Shooting Off Sparks
By Skylaire Alfvegren
LA Weekly: Tuesday, November 3, 1998 - 11:00 pm
(...continued)
It too died a little death, but was followed by the successful and seminal A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing. "At the time," says Ron, "our road manager also had a mustache, and he walked into the office [at Warners]. They got up, shook his hand, saying, 'Great record, Ron.' That should've given us a hint about American record companies' general attitude toward us - no clue!"
Greater response in England gave the Maels the opportunity to live abroad. "We had always been huge Anglophiles," says Russell, "and to this day there's a greater acceptance of eccentricity in the music scene there." In England, with musicians found through an ad in Melody Maker, they recorded the first of four albums for Island. 1974's Kimono My House contained the frantic "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us," hailed by Melody Maker as "the most interesting single of the pre-punk era." Kimono was followed by Propaganda, which birthed two massive hits in the band's adopted homeland and nary a mention Stateside. Writing twisted lyrics and complex guitar rock before there was a snappy name for it, the Maels enlisted producer Tony Visconti to write star-spangled orchestral oom-pahs for 1975's Indiscreet.
But Sparks needed a change. The band's constants are a tremulous voice, a manic keyboard and two big, fussy brains, and it stands to reason that such heaving cerebra would tire of the same old plink plink plink. So, in 1979, they "went electronic," recording with producer Giorgio Moroder, the mastermind behind Donna Summer's groundbreaking "I Feel Love."
"We thought the combination of the vocal with a really cold electronic sound was amazing," Russell says, "and we were getting tired of our musical surroundings - not the songs, but the trappings of a band." No. 1 in Heaven hit like a bullet, setting the stage for '80s synthpop as the curtain fell on punk. Numerous bands including Depeche Mode, New Order and Pet Shop Boys cited that album as influential, as was the idea of being a duo, of challenging the conception of what a band is.
The sedan-size electronic instruments of the time prevented Sparks from touring, so they returned to a rock-band format and a slicker, new-wavier sound, releasing Whomp That Sucker!, Angst in My Pants and Sparks in Outer Space, the latter featuring their biggest American hit, "Cool Places," a duet with the Go-Go's' Jane Wiedlin, which not-quite-rocketed to No. 49 in 1982. These were the halcyon days of early KROQ, a period when Sparks toured and was "as important to L.A. radio as Depeche Mode or the Cure," as one fan put it.
Sparks' almost arrogant disregard of trends may have got them ostracized by the American music biz, but it's made for an odd agelessness in their work. Practically everything they've recorded in the last two decades sounds as if it could've been released at any point therein. They've been more likely to start trends than follow them. "We've never tried to make timeless music like, say, Bruce Springsteen," says Russell. "But we've come to realize that maybe we've had more of an influence on pop music than we thought."
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