by Daryl Easlea
The brothers would later become evangelical about their tastes and were happy to share them, as Jim Mankey recalls. “Ron and Russ were the equivalent of how The Beatles were in Liverpool; how they took the latest records from sailors that came in to port. In Ron and Russ’ case, it was all the freaks and disreputable types that they met in their stepfather’s shop who would share their musical desires.”
The exuberance and optimism of LA in the mid-Sixties has been well-documented. “LA was fun, full of music and clubs and also hopeful feelings,” Ronna Frank recalls. “UCLA was perfect for the Maels; it was a place where they could indulge their art and find other like-minded souls.”
Although they have since suggested that they were passing through university waiting for something better to come along, Ron and Russell threw themselves into college life and their cultural dabblings became grander. Later on, fellow travellers such as Harley Feinstein would benefit from their wisdom: “I was just starting off in college and I was looking for people to learn from. They were really up on new wave, European cinema, photographers like Diane Arbus. I had never been to Fellini and Godard movies. We went to see Bergman movies together; they introduced me to that whole world — a real cultural education.”
Ronna Meyer, a student at California State University of Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, was married to Ron’s best friend, Fred Frank. “It was great fun. Ron was a year ahead of me, and Russ was a year or two behind,” Ronna recalls. “I’d met Ron when I was at Fairfax High School through my husband. They were also in the same fraternity at UCLA, so I went to lots and lots of fraternity parties. We went on hayrides in West LA as part of the fraternity parties. Ron Mael was on the hay wagon, too.”
Ron, Fred and Ronna were inseparable during Ron’s early years at UCLA. Ron was best man at Fred and Ronna’s wedding in 1966 and nearly married Fred himself, as Ronna recalled. “At our wedding, the person who married us asked if Ron ‘Mael’ instead of Ronna ‘Meyer’ would take Fred to be their husband. Oops!”
Ronna also got to know Ron’s kid brother, whom she recalls as “poetic. His hairstyle and face resembled Jim Morrison.” She considered Ron to be the more serious of the two, very much into art, and heavily into silk-screening T-shirts.
With their shared tastes and loves, it was inevitable that the brothers, as most teenage Americans had done after seeing A Hard Day’s Night, should take the logical step from being music lovers to music makers and form a band. But right from their earliest recordings there seemed to be little straight pop in their repertoire. Although other names such as The Bel Air Blues Project, Moonbaker Abbey and Farmer’s Market have been mentioned, Ron and Russell Mael’s first proper group was called Urban Renewal Project, featuring Fred Frank on guitar and Ronna on drums.
“We used to practise in the gym at Palisades High School,” Frank, who had previously played in The Loafers, says. “In the later stages, there was a young boy, aged 13, who played drums. There was also a college-aged guy who played bass.” The group’s look, as future Sparks publicist, fan club chief and finally manager, Joseph Fleury, later described it, was “rather Beefheart in appearance — Ron with his vest and ten-gallon hat, while Russell donned short, ear-length hair.”
The closest Urban Renewal Project came to the big time was when they entered a couple of Battle Of The Bands competitions. The first was at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1967. Due to financial and technical constraints, Urban Renewal Project had to go through a single amplifier for the heats. “It was amazing,” Frank recalls. “The arena was filled with so much sound, you couldn’t hear anything specific. It was very exciting. We were very hopeful back then, and played Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’, with me on snare drum.” The cacophony was fairly unpleasant and the band failed to progress any further. Reportedly, another act competing that day was Taj Mahal.
Another Battle Of The Bands occurred at the Hollywood Wilshire YMCA. This time, only two groups showed up, and the other outfit were not in sporting mode, “pulling out leads to the speakers”. Piqued by this display of bad form, Urban Renewal Project played, as Russell told Sounds in 1970, “our most obnoxious song in retaliation”. It was then they realised that the band members were all playing in different keys. “We played a lot of Rolling Stones stuff, and music from that era,” Frank recalls.
