SPARKS WILL FLY, I PREDICT

SPARKS WILL FLY, I PREDICT

FEATURES

J. Kordosh

Yes, they still look strange. In 1977, Robert Hull said “Sparks is just plain weird,” but I believe he was referring to their music as well as their physiques. Now—six years after—they’re every bit the brothers most likely to...uh, makes no sense? Baffle and amaze? Amuse and engage? Hoodwink yo mama??

They are the U.S. Maels, Russell and Ron, a bundle of wonderful from L.A. They’ve been around for any number of years, happily skipping through five labels, churning out product as if it was so much well, product. They were a cult item and (bonus? onus?) the American Roxy. Or, as Russell Mael says, “What money?”

No point in rehashing the fascinating ’70s, though; Sparks is a new band. “Cool Places” is new music this year; “I Predict” was new music last year. Sparks want to go over big and forget their historical wonderfulness. They want it so bad they don’t mind if you forget it, too. They fully understand that someone born in 1968 is unlikely to remember stunning art (Kimono My House); they also understand that that same person may launch Sparks on to vast commercial success. Russ tells me that they’ve always had a young audience because “we’re doing something that’s modern and vital and we look good.” Russ also wears a baggy white sequined suit in concert nowadays.

Lately, a Sparks concert has meant a Rick Springfield concert as well. This is a pretty good deal, since Springfield draiws thousands of people for a hobby. Of course, he couldn’t stay in a writing contest with Sparks any longer than a monkey could retain a syllable, but who cares? It isn’t irony— it’s not even Allentown, where they’re closing all the factories down—it’s just the way things go.

So it’s no sweat for the Mssrs. Mael. This tour is a truly mind-boggling 85-date extravaganza, and I’ll bet Ron Mael’s never even had half that many dates in his whole life. Sparks see the whole deal with the cunning of show-biz vets, anyway. “It’s one more way of us reaching a million people— live—than we possibly ever could do,” Russ said. The frighteningly-normal Ron added: “The reason we’re on this tour is because of Rick Springfield and the fact that he’s a fan of ours. There was a fantastic competition among bands to get on this tour.” Go sit in the corner, Mick.

I’ll get back to the tour in a second here, but let me tell you a little about these cats. Russ, who’s the obligatory good-looking one, is a real nice guy, speaks with a very slight stutter that makes him even cuter, and a master of the difficult art of smiling for weeks at a time. Older bro Ron (32) is also nice, also shy. “Everyone always looks at me, saying, ‘aren’t you a little uncomfortable?’ And I’m not, because I’ve been doing this for so long it’s just natural.” He doesn’t like to talk (or smile) as much as Russ, but he explained: “It’s hard for me to get into conversations. Bus drivers want to get into conversations (bus drivers?) and I’d just rather stay by myself and think of things and ideas for songs.”

But that’s only surface strangeness. Russell astonished me with this revelation about his brother: “He’s got the biggest collection of snowballs at home in the Western World.” So where’s he keep ’em, in his Olympic-sized freezer? No, these are the little shake ’em and watch the pretty fake snow fall over the pretty fake scene things. Said the dedicated collector himself: “To any readers out there—if any readers send snowballs from where they are to our address on the liner notes.. .you don’t have to buy the album, just borrow it.. .I’ll send you a postcard from somewhere. It’s a bad deal, I know, but it’s the best I can do under our budget.”

Not to be outdone, Russ sprung this one on himself, after noting that Ron will get “about 2,000 snowballs” if his plaintive plea were heard: “I collect Smiley Faces—the yellow happyface thing. I’ve got ’em now in cloths and wall thermometers and pads and buttons. I’ve really got a huge collection of buttons. It’s just so happy, it’s sickening, y’know? But if anybody has anything like that, the same offer applies. Preferably not badges—I’m really well-stocked on badges, anybody can get those.” He went on to tell me the thrill of picking up a Happy Face at a Stucky’s with the immortal words, “Smile, you’re in Indiana,” emblazoned across it. Hey, I thought hobbies were supposed to keep you from going crazy.

I asked the guys what these rather cynical collections said about their attitude towards America. “There’s not a cynical bone in my body,” Russ smiled happily. “I just think things look better in the snowballs and on postcards than in the actual place,” Ron added. “If I go to museums or anything, I don’t even bother going to the exhibition. You just go to the gift shop and whatever they have there is all you need.” Hey, it’s probably true!

