This wild little guy has been out for a second but we were so busy with shows, shows and shows that we didn’t get a chance to make a huge deal about it! So behold—L.A. RECORD 104! First issue of our sixth year of printing with busting-through-the-mold L.A. transplant KING TUFF on the cover and a very provocative MIA DOI TODD on the poster! Must it be seen to be believed? Or must one first believe to see? Order a copy and all will be revealed … including characteristically reality-rending interviews with Hall & Oates, the Middle Class, Animals & Men, Don Juan Y Los Blancos, Paul Collins, James Pants, Shabazz Palaces and more!

And of course there’s side B with interviews with Tim Burton (!?), Guy Maddin and Sparks on their new collaborative musical, Interpreters by Bleached, Computer Jay and Ria Ama and more, as well as 50 hand-made hand-illustrated album reviews, mind-debriding comics — now expanded! — and a new L.A. WISDOM, in which DJ Nobody and Laena Geronimo discover the exact moment when living with your parents becomes sad.

Order your own copy here! Or subscribe here! Or just grab one for free across the greater Los Angeles metro zone!

L.A. RECORD 104:

CHELSEA WOLFE — KRISTINA BENSON
MIA DOI TODD — DAIANA FEUER
PAUL COLLINS — DAN COLLINS AND KRISTINA BENSON
HALL AND OATES — DAN COLLINS
PAPERCRANES — DAIANA FEUER
ANIMALS & MEN — CHRIS ZIEGLER
THE MIDDLE CLASS — JONNY BELL
KING TUFF — CHRIS ZIEGLER
SPINDRIFT — DAIANA FEUER
MICHAEL CHAPMAN — KEVIN FERGUSON
FEEDING PEOPLE — DAN COLLINS AND LAINNA FADER
DON JUAN Y LOS BLANCOS — LAINNA FADER
JAMES PANTS — CHRIS ZIEGLER
SHABAZZ PALACES — LAINNA FADER

ALBUM REVIEWS EDITED BY DAN COLLINS
THE INTERPRETER: COMPUTER JAY — KRISTINA BENSON
THE INTERPRETER: BLEACHED — KRISTINA BENSON

COMICS EDITED BY TOM CHILD

L.A. WISDOM EDITED BY DAIANA FEUER

ART EDITED BY DREW DENNY
TIM BURTON — DREW DENNY

FILM EDITED BY LAINNA FADER
THE INTERPRETER: RIA AMA — LAINNA FADER
SPARKS/GUY MADDIN — LAINNA FADER

BOOKS EDITED BY NIKKI BAZAR
EXCERPT FROM KASMIR BY JON LEON
FROM DALI TO LAMA … KARMA OR COINCIDENCE BY PATRICK LYONS
BOOK AND ZINE REVIEWS

Long-running pop duo Sparks are now 22 albums deep and their latest, a musical commissioned by Swedish National Radio called The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, will be performed live at the Los Angeles Film Festival, with stage direction from Winnipeg wunderkind Guy Maddin, who hopes to direct a feature film adaptation. This interview by Lainna Fader.