Although their music was not dissimilar to what thousands of other bands were into, there was a strong streak of individuality and darkness running through the brothers even then. A session at Fidelity Recording Studio at 6315Yucca, Hollywood, marked the recorded debut of the Maels.
Ronna Frank: “We recorded a song onto a 45 called ‘Computer Girl’ in a studio; Russ wrote lyrics and Ron wrote the music. Russ sang lead, I played piano, Fred played guitar, and I can’t remember what Ron actually did on it. My part was to say ‘This is a recording,’ throughout the piece.” Frank also recollects the four band members being in a small room facing the sound booth next to a grand piano.
A test acetate exists of ‘Computer Girl’, along with three other cuts — ‘A Quick Thought’, ‘The Windmill’ and ‘As You Like It’. ‘Computer Girl’, later given away with the superb Japanese volume, Sparks Guide Book, is quite remarkable and demonstrates how the brothers started as they meant to continue. Its subject matter was about a man who forms a relationship with a female who is a computer. Alongside Ronna Frank’s repeated ‘This is a recording’ intonations, reminiscent of later English eccentrics like the Flying Lizards, Russell sings about placing an IBM card in her stomach to get a date over Ronna’s snare, with her husband’s tremolo-laden guitar floating in the background. It’s all rather odd and the influence of The Velvet Underground is unmistakeable.
“We couldn’t figure out way back then that we were singing about computers, when there weren’t computers per se, so we can’t figure out how we got the metaphor of a ‘Computer Girl’ into a lyric,” Russell explained in the BBC documentary This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us — The Story Of Sparks in 2007. “There you go, ahead of the game again.”
The band’s third appearance — at an Industrial Design Conference at UCLA — was a less than illustrious proposition. The participants wanted something far more straight-ahead, and the only time the group could play was while the delegates were eating. It was not a huge success. “Anything they could do to make a buck, they were willing to do,” Larry Dupont recalls. “Someone got the band this job and it was the worst combination of venue and band you could possibly imagine.”
The spectre of being called up to fight in the Vietnam War would hang over the Mael brothers for the next few years. On June 23, 1967, the pair, along with Dupont and early friend and occasional band associate Harold Zellman, attended the 10,000-strong anti-war demonstration centred on the Century Plaza Hotel. US President Lyndon Johnson was attending a fundraising dinner for the Democratic Party when a coalition of groups opposing the war converged on Century City. Muhammad Ali delivered the gathering’s keynote speech.
“Everyone was there,” Dupont recalls. “It was one of the first decent sized anti-war demonstrations in Los Angeles. The kind of people who went out to protest were people coming out of work at the end of the day in business suits, and mothers with children. The protests hadn’t been taken over by the younger, more boisterous crowd yet.” The police, who had been anticipating a smaller crowd, did not have the event especially well-organised. The march came to a halt when some radicals began a sit-down protest in the road. “The crowd was strung out across this bridge with another major cross street underneath and it was going no place,” Dupont remembers. “We couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. I got on Ron’s shoulders; even though there was some guy up there with a bullhorn shouting into the crowd, we couldn’t hear a thing he was saying. The police tried to push the crowd back with half the people still moving forward. A riot broke out with the cops pounding people and everybody scattering in all directions.”
Johnson rarely campaigned publ
icly after this, and the demonstration could be seen as the first step on the route to his withdrawal from running for a second term of presidential office the following year. Although Zellman and Dupont went to further demonstrations, this was the only one at which the Maels were present.*
Urban Renewal Project sputtered out, as Fred Frank was unable to dodge the draft.
Ronna Frank: “We kept playing together, and played around areas of Los Angeles at different clubs. Fred was drafted in 1968. We had already begun working to earn a living and Ron and Russ wanted to pursue just the band. So we drifted apart from the others.”
Things changed into a higher gear musically when the brothers met Earle Mankey. As Fleury said in the 1975 release 2 Originals Of Sparks, “The brothers placed a ‘guitarist wanted’ ad in a local music shop, and wound up with a rounded Gene Clark haircut and shades.” Which was cool, as Clark’s former group, The Byrds, were just about acceptable on the Mael radar. “We detested folk music because it was cerebral and sedate and we had no time for that,” Ron told The Guardian in 2002. “But The Byrds were OK because they electrified it and they had English hairstyles.”
