Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  Sparks toured the US to promote the album, providing material for the bootleg album, Live At The Bottom Line. While Hewlett was involved in other projects, he temporarily got ex-Doors manager Bill Siddons to look after them: “I’d met Bill and that was it. Bill’s a laid-back, smoke-a-joint type of guy. It didn’t work. He’s a lovely man, but he wouldn’t be on their wavelength, too relaxed. Ron and Russell are Broadway, high tempo, Paris, the Ritz, LA, Hollywood.”

  The Columbia Records press pack shouted that “the Big Beat Tour should convert many non-believers and convince all those Sparks fans they were right all along”. However, Maida and Salen were not in the running — drafted in were guitarists Luke Zamperini and Jim McAllister and bass player David Swanson.

  This line-up played its debut gig in Santa Barbara on November 6, soon after Jimmy Carter had been elected as President. Sal Maida was to return after a few gigs as Swanson simply wasn’t cutting it. The shows, a mixture of headlining gigs and support slots for The Patti Smith Group, saw some fantastic performances from the group, with Ron incorporating a rock’n’roll, piano-stool smashing act into the set each night.

  Despite all Sparks’ art and film school ambitions, their film debut was anything but the work of an auteur. Rollercoaster rode the wave of mid-Seventies disaster movies and for many it was the thin end of the wedge. The film starred Timothy Bottoms as an unnamed young assassin, intent on planting bombs on rollercoasters. Harry Calder, played by George Segal, an amusement park technical wizard, attempts to thwart him. In a nod to the all-star casts of the era, veterans Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark were on the bill, as was, in her first screen role, the 12-year-old Helen Hunt.

  The film’s big selling point was Sensurround: the short-lived phenomenon developed by Universal Studios that recalled the Fifties-pure hokum to drive people back to the cinema. The public had already endured the 1974 Charlton Heston-led nonsense of Earthquake and the gung-ho Jap-swatting of 1976’s Battle Of Midway in this new format. Sensurround worked on the principle of installing large low-frequency speakers beneath the screen and also in the front and back corners of the cinema.*

  In many respects, Rollercoaster was an extended riff on the ‘Circus Circus’ section of Guy Hamilton’s 1971 James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever. We see Vietnam vets working on shooting ranges, and Segal plays the tragicomic lead that he perfected opposite Glenda Jackson in 1973’s A Touch Of Class, clearly having picked the wrong day to give up smoking.

  Originally, pansticked rockers Kiss were lined up for the film, but negotiations fell through. “We were approached to be in Rollercoaster — the Sensurround movie — with two of the songs from Big Beat, ‘Fill- Er-Up’ and ‘Big Boy’,” Ron told Trouser Press in 1982. “That was our first big screen appearance.”

  At one hour and 20 minutes into the film, the touring line-up of Big Beat appear at the launch of the Great American Revolution Rollercoaster (the first with a 360 degree steel loop in it) at the Magic Mountain theme park in Valencia, California. Russell looks beautiful in his vest, and Sal Maida flashes his blue Rickenbacker in front of a crowd that surely Richard Linklater would later reference for his affectionate 1993-made, 1976-set stoner comedy, Dazed And Confused. Bouncing along, they look like an approximation of the audience the Mael brothers would have liked to attract in the US at the time.

  The sequence involving Sparks lasts for 12 minutes, intercut with footage of workmen locating the bomb placed on the rollercoaster. “The earth is shaking, so am I” section of the lyric of ‘Big Boy’ is featured heavily. Russell gets pulled into the crowd; Ron smashes his piano stool, both features of their current set.

  Rupert Holmes: “Oh I saw it, and in the full glory of Sensurround, I believe. The Sparks tunes are the highlight of the film for me. However, my favorite George Segal vehicle continues to be King Rat.”

  Almost three decades after the film’s 1977 release, Sparks regarded it as being a huge regret and “a wart on the backside”. Whatever the brothers’ misgivings regarding the whole enterprise were, it remains Sparks’ most widely seen performance.