Why did Swedish National Radio commission Sparks to write a musical?
Ron Mael (keyboards): We played in Stockholm a few times. For some reason there’s a following for us there and this woman who was the main person at the Swedish National Radio commission had come backstage at one of the shows. There’s kind of a system in Sweden where they really support live radio drama. It’s kind of considered something cool—it’s not something intellectual. So she contacted us in 2009. Most of the artists that have done work for Swedish National Radio are Swedish artists but she really liked what we were doing and she wanted to know if we’d do a radio musical. We were a little hesitant because we’re kind of visually oriented but we decided to go ahead with it. The only stipulation they put on it is that it had to have something to do with Sweden in some way. We were familiar with Ingmar Bergman and we love that sort of cinema so we decided to write something for them. They had the premiere of the radio musical and they have kind of a ritual there where everybody goes into basically a small opera theater but there’s nothing happening on stage. You just sit there and listen to it.
So they were staring at a blank screen?
Ron: Well, there was a picture of Bergman on the screen and a couple of exit signs but other than that it was kind of nothing. We were sitting in the audience and usually when you’re performing you kind of think that you’re pulling some strings sometimes but with this there was nothing, But the reaction was really good. So in any case we’ve always wanted to do a movie musical. We’re big fans of Guy Maddin and our mutual friend Michael Silverblatt introduced us. For about a year and a half we were telephoning and emailing and he really thought this was a great piece and wanted to direct it. Our manager sent the piece to the L.A. Film Festival and they really thought it was special—plus they really love the work of Guy Maddin so the combination of the two was something they were really interested in. They originally just wanted a table reading where everybody just sits there and sings or reads the thing and Guy Maddin was just going to do stage directions in between pieces but we thought that it’s not so exciting for an audience to watch people sitting there reading. We had total confidence that the music would work on a purely aural level, but once you added the visual element of people reading it seemed like it would be more boring. So one thing led to another and now we’re doing it on a pretty grandiose scale. We want to keep it from being a completely successful theatrical event, because our aim for doing this—to be crass about it—is to get somebody to finance the film version. And if they saw it as being finished theatrically then what’s the point?
What is it about Maddin’s work that you are attracted to?
Russell Mael (vocals): We feel a kinship with Guy in a certain way. He’s got a self-contained world and all of his films fit into that world. And it doesn’t necessarily relate to anything that’s not in that world or going on in film. Sparks has created kind of its own universe musically. It doesn’t really matter what anybody else is doing on the periphery. We think Guy has that same sort of vision with his films. He’s just in his own little world and we really like that world a lot. He doesn’t operate within the same parameters that are used in Hollywood. Having said all of that, we feel that the combination of what Guy does with this project is not so left field that it couldn’t have a bigger audience.
Bergman’s films are deeply impacted by his experience of growing up religious, losing his faith and then struggling with that loss for the rest of his life. How do you relate to Bergman in terms of faith?
Ron: We kind of understood him through his films, really. Our upbringing wasn’t as traditionally religious as his was. But there is a moment in this piece where he’s asking for God’s help in much the same way someone in one of his film’s would, and we wanted that to be sincere and not a joke. It’s the one moment in the piece where the Bergman character actually sings and that seemed like the way to make it seem really important for Bergman. Peter Franzen, the actor who’s doing that song, is able to perform it so it’s really touching, whatever your feelings are about religion.
Why is Greta Garbo Bergman’s savior?
Ron: Even though the starting point of the piece is the ’56 Cannes Film Festival, we wanted the time references to be all over the place so it wasn’t just a story about the past. So at the time that a savior is needed for him, to have Greta Garbo—another iconic Swedish figure—walking on the beach in Santa Monica and spiritually and physically saving Bergman seemed like the right thing to do from our perspective. She seems so iconic and out of place but we like things that are out of place. All these things are done with some absurdity but we never wanted it to be campy or just funny. We wanted it to be emotionally touching and we think we pulled it off as far as the writing went, but the people actually performing are taking it to another level. The combination of Peter as Bergman and Ann Magnuson really raised the level of the piece.
Russell: She is also kind of the bookend device to how he got himself in trouble by adventuring in to see this Hollywood movie. A Swedish device ends up showing him the way back to where he really should be—and that he made the right decision to clear out of Hollywood.
You guys did an interview in the 70s in which you said you liked doing music and liked acting, but you didn’t like combining the two in the same project. What changed?
Russell: Ego trip! I can’t even remember in what context that was said but I honestly don’t know. I think it’s more about combining the things on our own terms. It just depends what the project is. Our strength is doing our very specific vision and it’s the same with Guy. You take the person out of their world and you dilute their strengths.
Ron: Also—in the 70s, we were working within the song format. Even though they weren’t traditional songs sometimes, they were still albums of ten or twelve songs. By taking part of something that’s more theatrical and not as restricted, maybe our objections dampen because we’re trying to find a way to burst out of what we feel is such a limited view of what pop music is today. In some ways, what we always do is a reaction to what other people are doing. The more conservative other things seem to us, the more adventuresome we want to be.
You’ve said that you fight hard to not sound like a band who’ve put out 21 albums—how do you do that, and why?
Russell: I don’t think there are any other bands that would do the kind of project that The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is. With 21 Nights, we were really convinced that no other band would ever do 21 albums in 21 nights. There aren’t that many bands that have 21 albums and the ones that do are groups with a more established, comfortable situation that wouldn’t want to go through what we did, rehearsing for four months for this. We know the Rolling Stones will not do 21 of their albums, even though they have more than 21. They will never do it—I promise you that! Having that kind of spirit of wanting to do things that other bands wouldn’t want to or couldn’t do keeps you fresh, as does wanting to do challenging stuff that gets people as excited as we were when we heard things on the radio that inspired us. Roxy Music was releasing albums when we were living in England in the 70s, and it was unspoken but we wanted to be able to compete. There was a competition when our stuff would come out while we were there and we’d go, ‘Oooh, what’s Brian doing now?’ You always heard about the Beatles and the Beach Boys working off each other, seeing who can outdo the other—just having that kind of provocative spirit. When you do something that makes you a little uncomfortable, those are the things that end up having the best possibility of sounding really fresh.

