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Jerry Rubin from Santa Monica |
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Russell Mael is creazy about russian pop-art |
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Hello Young Lovers!
Dick around with Sparks
By Chris Ziegler
One of the last shows for Sparks in Westwood might have been one of its very first shows then-UCLA-students Russell and Ron Mael, delivering a set of high-concept glam-pop to a pizza parlor crowd that asked if they could please just turn it down. (It reminds me of Flight of the Conchords, says Russell.) Now almost 40 years and 21 albums later the brothers Mael will be performing a special and especially rare homecoming double-set at distinguished Royce Hall, showcasing their newest album and their established 1974 classic Kimono My House. Shame to fame to academic acclaim that last stage comes in pop generally posthumously if at all, and more rarely still for a band so proudly particular as Sparks, who could still get banned from BBC airplay (thanks to the song Dick Around) as recently as 2006.
With hit records all across the Western world in a good year, said the L.A. Times, theyll sell a million Sparks is still ferociously active, releasing their newest Exotic Creatures of the Deep (on Lil Beethoven, the label named after the 2002 release some might call their comeback album) this summer after a historically unprecedented run of 20 live shows presenting every album theyd ever done (including the original B-sides!) in chronological order.
They did the math 240 songs and 4.8 million notes, said Ron and it works out to about 34 notes per second, which the Maels allow might be uncomfortably accurate. (The mind boggles, wrote The Times of London.) And then they did the shows, and when they were done, they flopped out of bed the next morning at 4 a.m. to catch the only flight to Estonia, where they would be headlining a pop festival. And after the slow fade of the last line of the last song on their new Exotic Creatures of the Deep I dont care if you love me/Just say you like me, sings a chorus with Russell it became apparent, says Russell, that what theyd created was less a conventional career in pop than an entire self-contained universe.
Since the days when they played for pizza, Sparks remains too funny to be serious, too real to be camp, too relevant to be nostalgic and too smart for their own or everyone elses good. Their most recent appearance on the local airwaves to promote this weekends performance comes on KCRWs literature show. Thats the sort of thing which just like a Sparks live set in a hall thats hosted Edward Albee readings and Werner Herzog screenings makes Russell proud, possibly the same way he felt when The Times said his and his brothers music was postmodern before the term existed. After 21 albums, the implication becomes clear. Sparks isnt just enjoyable its educational.
As UCLA students, neither Mael studied music Ron studied graphic arts, after his father the newspaper designer, and Russell filmmaking and theatre arts. In fact, both probably had more time on the football field during high school in Pacific Palisades Russell even made varsity than any formal musical training. Ron took piano lessons from age six to nine and then stopped, and Russell never had any musical training. (To this day, the brothers mostly dont read music when rehearsing those 240 songs, they instead polka-dotted their studio with Post-it note cue cards.)
But even as kids in the band originally named Halfnelson, they were dedicated Anglophiles: The Beach Boys were the only kind of American thing we really liked, says Ron. We were buying all the English imports when they came out the floppy Who albums with the bendable covers that you couldnt get here. When they finally got a gig at the Whisky, the marquee read: FROM ENGLAND SPARKS! They didnt object, says Russell. It was just another well-intentioned attempt to make the Maels fit in somewhere: Even the idea of the name, says Ron. Halfnelson was thought to be too weird, so we were kind of ... convinced to change it to Sparks. Which was more acceptable. But it didnt sell any more! Everybody tries to analyze things but it seems like things work or they dont.
So the Sparks star doesnt rise and set so much as simply orbit. When their arch glam-pop began to lag in England in the 70s, that unexpected dip into disco with Giorgio Moroder charted in France. When their disco sales dropped, KROQ discovered 1982s Angst in My Pants, and even gave away the wedding dress Ron wore on the cover as a promotion. After America, Germany again, with When Do I Get to Sing My Way? In 2002, they released Lil Beethoven, reviewed as a masterpiece of pop art in England. Theyre unpredictably consistent well, theyre always consistent within, they say. They make, says Russell, Sparks albums from Sparksworld.
