Everybody in Michigan knows who Geoffrey Fieger is.
Since stepping into the national spotlight in the early 1990s as Jack Kevorkian’s attorney—better known as Dr. Death—Fieger has been everywhere. He has had high-profile cases, been portrayed in HBO movies, and was the wildly unsuccessful Democratic nominee for governor in 1998. His Fieger Law commercials are ubiquitous on Detroit TV. Everybody knows Geoffrey Fieger.
What they might not know, or maybe they’ve forgotten, is that his little brother was far more famous first.
Doug Fieger, who passed away in 2010, was the lead singer and songwriter for The Knack, and he’s the guy who wrote and sang one of the greatest one-hit wonder songs of all time, “My Sharona.”
Released in 1979, the song quickly shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, where it remained for six weeks. It finished the year as the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Top Pop Singles list.
The infectious song had a rebirth in 1994 when it was featured in the film “Reality Bites,” which resulted in it re-entering the Billboard Hot 100 list. In 2008, Billboard ranked it No. 75 among the greatest songs of all time. George W. Bush reportedly had it on his iPod.
And it was written and sung by a 1970 graduate of Oak Park High School, who happened to be Geoffrey Fieger’s little brother.
Geoffrey was the oldest of the three Fieger children, born in 1950. Doug came along two years later, and their younger sister, Beth, was born two years after. Geoffrey went into law, Doug became a rock star, and Beth became a Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include writing a couple episodes of “Mad About You.”
The siblings didn’t always get along. Not surprisingly, Geoffrey was the alpha dog, and as mom June told the Detroit Free Press in 1996, he would frequently bully his younger brother. “He’d tell everybody to shut up” when he wanted to go to bed, June said.
Doug became a rocker right out of high school. He formed a three-person Detroit-area band called Sky in 1970, and they had some modest success, recording a couple of albums and opening for the likes of Jethro Tull, Bob Seger, and The Who.
Sky split up after just three years, and Doug decided to move to Los Angeles and join the music scene there. After bouncing around with a few other bands in L.A., he teamed up with Berton Averre, Prescott Niles, and Bruce Gary to form The Knack, a sort of power pop/New Wave band.
Around that time, Doug had a teenage girlfriend named Sharona Alperin, and, although they broke up after a couple of years, she was the muse for his biggest song ever.
The Knack’s debut album, “Get the Knack,” came out in 1979, and it was an immediate hit. The black-and-white cover photo, with a smiling Doug in the middle, was reminiscent of the “Meet the Beatles” cover shot from 1964. A couple of other songs from the album (especially “Good Girls Don’t”) were modest hits, but “My Sharona” was a smash.
Doug Fieger was now hugely famous, while his older brother was still building his law practice back in Michigan. The Knack released a few other albums but never came close to the success of “My Sharona.” The band broke up in 1982 and then got back together three more times before Doug’s death in 2010.
As for the Fieger brothers, they weren’t close as adults, going several years without speaking. They did patch things up in 1998, when The Knack reunited to do a fundraising concert for Geoffrey Fieger’s gubernatorial campaign. The concert took place at St. Andrew’s Hall in Detroit, and Kevorkian was in attendance. “I’d prefer big band music, but let’s see what this is like,” he said before the concert.
Geoffrey got whipped in the election, losing big to incumbent Republican Gov. John Engler, and that was his last big foray into politics.
As for Doug and Sharona, they remained friends long after they split up, and she was one of the last people he spoke to before he died of lung cancer in 2010 at age 57.
Sharona is now a luxury real-estate agent in Beverly Hills, and she greatly plays up the fact that she’s the muse of “My Sharona.” Thanks to her old boyfriend, her legacy is certainly assured.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