THE SEDUCTION OF INGMAR BERGMAN ON SAT, JUNE 25, AT THE FORD AMPITHEATRE, 2580 CAHUENGA BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8:30 PM / $18 / ALL AGES. ALLSPARKS.COM OR LAFILMFEST.COM.

Director Guy Maddin’s latest project is a “film-to-be” adaptation of a musical originally written for Swedish National Radio by brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, in which a live cast—including Maddin and the Maels, appearing in supporting roles—will perform on stage the story of Ingmar Bergman, who is mysteriously transported from his native Sweden to Hollywood during the height of the studio system in the 1950s. Maddin will direct the on-stage world premiere of The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman at this year’s L.A. Film Festival and hopes to make the story into a film in the future. He speaks now from his home in Winnipeg.

Why are you working with Sparks on a musical about Ingmar Bergman?
I’m a longtime fan of the boys—the Maels. It never occurred to me that I’d ever do anything like this. I’d been researching them as film forces for a lost film project that I’m in the middle of right now—lost, aborted and unrealized films, I should say. I know at one point they were slated to make a picture with Jacques Tati back in the 70s and I was really intrigued by that. I think I discovered them in 1974 when they were just a few albums old. I’d kept in touch with them because I liked the fact that they’re really hard-working and kept evolving but still kept what I’d loved about them in the first place. I’d heard from a mutual friend—Michael Silverblatt, the guy that runs KCRW’s Bookworm—that they were aware of my movies and liked them OK or whatever so he arranged for some kind of introduction so that we could just kind of sheepishly glance at each other through splayed fingers and blushes, things like that. I find that they and I have very similar temperaments and as I got to know them a little bit more I learned to love these guys. When they asked me if I’d be interested in working on this I just said, ‘Absolutely. Sounds like fun.’ I’ve always been interested in the occult way in which music and image work together. No one can ever figure it out, I don’t think. There’s no formula. It’s not quantifiable. There’s no function that can be written down. It’s just very mysterious and so I thought, ‘Well, why not try to make it happen with this project?’ Which was already pretty cinematic. After all, it had its premiere in a theater with a blank screen and so people were listening to The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman and sitting in their seats looking at blankness—so they were obviously seeing things through the music.
How does the Maels’ relationship with Tati feed into their characterization of Bergman?
I don’t know. I’d kill to get my hands on the original Tati script for Confusion—the film they were going to do. I know Bergman is endlessly complicated and the more you watch him, the deeper he gets. What’s strange about the Maels’ music is that it seems remarkably simple—at times even as simple as a kind of a Dr. Seuss-y kind of a bounce—but the more you listen to that, the more you appreciate what’s going on in it. It rewards constant re-listening. I think maybe at first glance the opera—or whatever this is—is so simple. Bergman goes into a Swedish theater showing an American film and ends up literally in Hollywood—not just imaginatively—and has himself a little panic attack, which ends by the Santa Monica pier. And he runs out of North America to flee from Hollywood and then just his sort of fevered brow … You know, us Scandinavians—I’m Icelandic—us Scandinavians aren’t used to having brows with temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so when his brow is soothed by Greta Garbo, a successful Swedish émigré to Hollywood, he feels he can safely return to the dour, cold breast of Stockholm. I just liked the simplicity of it. And yet Bergman himself brings so much complication. It’s almost like you’re just getting a character transplant. A lot can be done in a short amount of time with the movie.
How exactly will Greta Garbo rescue Ingmar Bergman in the film?
I don’t know. I had my own encounter with Greta Garbo once—slightly more mystical than Bergman’s. In 1992 I went to Stockholm and saw the dress she wore in her first film, Gösta Berlings Saga. It was locked in a glass case at the Stockholm Cinematheque and I asked the curator there if he could please, please, please unlock it just so I could climb inside the glass chamber just so I could be inside the same space as the dress and he actually did so. I couldn’t believe it. I had to flirt with him a lot to get him to do it. He even locked the door so it was locked in there with me and once the door closed I was surrounded on all four sides by clear glass, like a perfectly transparent phone booth with the Gösta Berling dress—which I was very familiar with, I’d watched it over and over again—just on some kind of body mannequin. My head started to swim and I couldn’t help it. I licked it. I licked it right on the breast and with my big soggy tongue, dug into the fabric, which was 72 years old or something. I don’t remember exactly, but it was old and I tore a hole in it. I tore a hole about the size of a quarter in it and whatever formaldehyde spritzes