by Daryl Easlea
The union of the two bands came through the Maels’ only real vice: coffee and pastries.
David Kendrick: “We used to hang out separately at the Farmers’ Market in LA. It was the only place in Los Angeles that you could get Espresso and we were all coffee fiends. There was this Belgian waffle stand there and we would end up there at the same time.”
Kendrick and Boehm — the duo at the core of Bates Motel — impressed Ron and Russell with their prior knowledge of Sparks, something not many young Americans had. “We just got talking and it was clear that we liked a lot of the same stuff,” says Kendrick. “We got to know each other that way.”
The brothers began to open up about their situation, as Kendrick says: “They said that Terminal Jive frankly was a pretty bad album and they weren’t too crazy about it. But they always seemed to have something happening somewhere in the world that would enable them to survive. Due to the success of ‘When I’m With You’ in France, they really wanted a live band again as they had this chance to tour there.”
After Ron and Russell went to see Bates Motel play, they hired the whole group. The tour, which ran through the autumn of 1980, was a blast and, for the brothers, it was a delight to be playing live for the first time in four years. Often Ron would simply write out the chords and the band would learn the songs from scratch. The list was a perfect hybrid of all eras of Sparks’ career. Being something of an aficionado, Kendrick helped shape the repertoire and made sure his personal favourites from the Island days — ‘Here In Heaven’ and ‘Hospitality On Parade’ — were incorporated. Tellingly, there was only one song, ‘When I’m With You’, from the album the band was supposed to be promoting.
Chapter Thirteen
So You Better Have Fun Now: America
“There’s something about the words on Angst In My Pants that has Ron’s unique combination of sarcasm, wit and earnest emotion.”
Steven Nistor, 2009
“They can compare us to Devo if they want to, all the bands we predate by ten years.”
Russell Mael, 1983
During rehearsals for the French tour, the new-look Sparks learned all the songs that would become their next album. Immediately afterwards, the band decamped to Musicland Studios in Munich where they started work on what was to be Whomp That Sucker.
Musicland Studios — where bands such as The Rolling Stones and Queen had recorded — was situated in Munich’s Arabella Hotel. One might think of Musicland as being on top of a mountain, or secluded in a forest, but it was underground.
David Kendrick: “This was definitely subterranean. The coolest thing about it was that through one of the back doors in the basement, you’d head into part of an abandoned underground system. I actually banged on some wood and pipes and stuff out there because the echo was so amazing.”
Although still overseeing the four-album production deal he’d entered into with the Maels, after Terminal Jive, Giorgio Moroder was no longer involved with the recordings, which gave Sparks the opportunity to work with yet another producer.* Rheinhold Mack was one of Moroder’s production team but was also very hot in his own right at the time. Fundamentally a rock producer, Mack (as he was known) had worked with the Rolling Stones, but was best known for his work with two bands that had crossed Sparks’ path back in 1972 — Electric Light Orchestra and Queen. Mack was able to effectively blend the synthetics of Sparks’ last two releases into something far more band-like.
For the first time since Big Beat, Sparks worked in one room as a group. Boehm, Haag and Kendrick were there to support the brothers and be sounding boards for both Ron and Russell and Mack.
David Kendrick: “Mack was easy-going and I liked him a lot. We recorded well. We did the songs to a click track but essentially played live. Everyone was around the whole time.”
The group stayed at the hotel over the studios, and were on call most of the time to go downstairs to record. Ron wrote his lyrics in his hotel room the night before recording, after Russell had improvised nonsense words in rehearsal.
David Kendrick: “There was always a title to the song but the lyrics were not necessarily finished. We’d learn the songs and the final lyrics would be done literally as we were due to start recording the next song. I thought it interesting as Sparks’ songs are so conceptually based and it was funny that the words were the last step.”
Moroder popped into the studio once or twice to see how things were progressing. “It struck me there wasn’t a lot of intellectual depth there,” Kendrick says. “[Moroder] just wanted stuff done quickly. He didn’t want to bother with Ron agonising over his lyrics; he and Keith Forsey took the view that lyrics didn’t even matter! They worked well together for a while but it didn’t seem like he really, totally got where they were at. I was really glad that Mack was involved because he was a rock guy and liked the idea of a live band.”
