Yesterday, February 14, 2010, Doug Fieger passed away after a long battle with cancer; he was 57. He was the frontman and chief songwriter for the seminal New Wave power-pop band The Knack, known as “The Band That Killed Disco”, and their 1979 #1 hit (for 6 consecutive weeks) “My Sharona”, principally written by Fieger (guitar solos composed by Berton Averre), was known as “The Song That Killed Disco” (I’ve done a feature on the song on Citizen K’s Just A Song blog here). The Knack were part of a movement back to straight-ahead Rock & Roll that happened on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, starting with Punk in the late ’70s and moving on to New Wave. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Elvis Costello. Patty Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, Talking Heads… That was a great time in popular music, and Doug Fieger put The Knack firmly in that pantheon of gods who put Rock & Roll back at the top where it belonged.

Fieger came from the Detroit area, and was playing in bands starting in high school. In fact, in 1970 and 1971 Fieger played bass and sang lead in the group Sky, which was founded by producer Jimmy Miller (Rolling Stones, Traffic, Blind Faith) when Fieger was still in high school. He continued to play in bands and even did some producing before forming The Knack in 1978. He’d moved to California by that time, and The Knack was playing in LA area clubs like Whiskey A Go-Go and The Troubador when they were discovered and signed by Capitol Records.

Rather than go into a long retrospective of Doug’s career, I just want to post some videos from the early days of The Knack, all live performances. This, more than anything else, shows who Doug Fieger was and what he was all about.

Good-bye Doug. You’ll be sorely missed, but at least you left us a legacy we can enjoy for a long, long time.

Text © 2010 by A. Roy Hilbinger