This explains, in part, why Sparks have a history of writing very clever material, anyway. The classic “I Predict” (“You’re gonna take a walk in the rain and you’re gonna get wet...you’ll eat a bowl of chow mein and you’ll be hungry soon...Somebody’s gonna die, but I can’t reveal who”) was written by Ron after some sublime reading. “I like reading the Enquirer and the Star,” he admitted. “Nice, inspiring things. I like all those kind of things. So carrying that to a bit of an extreme was really the inspiration for that song.” Face it, the guy’s a genius. I’m sure you know, in your heart, that—as Ron said—“those papers are not just for a few kooks.” Hell, they’re for a whole country of kooks.

Some might argue that Sparks aren’t quite as clever as they were in days of yore, but I can’t buy it. “I think it’s more refined, compared to what it was, and a little bit less wandering around. But I think the attitude’s still there and the basic function is really similar.” ’Strue; tunes like “Upstairs” and “All You Can Think About Is Sex” (their next single, which—as Ron put it—is “guaranteed to have no television exposure already”) are hot property. Who cares if Russ introduces them with stuff like “We’ve only been here a day, but we can see there’s a lot of sex manaics in this town...” The young girls seemed to think that was a darn ed exciting thing to say. Plus, for more aged customers, he likes to announce the presence of Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, George Bush, and Rosemary Clooney in the audience.

But they are, as Russ insists, writers foremost. They’ve become good friends of the Go-Go’s (in a way so silly it could only happen to Sparks) and wrote a song which will be on the young ladies’ next album. “It’s called ‘Yes Or No.’ ” Russ said. “It’s a really neat song (only Russ could give substance to the phrase “really neat”) which I think will be the single. It’s probably—right at this point—well, it sounds more like a single than their other songs we’ve heard.” Ron mentioned he was “thinking of joining the GoGo’s,” but he’s probably.. .no, I won’t say it.

Anyway, Russ sang “Cool Places” with Jane Wiedlin, as you probably know. I asked him how the recording event came about, and got another stranger-than-fiction story. “She had written a really nice (probably really neat, too) letter,” Russ answered. “Not her, but the president of her fan club, had written a really nice letter to the Sparks fan club, saying that they (the Go-Go’s) wanted to join our fan club. And that Jane, in particular, had been the president of her own little chapter of the Sparks fan club ten years ago, in the Kimono My House period. So I got that letter—they passed it on to me—and I thought it was (what else?) really nice. So I wrote a letter back to her—and then—saying it was (you guessed) really nice of you to say that stuff to us. And if you ever want to do a duet or a project together or have an affair, either or, let me know. She wrote back and got in touch with us, like the next day, and said let’s do it. (Oh, yeahhh?) And it worked out real well. (Oh, the song!)”

So it did. And now a bright horizon beckons the rejuvenated Sparks. Getting back to the never-ending tour, Russ told me “There was some talk of us playing with Roxy on their American tour, and we found out it was only a 15 or 20 city tour. We want to make an attempt to break out of that cult thing—we could get the same Sparks cult people to a Roxy/Sparks show. It would be TURN TO PAGE 59 fun, but we want to try something else and break out of it.”

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(Regarding Roxy, the boys—what else can I call ’em—have no harsh words, other than Ron noting that they’ve become “sophisticated” and “cool and sort of detached and adult, in a certain kind of way. And we’ve never strove for that New York savoire faire.” A half-minute later, of course, he says this is “good.” Russ would’ve said it was rea//y good, I’m sure.)

So it’s the million-people road with Rick for Russ and Ron, and more power to ’em. Evidently Springfield, like Wiedlin, was a Sparks nut in his time, too. “He said that he had our first album when he was living in a small apartment in Hollywood,” Russ told me. “And it was one album he really likes. As it turns out, we find that more and more people are sort of surfacing as Sparks fans; that—before—-it wasn’t cool to admit it or something, and now they’re sort of coming out of the closet. A lot of people are starting to say more things now than they did five years ago, and, y’know, it’s flattering for us to know that they’re there.”

Flattering? Hell, man, it’s neat.