by Daryl Easlea
With its twittering strings and swooning, soulful arrangement, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ remains one of the great anomalies in Sparks’ catalogue. However, although slated for single release, it was withdrawn in the UK almost immediately. Although the remake of ‘I Like Girls’ was recorded with the same line-up at the same time, the B-side of the UK release was the quirky ‘England’, which saw the band reunited with Earle Mankey. As dour and experimental as ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ is over-egged and velvety, in one fell swoop, it dealt with all the questions the duo faced about the country that had been their home for the past two years.
New York in the summer of 1976 was a febrile, cutting edge location. The city was going broke, people were moving out to the suburbs and new wave had broken in the Bowery. Election fever gripped the city as it looked like Americans would finally get their chance to vote against Gerald Ford, the President they had never elected, and put southern Democrat Jimmy Carter into office.
The Maels entered this atmosphere with new drummer Hilly ‘Boy’ Michaels and bass player Salvatore ‘Sal’ Maida, formerly of Fleury and Hewlett protégés Milk’n’Cookies.
John Hewlett: “Milk’n’Cookies was Joseph’s suggestion. [Keyboard player] Ian North was an interesting character. [Vocalist] Justin Strauss, who later did brilliantly in New York as a DJ, was there; the elements were in place. I thought the songwriting was good, but the album [the band made for Island in 1974] didn’t rock my heart, and I wasn’t really 100% into it.” Sal had originally auditioned for Sparks back in 1973 and had gone on to play with Roxy Music.
At Holmes’ suggestion, the Maels, Maida and Michaels decamped to Studio A at New York’s Mediasound Studios for several intense weeks. “Mediasound was my second home for almost five years,” says Holmes. “At times, I would be there from 10am until dawn…” Jeff Salen was also kept on as the album’s guitarist.
Rupert Holmes: “Jeff was sort of an artistic sidebar to the album. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It was simply that you had the feeling he had his own career ahead of him, so he became a kind of resident studio musician within the group. I remember wondering if he planned to tour with the band after the album was completed, and thinking that might be unlikely.”
Mediasound had originally been a church, located close to the corner of 57th and Eighth Streets, and continued as a temple to music: its doorway and gorgeously tiled entrance hall might have been the entrance to an abbey.
Rupert Holmes: “Below the street were two other smaller studios, a couple of editing rooms, a mastering room, and tape storage rooms. Studio A had rafters that betrayed the room’s ecclesiastical origins and that allowed rock bands to crank their Marshalls all they wanted. We would sometimes put microphones in the rafters to capture the ceiling’s ambience. A flight up from Studio A were the business offices of the staff. The mixing studio was on that level as well.”
The studio rarely closed. In addition to all the rock, R&B, salsa, and pop recorded there, Mediasound was where most of the music for Sesame Street was recorded. For years, there was a permanent session booked at 9am, with engineer Fred Christie always behind the console. Around noon, the Muppet folks would leave and the jingle crowd would come in — often then with Luther Vandross in full effect. In the evenings, it was rock ‘n’ roll.
Big Beat had the cards stacked against it from the very start due to the constraints imposed by CBS. Ron once described the album as a “screwy situation”.
Rupert Holmes: “I honestly don’t know the context of Ron’s comment. I do know one aspect of the project that was highly unusual and that made the work more difficult for all of us. When I began work on it, Columbia Records had already set a release date, and it was ridiculously close at hand. They told me that they had to print the LP jacket before I’d begun work on the album or they’d miss their release date. Insanely, this meant I had to give CBS the song titles and their sequence on the album before we recorded them!”
Holmes, quite justifiably, complained to the label. “But what if we don’t like the way a song turns out, or Sparks write a new song while we’re recording the album? And how can I sequence an album that I’ve yet to hear?” Columbia simply informed him that this was too bad, and that if he didn’t commit immediately in advance of recording, he’d be killing the originally set release date and delaying the record’s release for six months.
Holmes understood how anxious Sparks were about their first release on a prestigious American label like Columbia Records, and felt it wasn’t his right to sabotage their timing. Any delay would have meant Sparks would not have any product out until 1977, and by that time the band might well have been forgotten. Holmes listened carefully to the songs as the group played through them, decided they were all ‘recordable’ and unlikely to be cut from the line-up, and tried to come up with the best sequence that he could imagine.
