Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Richard Crouse

  Catching the next flight to Kingston, the drummer and the porn star met for the first time the very next day. She made good on all her promises, including a week’s studio time at Federal Records. Diamond spent several days rerecording the instrumental demo, playing most of the instruments himself. On the third day of recording, the doctor paid a visit to the studio. He was growing impatient with the slow process and asked if Diamond really had a song for his girlfriend to sing. Diamond was stuck. He had the melody but no lyrics. “Just give me forty-eight hours, and you’ll have your song.”

  Pressured, he left the studio to pace up and down the beach. The first three words came out of the blue — “More, more, more.” Excited, he went to a bar, downing several rum punches. Tipsy from the alcohol, he started writing the tune’s verses in a cab ride back to the house. He sang the uncompleted lyrics to the cabbie. Legend has it that the driver was so impressed with the words, he didn’t charge Diamond for the ride.

  Later that night, he presented his handwritten notes to True. Then he made an awful discovery: True couldn’t sing a note, couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket. The pair stayed up all night, with a desperate Diamond acting as vocal coach, teaching her the song. The next day, exhausted, Diamond finished the lyrics and headed for the studio.

  Getting True to relax in the studio was Diamond’s first job. This was her first time in a professional studio, her big shot at pop stardom, and she was nervous. Diamond wanted her to sound sexy, to really sell the song. But her tension showed through in the vocals. Drawing on his experience as a session musician, he tried to help her loosen up. Dimming the lights in the studio, he instructed True to pretend she was on a porno movie set. By the time he got the take he wanted, True had taken his advice to heart, removing her shoes and panties and loosening her blouse, exposing her breasts. With her vocals in the can, True returned to her boyfriend’s house, leaving Diamond to finish up loose ends.

  He spent the next two days tinkering with the tape, electronically enhancing True’s voice, bringing it up to pitch and double-tracking it to add more depth. Satisfied with the result, he returned to New York with the tape under his arm. He shopped it to an executive at Buddah Records who suggested they take it to a disco, slap it on the turntable and see how the crowd responded. As soon as the music started, the dance floor filled up, and Diamond was offered a deal.

  “More, More, More” by the Andrea True Connection reached Number Four on the charts in April 1976. A follow-up album, also produced by Diamond, only contained one single — “NY, You Got Me Dancing” — which stalled at Number Twenty-Seven in March 1977. In the age of disposable disco celebrities, Andrea True was a has-been barely one year after her first hit.

  Gregg Diamond went on to work with Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross.

  Pete Townsend and The Who in full flight in a still from The Kids Are All Right, a 1979 rockumentary. Left to right; John Entwistle (bass), Roger Daltry (vocals), Keith Moon (drums) and Pete Townsend (guitar/vocals).

  Who Are You

  The Who

  It was late March 1977, and Pete Townsend was having a bad day. A drawn-out dispute with his former managers had sapped the guitarist and reinforced his feeling that The Who had sold out — that they were driven by money rather than by music. Punk rock had gripped Britain, and the new brood of brazen bands left Pete feeling like a dinosaur, a relic of an older generation. He was thirty-two years old.

  Feeling the need to blow off some steam, Townsend met business partner Chris Stamp at a club called the Speakeasy in London’s Soho district. The upcoming events would later be used as the basis of the last great Who single of the 1970s.

  Dave Marsh called Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols “the best example of deliberate vulgarity rock has ever produced.” It’s surprising, then, to learn that “Pretty Vacant,” the LP’s second single, was inspired by an Abba song. Pistols’ songwriter and bassist Glen Matlock, a closet Abba fan, lifted the guitar riff from Abba’s “SOS” as the basis for a nihilistic anthem that was banned from radio in the UK. “(Guitarist) Steve (Jones) toughened it up,” said John Lydon in his book Rotten: No Irish — No Blacks — No Dogs, “because the original guitar line was very sissy.”

