Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  “I could never see someone like Todd sign a band like us and release a record like that now,” Ron said in 2003. “I don’t think people would have such patience with us today.” In 1971, patience was certainly what was needed with Halfnelson.

  Featuring songs that Rundgren suggested “would not relate to the outside world,” Halfnelson was released in the autumn, full of brittle, intricate pop and containing so much treble it makes your speakers contract. It did, as Russell said, “retain the essence of our ‘living room’ demos”.

  “The album was incredible,” Joseph Fleury wrote. “Every song was a strange little gem, and immediately catchy and tuneful. The point is, the more you hear the songs, the less accessible you think they will become.” Critic Ned Raggett’s assessment of opening track ‘Wonder Girl’ is spot on. Raggett argues that with Ron’s tinkling piano and Russell’s vocal acrobatics, the track, with its “ever-so-slightly-weird lyrics about love that couldn’t quite be taken at face value,” saw the Maels establish themselves so perfectly “that arguably the rest of the brothers’ long career has been a continual refinement from that basic formula”.

  ‘Fa La Fa Lee’, sung by a cold-suffering Russell, is a giddy piece of pop, albeit one that Ron described in 1975 as “incest at the roller-rink”. The fairly indecipherable Russell-written ‘Roger’ (“my first major composition of any stature”) became a key track from the demo and the one that made ears turn, featuring a guitar sound not dissimilar to ‘Love You’ from Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs.

  ‘High C’, one of the band’s most well-received live songs, was the first track to be recorded for the album and shows quite how outside the scene they were. Writing about imaginary characters has since become commonplace after various British songwriters the Maels admired such as Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and Roy Wood introduced the practice back in the mid-Sixties. However, to sing about an opera singer who is having issues reaching high C marks out Sparks’ unique selling points of novelty and strangeness.

  ‘Fletcher Honorama’, which took around 20 takes to complete, and was later covered by R Stevie Moore, is remarkable. It shows the indirect influence of The Doors on the group in the menacing, somnambulant backing to Russell’s swampy vocals. On certain listens, one can hear this track and believe that Sparks never actually bettered it. It is “about a celebration being thrown for an old man named Fletcher just before his death,” Ron said in 1975. “His friends didn’t want to wait until he died to get together.” The repeated detuned piano riff in the instrumental break adds spice to the proceedings. The Beach Boys provide a reference point on ‘Simple Ballet’. It took Russell seven takes to get the ‘oh no’ before the ornate instrumental.

  The Ron and Russell co-write ‘Slowboat’ is perilously close to being a Sparks ballad. “This was written around the time of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and ‘Let It Be’ ” [both 1970] Ron said in 1975. “The reason for this one not being accepted can only be attributed to a lack of backing by the record company.” Russell thought that it should have been a single. Hearing it today, it seems out of place on this or any Sparks record, featuring acoustic guitar and a guitar solo straight out of an AOR manual. It’s also rather lovely. Russell would perform this on stage from a papier mâché boat on wheels, dressed in his sailor’s suit.

  As if to underline their own disgust at a straightforward love song being on the album, the riposte came with the Earle Mankey-penned ‘Biology 2’, featuring the guitarist and his then wife, Alisha, and one of the few tracks from the album to get radio play. ‘Saccharin And The War’, another Russell song, further emphasises the democracy of the early albums. Russell believed that this song, about weight reduction — something of a lifelong Mael obsession — was better on the original demo tape. ‘Big Bands’, a rewrite of ‘Summer Days’ from the Urban Renewal Project repertoire, is, as Ron said, “a medley or, to be more blunt about it, a song composed of about six parts spliced together that we couldn’t play straight through from start to end. A typical ‘set-up-that-final-rave-up song’ song.” Its lyrical references to Herbert Hoover were later sardonically downplayed by Ron, who explained, “This was when American references could be extensively used since our audience, though small, was mostly American.”

