My Corona!

By Pie Guevara

Pie Guevara appears in Posts Scripts through the gracious courtesy of Jack Lee and Tina Grazier and is an unregistered trademark of Engulf and Devour Investments LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Walton Industries which, in turn, is wholly owned by David Walton.  So there!

OK, I can’t put that up bit from PolitiZoid without giving a nod to the original from back in the day…

“My Sharona” was debut single by The Knack released in June of 1979 and written by band members Doug Fieger (lead vocalist) and Berton Averre (lead guitar). The single was simultaneously released along with their debut album Get The Knack which included an album version of the song. The inspiration for “My Sharona” was Fieger’s long time love interest Sharona Alperin, to whom he was once engaged but never married. They remained lifelong friends and Alperin was at his bedside the week Fieger died of cancer on February 14, 2010. He was 57.

The single of “My Sharona” became an instant international number-one hit. After selling a half million copies in the US it was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America making it Capitol Records’ fastest gold status achieving debut single since The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964. In June it rocketed to number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles list, maintained that rating for 6 weeks and finished out the year in the number-one slot on Billboard’s 1979 Top Pop Singles year-end chart.

The Knack’s debut album, Get The Knack, was recorded in just two weeks at a cost of a mere $18,000. Following its release it spent five weeks at number-one on the Billboard 200 album chart. It went Gold just 13 days after its release, went Platinum when it sold over a million copies in less than two months and marked another milestone for Capitol Records that summer as their fastest selling debut LP since Meet the Beatles! in 1964.

In the late 70’s and well into the 80’s I commuted from “Laughing Yet” to “Liver Gulch” every afternoon to work swing shift in Target Diagnostics on the Shiva Laser Fusion project at LLNL. Needless to say that as an aficionado of The Knack I cranked up the car radio every time one of their songs was played and rocked out.

This ultimately led me to not paying attention to my speed one day. On a Sunday morning I was rocking to The Knack while traveling to Livermore to work overtime in order to get off the last shot of a month’s series of experiments that had to be completed before we could move on to the next series. It was a tough morning as I had been up the night before running diagnostics on the previous laser shot and had not gotten home until 2am.

I must have been going 70mph on 580 (which was the speed limit before Carter approved the nation-wide 55mph limit) when a CHP officer I had not noticed behind me lit up and hit the siren. That ticket wiped out my entire weekend of overtime. Man it hurt. Aiee, aiee, aiee, aiee ya! My big boner!

“My Sharona” inspired lots of covers here and abroad by artists from the famous to the obscure. The half a dozen or so that I have found audio or video clips of are uninteresting so I won’t bother posting them here. Perhaps at the pinnacle of pointless cultural radiation and reverberation is the cover by Alvin and the Chipmunks but it is so obnoxious that I’ll let readers go look it up for themselves. I guess anyone who has been covered by Alvin and his crew must know that they have landed on a plane of cultural influence so rarefied that a bunch of cartoon  rodents will try and make a buck out of you.

Then there are the parodies but for the most part when they aren’t merely lame they are just plain crude. Of course there was Weird Al back in 1979 taking his  shot…

And there is this gem also from 1979. “My Sharona” had made it’s first mark in the world affairs arena. Of course my favorite line is “And you know if you were here…you were here, we’d hit you in the  face with a pie-atollah!”

Finally, as a last ditch effort to entertain all you social distancing shut-ins, this young lady is quite talented and just as cute as can be…

If you would like to spend some time noodling around on the internet one of my favorite authors, columnists and bloggers is James Lileks. He wrote a column for years at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and currently writes a wide ranging cultural column for National Review — James Lileks, National Review

You could spend days wandering around his blog site LILEKS (James).

Be sure not  to miss The Gallery of Regretable Food.