But after seeing the movie, delightful as it is, I'm afraid I have to don my armor again. "Reality Bites" uses "My Sharona" as a joke, the aural equivalent of the Shaun Cassidy posters, "Good Times" reruns and "Planet of the Apes" figurines that represent the worthless flotsam and jetsam of Generation X culture.

Admittedly, any apologist for the Knack faces an uphill battle. The Rolling Stone Record Guide doesn't rate the Knack's albums with even a single star, endowing them instead with the dreaded square. Translation: "Worthless: records that need never (or should never) have been created." It concludes, "The Knack seem destined to be a trivia question in the year 2000."

Maybe so, but in my opinion the question isn't, "What do you see in the dictionary when you look under 'one-hit wonder'?" but "Who saved rock-and-roll and never even got thanked?"

Cast back to the late '70s. After the Sex Pistols and other punk bands had strutted upon the stage, pop music descended into a vapid morass, overtaken by the forces of disco darkness. "Saturday Night Fever" was the No. 1 album of 1978. I can't have gone to the only high school where the Bee Gees were hailed as gods by a dismayingly large portion of the student body.

Sure, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, the Ramones and others were doing important, influential work, but Rod Stewart, Chic and the Village People were recording, respectively, "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?," "Le Freak" and "YMCA."

And the Knack were recording "My Sharona," which would beat out that other dreck to become the No. 1 single of 1979. I can still remember where I was when I first heard it: half asleep in my bed in the basement of our Rockville house, the clock radio tuned to WAVA. The drums and electric guitars -- insistent, insinuating -- cut through the hazy summer morning and I sat bolt upright (even if I did at first wonder why someone was singing about "Mice Aroma").

"My Sharona" was unlike anything that was being played on Top 40 radio at the time. For starters, it was fast. It was energizing, unlike the rest of the hit parade, which seemed to suck the vitality out of the very air. (Compare "My Sharona" with the other song featured prominently in "Reality Bites": Peter Frampton's somniferous "Baby I Love Your Way" is musical saltpeter.)

Did I really call my best friend, Pat, and say "I have heard the future of rock-and-roll and its name is the Knack"? Probably not. But at 4:30 a.m. three months later my girlfriend Diane and I drove to Peaches Records in her white Dodge Dart to get in line for tickets for the group's Lisner Auditorium gig.

For all those people for whom the defining concert experience of their high school years was the Doobie Brothers, Supertramp or Peaches and Herb, just let me say, you missed a great show.

But what else would you expect from a band that had a truly extraordinary live act before it was even signed? The Knack -- rhythm guitarist and singer Doug Fieger, lead guitarist Berton Averre, bass player Prescott Niles and drummer Bruce Gary -- took the L.A. club scene by storm in 1978. Their gigs at Hollywood's Troubadour and the Starwood were the stuff of legend: fans lining up around the block, bigwigs such as Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Money and Ray Manzarek dropping by to jam, a profusion of swooning teenage girls (including one named Sharona Alperin).

After a furious bidding war by 13 record labels the group signed with Capitol. Its first album, "Get the Knack," was recorded in 11 days at the ludicrously cheap cost of $ 17,000. The album sold close to 6 million copies. "It was a record that went from not being on the radio one day to being on every single radio station in America the next day in heavy rotation," says Fieger on the phone from Los Angeles. "It was the fastest debut to platinum in history up to that point."

But when anyone thinks of the Knack now, it's rarely to consider the music but rather the firestorm of bad press that soon engulfed the group. If ever there was a band that could have benefited from being killed en masse in a plane crash shortly after its first album, it was the Knack. Either by design or by accident, the group delighted in rubbing people the wrong way.

They gave no interviews -- not to the radio stations that made "My Sharona" ubiquitous, not even to Rolling Stone, which promised to put them on the cover.