Rupert Holmes: “Because of the incredibly tight timing, I had no choice but to go with a minimalist approach to recording the band, which luckily was in keeping with the Maels’ new style. They were certainly in a state of total readiness for the studio. Part of this was because Sparks and I were striving for an extremely spartan, minimalist sound, unlike anything they’d done before. So there was no debate about additional musical overlays. The drum sound on Hilly Michaels’ kit became the centrepiece and trademark of the album and I take some credit for creating that.”
Holmes was hands-on with his suggestions. “I guess the biggest contribution I made in terms of the music itself was to ‘Big Boy’, in terms of its backing vocals and, in particular, Jeff Salen’s guitar break. We couldn’t come up with a guitar break that sounded nihilistic enough for my tastes, so I recorded Jeff playing eight random guitar solos without regard to rhythm or key. I then laid all eight solos side by side, mixed this completely random octet into two stereo tracks, and cut them into and out of the rhythm track of ‘Big Boy’. So you have this four-bar moment in the song where the world goes slightly mad. In the Sixties, there was a bare basics Manhattan cafeteria chain named Horn & Hardart that used to say, “If you want something nice to look at, stare at your food.” My approach to Big Beat was, ‘If you want colours and shading, pay attention to Ron’s lyrics’.
“I’d build three or four-part vocal harmonies in layers, writing out the harmony as if it were to be sung by a choral group, then teach the band members by ear to sing just one part in unison… then teach them and record a second and third part the same way. The band wouldn’t actually hear the final ‘Mormon Tabernacle’ harmony until they went into the control room and heard the full playback. This was the case with ‘Big Boy’, for example. You can actually hear my own voice amid the male choir of Sal, Hilly and Jeff on that cut.”
One of the biggest technical challenges Holmes faced was getting the ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ version of ‘I Like Girls’, complete with its lavish instrumentation, to be compatible with the minimalist sound of the album. “It had a completely different rhythm section than the other cuts. Yet I don’t think the final mix I did for the album seemed alien in spirit,” Holmes recalls.
One evening, two policemen sauntered into the studio. Holmes asked if there was a problem. The cops replied that there had been a noise complaint. “Now keep in mind Mediasound had been in business for nearly a decade,” Holmes laughs, “and some of the loudest bands in the history of rock had recorded there. This was a very surreal moment. I’ve always wondered if the two cops had been sniffing around for drugs, either to make a bust on the premises or [they] wanted to be included in on the fun. If so they came to the wrong session and the wrong band.”
With Sparks it was work, not play and Holmes is full of praise for the brothers’ working methods. Asked to describe them both, the producer replies, “Conscientious. Positive. Energised. Unaffected. Focused. Reasonable. And did I mention conscientious?” And the rest of the band? “See all the above. Hilly was the cut-up of the group, a New York wise guy in the best sense, whereas Ron’s i
ntellect and wit were as dry as the Sahara. Jeff was a little bit of a ‘star’ but no less than he deserved to be. Sal was a terrific musician and a very likeable guy. They certainly didn’t act pressured or nervous during the album. They were gracious and enthused. I don’t recall a single tantrum or quarrel.”
The entire album was mixed in the windowless upstairs mixing room over the course of “the longest three-day weekend” of Holmes’ life. “I had from a Friday afternoon to a Monday morning to mix the entire album. I had never mixed an album in three days. Sleep was not an option. In the end, I was putting instant coffee into my brewed coffee to stay awake. The talented engineer Godfrey Diamond heroically kept pace with me. What he put in his coffee I can hardly imagine. By early Monday morning we had a finished album in the sequence I’d committed to weeks earlier, and I walked the master reel to the mastering studio to put the finishing touches on it. That was a ridiculous way to complete an album, and I lost more than sleep in the process. Perhaps this is one aspect of what Ron means when he says it was a ‘screwy situation’. Maybe not.”
