Watch Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin Cover the Knack
Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin continued their "Hanukkah Sessions" by covering the Knack’s “Frustrated.”
The series sees the Foo Fighters leader and the band's producer celebrating the work of Jewish artists. Covers have included songs by the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” and Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”
You can watch the latest video below.
“Tonight we’re featuring four nice Jewish boys whose biggest hit was a song about a nice Jewish girl … ‘My Shalom-a’ or something like that,” the pair said in a brief statement. “We’re huge fans of New Wave (as well as the ‘old wave’ that came after Moses parted the Red Sea) … so we were psyched to get to cover one of our favorites … the Knack!”
“Frustrated” was the closing track on the band’s debut album, Get the Knack, which was released in 1979. Even though the song was never released as the A-side of a single, it was the B-side to “Good Girls Don’t” and is considered by fans to be one of their greatest tracks. And just like their No. 1 “My Sharona,” "Frustrated" is about singer and guitarist Doug Fieger’s attempts to start a relationship with Sharona Alperin. The pair eventually got together, but some critics find “Frustrated”'s lyrics somewhat sexist.
“People have picked up on the fact it was an album about teenage love,” he explained in 1998. “If we had announced that back then, people would have said, ‘That's such a pretentious statement, who the hell do these guys think they are?’ But it really was. It was a loose concept, a set piece [guitarist] Berton [Averre] and I wrote from the point of view of our 14-year-old remembered selves. And since he was only 24 and I was only 25 at the time, it wasn't like we were stretching way back in our memories.”