Kendrick remembers the sessions as a time of good humour, with Queen, who were painstakingly putting together their ill-received disco album, Hot Space, being around as well, adding to the freewheeling yet businesslike approach of the sessions.
Sparks’ tenth album, Whomp That Sucker, was released in May 1981 on the Why-Fi label in the UK and Ariola for the rest of the world. The thanks list on the album’s inner bag listed at least seven pastry shops around Munich, reflecting a shared love of coffee and cake that had helped the band through an intense recording period.
David Kendrick: “Quickly Imbiss was a fast-food pastry place we frequented near the hotel. We went almost daily to the Cafe Reitschule [riding school], a great cafe in the ‘Englisher garden’ overlooking the park and a dressage horse-training ring for the Munich elite.”
After two records of Giorgio Moroder and Harold Faltermeyer-directed disco synthesiser experimentation, guitars and electric pianos were suddenly a major part of Sparks’ world again. Whomp That Sucker updates Kimono My House with a nod to modernity as opposed to No.1 In Heaven and Terminal Jive’s wholesale rejection of the past. It may not be one of their all-time greats, but it still contains ‘Tips For Teens’, ‘Upstairs’ and the simply smashing stupidity of ‘The Willys’ and ‘Wacky Women’; after the meandering, phoned-in triteness of Terminal Jive, here at least was a little flesh on the bones. Sparks sounded like a band again and, importantly, on ‘I Married A Martian’ and ‘Wacky Women’ it sounded like they were having tremendous fun.
“Harmonies were back again,” Russell said. “As were songs about girls who suffer from overly beautiful exteriors and their ensuing suicide attempts. Followed by new-found happiness as a result of their total facial disfigurement.”
The song in question, ‘Funny Face,’ also featured the first proper Sparks guitar solo since Big Beat, courtesy of Bob Haag. Five years since their last permanent unit, and less than two years after denouncing bands in the press, Ron and Russell Mael rather enjoyed being part of a band again.
“That album was an explosion for us,” Ron said in 1982. “We had been working in tight little ways with session people and real bourgeois types. We wanted to rebel against that and make an album that had real character to it — a lot of songs, really rocky. This album is important to us. We’ve always liked working in a band format. It gives you a certain set of rules and keeps you from being too cerebral. It gives you an element of looseness.”
“This is a favourite because we felt liberated after the constraints of Terminal Jive,” Russell told Paul Lester in 2008. “It didn’t feel like a step back for us, even though it was working with a band again. We really felt free to work within what for us are traditional song frameworks, but with other people. There’s a support system working with a band.”
There was something dumb and accessible in this new Sparks sound. It sounded like Devo, for sure — ‘Upstairs’ especially has the breezy, wheezy synthesisers of ‘Whip It’ — but then didn’t they sound like Sparks? Despite Devo’s undeniable influence on Whomp That Sucker, it remains unclear if the influence was mutual.
In a 200
9 interview in The Wire magazine, Devo vocalist Mark Mothersbaugh commented, “Even after I met him I was still a big Ron Mael fan. I just had this whole idea of who he could have been. Just from seeing him on TV… Somehow they got on TV with this stuff… I remember him with his really stern Adolf Hitler look, and it was so not rock’n’roll, in an unexpected way, that you just couldn’t help but think that there was something there. I only met him in public situations, which weren’t his forte as much as his brother. His brother was the flamboyant… or irritating-looking, poofy version of the two of them. And I really liked Ron and I always said, ‘Well, I don’t care what Russell’s doing, I’m sure Ron really runs everything and it’s really his band…’ ” *
Whomp That Sucker is funny, muddy and loud, and its cover reintroduced the humorous style of the early Island albums. After the strange, dispassionate dislocation of Terminal Jive’s sleeve, Whomp That Sucker finds Sparks retreating to the broad comedy of Propaganda and Indiscreet, a pattern that was to last for the next three albums. Taking the title literally, we see the brothers in a boxing ring. Russell is out for the count, unconscious on the floor, while Ron is seen behind, victorious with both arms aloft, ribs on full display.