Holmes has since worked with many acts, but continues to extol the virtues of the group. “There was no pouting. No fights. No friends or managers popping in and making suggestions. No drugs of any kind, except perhaps a few beers among the sidemen in the late evening. Both fellows always dressed in impeccable taste and style, Ron usually in trademark tie, whereas Russell would sometimes arrive in the company of a breathtakingly lovely Scandinavian blonde.”
Big Beat continues to split the Sparks audience. It’s brash and dumb, but that’s part of the fun. After the excessive conceits and trickery of Indiscreet, it’s like a trip back to garage land — as if Sparks had denounced their own progressive form of rock by becoming punk.
Musically everything is straightforward; guitar solos are back. What particularly stands out is Ron’s piano playing. “At the time I was trying to be less stylised on keyboards,” he recalled in 1982. “Since then I’ve realised the error of my ways and have become more stylised than ever. I started playing acoustic piano thinking it was best to try and eliminate that kinkiness.” Of course, being Sparks, there is still a great deal of kinkiness; it’s just a lot less complex kinkiness — a whirl of searing noise and ridiculous economy.
The opening, cleansing whomp of ‘Big Boy’ signals a rediscovered bite after the Sparks’ listener previously sailed away on the strings of Indiscreet. ‘I Want To Be Like Everybody Else’ has an infectious swing, FM radio guitar and a comment on the speed of life and the herd mentality. ‘Nothing To Do’, the song that so inspired Joey Ramone, with its Beatles-like build-up, demonstrates how accomplished Ron had become as a songwriter. “Joey Ramone has told us that he has wanted to do a version of this song,” Russell said in 1991, “yet has never been able to convince the other Ramones. I hope he’s successful one day.” *
‘Nothing To Do’ sits amid gloriously daft (and brief) songs such as ‘Fill-Er-Up’, ‘Throw Her Away (And Get A New One)’ and ‘Everybody’s Stupid.’
‘I Bought The Mississippi River’ opens with a flourish that recalls ‘High C’ from the first Halfnelson/Sparks LP. It’s a fanciful marriage of Sparks’ old style theatricality with their new rock sensibility, and a wonderful slice of Mael nonsense, inspired by the then-recent purchase of John Rennie’s 1831 London Bridge by Robert McCulloch for Lake Havasu City. ‘White Women’ has caused controversy ever since its appearance. “I liked to be politically incorrect even before politically correct existed,” Ron told Q in 1993.
‘Confusion’, the aborted title track of the Jacques Tati film, appears late on the album. Originally recorded with Tony Visconti at the Indiscreet sessions when known as ‘Intrusion’, the song doesn’t fail to namecheck the French maverick. ‘I Like Girls’, which had been in Sparks’ live act since 1972 and was first recorded at Bearsville with the original band, got dusted down for the sessions. The lyrics of the song had actually been printed in Sparks Flashes in 1974 (“We at the Sparks fan club call your attention to ‘I Like Girls’, which seems to have become the group’s anthem”).
Big Beat was released on Island in the UK and Columbia in the US in October 1976. Like the two tracks, ‘Big Boy’ and ‘I Like Girls’, that were selected for singles, the album failed to make the charts in either territory. Unlike the wit or scams of the three previous sleeves, the cover was a simple portrait of Ron and Russell, with no other member shown. The brothers had now achieved their desire of being simply a duo. With its stark simplicity, it rates as one of Sparks’ strongest images — done in 15 minutes with the legendary Richard Avedon, it captures the brothers in all their black and white beauty.
Rupert Holmes: “I don’t know what [the brothers’] public attitude is today towards the records we made together in 1976. I hope in the years ahead, the Maels will be proud that they went so strongly against the grain of the music scene and of their previous sound [and even of their previous single!] with Big Beat, and that they will view the album with the admiration I had for it when I assisted them in making it.”
Unfortunately, the brothers’ comments betrayed their less than beneficent view of Big Beat.
“Rupert Holmes is really good for Barbra Streisand, but I don’t think he’s a rock’n’roll producer,” said Ron. His opinion is one that has been repeatedly reinforced over the years, yet it appears increasingly flawed as time passes. While not all the tracks stand up to the Kimono My House acid test, there is plenty to enjoy. Funnily enough, at the time, the album was perceived as something of a breath of fresh air.