  ‘(No More) Mr Nice Guys’, a storming rocker featuring the guitar of its co-writer Jim Mankey, contains the seeds of the approach Sparks would soon take. Amended to the singular, Alice Cooper borrowed the title for his 1973 hit single. “Well, at least somebody was to make a buck out of it,” Russell said in 1975. “‘Nice Guys’ met with resounding approval by the six waitresses and sparse ‘tour bus’ audiences that caught our regular Whisky A Go Go shows in LA.” *.

  Despite its frangible, askance pop, Halfnelson seemed to lack any commercial sensibility. It was released in a sleeve with a Sixties catalogue model — whom some initially believed to be Grace Kelly — sitting in a car, while the band looked on. “The Halfnelson cover was Ron’s idea but they reached a point where something else was needed,” Larry Dupont recalls. “I thought colour-tinting would be best, so I took the photographs for that and then the whole thing was pieced together and then I ended up colouring it.”

  “I’m impressed by how developed our musical direction was on Halfnelson,” Ron later mused. “There was a sense of trying to both play within the rules of what constitutes pop music and also seeing what happens when you find those rules too confusing.”

  After Halfnelson had been out for a short while, Roy Silver, concerned for his charges, arranged a meeting with Albert Grossman at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. He presented them with a proposition.

  Harley Feinstein: “Albert told us his plans for the group. He thought we had a real chance of making it. He told us to picture a telephone pole. The pole has been standing there for many years and people keep going up to it and tacking up notes to it about their groups; every single square inch of that pole has a nail in. ‘My goal as the owner of the record company is to find the inch of space that isn’t covered and put you into it’. And then the name change was discussed.”

  Ron later wrote in Profile how they set about the change. Grossman thought the name Halfnelson was “too weird. Too esoteric. Too wrestling.” With his years in the business and an eye for a good turn, the bear-like Grossman had just the name. “Sparks Brothers! Get it? Wild and wacky like The Marx Brothers, but since that name had already been taken, a perfectly acceptable alternative. A great quantity of silence greeted this announcement.”

  Harley Feinstein: “We weren’t that hot on the name Halfnelson, we were fine with changing the name. Several other names had been bandied about in the past. It was very difficult for us to get one to agree on. One of the names we had considered was ‘Chinese People’. We were all into WC Fields and there was a line from his film International House, where he was concerned about the amount of people from China around, so he exclaims loudly, ‘Ah! Chinese people!’”

  Jim Mankey: “If there was any dissension about the name change, it would only have come from Ron; he was the man in charge. He thought the new name was laughable and not very creative and he was right. Halfnelson was kind of an odd name, too. A name that evoked sweaty wrestlers was not what we were about. Ron and Russ had kind of a bad attitude towards authority and they didn’t like the likes of Albert Grossman giving them suggestions on how they should act or write their music.”

  They were also concerned that the surviving members of The Marx Brothers — Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo — would be angry. The band compromised and shortened the name simply to Sparks, although they were The Sparks Brothers long enough for Warner Brothers to put an ad in the music trade welcoming them to the label.

  The Halfnelson album was rechristened simply Sparks, with the group standing against a red-brick wall, coloured by Larry Dupont. “That was 100% Ron’s idea,” Dupont says. “I do seem to remember that at the time Ron had a brick fetish and I think he had at one point tried to make brick pants out of plastic bri
cks to wear on stage, which didn’t work very well.”

  To coincide with the re-release, the album’s most commercial track, ‘Wonder Girl’, was put out as a single, and on July 29, 1972, Sparks performed it, with ‘(No More) Mr Nice Guys’, on American Bandstand. Genial host Dick Clark commented on their appearance; indeed, the pictures of them with Clark, who sports a grown-out straight’s haircut of the early Seventies in suit and tie with Ron in his psycho John Oates phase with eye make-up and Beatle pendant, are slightly unnerving. ‘Wonder Girl’ gave Sparks a taste of national fame as the single rose to 92 in the Cash Box chart, and nearly made it into the Billboard listings. Infamously, the record reached number one in Montgomery, Alabama.

  The band’s live show became increasingly surreal. Russell would attempt to knock himself unconscious with a giant wooden hammer onstage, which actually happened in Texas.

