08:35):
It’s got a real timelessness about it.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And you heard from members
of the band, and you also heard from Sharona Alpren herself,
the woman who inspired the number one song. People kind
of knew the band. I was there at the time,
but my goodness, everybody knew the song and it became
(09:02):
I think the greatest one hit wonder band of all
time the Neck. It was recorded in Glendale, a north
of Los Angeles, at the recording studio. The producer and
engineer said his greatest contribution was to leave the song alone.
The story of My Sharona and how it came to
be here on our American stories
Discover more real American voices.