were being used to preserve the fabric scorched all the taste buds off my tongue and I couldn’t taste anything for a year after that but I was so proud that I didn’t care. I couldn’t taste food. It was a tasteless act, I suppose, on some sacred object but I felt like it was mine. It was mine to do with what I wanted and it was a bit of a gesture of mad love. I know I do have a cold temperament like so many other Scandinavians but … I don’t know, I was just overcome by madness. I’ve just always felt a lot closer to Greta since then. So when I encountered this episode that they’d written in, I just thought it was another great intersection between Sparks and me. That they would choose someone as all-powerful as Greta Garbo—because that was the face of a century, after all—to loom out of the sky, to loom out of the luminosity and just restore things to a monochromatic cool and everything would be fine …
Why do you think Russell is suited to play a studio executive and a police officer and Ron is suited to playing a limo driver and a Hollywood tour guide?
They only have so many singing parts and things in the movie, and I guess maybe Ron just didn’t want to play Ingmar Bergman. I guess he just doesn’t look enough like him. It’s a big fever dream so it makes sense that the creators of the opera themselves actually serve as sort of footmen—that they’re at every level of the hierarchy of this thing. They’re chauffeurs and executives and composers and performers as well. I like the fact that they’re interlarded with the project from top to bottom. They’re kind of smaller parts, but they’re very lovely and they just keep reminding everybody that even though there are other performers and bigger parts—Bergman, Garbo—the Maels are involved top to bottom. It’s a nice way of knitting the composers right into the performance by actors and singers. I think I’d really love that to happen in the movie as well, if it ever gets made.
The Maels have said that they aren’t interested in revealing their own personalities in their music. How do you relate to them?
I think it’s another place where we agree or where we have similar approaches. A lot of people think my movies are really strange or bizarre or something but I’ve always been a folklorist—a fairytale buff. The Maels and I are always entering the world of music and literature and film through the fairy tale door, finding ourselves in there somewhere and then trying to figure out ways of representing ourselves in those terms—in heightened terms, in uninhibited terms, exaggerated terms if you have to. I like the idea of calling it ‘uninhibited’ terms because when you’re uninhibited, you’re telling the truth and the truth that’s on your mind is free to be blurted out. It might seem exaggerated or too loud or inappropriate or bizarre but it’s still true. When you’re exaggerating what’s on your mind, you tend to distort things. I think what they do is they take the truth and figure out a really stylish or boppy or fun way of uninhibiting it and revealing it to people in disguised forms—forms that are more fun or melancholy even, or boppy or catchy, whatever atmospheres or flavors they’ve chosen for songs.
What fairy tale meant a lot to you as a kid?
I really liked Journey to the Center of the Earth which was more of a movie I remember seeing when I was very young, maybe 3. Maybe just ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ which I never took to heart. I’m still building things out of straw. I became a housepainter and instead of replacing rotten boards, I’d just put three coats of paint on top of them. I kind of make films that way too. Their surfaces are always moldering and flaking off and things like that but I do try to have at least a strong framework underneath—but I’ve still got lots of rotten straw around there. Maybe somebody should have explained the fairy tale to me.
Memories from growing up are obviously a big part of your films—do you think memories enhance or impede our ability to enjoy the present?
Our memories are the present, you know? I can only paraphrase something Faulkner wrote. I think that we all live in the past and the present simultaneously. When you think of it in the most simplistic terms … you see a glowing red-hot stove element and you go to put your hand on it because it’s attractive but then you remember. There’s a very complicated matrix of memories that inform every moment and whenever we smell something, it subconsciously or even consciously reminds us of something. We’re just constantly wading through a sensory world of memory that’s being stirred up constantly by the present.
What do you think the difference is between nostalgia, melancholy and grief?