Born in 1947, Washington native and UCLA engineering graduate Mankey was something of a whizz-kid. He was a technically accomplished guitarist and knew how the recording process worked. “Earle was really talented at recording — just on a reel-to-reel tape player,” Russell said in 2003. “He could do whatever you wanted; playing things backwards, speeding up vocals. It was a very different attitude to a lot of LA bands at that time. Mostly new bands went out and played their stuff in front of a public and assessed how it fared. We never went that route. It became almost the same issue as we are facing today — ‘How best do you present something that you’ve recorded?’ ”
“We were doing things like ‘sampling’ one note from a classical record — long before ‘sampling’ was even a term,” Ron added. “We didn’t have to worry about what anyone thought, because no one was hearing it. We were just doing things we thought sounded cool. We’ve been in that position a few times since — the first stuff was ‘pure studio’”
A new band, Halfnelson — named after a one-handed wrestling hold — was born. Larry Dupont, who had by now graduated and was working as a photographer at UCLA, was a constant presence, taping things on his recorder. He also inveigled the band into another art project.
Larry Dupont: “Halfnelson worked on the music for a 16mm film a friend and I were making in college about the Goodyear blimp. We went off and got all the gear and ultimately made a movie in a UCLA basement. My dark room became our editing room.” Although Halfnelson added the original music, the soundtrack expanded to something rather grander, as Dupont confirmed. “Eventually we discovered organs and symphony orchestras and used that. We showed the film to several people at various different stages.”
While the film was never finished, the project showed the Maels’ willingness to experiment. With Mankey’s involvement, a 12-track demo was recorded with bass player ‘Surly’ Ralph Oswald and drummer John Mendelsohn now part of the group. Russell played bass on a lot of the recording, while Ron mainly played organ. To show this was a real proposition, Mike Berns, a drummer from local band Rabbit Mackay, became Halfnelson’s manager. As a player, according to Harley Feinstein, he was into “rootsy, bluesy stuff, a million miles away from what Halfnelson wanted to do”. However, Berns had connections in the LA music scene and provided the finance for their demo.
After the tape was recorded, the line-up seemed to flake away. Oswald and Mendelsohn went off to form Christopher Milk (and later Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips). Mendelsohn found notoriety as an outspoken rock critic for Rolling Stone magazine. He later wrote in his 1995 autobiography, I, Caramba (Confessions of An Antkiller), “I joined a group called Halfnelson, later renamed Sparks. Two years before, the singer and I, the only two longhaired boys in sight, had sneaked suspicious glances at one another in Italian 101. They wanted to be precious and adorable, as they wrongly imagined The Kinks to be, while I, a Who fan, wanted to be intimidating. I was soon asked not to be in the group any more.” As the band needed a drummer, Berns would sit in wherever possible.
With the demo, which was to be artfully packaged to look like a ‘proper’ album — its tracks being ‘Chile Farm Farney’, ‘Johnny’s Adventure’, ‘Roger’, ‘Arts And Crafts Spectacular’, ‘Landlady’, ‘The Animals At Jason’s Bar And Grill’, ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, ‘Millie’, ‘Saccharin And the War’, ‘Join The Firm’, ‘Jane Church’ and ‘The Factory’ — Halfnelson were set to knock the Los Angeles music scene dead.
* Despite their political motivation, it would take some 39 years before Ron and Russell would record their first explicit protest song as Sparks, ‘(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country?’
Chapter Two
Californian Folk Songs: Halfnelson
“Mostly, Sparks are somewhere else entirely. American Bandstand will never hold them. Instead, someone will have to resurrect Ready, Steady, Go!”
Bearsville biography, 1971
“There’s no telling what kind of people they really are underneath all their arty trappings.”
Jim Mankey, 2009
Halfnelson’s demo recording, which later, erroneously, came to be known as A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing, was almost finished. However, a proper band was needed, and a new rhythm section was essential, as well as a place to rehearse. Russell was in Ace Music in Santa Monica when he spotted a ‘drummer needs band’ card.
