Sharona Alperin

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Sharona Alperin (born September 30, 1960 or 1961 ) is an American who was a muse as a teenager and later also the partner of Doug Fieger , the front man of the Californian rock band The Knack . Fieger wrote the world hit My Sharona for her in 1979 . Today she works as a real estate agent .

biography

origin

Sharona Alperin is Jewish . Her parents were Marvin and Miriam Alperin. The father had a furniture store . Sharona Alperin grew up in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles and attended high school there in the late 1970s . She also received training in a yeshiva . On the weekends, she worked as a saleswoman in a clothing store that also employed the musician's girlfriend at the time, Doug Fieger.

Sharona Alperin and Doug Fieger

Doug Fieger

Doug Fieger's girlfriend introduced him to Alperin in May 1978, who was either 16 or 17 years old at the time, depending on the source. In retrospect, Alperin did not commit himself to this question; In an interview from 2010 she said she was "16 or 17" at the time.

Fieger was “overwhelmed by Alperin's beauty from the very first moment”. He himself later said he was crazy about her. He separated from his girlfriend, pursued Alperin and tried to win her over. The nine years younger Alperin was initially not ready for him to end the relationship with her boyfriend at the time, but nevertheless met the musician again and again. During this time, Fieger wrote numerous songs that addressed Alperin and his relationship to her. Some of them found their way into The Knack's first two albums. Fieger's fixation on Alperin led to the idea of ​​naming a song after her. Against the concerns of the other band members, a song that describes the desire of an adult for a minor "unabashedly clearly" was given the title My Sharona .

This became the summer hit of 1979. The Knack toured extensively in the USA and Australia in the following months . Fieger finally had Alperin flown in for a concert in Hawaii . Then they both became a couple. Alperin and Fieger lived in Los Angeles. The relationship lasted four and a half years. Even after their end, Alperin and Fieger remained close friends. Even years later, Alperin regularly inspired Fieger to write new songs. Among other things, You Gotta Be There from the 1998 The Knack album Zoom was about her.

Alperin accompanied Fieger in 2010 in the last few weeks before his death and was at his side alongside his wife when he died.

After Doug Fieger

Alperin has been a real estate agent in West Los Angeles since 1987 . Her brokerage career began with Dalton, Brown & Long Realtors, which were acquired by Sotheby's International Realty in 2004 . For Sotheby's, Alperin offers real estate primarily to actors and other customers in the entertainment industry. Alperin is married and has two sons born in 1999 and 2003.

The song

My Sharona was slated for release on Get The Knack , the band's debut album. All songs on the album were recorded within 11 days in April 1979. The album, which was elaborately produced by Capitol Records and Mike Chapman , was released in the USA in June 1979. My Sharona was released as a single and released at the same time as the album. The cover of the single showed a color shot of Sharona Alperin, who posed in a tank top and jeans and carried the album Get The Knack under her arm .

For Doug Fieger, My Sharona was inextricably linked with Sharona Alperin and his desire for her:

“ The song was a metaphor for the sex I wanted so badly with Sharona. It had a climax in Berton's euphoric guitar solo . "

The clearly recognizable direction of the song, which was also continued in some pieces of the second album from 1980, brought the band and especially Fieger into criticism. One critic said that compared to Doug Fieger, " Rod Stewart is a model boy of sexual humility". The Knack guitarist Berton Averre later played down Alperin's personal role:

“ There is a simple truth in rock music: at some point you will run out of girl names. Whether Sherry or Gloria, everything has already been there. Sharona was a new name and it was catchy. "

My Sharona was The Knack's most successful song. It reached number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and on the national charts in Canada , Australia and Italy . A use in the soundtrack of the film Reality Bites - Voll das Leben led to new chart positions in the USA and Australia in 1994.

My Sharona was parodied many times in the following decades, with the first name regularly being replaced by similar-sounding terms. Weird Al Yankovic made it into My Bologna in 1979 , a song about a meat sausage similar to mortadella , which is called Bologna in the Anglo-American language area. The Dead Kennedys varied the title line to My Payola in the 1980 song Pull my Strings . Other versions were Ayatollah or My Toyota .

Sharona Alperin and My Sharona

Sharona Alperin is still regularly associated with My Sharona 40 years after the song was published . Reports or portraits of her appear again and again, in which the assessment is often made that Fieger made her “immortal” with My Sharona . Sharona Alperin is open about the song and her role in its creation. For her, My Sharona is "the song that changed Doug's life and my life forever". Your professional website has the address www.mysharona.com, on the home page My Sharona is played in the original version of The Knack.

literature

  • Michael Heatley, Frank Hopkinson: The Girl in the Song: The Real Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics , Pavilion Books, 2014, ISBN 978-1-909396-88-3 .
  • The broker of the beautiful and the rich - »My Sharona« from “The Knack” . In: Frank Bruder, Richard Fasten: Pop-Splits - The best songs of all time and their story . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Harold Bronson: The Rhino Records Story: Revenge of the Music Nerds , BookBaby, 2013, ISBN 978-1-59079-135-6 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Evan Henerson: A realtor with Knack. www.jewishjournal.com, November 20, 2013, accessed January 15, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b Laura Lee: The Name's Familiar II , Pelican Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4556-0917-8 , p. 16.
  4. ↑ a b c Alan Connor: Who was “My Sharona”? www.bbc.co.uk, February 17, 2017, accessed January 16, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c Michael Heatley, Frank Hopkinson: The Girl in the Song: The Real Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics , Pavilion Books, 2014, ISBN 978-1-909396-88-3 , p. 80.
  6. ^ A b c David Konow: The story of the Knack's “My Sharona” and the real life romance behind the song. www.laweekly.com, July 11, 2017, accessed January 15, 2019 .
  7. ↑ a b National Public Radio: The Woman Behind “My Sharona” . Interview with Sharona Alperin for NPR, March 6, 2010.
  8. ^ A b Pierre Perrone: Doug Fieger: Leader of The Knack who co-wrote the worldwide hit "My Sharona". www.independent.co.uk, March 5, 2010, accessed January 17, 2019 .
  9. ↑ a b Ben Sisario: Doug Fieger Dies at 57, Singer of “My Sharona”. www.nytimes.com, February 15, 2010, accessed January 17, 2019 .
  10. ^ Josh Young: Sharona Alperin of "My Sherona" and her life as a real estate agent to the stars. www.ew.com, June 16, 1998, accessed January 16, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Illustration of the single cover of My Sharona (accessed on January 16, 2019).
personal data
SURNAME Alperin, Sharona
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American real estate agent
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1960 or September 30, 1961