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For about eight months in 1979, the Knack was a pop sensation. Its debut album, Get the Knack, sold 5 million copies, while “My Sharona” blared on car radios throughout the summer. The band’s brash sound and Fab Four affectations seemed to incite Knackmania overnight. Then, suddenly, it was all over. The records stopped selling, and the girls stopped screaming. The Knack’s strict no-interview and no-TV policy backfired; critics dismissed the band’s Beatlesque packaging as shallow hype and attacked singer-guitarist Doug Fieger for the sexist arrogance of his lyrics. By November 1980 the Knack had fallen apart. Although the...

Doug Fieger, lead singer of rock group the Knack, died at 57 after a battle with cancer, his brother Geoffrey confirmed today. “I’ve had 10 great lives,” Fieger told the Detroit News in a January interview. “And I expect to have some more. I don’t feel cheated in any way, shape or form.” Get the Knack, the album that featured “My Sharona,” spent six weeks at No. 1 in 1979. The hit single was perhaps best immortalized (or at least revitalized) via a hilarious impromptu gas station dance party in 1994’s Reality Bites. “Can you turn this up please? Please?...

Doug Fieger, frontman for the Knack, is reportedly dying. According to the Detroit News, the man behind 1979's classic 'My Sharona' and its parent album 'Get the Knack' has lung and brain cancer. Still, Fieger, 57, has a pretty positive outlook on his mortality, considering the three craniotomies and whole-brain radiation he has endured. "Everybody is in the same spot," the Southern California-based rocker told the paper. "I just know there is something that will potentially end my time here." Fieger, who had a piece of his lung removed in 2004 and has been diagnosed with 22 brain tumors, says...