Rock 'n' Roll High School With SPARKS

     I watched the Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers, and as a fan from the '70s, I thought I'd tell my own Sparks story. I started buying Sparks albums as soon as I bought my first component stereo system in the late 1970s. I searched used record stores and bought new Sparks albums as they came out until I had all of their albums.

     There was a club at Dearborn High School called The Pretentious Club, and the sponsor was Russ Gibb, a concert promoter, disc jockey, and school teacher that used to own the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. He had many stories about bands from the 1960s, mostly about how not enough tickets were sold, so Russ wouldn't pay them but would tell them that they could sleep on the living room floor in his house, then in the morning he would get up and make them all breakfast.

     When I started High School in 1981 The Pretentious Club had established a business model in which they would have fundraisers like selling bagels in the cafeteria, then would do something with the money, and you can only have so many pizza parties, so overtime we had built up well over a thousand dollars in our account.  In 1982 when I was 16 Sparks toured for the first time in years and came to Detroit at Clutch Cargos, we brought about a dozen pineapples to get Sparks to play the song Pineapples off Indiscreet, and eventually a couple ended up sitting on Ron's keyboard and the rest were on the stage, but Russell said that they were sorry but this band didn't know that song.

     In the Edgar Wright documentary it covers the fact that Indiscreet was one of 3 albums produced in England in 1974 and 1975 and since then Ron and Russell Mael had come back, gotten another band in The States, then abandoned that band a couple of years later and formed a duo to do No.1 In Heaven and Terminal Jive with Giorgio Moroder, and then formed yet another band around 1981, which was the band that we saw in 1982. It may have only been 7 years since Indiscreet, but it was also 6 albums and three bands ago.

     I spoke to Ron and Russell, and told them that if they had any time they could come over and play at our high school for $1,000.  I seem to recall they said that they couldn't now, but that they would be touring for the next few years and would fit us in next year.  Anyway, they did come and play next year, and after showing them the stage I asked if there was anything else I could get them. "The money?"  They politely asked.  I took Russell in one of his big sparkly suits to the vice principal's office where we had arranged for the $1,000 to be waiting in cash, then after school they played free in the auditorium, and we had our own Rock 'n' Roll High School with Sparks. 

     After I graduated high school I went off to college and bought the last few Sparks albums of the 1980s, so I can proudly say that I still own the first 12 Sparks albums. Then like many people I lost track of Sparks when they took a five-year hiatus from 1988 to 1993 to work on some now abandoned anime project with Tim Burton. They popped back up on my radar in 2015 when they formed the supergroup FFS with Franz Ferdinand and I thought Johnny Delusional and Call Girl were good songs, but I didn't dive into the last 20 years of their catalog at that point. 

     I doubt that the Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers will do anything to bring any new fans into the fold, I think it fails there, but like me, I'm sure there are other early fans that weren't aware of their catalog over the last 30 years. Thanks to YouTube and Sparks themselves you can now check out their entire catalog, because the official channel for Sparks started uploading videos and albums around 10 years ago. Now I have a saved playlist on YouTube of 50 songs written between 1974 and 1984, and 20 songs that I think are amazing over the last 30 years, plus a list of live performances. Ron and Russell Mael just don't quit, still going strong after 50 years Sparks is the preeminent art rock band on the planet, producing another 12 albums over the last 30 years, and now are set to release their 25th album in 2023.

     Anyway, that's my story about how around 40 years ago I paid Sparks $1,000 to play a free show in our high school auditorium.

     Sparks Mix Tape 1994 - 2020

1) When Do I Get To Sing My Way? (Official Video) -Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins

2) (When I Kiss You) I Hear Charlie Parker Playing  -Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins

3) Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat [Plagiarism Version] -Plagiarism

4) No. 1 Song In Heaven [Plagiarism Version] (Official Video) -Plagiarism

5) Funny Face [Plagiarism Version] -Plagiarism

6) Balls -Balls

7) More Than A Sex Machine -Balls

8) Scheherazade -Balls

9) The Calm Before The Storm (Official Video) -Balls

10) The Rhythm Thief (Official Video) -Lil' Beethoven 

11) My Baby's Taking Me Home (Official Video) -Lil' Beethoven

12) Dick Around (Official Video) -Hello Young Lovers

13) Rock, Rock, Rock [Live at the London Forum 9/30/2006] (Video) -Hello Young Lovers

14) Good Morning -Exotic Creatures Of The Deep

15) I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song -Exotic Creatures Of The Deep

16) FFS Call Girl

17) FFS Johnny Delusional

18) What The Hell Is It This Time? (Official Video) -Hippopotamus

19) All That -A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

20) Please Don't F*ck Up My World -A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

     Plus these three Sparks concerts from 1994, 2006, and 2021 show that if anything, in their 70s Ron and Russell are just getting better, and that Russell's untrained multi-octave voice is apparently untouched by time. (YouTube titles):

-Sparks Live / Hamburg 1994 / Schmidt's Tivoli / Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins / Christie Haydon 

-Sparks at London Forum: "Hello Young Lovers" Full Show - Sep 30, 2006 [HD]

-Sparks: Live in London 2021 (High Quality)