It’s tempting to be glib and say they’re all the same thing. They’re all sort of component parts of … yeah, I don’t know. Luckily I don’t feel grief very often. Nostalgia and melancholy are often overlapping—like carpet and underlay, you know? They’re hard to distinguish and sometimes they do feel synonymous. I like the feelings. I like a melancholic stroll. For some reason, walking is just a thousand times better for producing memories and creative solutions to problems than, say, driving or jogging or bike riding or laying on the couch or even just writing and trying to solve things. For some reason, just going on a stroll and thinking … it’s like everything settles in while your most recent meal is settling in. All the years that you’ve lived before start settling in, kind of like collating pages and shuffling them and squaring them until they’re in a nice, neat stack and things start to make sense. You start to remember how far back some things are and place them and they make some sort of emotional sense—how emotionally far back some things are and literally how chronologically far back some things are. For some reason I like those feelings. I guess I’ll just refuse to answer your question. I won’t distinguish between those two things. I like them both. It’s kind of like whether to get a chocolate shake or a chocolate malted. They’re both exquisitely melancholy.
In your published journals, you describe sex and amnesia as two different anesthetics for the pain of loss. What kind of loss is best treated with sex? What kind of loss is best treated with amnesia?
Amnesia is a far better anesthetic than sex, I’d imagine. We all need forgetfulness just to get through the day. There is a Borges story, ‘Funes, the Memorious,’ about a guy who remembers everything so well that he’s basically paralyzed. You’re remembering everything and ultimately nothing. Starting there, you need some amnesia just to create some continuity in your life. Then, you need to be able to move on and forgive yourself so you need to forget some of your most heinous acts of thoughtlessness or cruelty. You also need to forget those that have been committed against you. You need to forget some of your fears. Sometimes it’s helpful to forget your responsibilities and duties. You need to forget that it hurts to fall off a bicycle or a horse or you wouldn’t ride a horse or a bicycle. You know, those sorts of things. Some people forget their marriage vows and things like that and that’s a good thing for them. All that stuff makes the world go ’round but it’s obviously not good for everybody to do that—or to forget their parents. But I think sometimes it’s great to forget grief. To forget a big injury is part of the healing process so if someone you really love terribly has left you, it’s best to be allowed to forget that now and then. So forgetting sounds like a negative thing when you first think of it, but it’s very liberating. Sex? Oh geez, I don’t know what that anesthetizes. That’s more like scratching an itch—sometimes an itch big enough to literally revolve the moon around the Earth and the Earth around the sun but sometimes it’s just whatever. I don’t know what I was thinking of with sex as an anesthetic. I might have been thinking about how my genitals had no feeling in them anymore.
You’ve said most filmmakers don’t have the nerve to be really cruel to their characters, to give them what they deserve and what the audience secretly wants, even if they don’t know it. What are they afraid of?
I must have said that a few years ago. I was probably just bullshitting. No, I think I was probably complaining that a lot of directors are afraid of melodrama and that in melodrama, just like in the Old Testament, people get what they deserve—in melodramatic terms anyway. I’m not calling for a crackdown on crime or anything like that. I actually believe in rehabilitation instead of punishment. I’m one of those people. However, once I’m holding a camera or watching a story, I think we all become punishers—or people trying to understand the world—but you can’t help but give yourself over emotionally rather than just rationally, or judicially or fairly. Who needs to be fair when they’re watching a movie? So I think a lot of movies wimp out. They’re afraid and they get bogus in the third act and give people the ending they feel they should rather than give people the ending that seems psychologically right.
Do you think people—either consciously or subconsciously—tend to enjoy seeing other people suffer?
Absolutely. Not always. Sometimes witnessing such things creates permanent trauma. It’s almost as horrifying as the other’s suffering. But let’s face it—that term schadenfreude exists for a reason. Almost everybody has it at one time or another for sure. I’m not so cynical as to think that it’s all the time. I’ve actually worked hard at trying to be more empathetic. I think I was a sociopath when I was a teenager and a young man. I recognized that at least. I think I read a definition of a sociopath and secretly gasped and realized I was one. I’ve been working a lot harder on being less of a sociopath and I think you can actually make some progress that way.
How do you do that? How do you work to be less sociopathic?
How did I do it? I think it was just an exercise of trying to constantly put myself in other people’s shoes and maybe I just accumulated enough years on the planet and actually experienced some miserable things and realized how little the old me would have cared about how the new me would have felt and I was kind of appalled and felt lonely. I’d also had some huge regrets about how I hadn’t sent off some elderly relatives very well and I really don’t want to make that mistake now that some more elderly relatives are ready to go. They’re on the launch pad. Some of it’s selfish. I want to be more empathetic so I’m less haunted by the send-offs. I’m not sure that’s complete empathy, but if all I can get is a facsimile of empathy, I’ll settle for it.