“This is Sparks with Ron Mael’s keyboards submerged in the mix under the loud guitars and belching response so it doesn’t sound like ‘Mr Sparky’s Magic Piano Screwing A Metronome’ any more,” Pete Makowski wrote in Sounds. “This is Sparks with Russell singing like his balls have dropped at last. It sounds real not like Joni Mitchell at 78rpm. And the lyrics, there are less of them. This is Sparks with less words but stronger songs.” Makowski compared the brothers to the Ramones and gave the album a generous five stars. Jan Iles in National Rockstar opened her positive review with the statement, “Producer Rupert Holmes has managed to rekindle Sparks’ creative flame with this recording.”
It’s only over time that the critical position reversed; Rolling Stone retrospectively wrote that Sparks “abandoned the speeded-up music-hall approach and opted for somewhat less outré rock. No one seems to care.”
Original US Sparks’ convert Ira Robbins is not a fan either: “It was just yelling. That was a bad album. It was them abandoning what they had suddenly developed as their format. Kimono My House and Propaganda are just amazingly great sounding. I would credit John Hewlett for a lot of that and Muff Winwood’s production — that really chunky guitar sound and the drum beat. I think Big Beat felt to me, as a critic, like a concession to America. It was like they changed labels, they were suddenly on Columbia and they wanted to have mainstream American success. It felt like a mistake. I wasn’t enthusiastic. That record has more in common with the Sailor album than it does with anything that was being made in America at the time.”
Tony Visconti is clear why Sparks would forever battle with acceptance in their home country: “American music’s always been meat and potatoes, straight-up rock. It’s part of the American culture. It’s like Bowie. Bowie’s actually a non-rock musician, but he uses rock to express himself. He’s an actor, he’s a great writer — I would tend to put Russell and Ron in that category. They couldn’t do what they do in America — it’s just not American-style music.”
“Big Beat was a stiff, sales-wise,” Ron declared in 1982. “It shook our confidence, because we had just signed with Columbia and moved back to the States. We thought it would be the same as when we moved to England and signed with Island. When that didn’t happen it was a little maddening. So much of a record has to do with the circumstances around it, and there was no atmosphere around Big Beat. That was a real miserable time. I don’t especially like this album, but I
don’t know if it’s for musical reasons or just because things were not particularly groovy then.”
Russell’s view seemed to have mellowed by the time of the Sparks Spectacular in 2008. “It’s an unfairly slighted record, I think. There are some contentious songs. You’re always trying to come up with something provocative. A song like ‘White Women’, obviously, it’s not meant to be taken at face value. We always tried to shake people up. We never wanted to be background music.”
Background music Big Beat certainly isn’t. To these ears, it’s a brave attempt to do something different, and the fact the record is so contentiously debated adds to its afterlife. Had it been a hit, it might have been a bold attempt to go back to basics, like, perhaps, The Beatles after Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Rupert Holmes: “The sound and attitude of Big Beat was probably well ahead of its time. As we were recording it, the music scene was tilting towards really lush disco. Had our arrangement of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ been done to a disco beat and released as a 12-inch record in the spring of 1977 instead of a year earlier, it might have been a huge club hit for the Maels. Instead, the lean, spare sound of Big Beat emerged in a world that was temporarily mad on sweeping strings and Salsoul brass… If Big Beat had been released a few years after that, as the world was retching from a surfeit of slushy disco, it might have been received not only enthusiastically but gratefully.”
As Russ Regan had said about Sparks in 1970, Ron and Russell were again about two years ahead of their time. Perhaps the biggest irony of Big Beat was that the brothers had split up a band to hire a band that wasn’t as strong as the one they already had, and in doing so removed some of Sparks’ personality. While no fan of retrospective thinking, Hewlett is convinced that the ‘75 line-up should have been retained for longer. “We had that big focus on America. I now think in retrospect it was an error. I think we should have saved the money after the 1975 US tour. Ron and Russell should have returned to LA, written an album, come back, rehearsed and toured it with the band, and the band should have toured Europe, Japan and Australia, worked the places where we were huge and made money; then let America take care of itself.”