The sleeve marked the start of the Maels’ collaboration with designer Larry Vigon, which set about making the brothers a cartoon of themselves. It worked very well; emphasising the brothers as a comedy double-act, with the fall guy alternating between covers. LA-born Vigon, who got to know Sparks through Moroder, would regularly meet the pair at the Farmers’ Market.
Larry Vigon: “I was really happy to get a call from them. I really enjoyed working with those guys because they were smart; a good sense of humour, well-educated.” Vigon draws similarities between the brothers and Lindsay Buckingham for whom he designed the hand-drawn Fleetwood Mac logo on Rumours and the intricate artwork of Tusk. Both share the focus and eccentricities of musical geniuses.
Although Whomp That Sucker was not to be a chart success in the UK, its launch in the second week of May at the London Hilton in Park Lane marked one of the final appearances of Ron and Russell in Britain until 1985. A re-creation of the boxing match between the brothers was staged for the press and guests who included Viv Stanshall, Clem Burke, Tony James and Judge Dread.
Something curious happened — whether it was the publicity generated by their new American band or whether the world had caught up, but the album, with its broad-based B-movie comedy, began to be picked up by the burgeoning student radio movement in America.
David Kendrick: “There was a new radio station in LA, K-ROQ, and it was actually playing local, newer music; modern rock or new wave. It was one of the few stations that played Sparks. They were one of the first groups they really picked up on and there were a number of songs from Whomp That Sucker that got a lot of radio play in Los Angeles specifically. The group got really well known, really quickly.”
MTV, too, had begun broadcasting and if ever a band were suited to repeat video screenings, it was Sparks. Promos were prepared for ‘Tips For Teens’ (a re-creation of the boxing match) and ‘Funny Face’ (Ron appears to be waiting behind a tree to offer sweets to little girls before being beaten about the head by one of their mothers). Rolling Stone and Trouser Press were favourable in their reviews.
“A new young audience was attracted that was virtually unaware of our British and European past careers,” Russell said. “We were a brand new band with nine albums that few of our new fans were aware of. Dick Clark welcomed us back.”
Indeed, it wasn’t long before Sparks were back on American Bandstand, the show that they had first appeared on almost a decade earlier. After all the attempts to break America, it now seemed to be happening. The band and Joseph Fleury were absolutely delighted when the album climbed to number 182 on the US album chart.
Sparks toured throughout the West Coast and played key dates in Europe. Like ‘Sir’ Peter Oxendale a decade before, a second keyboard player, Jim Goodwin, from John Cale’s band, was drafted in to flesh out the band’s live sound. One of the more bizarre appearances in Sparks’ career came on December 9, 1981. A year on from John Lennon’s death, the band appeared in a televised tribute concert at Bayerisches Femsehen as part of Eberhard Schroeder’s Rock & Klassik series. An ad hoc ensemble performed what can only be described as a ‘loose’ version of Lennon’s 1969 hit ‘Give Peace A Chance’. On stage, being ever Stentorian with his vocal is the English eccentric performer Peter Hammill, the cult artist’s cult artist, and over to the right, Sparks. Ron, in his sunhat, hits some claves apologetically and Russell shakes his maracas aimlessly. Around them, heavyweight performers such as Brand X percussionist Morris Pert, ex-King Crimson saxophonist Mel Collins and guitarist John Miles plod into the leaden groove. The very fact that any of these people were on stage with Sparks was frankly unusual. “Peter Hammill was there alongside Tangerine Dream,” Kendrick laughs. “That was the end of the show. We were all playing. It was strange to say the least.”
For Sparks’ next album, RCA, which had represented them in the States, declined to pick up the option, so the band signed to Atlantic, one of the most respected companies in the world. Although Island had the romance and Virgin the status of maverick outsider, this was not just any old record company, this was Atlantic. The label, founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat, and student Herb Abramson, was named as a response to the West Coast jazz label, Pacific. Atlantic had an incredible soul, R&B, blues, jazz and rock tradition, and it was now going to include Sparks, too.