THE SEDUCTION OF INGMAR BERGMAN ON SAT, JUNE 25, AT THE FORD AMPITHEATRE, 2580 CAHUENGA BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8:30 PM / $18 / ALL AGES. ALLSPARKS.COM OR LAFILMFEST.COM.

According to his website, Dave Thompson has written “over 100 published books,” so I didn’t have hopes for a high quality bio, but here it is: a juicy morsel of a book, a compact rock story in a goofy font (is that Chalkboard or Comic Sans MS?) splattered with xeroxes of old fliers, mag covers, newspaper reviews, record company one-sheets, ticket stubs, etc. This book is all business, though it’s hard to say if that’s by choice since the Mael bros. are infamously devoid of any public private life. Who cares? No sordid details needed. Sparks switched band members and record companies as often as they switched styles, and with their long career studded by at least four very different peaks, they are the ReddiWip of rock subjects. A band with something for everyone: first-phase, 1970s, Kimono My House/Propaganda fans; turn-of-the-decade, Giorgio Moroder-touting disco-lovers; suckers for hit-riddled ’80s albums Whomp That Sucker and Angst in My Pants; revitalized champions of recent treasures Lil’ Beethoven and Hello Young Lovers. Sparks have managed to maintain that most elusive of band qualities—you know it, i—–ity—with only a few bends backward here and there. And Thompson gives them the benefit of the doubt every time. This is truly a fan’s book. When former manager John Hewlett calls Sparks determina- tion to be perversely unpredictable in itself boring and predictable, Thompson simply interjects: “Wrong.” Haha. His googly-eyed take is refreshing even if it leads him to some pretty stark hyperbole once in a while, such as describing Propaganda’s “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” as “not only Ron Mael’s most beautiful composition, but one of the loveliest songs anybody has ever written.” Wrong. “Achoo!” comes along two tracks later and completely demolishes that track. No matter. I don’t mind fan-bickering with the author if it means I get such sensitive, loving treatment of one of the world’s hardest working bands out of him. Through all the coulda-beens—sigh over Sparks featuring Mick Ronson—and the shouldn’t-have-beens—Terminal Jive pales because Moroder wrested control from Ron Mael, head and guts of the band—Thompson’s a solid tour guide. Not exactly Willy Wonka, but definitely not boring. I’d go again.

