Sparks Fly: Ron and Russell Mael, beach boys of lotusland, get ‘MAD!’ on their latest album
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Ron and Russell Mael are that rarest of all breeds, the Los Angeles native. The brothers came of age in the 1960s on L.A.’s Westside — decades before it was “310” or west of the 405 Freeway — because the north/south artery hadn’t yet been built. A sporty upbringing of beach volleyball, AM radio tuned to 93 KHJ, and Palisades High School football (for Russell) belie the intellectual cool-cult status the band has held for decades. A status, that in the last few years, after making eclectic, uncompromising and witty albums since 1971, is morphing into something approaching mainstream recognition.
The Maels credit the newfound momentum to cinema, specifically the 2021 Edgar Wright documentary “The Sparks Brothers” and “Annette,” a film that opened Cannes in 2021 which found the creator-brothers joyful on the red carpet with director Leos Carax and stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Up next? A “half-musical” with John Woo (“Face/Off”).
If the musicians’ visibility and viability has shifted, Sparks’ music remains inventive, brainy and flamboyant pop, often born of sunshiny moments and wistful memories that wend their way into lyrics.
But it’s hardly nostalgia. “Perhaps in the themes,” says Ron, “but in a musical sense, we really try to avoid nostalgia completely.”
“JanSport Backpack,” is a yearning tune with harmonies and a hazily poignant emotional tone akin to the Beach Boys —another band of Westside brothers and musical observers of youth culture. If the narrator laments the JanSport Backpack girl walking away, the love interest in “My Devotion” has “[her] name written on my shoe,” as Russell sings.
“Maybe it isn’t so much nostalgic,” Ron said. “In some ways, we matured, in some we haven’t, so we’re still kind of living in an era of writing somebody’s name on their shoes.”
One tune is a surprising almost-love-letter to a fixture that’s the bane of many Golden State warriors’ existence — and satirized aptly on the “Saturday Night Live” sketch “The Californians”: The 405 Freeway. “I-405” is a frenetic, driving, cinematic journey that perfectly captures the drama and beauty roiling underneath bumper-to-bumper frustration.
“You kind of think of the I-405 in a negative way, because you think of being stuck on it. Everybody has their horror stories about it,” says Ron, perched next to his brother in the lounge area of Russell’s bright recording studio, surrounded by the coolest pop culture tchotchkes and collectibles imaginable.
“One time when I was up at the Getty Center, and it was starting to be dusk, with the cars moving it seemed, in its own weird, L.A. kind of way, romantic. Almost like our equivalent, if you really stretch it, to the beautiful rivers in Europe and Japan,” Ron says. “That was kind of the starting point for the song. If you look at it from a distance, there is kind of a beauty, and I think that’s one of the keys to Los Angeles. You have to see things that you kind of think of as mundane in a slightly different way. Like, you go to Europe and things are obviously Art. Period. But here, a car wash or something…”
“…We’re big fans of supermarkets,” Russell chimes in. “When they go away, it’s kind of sad. Even department stores now are almost becoming a relic of the past. It’s like a ghost town in the Beverly Center. All that’s going to be gone at some point soon.”
If not by gentrification and L.A.’s habit of eating its own, then natural disasters. The Jan. 7 Palisades fire burned part of Ron’s high school, and the entirety of the home they lived in with their mother after their father’s passing, on Galloway Street in the Palisades. Nearly every house in the entire neighborhood — the Alphabet Streets, a working-class enclave when the Maels lived there — was reduced to a pile of rubble.
“They had some of those aerial shots where they made the grid of the names of the streets, and it was gone. It’s hard to comprehend, it was real suburbia there,” says Russell, “and flat, so you think, ‘well, surely that can’t burn down.’”