  Hello, hello, hello. An outtake from the Indiscreet back sleeve, LA, May 1975. (GERED MANKOWITZ)

  Adrian Fisher (centre) intent on his rock’n’roll lifestyle, LA, 1974. L to R: Ian Hampton, Dinky Diamond, Fisher, Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Trevor White. (LAURENS VAN HOUTEN/FRANK WHITE AGENCY)

  Standing not a million miles away from the Waterloo sunset that had so influenced the Maels, 1974. L to R: Russell Mael, Ron Mael, Dinky Diamond, Trevor White, Ian Hampton. (BARRY PLUMMER)

  Adrian Fisher. “If I didn’t know something, he’d teach me to do it. He was a very generous guy.” — Trevor White. (PETER MAZEL/RETNA)

  Ian Hampton. Admired by all, Hampton remains one of the Mael’s Brothers most vocal supporters.(PETER MAZEL/RETNA)

  Dinky Diamond — “He was a clever drummer and a clever man. He had the perfect feel for every track.” — John Hewlett. (PETER MAZEL/RETNA)

  Trevor White. Once sold a guitar to Marc Bolan. Came in at the height of the Maelstrom. (PETER MAZEL/RETNA)

  Going up to Magic Mountain, 1976. L to R: Sal Maida, Jim McAllister, Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Luke Zamperini, Hilly Boy Michaels. (BRAD ELTERMAN/LFI)

  T*ts, perhaps? Russell Mael reads some literature, LA, 1975. (BARRY SCHULTZ/RETNA)

  ‘Ron and the Great Pumpkin?’ Farmers Market, LA, mid Seventies. (BRAD ELTERMAN/LFI)

  Ron and Russell Mael, LA, 1975. (BRAD ELTERMAN/LFI)

  At home, at work, at play. Ron and Russell taking their ease, California, 1975. (LFI)

  A selection of front covers from the height of their Seventies success. (COURTESY AUKE LENSTRA)

  “The Big Beat Tour should convert many non-believers and convince all those Sparks fans they were right all along.” — Columbia Records. Patti Smith and Russell Mael backstage, December 1976. Rodney Bingenheimer is to Russell’s right. (JENNY LENS)

  Shooting the ‘Beat The Clock’ video, London, Summer 1979. (PAUL CANTY/LFI)

  What better to promote an album than a little fratricide? From the range of photographs taken to promote Sparks’ arrival at Columbia Records. (SAM EMERSON/LFI)

  * The tracks, ‘I See The Light’, ‘Adrian’s Boogie’, ‘If It’s Love That You Want’ and ‘Shot From A Gun’ remain unreleased after Island decided not to pursue the project.

  *Shortly after the completion of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, Lesser and Holmes decided to part amicably, Lesser to produce the second Sailor album and Holmes to produce Sparks, both still under the pair’s “Widescreen Productions” banner.

  *It was not to be, as the Ramones vocalist died in 2001.

  * There was only to be one further film produced in Sensurround, 1978’s Battlestar Galactica, which acted as a pilot for the television series.

  Chapter Ten

  We Cowboys Are A Hardy Breed: Introducing Sparks

  “It felt more like an art project than a commercial project.”

  Thom Rotella, 2009

  “These guys come in, get paid $480for half an hour and they just assume the first take is fine cos if it is they can leave.”

  Russell Mael, 1982

  At the end of 1976, punk rock was the new thing to hit the UK music scene. Led by the Sex Pistols, whose manager Malcolm McLaren was briefly associated with The New York Dolls, the movement was a further development from the scene that had been underground in New York for the past two years. In December, the Pistols became national béte noires after their appearance on ITV’s Today programme. If ever there had been a time for Sparks to be in Britain, especially if they were aware of the respect The Sex Pistols and Siouxsie and The Banshees had for them, it was now. However the Mael brothers were back in California.

  The Big Beat campaign ended with a New Year’s Eve gig at the Santa Monica Civic Center with Sparks supported by ex-Turtles Flo and Eddie and, filling in for the Ramones, a new LA band, Van Halen. It had been a strange tour; the highs had been higher and the lows consid
erably lower than on previous jaunts. Although there had been press interest and some remarkable shows, it hadn’t been enough to gain any mass US acceptance and the album, by now a couple of months old, had disappeared from view.