—Howe Strange

DAVE THOMPSON’S SPARKS: NO. 1 SONGS IN HEAVEN OUT NOW ON CHERRY RED BOOKS. HTTP://WWW.CHERRYRED.CO.UK/BOOKS/.

The three Chinese bands all share an affinity for first-generation post-punk like Joy Division and Bauhaus. It’s most apparent in the basslines, but all three bands take their sounds in unique directions. AV Okubo plays industrial punk with keyboards that sound distinctly Asian. Carsick Cars are China’s answer to Sonic Youth, and that’s not hyperbole. P.K.14 sounds like Joy Division with the urgency of the Clash. Chinese students were jumping around in a frenzy, and hipster jaws dropped before bands who are local heroes 5,000 miles away from Spaceland and the Echo.

I missed most of M31′s set but returned in time to grab a couple two-for-one beers (one Chinese/one American) and hit the main floor for the first of the Beijing bands, AV Okubo. It wasn’t really unusual seeing Chinese musicians onstage in L.A., and the music was so loud that the language difference had a minimal effect. In fact, I was standing next to a friend from L.A. RECORD, and two songs into the set he turned to me and said, “Oh, wait—these are the guys from China?” Lu Yan (vox/keyboard) is a fierce front man with a vocal delivery that rates up with the rest of the genre’s screamers. They kind of reminded me a bit of Infected Mushroom. AV Okubo’s debut CD is produced by Martin Atkins, and it’s easy to see why he’d be interested in working with a band like this.

L.A.’s Monolators were the next band up. Perhaps it was because they were onstage a little early compared to their preferred midnight slot, or maybe it was because they wanted to impress the Beijing bands, but they hit the stage with even more ferocity than usual. The band sounded great—blazing through their set, breaking mic stands, cords and strings and flailing all over the place. The Chinese students were even caught in the frenzy—a tornado of energy lifting everything not fastened to the floor. They closed with local classic “We Fell Dead” and raised the bar for P.K.14.

(I think this was around the time I walked across the street with friends to smoke the mystical bloggerweed. For some reason, the bloggers in this town get the best weed in L.A.—I think if you show the collectives your URL link, they take you to a secret humidor for the strongest marijuana in the universe.)

P.K.14 are legends in China, and lead singer Yang Haisong made the most of his stage space, shouting in Chinese over classic Factory Records-style music with an intensity that makes Bruce Springsteen look bored by comparison. Yang leaped through the air and danced like crazy, unlike his Wednesday night Viper Room appearance where he spent the set writhing on the stage and screaming directly into the floor. Clearly, he’d been watching the Monolators and was conscious enough to want to avoid repetition—a mark of a true headliner. The band’s songs are also in Chinese, so I don’t know what the lyrics are about, but they sound important. The band was tight and they play heavy and hard. The band absolutely killed, and by the time they left the stage the American Legion Hall was as humid as Nanching with vaporized rock ‘n’ roll sweat.

I was excited to see Signals, since I was a fan of the Mae Shi and I’d never seen the band that rose from their ashes. But I never really got into this band. I think the double wallop of the Monolators and P.K.14 really siphoned away a good part of their energy. I was psyched to hear their cover of one of my most favorite bands ever—Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants”—but ultimately they never quite won me over. I’d definitely catch them again though, because I really liked the Mae Shi and sometimes a band’s slot on a lineup affects how they connect with the audience.

By the time Carsick Cars hit the stage, it was close to 1:30 AM—if not past it. The crowd by this point was mostly Chinese, with some hardy hipsters sticking around to see a band which had developed some local buzz after a midnight set at the Echo earlier in the week at Walking Sleep’s Monday residency. (They’ve also been building an international reputation after opening for Sonic Youth on their European tour.) Carsick Cars are into pedals, loops and long waves of distortion, and they do it better than most American bands that I’ve seen. They also have a keen sense of pop hooks and riffs that really separates them from most of the shoegaze-ampstare bands. They even have a few songs in basic English, which really helped me get into them. The title track from their new CD, You Can Listen, You Can Talk, sounds like a mix of Sonic Youth and classic bubblegum. Their jams were really good, and they had a nice ebb and flow linking the riffs, jams and choruses—and their new songs shred!