Most of their songs were unabashedly about sex, and they were not even vaguely feminist. Some painted women as castrating teases, and reviewers sensed a not-entirely-healthy obsession by four grown men for 14-year-olds. Los Angeles Times critic Kristine McKenna sniffed, "Rock stars have a moral responsibility not to be corrupt creeps."

Fieger is unapologetic. "Yes, we were singing rock-and-roll songs about teenage girls. Odd concept. Geez, that was original."

But, of course, that's what being an adolescent boy was all about: You wanted to get in a girl's pants, and if you were lucky, a girl or two wanted to get in yours. When I heard songs like "(She's So) Selfish," "That's What the Little Girls Do" and "Frustrated," I thought they were funny, parodies of the angst that fills every teenage boy's mind. I didn't rape and pillage as a result of "Get the Knack." I was just amused when Fieger sang, in "(She's So) Selfish": "She said she'd make your motor run/now you know she'll never give you none."

More serious, though, was "the Beatles thing," the ultimate albatross around the Knack's neck.

You don't mess with the Beatles. But the Knack did. Their debut album was called "Get the Knack" and featured a cover photograph of the band that, if you were predisposed to such an interpretation, vaguely resembled the cover of "Meet the Beatles." Worse, the LP's actual paper label was Capitol's "rainbow" design, the same used by You Know Who, and the back of the album sported a photo of the band playing in a TV studio that, it was charged, looked suspiciously like the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Fieger denies any wholesale Moptop plundering, calling it all a "misunderstanding." But he does admit of the TV studio shot, "We used the Beatles image in that photo in the same way that Andy Warhol appropriated the Campbell's soup can for his art. It was an ironic statement, and it didn't have anything to do with the [Beatles'] music."

Such subtle semiotics went over the heads of most record reviewers, who skewered the band at every opportunity. It didn't help that the group's second album, "But the Little Girls Understand," seemed to confirm every Knack-basher's worst suspicions. The first single was called "Baby Talks Dirty" and featured a couplet that rhymed "lick me" and "sticky."

The band fought, Fieger and Gary nearly coming to blows while on tour in Europe. Fieger says he had a since-vanquished substance abuse problem. Under tense circumstances they recorded a third album, "Round Trip" (1981), then broke up.

In 1990 the group reformed with replacement drummer Billy Ward and released "Serious Fun." It may as well have been titled "Put Me in the Cutout Bin."

What has been lost in the scorched-earth criticism of the Knack is 41 minutes of powerful pop: "Get the Knack," a record as hooky as a tackle box. (And, you'll be glad to know, available on CD.)

There's the first cut, "Let Me Out," which starts like all great rock-and-roll songs -- with a shouted "One, two, three, four!" -- and goes straight into "Your Number or Your Name," an infectious song about a girl perpetually out of reach.

There's the scatological "Siamese Twins," inspired, believe it or not, by a John Barth short story.

There's the cover of Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat," featuring a great internal joke: the paradiddle drumroll from "Peggy Sue."

And there's "My Sharona," a powerful, 4-minute-52-second seduction. Gary's drumming is much more complicated than it sounds. That signature "doo-doo, da-da, doo-da doo-da, doo-doo-da" is what drummers call a flam: a staggered strike of the drum sticks producing a full, earthy tone. Niles marries his bass to the beat, Fieger slashes out power chords on his Stratocaster and Averre whips off a truly transcendent guitar solo. I could listen to the guitar solo in "My Sharona" every day for the rest of my life and die a happy man.

My 2 1/2-year old daughter likes "(She's So) Selfish," though she thinks it's about a little girl who won't share her toys (which in a way I guess it is). I gave her babysitter, Emma, a ride home the other night. She had seen "Reality Bites" and liked the scene in the minimart. She didn't recognize "My Sharona," though. Never heard of it. Or the Knack.

They're part of your cultural heritage, I wanted to say. There once was this beast called disco that threatened to take over the land, and in their small way the Knack helped slay it.

But Emma was born in 1979, the year "My Sharona" was released. She says she likes the Beatles.

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