  John Hewlett. “We’d invested all our money in touring America. If I’d been on my game I should have told them to take a break, rehearse a new record and then tour where we were popular. I think they would have gone for that as they were so huge in Europe. I should have offered that carrot, rather than doing the New York thing.”

  With Columbia wanting to represent the group worldwide, Island offered little resistance: “I was aware when they left for Columbia,” Chris Blackwell recalls. “Ultimately, we didn’t do that great for them, really. The first record did well and then it slipped down a bit. We parted on good terms.”

  Tim Clark: “It’s fair to say by the time of Big Beat, for us it was largely over. There wasn’t great sadness when Sparks left. They weren’t to be as Roxy Music in the end, with a string of really brilliant albums.”

  Roxy Music, the band that Sparks had been compared with in 1974, had gained the sort of commercial and critical acceptance that the Maels craved. However, although they had achieved bigger sales there, America had been as lukewarm to Roxy as it had been to Sparks. There was something about art and pop that just didn’t travel well across the Atlantic. Sparks’ old acquaintance at Island, Richard Williams, wrote in Keep On Running that “later, having acquired a fanbase that included future members of New Order, The Smiths and Depeche Mode, [Sparks] went back home to continue their unorthodox progress through the world of popular rhythm music”. As a parting shot, Island put together a compilation album, The Best Of Sparks, released in March 1977.

  By spring, the Sparks touring band had long since fallen apart. Ron and Russell were back in LA wondering where the next move would take them. Hewlett and Fleury were working with the New York new wave band Mumps, with Hewlett enjoying the novelty of being in New York. Although he had become less of a presence with Sparks, Hewlett was still overseeing negotiations for their next album.

  The lapsing of the Island agreement was a good thing as now they would be on the same label across the world. Founded in 1888, Columbia was one of the biggest labels in the world in the mid-Seventies, boasting an enormous roster of acts of the calibre of Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Pink Floyd and Billy Joel. With a big production and the cream of a backlog of songs that Ron had written since Big Beat in August 1976, the Maels could surely rise to the challenge of being in such prestigious company.

  Bob Ezrin was the brothers’ target as producer. Having made his name working with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Peter Gabriel (overseeing Gabriel’s solo album after leaving Genesis), Ezrin’s theatrical style would have suited Sparks well. However he heard Ron’s new material and turned them down.

  The next available option was less glamorous. Columbia A&R man Terry Powell suggested that he handle the job, assisted by the brothers. Powell’s previous credit was co-producing, with Doors’ associate Bruce Botnick, the debut album by Starwood, who’d had a minor FM hit with the song ‘Tortuga’. After a string of name producers, for the first time Sparks worked with somebody that no one outside the industry had heard of. However that could be a good thing, as no one would pre-judge or anticipate anything from a name that would carry its own weight of expectation.

  The initial trade announcements suggested that Botnick (who shared office space with Powell) would co-produce, but nothing was to come of that. The hubristic tone of these early 1977 ads, trumpeting Sparks’ next work, sounds surprising: “A late summer single is planned in front of the album’s release. This should be the perfect set-up for an album that is destined to become a rock classic … the transition is complete. The challenge has begun. Ron and Russell Mael are willing to meet the cream of rock’n’roll bands on their own turf. It’s an event not to be missed.”

  The challenge had indeed begun, but the brothers had no band. Because they had enjoyed the flexibility of working with session players on Indiscreet, the Maels decided to make their next record with a host of hired hands and, for the first time since A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing in 1972, they would record in their home city. As Rumours by Fleetwood Mac became an international obsession and the disco craze reached its zenith, in summer 1977, Sparks went into the legendary Larabee Sound on Santa Monica Blvd and Larabee in Hollywood to cut their seventh album.