When In the Red label head Larry Hardy who would release their Hello Young Lovers in 2006 alongside records by the Black Lips and the Dirtbombs first heard Sparks, it was on a stolen 8-track of Kimono My House, which hed listen to in a friends parents parked Cadillac. It sounded positively otherworldly, he says now. I fell in love with them almost immediately.
Then as now, there was something instantly accessible about Sparks, despite a sense of humor chasing challenging toward caustic and a lifelong opposition to pop convention, explained repeatedly by Russell as songs that telegraph everything theyre going to do in the first few seconds: Im sorry you were broken-hearted, he says, but youre boring me to death with your sorry tale! Instead, they write to impress themselves: Just from the beginning, says Ron, youd do things and think, God, thats pretty cool! We wanna continue with that on a different scale when you hear a thing that cracks you up a bit. Not in a joke way, but in a way you cant believe youre capable of doing it!
So for 21 albums theyve been cracking up, and in the slivers are reflected intricate pop compositions like Brian Wilson and Brian May and Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, arranged into little song-stories transposing Ray Davies Arthur to Nathanael Wests Los Angeles with confident, deep and brutally precise reportage on life, death, time, sex, confusion, music and love. Sparks songs suggest Marx Brothers shorts (Hasta Maana, Monsieur) and Howard Hawks features (Dont Leave Me Alone With Her) and exploito paperbacks (Sextown U.S.A.) and after-midnight TV (I Married a Martian) and all those strange connections between the unexpected and the universal that puts the electricity into pop culture and pop music both. There could be hundreds of potential No. 1s in those 240 Sparks songs. In Sparksworld, there are.
We would have loved to have done 21 nights in L.A., too, says Russell now, speaking from the Coldwater Canyon home where Sparks writes, rehearses and records its recent albums. The band is up to roughly one a year now, assembled bit by byte into four billion tracks on the computer. But logistically its such a hard thing to do to block out a venue for a month and a half, and to make that demand on the audience to rearrange their life! Its a demanding thing. Longevity sometimes makes people lazy if youre not sorta somewhat hungry, you wouldnt feel the need to do something like that.
The idea for Sparkstember though the shows actually took place last June was originally just a spectacular attention-getting idea, says Ron. Runner-up, he explained at the time, was killing themselves They actually were underrated! he said. And this is only slightly more of a pleasant experience. But at the same time, says Russell, it was a chance to take in the totality of their work with songs from young Maels off albums like the 1972 debut Halfnelson, or 1974s Kimono, some of which had never ever been performed live, locking into unexpected harmony with departures like 1979s disco hit No. 1 In Heaven or the baroque n roll of 2006s Hello Young Lovers: Were actually better than we thought! joked Russell then.
All Sparks records play well with one another, says Steven McDonald now, who (with Jim Wilson, Marcus Junca, and Steven Nistor) helped perform those 21 albums during a break from his usual duties as the bassist of Redd Kross another L.A. rock n roll brother team, he adds. The songs weave a continuum that makes the music undeniably Sparks. All good bands are insular. Sparks are definitely not to be excluded from that tradition. They have their own set of values and interests that are unique to Sparks and Sparks fans alike. All my friends that have been deep Sparks enthusiasts from the get-go are all truly unique freak-flag-fliers my favorite kind of people!
And now the flag-fliers are readying to fly in coordinating on Sparks website for a pre-show meet-up and then over to the university to see the first domestic performance of Kimono in decades, and the first performance of Exotic Creatures ever. What will they learn? If they have tickets, they already know Sparks is art, and those 240 songs would tell a story except the last few chapters arent written yet. Right now it ends with Russells I dont care if you love me/Just say you like me. But if hes speaking as himself Maybe I dont even know exactly. It makes it more interesting for the listener to not know exactly what its based on, he warns about Sparks lyrics hes not speaking to Sparksworld. Hes talking to another planet one hes just visiting.
Sparks performs Kimono My House and Exotic Creatures of the Deep at Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood. uclalive.org. Sat., 8 p.m. $17-$40. All ages.
Published: 02/11/2009