Slightly east of the 405, the Maels attended UCLA when culture was at a tipping point. Ron saw some of Jim Morrison’s “kind of impressive” student films at the school, and the brothers recall that, “UCLA, at the time, had this amazing booking policy; you had Jimi Hendrix and Alice Cooper and Mothers of Invention, Canned Heat. It wasn’t considered such a big deal. Just, ‘Let’s go see that person.’ Now you have to go online and mortgage your house to go to see anybody,” says Ron.
“We always loved that kind of music,” adds Russell, “but we never thought that we would ever be, you know, professional musicians. It’s just that was the music that we really loved.”
That said, by the age of 5, Ron was taking piano lessons and giving a recital at the Women’s Club of Venice, near where the Mael family then resided. At Paul Revere Junior High, Russell won first place at a Shakespeare Festival for his sonnet recitation.
Post those halcyon days, the brothers began delving into music together. Russell’s powerful, at times operatic, vocals and energetic stage presence proved the perfect foil for Ron’s distinctly quirky mien and adroit facility with words and keys. “I don’t know if you go as far as to call it a band,” clarifies Ron. “It was an attempt at being a band. We played at some dorm thing at UCLA once.”
“We also played a pizza place in Westwood,” Ron remembers.
“Shakey’s Pizza,” Russell adds with a laugh. “We were top-billed that night. Yeah, free pizza. We did the local Westwood circuit and then when we got somewhat better we started playing the Whisky a Go Go a bunch. We were officially Sparks then.”
The Sunset Strip, past its Doors days and with hair metal far on the horizon, wasn’t especially welcoming to Sparks, though [Whisky founder] Elmer Valentine “irrationally loved our band,” says Ron. “The audiences, when they showed up, they really didn’t like us and we were really way too loud. But he kept booking us. We would support people like Little Feat.”
The L.A. Times reviewed that 1973 show, with critic Richard Cromelin noting that Sparks’ “highly stylized attitude is not complemented by the necessary abandon.” That observation may ring true for some, but for Sparks, ultimately that “abandon” wasn’t and isn’t necessary. The energy of beguiling songs like “Angst in My Pants” and “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us,” belted out with Russell’s ebullient, pitch-perfect vocals, carry the always dynamic live show.
Over the last four years, the Maels are glad to shake the long-held best-kept-secret tag, grateful to “Annette” and “The Sparks Brothers” for the boost. “They kind of attracted people who were coming to us from the film area; they didn’t know about the band. It’s a new, younger audience, really diverse,” Russell says.
The lineup’s last few albums are the most meaningful to that sector. “Going back to say, [1974’s] “Kimono My House,” for them, it’s not meaningful in the same kind of way as somebody who was there at that time,” the singer says. “It’s really healthy that their focal point isn’t like the ‘golden era of whenever’ that might have been the ’70s in London or the ’80s in L.A. or any point in between.”
New eyes on the band have elicited a seemingly increased enthusiasm and energy that’s perhaps unexpected from seasoned septuagenarians. Unlike the Gallaghers, the Davieses, and many other brotherly duos in rock, the Maels present a united front. If the brothers are coy and circumspect about their personal lives, their working relationship is slightly less obtuse. Slightly. We’re in the room where their latest, “MAD!,” (released Friday) was created, and while the album credits both with lyrics and production, Ron is the main wordsmith. There’s seemingly not much back-and-forth on the lyrical themes or specifics.
“I hear about it on the day it’s time to start singing,” says Russell. “There’s a ‘here’s your lyrics, sir.’”
That said, Sparks’ seeming manifesto, “Do Things My Own Way” which starts the album, is clearly a statement of the duo’s longtime purpose, Russell singing, “Unaligned / Simply fine / Gonna do things my own way.”
So would it ever be “our own way”?
The Maels laugh. “Not as long as I’m writing the songs,” quips Ron.
“Good question, though,” says Russell with a smile.
“‘We witnessed the breakup of Sparks,’” Ron says with a laugh. “On the ‘Greatest Hits’ album, we can do a version that’s ‘ours.’”
Sparks performs at the Greek Theater on Sep. 30.
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