It was wonderful to see you at the show, Brian, and I was actually amazed how many of my friends turned out to be Sparks fans. Here is my writeup; I do these essays largely in long form for my own recordkeeping and aides-memoires, but also to organize my own thoughts about music:
Sparks
Lincoln Theatre, Washington DC March 26, 2022
In the dark days of November and December of last year, I was lying in my wife’s childhood bedroom watching not one, but two, movies about a band I hadn’t really ever thought of: Sparks, the conceptually provocative art-pop band of brothers Ron Mael and Russell Mael that has been around since the late 1960s, and infrequently flirted with mainstream appeal. There were songs I knew, or would have recognized: Their sound-effects laden 1974 #2 UK hit
“This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us,” which sounds like Queen’s Freddy Mercury backed by a hyperactive country band, and their hyperactive 1979 synth-disco dance number
“Number One Song In Heaven,” and the pointed ecological ballad “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” (
via the Neko Case cover), but rarely did more than a song or two penetrate my consciousness.
But then there was buzz about the documentary,
The Sparks Brothers, coming to Netflix. And concurrently, a long-gestated musical was released, featuring Adam Driver and Marillon Cotillard. And I started watching the documentary late last year, and thought, wow, these are some great songs. And then I was watching the musical
Annette, which is largely awful, in terms of the characters whom I couldn’t stand, but the music was undeniable, nothing moreso than the incredible opening, “Now May We Start,” which becomes an inescapable earworm after the first listen, not to mention the third or tenth. (
Scope the promo video, with Driver and Cotillard guesting.)
At some point, and after scouring old videos of the band’s performances and music videos, perhaps late one night after an edible, the thought occurred to me: holy cow, I’m becoming a Sparks fan.
The first thing about Sparks is that they are completely outside of my usual lanes. I never liked the more artsy end of the prog- and glam-influenced bands of the late 1960s or 1970s, when they emerged, with Russell Mael’s androgynous falsetto and Ron Mael’s deadpan and googly-eyed pantomiming from the keyboards. And by the time I became a serious musical listener in the 1990s, they were something of a nostalgia act, although I do recall “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” coming into the KRLX record library in 1994. But Sparks kept reinventing themselves, and like a comet on an elliptical orbit, once every fifteen years or so, the band’s idiosyncrasies would overlap with popular listenership in America or (more frequently) Europe, and they somehow have a career now that is well over a half-century. But mostly, despite the brothers’ reputation as career-destroying weirdos, and Ron Mael’s famously dour persona and Hitlerian mustache, and Russell Mael’s operatic singing, the music is
fun, and the concert at the Lincoln was arguably the most fun I’ve had at a concert in a decade or more. And weirdly, Sparks may be more popular in 2022 than they ever were in the 1970s or 1980s, at least in America.
The performance at the Lincoln Theatre was a monument of efficiency and maximal impact, along with unabashed joy in the presence of the audience. Promptly at 8:15 (no opener), to an opening fanfare from Shostakovich, the brothers Mael came onto the stage with a three-piece band (one guitarist temporarily off the tour with COVID). Russell was wearing a bright canary-yellow vest-suit, performing with remarkable energy for someone 73 years old — he’s the younger brother — and hitting all the falsetto notes from his 1970s hits. Ron was… well, I guess he’s been doing this for a half-century, so he’s got his thing: sitting in a Mr. Rogers sweater with his belted pants pulled up way too high, pounding the keyboards unemotionally with periodic smirks and grimaces. Honestly, they were doing this so long before Kraftwerk that they could have sued the Germans.
The show began, of course, with “Now May We Start.” It’s a perfect song to open a show, because it’s about the stress and drama that accompany having to open a show. It’s also, like a great many of Sparks’ best songs, a meta-song about music-making, replete with sardonic commentary about showbiz. (The Mael brothers were children of television, growing up alongside what would become Television City, and studied film and theater in UCLA before forming the band.) As an opener to a rock show, or a movie musical, “Now May We Start” is ideal. It’s also, if you aren’t into musicals, perhaps insufferably twee, but it’s so catchy. Oddly, it was not nominated for an Oscar for best song, but it won the César for best song of a movie in 2021, which is referenced in one of the band’s many sardonic t-shirts for sale at the merch table.