Angst In My Pants had a gestation period almost identical to its predecessor. Recorded at Musicland, it is the sound of players totally at ease with one another. ‘I Predict’, the Maels’ tribute to the National Enquirer, is probably the greatest example of this new approach. Building on the new-found sense of play, everything sounds a great deal more relaxed than anything the band had recorded before. Russell began to sing out of the falsetto he’d been singing in since 1974. This new muscle to his voice could be heard especially on material such as ‘I Predict’. While recording, the band played three nights of gigs in Munich and threw themselves into attendant press and promotion with gusto.
“This [album’s] based around really good songs,” Russell said in 1982. “I don’t think there’s any filler on it; it’s just doing what we should be doing. As an after-effect, it turns out the album’s been played on radio infinitely more than any other Sparks record in America. So we can do something that maintains the essence of what Sparks is, retaining personality and character, and still get airplay.”
Angst In My Pants is one of the most charming of all Sparks albums and their best LP from the Eighties. It’s daft, anthemic and full of great, funny, danceable songs. The grinding power-pop was so very of its moment, evoking ‘Centerfold’ by The J Geils Band or Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’, but adding lyrics that bordered on hilarious.
‘Instant Weight Loss’ strays close to vigorous, enjoyable rock. “Weight is an obsession with both of us,” Russell continued. “Ron carries a scale with him on tour; he takes it about as far as you can get without seriously damaging your health. I really like sweets, so there’s a real dilemma cos I also want to maintain the same appearance I had 11 albums ago.”
‘Sherlock Holmes’ manages to weld Joy Division and doo-wop, while ‘Nicotina’ has a dramatic punch, referencing the same Cossack songbook that ‘Goofing Off’ had done five years previously.
With its fun-packed backing vocals and frantic synthesiser playing from Jim Goodwin, ‘Sextown USA’ became a live favourite. The album’s title track was made from a tape loop of Kendrick’s drumming, over which Ron added his keyboard parts. Mack encouraged Russell to go over the top, using a lyric that Ron was going to use for another song. The final track to be recorded for the album, ‘Angst In My Pants’, packed a mighty punch. Writing on allmusic.com, Dave Connolly encapsulates the album by saying, “Throughout the record, Sparks succeeds not by pushing a pipe full of music throug
h a thin straw (as they did on classics like Propaganda) but by giving their ideas the space they need to succeed.” And most of the ideas did succeed.
Larry Vigon perfectly realised Ron’s next “purposely tacky” concept for the album’s sleeve. People had been commenting for years about the duo’s inseparability, that they weren’t brothers at all, or could even be secretly romantically involved with each other. Remember there were those who even suggested that the geishas on the front of Kimono My House were the brothers in drag. All absolute nonsense, of course, but toying with genders and masculinity all added to the fun of creating a sleeve image. Photographed by Eric Blum, Ron is dressed as a demure bride, with long flowing veil, flower bunch and rock twinkling on his ring finger next to a beaming Russell, the epitome of a smiling rock’n’roll groom, wearing a silver lamé suit (and Blum’s shoes, no less). The inner bag develops the theme even further — the happy couple are now at Niagara Falls; Ron in his polka dot honeymoon outfit smiling, while a Hawaiian-shirted Russell looks less sure than he did on his wedding day. Presumably, they had consummated the marriage by this point. For the first time since Indiscreet, the full line-up of Sparks appears on the album’s rear sleeve. All six members stand in Elvis poses playing acoustic guitar in their lamé suits, undoubtedly serenading the newly married couple.
With material this visual, it was obvious that Sparks should do a lot of television. On May 15, 1982, they appeared on Saturday Night Live as the guests of host Danny De Vito. For a generation of Americans, this appearance was similar to Brits seeing the group on Top Of The Pops back in 1974. Ron delivered a speech about the cultural significance of mice before opening the show with ‘Mickey Mouse’. For ‘I Predict’, Ron wore his sunhat, and, when not playing behind his keyboard (now with the ‘Roland’ brand name altered to state ‘Ronald’) he was eating in front of it or being hugged by his brother, who, in his crimson lamé suit, was going ape throwing athletic shapes. The band, too, were all resplendent in different shades of lamé. It was a great, ‘in your face’ performance, projecting the cartoon as large as possible for nationwide US TV.