  Harley Feinstein: “We went in a sedan halfway across the country to a redneck nightclub in Houston called the Liberty Hall at 1619 Chenevert. It had only just opened as a venue. It was pretty much beerdrinking, gun-toting, cowboy-hatted guys — and they loathed us. It was there when Russell brought the hammer along that he bought from a local fairground, threw it up in the air and it hit him on the head.”

  The band, and even Russell himself, thought the incident rather humorous, but his brother did not.

  Larry Dupont: “When Russ beamed himself over the head with a mallet, as soon as Ron got a chance to voice an opinion on the subject, it was one of tremendous stress and angst. It was funny no longer. We had to haul Russ out to the hospital.”

  In fact, the whole Houston sojourn was filled with incident, as Dupont recalls: “The drive there was horrific. We were in rental cars. One broke down in the middle of the desert. When we finally got to Texas, it was raining so hard [and there was] thunder and lightning. Lightning was literally forking over the road. Rain was coming down so hard, the only thing I could do was occasionally see a line down the middle of the highway. At one point, lightning shot over a group of trees and we went round a corner and there was this house in flames. When we got to Houston I said ‘Were you guys scared?’ and they said ‘Well somehow we felt that you had it under control because you didn’t seem scared.’ I’d been absolutely scared shitless but I didn’t know anything else to do but continue to drive, as insane as I thought it was. And then Russell pounded himself over the head. We were pulled over by a State Trooper at some place in Texas and I got a photograph of the entire band posing with him next to the guy’s car.”

  Strange Texan gigs aside, building on this modest head of steam, the group returned to the studio. Their second album, A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing, was stranger yet somehow more coherent than their debut and owed a great deal to the music of the Weimar Republic. Todd Rundgren would not be returning to produce it.

  James Lowe: “He had another record to make [in London], Straight Up by Badfinger. I am sure they would have stuck with him as a producer had he been available.”

  Speaking in 2008, Russell was unequivocal about the debt the group owed to Rundgren. “[He] seemed like a kindred soul… Todd liked us for what we were. He thought that the uniqueness of our approach and the sound, even then, was something that he only needed to make a bit more hi-tech — less like a demo. He encouraged all of our eccentricities, like using cardboard boxes for percussion, and we give him credit for that.”

  James Lowe: “Todd knew I was familiar with the style and asked me if I wanted to produce it. I said yes. I liked them very much. They were completely different. What rock’n’roll should be.”

  Lowe and Sparks clicked. “It was like going through the war together. We set up a session at Wally Heider’s Studio to record a ‘demo’ together and we did ‘Girl From Germany’. I got to insert more ‘rock’ into it than the first record, so I was happy and I guess they were too because we started blocking time at ID Sound where I recorded the basic tracks.”

  Although his years with Dylan had taught him to not get in the way of the artistic process, Albert Grossman believed that Sparks had that extra dimension that could make them successful, even though they looked so weird. Despite Dupont’s assertion that Grossman “didn’t understand who they were,” Lowe says that Grossman was a keen supporter: “Albert liked Sparks. He called me after the first record and since I was going to make the second, asked if I could get Russ’ vocals up front more. People were having a hard time understanding [Russ]. I agreed because the lyrics were the thing with this group, but I found it was not a function of level so much as the way Russ was enunciating the words. Albert probably called me three or four times about this.

  “It was an odd mix of characters but it was glued together once they sprinted into a song. It all sounded kind of strange. Like a club no one but the group belongs to. If you look at the cover of A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing you can see it looks like you drew from five different groups to get these guys. One with a mullet, frizzed-out glams, and head-banging demon-seed shit. ‘Oh yeah, we want to record a song in French!’ Somehow it all worked… I loved the first record and you know how you hear the material for a few weeks and you start singing the songs in your sleep? This one was stronger.”

