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 lik...