  Described as seedy and salacious, the Speakeasy was a hangout for many of the new bands of the day. That night, Townsend protégés John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett were performing as the guitarist settled at a table. Several quick double whiskeys later, Townsend was on a roll. Becoming physically abusive, he broke glasses and ranted to anyone who would listen. Midway through his drunken rampage, he spotted two punks at the bar. When told that they were members of the Sex Pistols, he wobbled over and confronted them.

  After some hostile back and forth, he grabbed one of the punks by the shirt and lifted him off the ground. “Listen Johnny …” he said, thinking he was talking to Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten. It wasn’t Rotten but gruitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook who tried to placate Townsend by telling him they were big Who fans. Townsend was flabbergasted. He had considered the Sex Pistols to be the future of rock and roll — a band to take over from where The Who had left off before they, too, prostituted themselves for commercial success. Townsend’s own feelings of self-loathing were so strong that he couldn’t even accept the praise from Jones and Cook. Repulsed and cursing, Townsend told them he was disappointed with them and left the club.

  The events of the night had left Townsend completely drained. A few feet from the club, he collapsed in a heap, passing out cold in a shop doorway. He slept for a time before a London policeman came by and recognized the rock star. Knudging him in the midsection, the cop roused him and made him an offer. “Wake up, Pete. As a special treat, if you can get up and walk away, you can sleep in your own bed tonight.” Rather than spend a night in the drunk tank, Townsend pulled himself together, found a subway station and made his way home.

  The next day, he woke up and wrote “Who Are You,” a diary-style account of the previous night. The song opens with Pete waking up in the Soho doorway and goes on to trace the surreal events of the evening. The single was well received, with Rolling Stone critic John Swenson calling it “… a pounding statement of identity lost and found.” Sales pushed it to Number Fourteen on the Billboard charts.

  For The Who and their fans, the 45’s success was dulled by the death of drummer Keith Moon from an overdose of Heminevrin on September 7, 1978, just weeks after the song entered the charts. Ironically, on the LP cover of Who Are You, Moon is seated in a chair inscribed “Not to be taken away.”

  A song called “No Future” was originally planned as the first single from Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. At the last minute, manager Malcolm McLaren switched the title to the more provocative “God Save the Queen” to inflame the press during Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee.

  My Sharona

  The Knack

  In 1979, The Knack resuscitated one of the sacrosanct rock-and-roll traditions of the sixties. Following in the footsteps of “Mony Mony,” “Bony Maronie” and “Hang On Sloopy,” “My Sharona” took an uncommon female-sounding name, turning it into a platinum-selling single.

  When Doug Feiger met the teenage Sharona Alperin, he was an unknown musician with a Beatles’ fixation. Despite his band’s Southern Californian roots, he modeled their look and sound after the groups of his youth — the Mersey Beat combos with their matching suits and short hook-laden pop songs. Even his band’s name was nicked from a British cult movie — 1965’s The Knack and How to Get It, directed by Richard Lester.

  The Mersey Beat posturing paid off. The Knack were hotter than a bandit’s pistol, finding themselves in the center of a record-company bidding war, with Capitol (the Beatles’ US record label) winning a contract with the young band. The resulting debut album, Get the Knack, took off like a rocket, earning a gold record only thirteen days after its release. But it was “My Sharona” that earned them a place in the pop-culture pantheon.


  With its edgy, power-chord hook and howled lyrics, “My Sharona” was an ode to teenage sexual frustration. “I had met this girl, Sharona, and fell deeply in love with her,” Feiger told Goldmine’s Jeff Tamarkin. “She was inspirational and moved me on a very basic level.”

  In the Name of Love: Billy Joel composed the elegant ballad “Just the Way You Are” as a birthday present for his then-wife/manager Elizabeth. Joel dropped the song from his repertoire when he married Christie Brinkley. David Bowie’s wife Angela was the object of affection in the Jagger/Richards’s tune “Angie,” a Number One for the Rolling Stones in 1973.