One thing that strikes me as a possibly original thought about Sparks is that their most highly conceptual songs are often the most catchy and popular. The absolutely insanely great single
“When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way,’” which I believe I heard first back in college but only re-discovered in the form of the incredible video, is the perfect example. It’s a song about desiring the popular acclaim of a Sinatra, or the destructive catharsis of a Sid Vicious, while being held back by a music world that won’t understand you — and the video turns into a murderous melodrama about the Mael brothers with Ronald playing the vengeful, underappreciated one desirous of his younger brother Russell’s charisma and popular recognition. The performance and the video are, as the kids say, *chef’s kiss*. And, Ron got up from the keyboards and did his running-in-place dance from the videos. There have been other songs about the songs that one hears in heaven, among them the Chills’ immortal
“Heavenly Pop Hit,” but “Number One Song in Heaven” is ingenious because it takes the biblical references to the angel Gabriel and his trumpet and instead imagines Gabriel as an electro DJ spinning high-energy hits for eternity. They even have an incredibly catchy song whose entire lyrics are, “Home, my baby’s taking me home,” repeated in various permutations 104 times, according to Wikipedia. The description would call to mind horrors of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, but the song itself is ingenious. Of course, they have a long fondness for puerile joke songs as well, so the cleverness has a flip side to its coin.
I am not expert in the Sparks back catalogue, but they hit most of the obvious high points of their very long career in a 100-minute show, including early favorites like “Wonder Girl” (which seems like it must have been a play on the Kinks’ “Wonderboy”), the lurid and winking 70s glam rock “Under the Table With Her,” and many of their dance-pop 80s European hits like the sardonic “Music That You Can Dance To.” Latter-day Sparks material included their collaboration with Franz Ferdinand, “Johnny Delusional,” and the extraordinary
“Edith Piaf (Said It Better than Me),” another in the long list of Sparks songs that are meta-commentaries on pop music and the gulf between mundane life and glamour. By that 21st century period, much of Sparks work was more classically-inspired, art-pop, but in the context of a rock band setup with guitarist, bass, drums fleshing out Ron and Russell’s songs, it was all of a piece. (They were missing one touring guitarist, out with COVID, but the sound was full and strong.) They did not do the acerbic early hit “Girl from Germany,” their arch commentary on bringing home a German girlfriend to meet their Jewish parents, which I would have enjoyed. I don’t think it’s a secret that a lot of Sparks songs over the years have been grating, or deliberately offensive or juvenile, or experiments gone woefully awry, or just maudlin or tawdry. But many of their best songs, including most of the ones featured in the documentary, found their way into the set, which demonstrates both the benefits of a long and varied career, and judicious setlist editing.
What was remarkable was the show’s energy and sense of joy. Russell was gracious and appreciative to the crowd throughout, and while the entire audience was well masked, you could see the smile lines on their faces. Four or five songs into the set, almost everyone was standing and dancing, and the sold-out Lincoln Theatre remained standing for the remainder of the set. And, wow, Russell is a truly great singer: while he got famous for singing in an airy and off-putting falsetto, which he still hits well into his 70s, he has a handsome, arrogant but melodic singing voice that favorably compares with Bryan Ferry at his post-Roxy Music peak — and from all appearances, Ferry does not sing as well now as Mael does. And Ronald, while he doesn’t speak much on stage, played creatively and feistily, whether it was the mechanical rhythms of the 80s synth pop or the orchestral flourishes of their 21st century material, and spoke thoughtfully to the audience about the Sparks creative process and their “insular” music making, as two brothers who’ve collaborated for a 55-year-plus career that has rarely been in step with popular trends.
All told, a wonderful and rewarding evening for the audience, and seemingly for the Mael brothers and band as well, as they celebrated after the encore with the droll “Suburban Homeboy” (not one of their best) and the stately “All That,” with an extensive paean of appreciation for the audience and a
“selfie” in which I can barely identify myself, off to the right over Russell Mael’s outreached arm (black hair, black glasses, dark complexion, white N95).
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/28/2022 05:33PM by zwirnm.