  Although Ron and Russell were clearly the creative directors of the project, all members of the band played a strong role: “Earle was interested in engineering so he and I would mix it up about guitar sounds,” Lowe says. “He liked a gnashy sound on some things and I was always trying to bring it into focus with some clarity. It was good-natured and we both got our way. Jim was darker and more the quiet type, what a bass player should be. He was down there on the bottom with definition like in ‘Nothing Is Sacred’. I really like some of the bass on that record. Harley was a good-looking guy with a different style of playing, kind of trashy but very intense. I remember him always running off to school or something. He would be taking down his drums just after the last beat to go take a test. They were easy guys to get along with. No attitudes.”

  In a catalogue that frequently harbours on the bizarre, A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing is pretty odd. Anything was fair game, and there was a sense of magic in the air.

  James Lowe: “We needed a kid’s voice for ‘Batteries Not Included’. Earle went out of the studio on La Brea Avenue and came back in a few minutes with a 10-year-old and his mom. The kid stepped up to the microphone and just did it. On ‘Beaver O’Lindy’ we decided on an accordion. I called Kip Tulin, the 14-year-old brother of Electric Prunes bass player, Mark Tulin. He came down to Hollywood and played for us. He was scared to death but did the job. So this record was made by kids, for kids.…”

  Lowe is not far off the mark when opining that virtually everything on the album is “cool”. The opening track, ‘Girl From Germany’, which enjoyed a renaissance when Sparks hit big in the UK in 1974, sets out the album’s intent; Ron’s off-kilter love song involves a man bringing his German girlfriend home to be greeted by his parents who cannot get over the Second World War. “To my knowledge, no other bands were dealing in the same subject matter at the time,” Russell wrote in the notes to Profile. In the main he was correct, although 10cc in the UK were ploughing a similar furrow, which had begun at the quirkier end of Sixties’ British psychedelia.

  The only full-group composition, ‘Beaver O’Lindy’, about an imaginary rock singer, is a patchwork of pipe organ, military drumming, cheerleading, varying speeds and a thrash-metal sensibility. ‘Nothing Is Sacred’ is notable for Earle Mankey’s Zoot Horn Rollo-like guitar and marks the first appearance on record of Russell’s falsetto, which was to be the centrepiece of Sparks’ subsequent period at Island Records. The string quartet on ‘Here Comes Bob’ was possibly influenced by Larry Dupont’s love of classical music, which he was always trying to get the band to listen to.*

  ‘Moon Over Kentucky’ was another example of how Sparks melded all the various facets of their tastes — the guitar of ‘Lucifer Sam’ by Pink Floyd with an element of the work of Bertolt Brecht
and Kurt Weill. While, as already mentioned, there were few contemporary acts performing material like this, the impact of the film Cabaret, released in February 1972, could not have failed to have influenced Sparks. The Bob Fosse picture, based on Christopher Isherwood’s play I Am A Camera, was set in the doomed Berlin of the Weimar Republic as the National Socialist Party’s power is on the rise. A time of decadence and opulence that had to come crashing down; doomed romance; the skull beneath the skin — very Ron Mael. After all the chintz and glitter, the church organ-style coda at the end of the track could well have been played by Vincent Price in The Abominable Doctor Phibes.

  The album contained one of the group’s exceptionally rare cover versions, except it was not as obvious as ‘Baby Come Back’ from their old stage repertoire. ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound Of Music had been written in the late Fifties for the stage production of the film, which had gone on to be one of the world’s highest-grossing movies of all time. Sparks’ version — a recent live favourite in their set — was, predictably, a hoot, with Jim Mankey’s heavily strummed bass in the middle section welcoming the tumult of Ron’s keyboards. It was at this point on stage that Ron would throw confetti into a cooling fan in order to spread it around the crowd, but which frequently failed to disperse. It was, as Russell said, “the best live tune as it resembled something that everyone had heard”.

  ‘Angus Desire’ has, in Russell’s modest opinion, “one of the best titles in the history of western music.” The song about drawing nude models in art class finds his singing sounding uncannily like Bryan Ferry’s. While Sparks were aware of Roxy Music, it’s unlikely that they would have heard them at this early juncture — ironic, considering the two bands would spend the next few years being closely compared and scrutinised.