  Using a riff that guitarist Berton Averre had been playing around with for some time, Feiger molded lyrics that expressed his feelings for Sharona, bending the words to fit around the hiccuping rhythm. The tune came together in an afternoon and was recorded very quickly, virtually live in the studio, with very few overdubs. Producer Mike Chapman says the first time he heard The Knack rehearse the tune, “I knew it was a Number One two bars into the song.”

  Even as “My Sharona” was climbing the charts, the inevitable backlash began. Critics attacked the risqué lyrics of “My Sharona” and its follow-up “Good Girls Don’t,” with one writer commenting, if this is how they felt about girls when they were unknowns, “I shudder to think how they are reacting to groupies.” One San Francisco artist started the Knuke The Knack movement, while a popular T-shirt of the time gave the well-known Jaws tag line a rock-and-roll spin. Embossed over a likeness of The Knack was the slogan, “Just when you thought it was safe to listen to the radio.”

  Today, Fieger’s muse Sharona Alperin has a flourishing residential real estate business in Los Angeles. “When they hear my name, people tell me where they first heard the song and what it means to them,” she told writer Judd Justice in 1996. “People say things like, ‘You’re part of the history of pop culture.’ Frankly, I’m not interested in my history. It was fun traveling first class around the world with The Knack, but it was all over before I was twenty-one. Now, when some people hear my name, they say, ‘Oh, the real estate agent.’ That’s my turn-on.”

  With only limited success after “My Sharona,” The Knack fizzled in 1982. A brief reunion in 1991 produced the lackluster Serious Fun, after which the band faded completely from view. The Knack may have crashed and burned, but their biggest hit stills garners plenty of play on radio and was featured on the best-selling sound track for the 1994 Generation X romantic comedy Reality Bites. Quentin Tarantino was refused permission to use “My Sharona” in Pulp Fiction because of the band’s apprehension with the film’s violent content.

  Weird Al Yankovic was inspired to write “My Bologna,” his 1983 take-off on The Knack’s “My Sharona,” by the cafeteria food at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. In 1984, he followed up the success of “My Bologna” with another food tune, “Eat It.”

  I Don’t Like Mondays

  Boomtown Rats

  A glimpse at a newsroom ticker-tape machine gave rock journalist turned Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof the idea for a song based on a disturbing true-life story of an American girl’s shooting spree. Geldof read the printout as a reporter asked why she had opened fire. “I don’t like Mondays,” the high-school sniper replied. Geldof took this line from the newswire as the starting point for a new-wave song that became a classic.

  The Boomtown Rats were one of the first acts to emerge from the new-wave scene of 1977, scoring Top Twenty UK hits from their first two albums. Despite their R & B leanings, the band was lumped in with the punk scene and were briefly banned in their home country of Ireland. It wasn’t until their third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979), that they earned their biggest hit — the superb “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

  In January 1979, Geldof and Rats’ piano man Johnny Fingers undertook a grueling radio-only promo tour, visiting thirty-two American cities in thirty-three days. Geldof was in Atlanta, Georgia doing an interview at a college radio station. He was pumping the Rats’ latest single “Rat Trap,” a Top Ten hit in England but one that had failed to generate much interest in North America. During a break in the interview, the newsroom’s telex machine alarm went off. What Geldof read coming off the wire overwhelmed him.

  A television game show inspired Peter Gabriel to write an alternative rock-radio staple. The European game show pitted contestants from different parts of the world in a competition for big prizes. “Games Without Frontiers” was Gabriel’s reaction to the show. Rolling Stone called the tune a “jaunty examination of the similarities between childhood play and adult warfare.”

  Brenda Spencer, a young Californian girl, had woken up, loaded a gun her father had allegedly given her for Christmas, leaned out her bedroom window and began taking potshots at the school yard across the street from her house. She only stopped long enough to take a call from a local reporter. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Something to do,” she replied. “I don’t like Mondays, and this livens up the day.”