“I spoke to Russ on the phone — Ron, he and Earle came over to my house and auditioned me,” Harley Feinstein remembers. “We didn’t do anything [to start with] and then we started taking pictures, they were readying me to be part of the group. We became pretty good friends right away. They were immersed in this demo, which they were then mixing, which they thought was going to be an album.”
At 19 Feinstein had no pop pedigree to speak of. He had been playing drums for around four years, and had been in the junior high school band at Emerson High in Westwood. “I would hang out with my friends, get drunk and jam, but I had very little in the way of drumming skills.” However, with his cheekbones and shock of curly hair, Feinstein fitted in with the Maels’ idea of how a band should look; no beard, not a scrap of fat, somewhere between the more photogenic members of the early Who and Kinks. “At first, there wasn’t much for me to do apart from be in photographs and make it look like we were a band.”
There was some tension between manager and drummer Mike Berns and new boy Feinstein, as Berns had been sitting in on early rehearsals with the group. “He really wanted to be Halfnelson’s drummer,” says Feinstein. “He was more of a bluesy, folky sort of guy, very different from a cultural and musical point of view. He looked like Charles Manson, with long hair and long beard — a cool-looking guy, but Ron and Russ were completely fascinated with the Mod look of England.”
Berns was ultimately happier being the wheeler dealer.
Larry Dupont: “In Hollywood when people meet people, they pat them on the shoulder and the first question they ask themselves is ‘Who is this person and what can they do for me?’ and secondly ‘What are their weaknesses?’ I don’t know if Ron and Russ were consciously using Mike Berns; certainly Mike Berns was consciously using the band. If people are consciously using each other to some end, then there’s really nothing nefarious in that.”
Halfnelson would rehearse wherever they could. “We were definitely a band,” Feinstein confirms. “Ron or Russ would come to rehearsals with an acoustic guitar and strum out a basic melody and some words and then we would develop it. There was no doubt there was hierarchy in who was in control of the group: Ron and Russ were the leaders because of the amount of influence they had. Earle was right behind them. I was the lowest man on the totem pole.”
Feinstein was not in that position for long. Although Russell added some bass here and there, the group needed to find a full-time bass player. Earle Mankey asked his you
nger sibling to join. “Jim came along,” says Feinstein. “Although he was pretty quiet, we had a bond”
Halfnelson now had a unique selling point of having two sets of brothers in the band.
Jim Mankey: “It was not really so much of an issue for us. It did seem to be of interest to people that there were brothers, for whatever that means, probably nothing! Ron and Russ had an ESP going on between them but Earle and I have a smooth, working relationship. Not quite the same as ESP.”
Having just turned 19, Jim Mankey, like Feinstein, had little experience and again, seemed beyond the Californian stereotype of a musician. Influenced by Lee Stephens of Blue Cheer, Jim had played in a high school garage band called 3Day Blues and having recently bought his first motorcycle, he would bike down from East LA to Halfnelson rehearsals in Satsuma. “I was like the guy in a T-shirt who emulated my grungy rock idols. Ron and Russell had a lot of colourful friends and I think I was less colourful than most of them, in fact. They placed me in the ‘slimy T-shirt’ school of rock’n’roll — which I was.”
Jim’s first impressions of the Mael brothers were indelible: “Ron had an afro, in keeping with the times I suppose. It was a shock to me to meet such strange and driven people. They knew what they wanted to do and they did it, whereas me… I was just a ‘let it happen or whatever happens I’ll just hang out and experience it’ kind of a guy.”
Jim and Harley both got on; as well as seeking the natural affinity that a rhythm section should have, they were united in that they were both the newcomers and outsiders, sharing a traditional rock’n’roll wing against the more cerebral Earle, Ron and Russell.
Jim Mankey: “Harley’s the funniest guy. He’s the nicest guy you’ll ever know. He was just loads of fun. We were always out partying and picking up girls, stuff like that”