  Introducing Sparks represents a meeting of two very different approaches — maverick outsiders and slick specialists. There were similarities — both were professional and focussed on the end result — but it was the first time that Ron and Russell had worked with players who had no emotional attachment to the final outcome. Now a long-established session player, Thom Rotella was relatively new in town when he played guitar on the album. He is one of 15 credited musicians (a whole 10 more than on Big Beat) that supported Sparks on the sessions, a long with future members of Toto and the backing singers from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

  Rotella had no previous knowledge of Sparks and got the gig because he had previously worked with Al Capps, who did all the arrangements for the album. “I had the impression that they were a British group,” Rotella says. “Al told me that they were a little off the wall and wanted to do something that was a bit more commercial.”

  New York-born Rotella had been playing in LA since 1973. He had majored in classical guitar at Ithaca and studied under Gary Burton at Berklee College of Music. The session scene was lucrative and Rotella’s diary was often booked well in advance. “Back then all the producers and arrangers had their own stable of players. I’d always know about three or four of the guys that would be on any session. Al Capps was the hub if you like. All the producers had their own players, but it was all from the same 30 guys.”

  Capps was a veteran arranger, who’d worked with some of the greatest radio-friendly artists of popular music such as Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra. Now here he was working with a man with a toothbrush moustache writing songs about ‘goofing off’ delivered by his matinee idol brother.

  Thom Rotella: “Al Capps was the most conservative guy. He was quiet and mild-mannered and he was used to doing straight-up pop stuff. I remember him sitting there watching the whole thing unfold. He was amused as it was such a different trip for him.”

  Another day, another dollar, and Capps didn’t come cheap. Spending like this, Columbia clearly had tremendous belief in the Maels. Although it was just another session for him, Rotella, who was working with his friends, drummer Ed Greene and bassist Mike Porcaro, recalls it with fondness. Sparks’ freewheeling attitude came as a relief, because most of Rotello’s other clients were demanding to say the least. “Ron and Russell were really fun because they just let me go. They told me to do whatever I wanted … Everyone else wanted you to sound like Larry Carlton. I was playing a Les Paul and everybody else was playing ES-335s at that point. I was happy they didn’t break my balls about not playing a 335. They just let me cut loose.” Although they were very clear about how a group should look and behave, Ron and Russell must have felt adrift in a world where people would actually break a guitarist’s balls if he didn’t have the right guitar.

  Fellow session man Lee Ritenour played most of the rhythm on the album, while Rotella added the solos. “Lenny Roberts was the engineer. He said that I was going crazy with those solos; it was one of the freest sessions I did in that time period.”

  The team at Larabee were a little unsure of the Maels with their strange songs and much has been made of the Maels’ disgust for the session men. “Most of our songs aren’t three chords,” Ron said in 1982. “These session musicians who were getting a quarter of a million dollars a year bitched constantly about not being able to play in those keys and ‘Wouldn’t it be better to use saxophone instead of guitar?’ and all that stuff. It was a joke.”

  The joke, however, wasn’t apparent to the session players at the time as
Ron and Russell kept their contempt well-hidden.

  Thom Rotella: “I remember them being really cool and fun to talk with. I dealt with Russell a little more than Ron for some reason but the whole vibe was great. I remember sessions where people were assholes, but here, the mood was very open, creative and interesting. Mike Porcaro and I were talking years later and we just remembered those tunes. They were really good writers. David Paich was on it, David Foster too. These were just the everyday guys that we worked with.”

  Russell has been disparaging across the years: “It was pretty boring using session musicians. These guys come in, get paid $480 for half an hour and they just assume the first take is fine cos if it is they can leave.”

  Rotella, who, by 1977, had played on records by Bette Midler and Carole Bayer Sager, had absolutely no idea where this strange record would fit. “I loved the tongue-in-cheek thing,” the guitarist says. “They were trying to take the commercial thing and do a bit of a parody on it. It felt more like an art project than a commercial project. For me, it felt like they were into their own thing and that they were doing this crossover thing in their own way — it was really cool.”

  And these were commercial songs that were being recorded — with a seven-piece vocal section; ‘Over The Summer’ sounded like The Beach Boys, ‘Those Mysteries’ like the ultimate show tune. “In the context of what they were doing, they took that format and did something creative and interesting with it,” Rotella adds. “They could have really sold out and just done some vanilla stuff. They were not spitting it out — they digested it and came up with something different.”