  This was a live report. As the singer sat there in the radio booth answering questions, Spencer had returned to her window and fired off several more rounds. The final toll: the school janitor and principal shot dead and eight school kids wounded.

  After the interview, Geldof returned to his hotel room and gathered all his journalistic gifts to turn a news story into a song. Deciding not to mention Spencer by name for fear of turning her into a heroine, he kept the details ambiguous. Geldof crafted the lyrics to tell a story about psychosis, not Brenda Spencer’s life story. As he sat alone in his hotel room running over the events of the day, he wrote “I Don’t Like Mondays” on an acoustic guitar with a soft syncopated rhythm.

  “I tried to picture the girl,” recalled Geldof in Is That It?, a memoir published in 1986. “I tried to visualize the scene: the police captains, the bullhorns, the playground, the parents. The girl must be some sort of automaton. And I wrote, ‘The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.’ And, of course, why was she doing it? ‘Tell me why?’ Maybe she’s right. Maybe there is absolutely no reason. But it seems the Californian ethos didn’t allow for reasons and logic for doing anything. They just did it.”

  Coincidently, the song made its debut in front of a live audience four months later on a Monday night in San Diego, California — Brenda Spencer’s hometown. “I Don’t Like Mondays” was an enormous hit in Europe. It topped the New Musical Express charts for a solid month in August 1979 and was voted Single of the Year at the British Pop and Rock Awards. It didn’t fare as well in the US, only reaching Number Sixty, partly because Columbia Records, fearful of a lawsuit from Spencer’s parents, withdrew the record one week after its release.

  The song, however, did have one major fan in the United States. From her jail cell, Brenda Spencer remarked that although she didn’t like the Boomtown Rats, she approved of the song because it made her feel famous.

  Bob Geldof was once described as “a Jagger for the New Depression.” “The Rats are the band I sing with,” said Geldof in 1978. “It’s a job. I don’t consider myself to be a big deal. But rock and roll, along with TV and the movies, is a great twentieth-century art form.”

  Crazy Little Thing Called Love

  Queen

  Queen’s best-known song is “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a marvel of studio technology that took seven twelve-hour days to record. It was Number One in Britain in 1975 for a record-breaking nine weeks. In America, it only managed Number Nine. The band would have to wait five years to score their first US chart topper. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was Number One for four weeks starting February 23, 1980.

  The late Freddie Mercury (real name, Fred Bulsara) was a man of eclectic tastes. Once asked in an interview who his two main musical influences were, he shot back with Jimi Hendrix and Liza Minnelli. Given those mentors, it’s not surprising that Queen’s music ranged from the glam-rock riffing of Sheer Heart Attack to the operatic excesses of A Night at the Opera to the jock rock of “We Are the Champions.�
�� A musical sponge, Mercury soaked up ideas, spitting them out in a series of irresistibly catchy and kitschy singles. “Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “You’re My Best Friend,” “Somebody to Love,” “We Are the Champions” and “Bicycle Race” all made it to the Billboard Top Thirty. In 1980, Queen were at the top of their game, riding high with two back-to-back Number Ones from an album appropriately called The Game.

  Bertie Higgins’s 1982 hit “Key Largo” was inspired by a 1948 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film. A gangster story set in Key West, Florida, Key Largo was directed by John Houston. Higgins and his girlfriend watched the movie on television late one night. Several weeks later, she ended the relationship. He penned the tune to win her back. It worked. They got married soon after the song came out.

  Mercury was on tour with Queen when he got the notion for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” an ersatz rockabilly tune. Lolling in the bathtub in his suite at the Munich Hilton, he came up with a melody line that didn’t sound like anything else the band had ever recorded. Leaping from the tub, he reached for his guitar and worked out the chords to the song. He quickly scrawled some lyrics and made a crude demo on a portable tape recorder. The next day, he introduced the song to the band who were eager to test their rockabilly chops.