. . . But the Little Girls Understand

for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles and Bruce Gary (d. 2006) The men don’t know growls Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but the version I prefer—low fidelity cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with shredded paper drums—remains unreleased, recorded not by some venerable Mississippi blues curmudgeon whose name, artfully dropped here, would evoke afternoons porch-sitting with magnolia wine and box-string guitar, or might bestow upon me some sorely lacking hipster bonafides. That’s never going to happen, since I am talking here about a nearly unlistenable cover, the monophonic noise and mid-range screech of The Knack, live in Hollywood, before a packed house at the Troubador, July 1979. So what if I was twelve? I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck out the gallop of My Sharona’ s bass, hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger and be Sharona’s back door man myself, though I’d have been better off learning how to get in the front door first. Which was the vaguest country, women, or the blues? I did not know. I still might not. I only knew what I was learning: that a song could actually sound like sweat; that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known as the piano-playing witness to greatness, had dropped by to sit in, and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue it was a benediction, as if to say,Hey, these guys are all right, forgive them their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot. So I want to say thank you to whatever thought to tape that show, because it taught me that I wanted a forever girl like Sharona, who, as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised, played the coolest records for her slumber-partying girlfriends, who all looked like the camisoled girls in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos. But I am getting ahead of myself, since, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows how this story ends. I have everything The Knack ever recorded, including this version of Back Door Man, which tells me everything that was wrong with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me. How does the show end? Listen to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time, the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era. For the band, you know how it ends already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness, comeback tour, state fair nostalgia; immortal Sharona—her real name —sells real estate, million-dollar homes. That’s what those little girls do, they grow up, which reminds me My Sharona, that set-closing number, may be the saddest story I know.