We all have gaps and blind spots.
And, like Donald Rumsfeld said, there are things we don't know we don't know.
I didn't know about the Los Angeles-based band Sparks, though I thought I knew enough. I knew their principal members were brothers Ron and Russell Mael and that Ron is the keyboard player and chief songwriter and affected a deadpan disaffection on stage. I understood he wore an interesting mustache.
On the other hand, Russell is the lead singer and a classic rock 'n' roll frontman in the mode of Roger Daltrey or Robert Plant. The story is that when they first appeared on the U.K. show "Top of the Pops," miming along to their British hit "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us" (which I thought was a 10cc song), John Lennon called Ringo Starr and told him to turn on the telly because "Marc Boland was doing a song with Adolf Hitler."
What we were supposed to think was that Ron was the secret genius behind the band, while his brother was a prancing piece of eye candy with a clean falsetto. But I suspected that they were in on the joke together and saw their band as a kind of pop art project.
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I remembered seeing their album covers in the '70s and '80s, usually in the cut-out bin, but still. I have a few of them — 1977's "Introducing Sparks," their seventh record, and 1982's "Angst in My Pants."
I would have guessed "Angst in My Pants" was their biggest-selling record in the U.S. because it received a lot of attention in the music press (of which I was a part) and because a single off that album, "I Predict," was made into a video that MTV at first refused to screen. (It's often reported that the video was directed by David Lynch. It was not, but the filmmakers consciously aped Lynch's style.)
MTV wouldn't screen it on the grounds that it was lewd, as it featured Ron in drag, performing a strip tease in a smoky cabaret. (We are not MTV. You can see the video here: youtube.com/watch?v=TH5USLpPa_0.) The network eventually relented, but only showed it late at night.
"Angst" was Sparks' first album to crack the Billboard 200 album charts, where it got as high as No. 173. And the next year, they almost had a hit single with "Cool Places," an infectious, corny duet between Russell and the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin that just missed the Top 40. After that, I lost track of them.
Except I thought that Sparks' biggest hit had to have been "Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?," which had been a very minor hit in 1981 but got new life when it was included in the soundtrack of the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" in 1984. A silly novelty song about "the knee-show, knee-show, big breast girls," its trashy synths and bouncy gang vocals have a Proustian effect on a lot of us who lived through the early '80s. While many of their songs were undeniably better than "Sex Girls," I would have argued it was Sparks' biggest contribution to the culture.
Only Sparks didn't write, perform or release "Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?" The song was done by a band called Gleaming Spires. Although three of the four members of Gleaming Spires played in the late '70s/early '80s incarnation of Sparks, Ron and Russell Mael had nothing to do with "Sex Girls."
I didn't know this until after I'd watched the just-released film "The Sparks Brothers," directed by Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead," "Baby Driver"), obviously in deep collaboration with the brothers. Although the film is highly entertaining and presents a great case for the importance of this no-hit wonder band (they did have bona fide hits in Europe; you can see their influence on theatrical artists like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry and David Byrne, and it's impossible to imagine the synth-driven pop of bands like Joy Division/New Order, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran without them), it tells us little about the off-stage lives of the Maels.
Which fits with Ron Mael's dictum that nothing autobiographical belongs in a pop song.
What's refreshing about "The Sparks Brothers" is that while it fails to penetrate the zone of privacy that Ron and Russell Mael have established for themselves — we never learn whether either brother is married or has children or has ever been to rehab (which seems unlikely, given how remarkably healthy they seem as they earnestly answer Wright's occasionally goofy questions) — it does what that long-out-of-print seventh album failed to do.
It introduces us to Sparks.
"There's something comforting in knowing something this weird can survive," Todd Rundgren, who produced their first record, says at one point. I don't know that I'll ever dive into their deep catalog — though a lot of their late-period stuff, which I hadn't heard before seeing the film, is very interesting — but Sparks seems like good people. Smart guys. And they seem to like each other, which is the exception for rock 'n' roll brother acts (see Ray and Dave Davies, Mark and David Knopfler, Liam and Noel Gallagher, John and Tom Fogerty, etc.).
And the Maels' moment might not be over when "The Sparks Brothers" documentary slips back into streaming channels; they are heavily involved in French director Leos Carax's ("Les Amants du Pont-Neuf," "Holy Motors") new film "Annette," which will open the Cannes Film Festival on July 6. The Maels reportedly wrote the film's songs and its script about a comedian (Adam Driver) married to a world-famous soprano (Marion Cotillard).
Baby boomers are perpetually surprised to find themselves susceptible to passing time. It is easy to find irony in the spectacle of the Woodstock generation clinging to the aural artifacts of their youth. "Classic rock" might have sounded heretical to the 20-somethings in the studio all those years ago, but now it's as established as the New York Stock Exchange.
Every generation eventually becomes its parents — or perhaps, in reaction — its grandparents.
