The Knack have a lot to answer for, and they know it. Only someone with an incredibly short memory could forget the trumped-up Beatlemania of their 1979 debut album, Get the Knack, and their arrogant stonewalling of the media. Such strategy merely reinforced the suspicion that the runaway success of the LP and its flagship single, "My Sharona," was actually a triumph of marketing over music. "My Sharona" – with its wicked, Led Zeppelin-style kick, brash vocal attack and yahoo celebration of teenage hots (a kind of "I Want to Hold Your Glands")–deserved to be the summer-of-'79 single. But, like the rest of this Los Angeles group's otherwise good-to-average, spunky Anglo-pop
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repertoire, the song was undercut by the smug misogyny and pedophilic fixation of singer-guitarist-tunesmith Doug Fieger. And though the Knack were only indirectly to blame for the resultant plague of Knack-alike clone-pop bands that followed in
Get the Knack's double-platinum wake, their artistic credibility took a severe beating when the imitations weren't that much worse than the genuine article.
Like Icarus in a skinny tie, the Knack flew too close to the sun and got burned real bad. Now they'd have us believe that they want to make amends. If the message of the first album was Get the Knack (or get lost) and the second LP insisted that the critics don't know...but the little girls understand, then the gist of Round Trip is, "We're sorry, give us another chance." Consider, for example, Fieger's contrite plea in "We Are Waiting," a campy psychedelic smorgasbord of Gary Numan-type vocals, tubular bells, sitar, backward guitar and alien poesy: "Oh we are waiting to show/You a different view ... /Please let us into your home/It's the least you can do." Or "Pay the Devil," lead guitarist Berton Averre's country-music waltz. It's slick, sub-Eagles fluff, with Doug Fieger admitting in the chorus: "Everybody's got to read the reviews/ ... even you/Got to learn to give the devil his due." Would you believe that Fieger maintains "I ain't a Chauvinist" in his latest cock-teaser anthem, "Boys Go Crazy"?
Given another chance with Round Trip, however, the Knack acquit themselves better than we had any reason to expect. If this were their first record, it'd be an impressive, entertaining debut. As their third, it's a somewhat remarkable comeback from beyond the grave of superhype. Now that their "phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust" (to quote the Clash's Joe Strummer in "London Calling"), the Knack still have quite a bit to lose and everything to prove.
At the top of the list is the true nature of their debt to the Beatles. Of course, any similarity between Round Trip and Revolver – right down to the album titles – is scarcely coincidental. With its mock-Indian intonations, karmic instrumental clowning and a touch of Lennon in the vocals, "We Are Waiting" is the mutant offspring
