There was always something funny about Sparks. 1972’s “Here Comes Bob,” an angular pop tune wrapped in a baroque string quartet that described how to meet girls by crashing your car into theirs, was an early tip-off that this was anything but your average Los Angeles rock band. Featuring Russell Mael’s squeaky falsetto and the quirky melodies, wiseguy lyrics and polished keyboards of his older brother Ron, Sparks sounded like nobody else on the U.S. scene.
“I didn’t set out to sing like this,” says Russell. “The way Ron’s writing evolved dictated my style. I would have been happy to be Mick Jagger.”
“Our sense of theatricality came from British bands like the Who and the Kinks,” adds Ron. “They cared about the way they looked. American bands thought only the music mattered. We never wanted to be considered bland, which was how Los Angeles bands were seen at the time.”
Though the band was originally a five-piece featuring future record producer Earle Mankey and his brother Jim (later of Concrete Blonde), Sparks’ twin focal points were always the Mael brothers. Russell’s boyish features and flowing locks made him look like Jim Morrison’s younger brother, while Ron’s clipped mustache and greased-back hair recalled Charlie Chaplin playing Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator. It was the perfect canvas on which to paint a 30-year career that, with last year’s release of Sparks’ steadfastly irreverent 19th album, Lil’ Beethoven (Palm), shows no signs of decline. The Maels politely skewer both the angst-ridden legions of nü-metal on “What Are All These Bands So Angry About?” and the weekend-warrior 50 Cent wannabes on “Suburban Homeboy” (“I bought me cornrows on Amazon/I started listening to Farrakhan”) with acerbic wit.
The band’s moniker came courtesy of Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager and part-owner of Bearsville Records, the label that released Sparks’ first two albums. “We were originally called Halfnelson, after the wrestling hold,” says Russell. “Albert liked the band, but he thought our name wasn’t connecting with people. Since we were humorous and we were brothers, he says, ‘Why don’t you be Sparks Brothers?’—like the Marx Brothers, which we thought was stupid. But Sparks sounded kind of OK, so we took that part.”
When the Maels moved to London in 1973, they fine-tuned their image. “I decided to get a haircut and slick it back,” says Ron, “and there wasn’t much precedent for looking like that in bands at the time. Our manager was really upset, because even though Russell and I don’t really look alike, the similarity was closer when I had long hair like his. He thought we’d completely blown our image.”
The result was just the opposite. The brothers immediately struck gold when “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us,” from 1974’s Kimono My House, shot to the top of the British charts. Another Kimono track, “Amateur Hour,” also went gold, but succeeding Sparks songs like the title track of 1974’s Propaganda (with its startling Gilbert & Sullivan-like a cappella intro) didn’t fare as well. The playing field was left wide open for Queen to over-inflate Sparks’ flamboyant style and rake in the cash with a series of worldwide smashes. It’s a scenario that still doesn’t sit well with the Maels.
“It bugged us,” says Ron. “But we’re still going, and they’re not. You can’t say it doesn’t irritate you to some extent when somebody says, ‘Oh, did you hear this groundbreaking piece of music?’ You’ll just sound defensive if you say you were first with something. But it’s whoever gets there the biggest, rather than the first, who’s known for that thing.”
What separated Sparks from the bombast of Freddie Mercury’s boys was the Maels’ sly sense of humor on songs such as “Under The Table With Her,” a 1975 ode to dinnertime dalliance on the carpet. The Maels list comedians Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce and the visual legerdemain of silent-film icon Buster Keaton and French pantomimist Jacques Tati as influences.
“I don’t know if the humor in our songs goes over people’s heads or if they think that’s all we’re about,” says Ron. “Hopefully, there’s another side to our songs that makes them more than just novelty tracks. It’s a really fine balance. It’s easy to do funny, jokey songs, but to also give them a certain depth is more difficult. Many people think if it’s humorous, it’s not very important. We think that makes our songs even more important.”
Sparks’ dogged sense of the absurd translates easily to their album sleeves. Propaganda, with its photo of the brothers bound and gagged in the stern of a speeding motorboat, and 1975’s Indiscreet, with the Maels crawling from the wreckage of their private airplane, show the pains the brothers take with their art. “The cover for Indiscreet was tricked-up a bit,” says Russell. “That was an actual plane crash at a small L.A. airport with us in the foreground, but we brought in a backdrop of a suburban L.A. neighborhood.”
Shot on the ocean off the south coast of England in gale-force winds, the cover for Propaganda was the real deal. “What you don’t see is this crazy photographer (Monty Coles) standing backward on the other end of the boat to capture that shot,” says Russell. “He also wanted us to skydive out of a plane, tied together, and he was going to follow us down. We drew the line there.”
The Maels even staged a three-round boxing match in London to support 1981’s Whomp That Sucker, which features a Rocky Balboa-flavored cover shot. “We went to trainers to learn how to move,” says Ron. “Anything for a gimmick.”
Sparks rode out the punk era—”the one time we felt we weren’t part of what was important musically,” says Ron—with 1979’s No. 1 In Heaven, a hypnotic album of Giorgio Moroder-produced electro-dance music. “We were accused of abandoning our rock ‘n’ roll roots,” says Russell. “It was good to see dance music became sort of cool when people like Johnny Lydon started working with it. Attitudes change.”
Sparks’ music, however, hasn’t changed all that much over the years. When asked if he still hits the high notes, Russell chirps, “Sure do.”
“We play ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us,’ and it’s still in the same key,” adds Ron. “But it’s become tougher from a morale standpoint because so little is going on musically that’s interesting. Sometimes we feel like we’re working in a vacuum.”
The Maels have a surprising response when approached by new converts about what it was like being part of the glam movement. “We tell them we don’t even know, because we never felt an affinity for any of that,” says Ron. “We always get classified with those people because we came along at the same time.”
It wasn’t, Ron insists, through any desire to be dolled up in mascara, rouge and glitter. “We just never wanted to fit in with the wallpaper,” he says. “We always wanted to stand out.”
—Jud Cost; photo by Sean Shroff
