U.S. Top 10 Singles, August 25, 1979

The Knack : My Sharona

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On August 25, 1979 The Knack topped the U.S. charts with "My Sharona". The New Wave smash would hold the #1 spot for six weeks before Robert John's "Sad Eyes" finally knocked it off the peak.

1 2 MY SHARONA –•– The Knack (Capitol) (1 week at #1) 

2 1 GOOD TIMES –•– Chic (Atlantic) 

3 3 THE MAIN EVENT / FIGHT –•– Barbra Streisand (Columbia) 

4 5 AFTER THE LOVE HAS GONE –•– Earth, Wind and Fire (ARC)

5 4 BAD GIRLS –•– Donna Summer (Casablanca)

6 14 DON’T BRING ME DOWN –•– Electric Light Orchestra (Jet) 

7 8 THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA –•– The Charlie Daniels Band (Epic)

8 13 LEAD ME ON –•– Maxine Nightingale (Windsong)

9 10 MAMA CAN’T BUY YOU LOVE –•– Elton John (MCA)

10 12 SAD EYES –•– Robert John (EMI-America)

Long As You Can Get It Up

The Knack : Frustrated

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On June 11, 1979 The Knack released their debut album, a brilliant Mike Chapman production brilliantly marketed by the old Beatles label, Capitol Records, featuring one brilliant single "My Sharona". Let's hold off discussing the single for another day. Get the Knack shot up to the top of the American album charts. In the U.K., it only peaked at #65. Maybe they saw through the pop sheen and manipulation. Yu see, this is an album with one major goal: rock out the teenage boys with songs about lust, lusty girls and girls who are not lusty enough. "Frustrated"? Weren't we all? 

The album scored only a B- from critic Robert Christgau who wrote:

Cognoscenti I know tend to couch their belief that this is the Anti-clash in purely technical terms -- harmonies treacly, production punched up, and so forth. Bullshit. I too find them unattractive; if they felt this way about girls when they were unknowns, I shudder to think how they're reacting to groupies. But if they're less engaging musically than, say, the Scruffs, they have a lot more pop and power going for them than, say, the Real Kids. In other words, "My Sharona" is pretty good radio fare and let's hope "She's So Selfish" isn't the next single. Face it, this is a nasty time, and if the Stranglers are (or were, I hope) Sgt. Barry Sadler, these guys are only Freddie and the Dreamers. Docked a notch for clothes sense

Even in the sexuallys aturated 70's Rolling Stone critic Ken Tucker was somewhat taken aback by Doug Feiger's lyrics . 

Infusing all the smart primitivism, however, are Doug Fieger's elastic whine and appallingly bald opinions. Legions of jaunty rockers have uttered repressed moans for their girlfriends, but Fieger comes right out and salivates with the drool of a witty satyr: "She's your adolescent dream/Schoolboy stuff, sticky-sweet romance/And she makes you wanna scream/Wishin' you could get inside her pants." 

That's from "Good Girls Don't," just one in a series of songs addressed to young women whom the singer wants to know only in a carnal sense. Fetid ideas like Fieger's are usually the stuff of panting heavy-metal bands, and easily ignored in the blare. But by couching his rampaging id in the locutions of classical pop rock, Fieger makes his callousness inescapable: he practically rubs your face in it.

Begging's Not My Business

Squeeze : The Knack

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Spring is the season of rebirth and in the Spring of 1979, Squeeze bounced back from their dreadful John Cale produced debut album with Cool For Cats, a pop album full of catchy songs about sex obsessed young men and the trouble they find. The album contains four U.K. hit singles, launching the band into the spotlight. The most memorable of the songs is "Up the Junction", the last of the tunes the band recorded for the album. 

Glenn Tilbrook recalls to The Guardian :

I came up with the little keyboard melody that Jools plays at the beginning, just before I sing: “I never thought it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham.” We made the video in the kitchen of John Lennon’s old house, where he’d done the Imagine video, with the white piano and the door that read: “This is not here.” What a place to visit when you’re starting out! We’d spent all day making the video for Cool for Cats, and had had quite a few beers. Then the director said: “Oh yeah – and we’re going to do Up the Junction, too.” That’s why we look so bleary.

Chris Difford adds :

I never “got a job with Stanley, who said I’d come in handy”, but I loved those Ian Dury-type rhyming couplets. The line “I’d beg for some forgiveness, but begging’s not my business” still makes me chuckle. It sums up male stubbornness.

I actually bought the album after 1980's Argybargy and found a lot of the lyrics sophomoric; the keyboards intrusive. Almost every song is about sex. Of course the average age of the five members was 22. Critical acclaim, which would include comparisons to Lennon and McCartney, were still a year away. 

"I don't particularly want to be taken seriously by the NME or anybody like that," Glenn Tilbrook told Smash Hits in March of 1979.

"No, neither do I," Chris Difford agreed. "It doesn't worry me personally whether people take us seriously or not. We'll either get through to people or we won't. I don't think there's much we can do to influence that course of events in so far as releasing records that we think will be taken as serious artistic statements".