But every generation is capable of producing timeless art, and for all the recent fuss (to which I have contributed) about the amazing pop music of 1971, I think that of all those classic albums the one that matters most — the one I may have played more than any other record — is Joni Mitchell's "Blue," which turned 50 last week, occasioning the usual attempts by the star-maker machinery to cash in.
On Tuesday, Rhino issued a digital EP with five unreleased recordings from the "Blue" sessions: a demo of "California"; an early version of "A Case of You" with different lyrics from the album version; a version of "River" with French horns; an alternative take of "Urge for Going" with a string section; and a version called "Hunter" that was apparently cut from the album at the last moment. (Mitchell was playing "Hunter" live as early as 1970, and a live version appears on the 2009 album "Amchitka," a document of a benefit concert Mitchell, James Taylor and Phil Ochs played in Vancouver in October 1970.)
The five-song EP is kind of a teaser trailer for "Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971)," which will be released Oct. 29 as a 5-CD set ($64.98) as well as digitally. (A deluxe 10-LP version, limited to 4,000 copies and on 180-gram vinyl, will be be available the same day exclusively at JoniMitchell.com for $249.98.)
I don't know that it's particularly useful to argue that any given album is, or is among, the "greatest of all time," but if there is such a thing as a serious GOAT discussion about pop music records, you can't have one without considering "Blue." And, like a lot of members of my cohort, I am very much looking forward to downloading these tracks.
Mitchell is the polar opposite of an act like Sparks, who maintain a formal distance between their art and their personal lives, which they rightly contend are none of our business. "Blue" is the ultimate confessional singer-songwriter album. She is singing about her life.
"The 'Blue' album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," Mitchell told Rolling Stone magazine in 1979. "At that period in my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either."
"Blue" was the first Mitchell album I encountered. It took me years to go back and explore her earlier recordings, and when I did, I was disappointed. Before "Blue," Mitchell was a crafty songwriter, a consummate hippy chick, all lank flaxen hair and Faye Dunaway cheekbones and freckles on the tip of her nose — the "old lady of the year" and perhaps even the defining female singer-songwriter artiste of the '60s — but after "Blue" she was serious and deadly, with a Miles Davis edge to her. Mitchell emerged from "Blue" an intimidating and sui generis artist capable of timeless work.
The difference between "Both Sides Now" and "A Case of You" is as far — maybe further — than "Blowin' in the Wind" is from "Simple Twist of Fate." Mitchell before "Blue" could have fit in the Brill Building; after "Blue" she's keeping company with Wallace Stevens and Aaron Copland.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Paul (and Linda!) McCartney's 1971 masterpiece "Ram," the album has been reissued as a limited edition, half-speed mastered vinyl pressing via UMe. It's available for $35.98 though, uh, well, it's apparently sold out. Your best bet is to check your local physical record store, which was a really fun thing all of us used to do before the internet ruined everything.
I can remember buying a copy of "Ram" in a record store the week it came out in May 1971. Well, not exactly a record store. I bought it at the Norton Air Force Base BX, near San Bernardino, Calif. It was one of the first major purchases I can ever remember making; most of the rest of my record collection then consisted of Elvis and Beatles LPs I'd sneaked out of my parents' wire racks and into my room, along with the sometimes inspired (the Rolling Stone's "Let it Bleed"), sometimes insipid (the 1910 Fruitgum Company's "1, 2, 3, Red Light") and sometimes way above my reading level (Anthony Braxton's "For Alto") albums gifted me by various uncles and aunts.
"Ram" I bought myself and instantly hated.
What exactly sparked my distaste for "Ram," I can't say — maybe it was the obvious insouciance with which the ex-Beatle committed his loopiest thoughts to vinyl. Maybe I was not sharp enough to realize, as a lot of people did (though McCartney denied it), that songs like "Too Many People" and "3 Legs" were expressions of his new post-Beatle freedom. I just thought they were stupid.
I probably had the same reaction as John Lennon, who said of the album:
"I thought it was awful! 'McCartney' was better because at least there were some tunes on it, like 'Junk.' I liked the beginning of 'Ram On,' the beginning of 'Uncle Albert' and I liked some of 'My Dog's Got Three Legs.' I liked the little bit about 'Hands across the water,' but it just tripped off all the time. I didn't like that a bit!"
These days I like McCartney's solo work a little better than when it came out, and "Ram" is one of his absolute best post-Beatles records. Part of that is simply loosening up and enjoying the melodic and chromatic pleasures available without getting hung up on the lyrics; part of it is appreciating the restless and inventive spirit that caused a major artist not only to run down these featherweight tunes but to actually put them out in the marketplace.
"Ram" is often cited as the place where genuinely independent record-making begins; it's a lo-fi ramble through the tune-bit mind of a kid from Liverpool who'd just emerged from the belly of a Leviathan and was joyful to be alive.
His dog had three legs, but it could run.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com | blooddirtangels.com