The event had a real special feel to it. It was really interesting and inspiring to see the two scenes merge. Members of the different bands were hanging out together and talking music. The Chinese fans loved the Monolators and the L.A. hipsters ate up P.K.14. All three Chinese bands are headliner quality, and the Carsick Cars—with their English lyrics and distortion fuzz bubble yum sound—are catchy enough to catch on with American radio. (Especially those stations that don’t suck.) I think the middle acts—the Monolators and P.K.14—were the stars of this night. Beijing’s music may be mostly unrecognized on these shores, but the best bands from China can definitely hold their own with L.A.’s finest. Los Angeles is awesome for recognizing this and welcoming them with open arms.

—Scott Schultz

Sparks is one of L.A. RECORD‘s favorite bands—re-enacted on two of our covers and interviewed here—and they will be playing a giant hometown show on Sat., Feb. 14 (Valentine’s Day—hello, young lovers!) at Royce Hall at UCLA! Tickets go on sale tomorrow and are available here. More info below.

Fresh from their monumental London live performance of all 21 of their albums in 21 nights, Sparks return to Los Angeles to perform two landmark albums in their entirety— their most recent ‘Exotic Creatures Of The Deep’ and the 70′s sensation ‘Kimono My House’, to be followed by a selection of assorted Sparks favorites.

“The brave among us know for a fact that next to no one is making such criminally underrated and startlingly original music, in any genre, these days” – BBC online

“International treasures” – Q Magazine

“The most important band in modern rock” – NY Press

When:

Sat, Feb 14 at 8pm

Where:

Royce Hall

Price:

$40, 30 ($17 UCLA students)

Sparks have just finished their 21st album Exotic Creatures Of The Deep. For the rest of this month and the first part of June, they will be playing one complete album (plus select b-sides) per night until they have played every album they have. They will premier Exotic Creatures on the final night. Singer Russell Mael speaks after rehearsing Halfnelson.

What deli was the first-ever Sparks show in and what did the customers think?
Russell Mael (vocals): It was actually in Westwood—a deli-slash-pizza place—actually a Shakey’s Pizza! I don’t remember the details but we were all UCLA students. I imagine we had the Westwood area covered when it came to places to play. It reminds me of Flight of the Conchords—we’d gotten booked into a pizza parlor! Everybody said turn it down. That was always that case—‘Turn it down!’ Because we thought volume would add to the excitement level.
It usually does.
It depends if there’s some musical support to it.
Were you really pretending to be English or did people just assume?
We never pretended, but we played the Whisky early on—before a record deal or anything—and they even put it on the marquee. ‘FROM ENGLAND—SPARKS!’ They didn’t even know. At the time, we didn’t object because we were Anglophiles—from our standpoint, we took it as a compliment.
Were you a quarterback at Palisades High?
Yeah—I walked away because I was too small to do it in college. I just couldn’t have competed on that level. I was varsity—I wasn’t first string, but I played quite a lot. In high school you could get away with being small if you were agile and quick and nimble. If I’d tried in college, I could barely see over the linemen’s heads. I really loved it. Both of us were really athletic. Ron was on the football team, too—though I have to admit, he was on the B-team. He didn’t make it to varsity, unfortunately. He was a lineman—he got a less glamorous job.
Did that repeat itself in the band?
Maybe not from his perspective—he thinks he’s got the glamorous position!
How did your football career get you ready for Sparks?
There are similarities—you’re going out on Friday night and performing in a certain way for a lot of people. It’s the same kind of rush—just throwing yourself out there and doing it in front of an audience. There are real comparisons. When you go on stage, it’s kind of like a sports match, too—you hype yourself up. And if anyone hopped on stage, I could floor them—they wouldn’t expect it from me!
How did you rehearse 240 songs? How do you make sure you don’t forget Halfnelson by the time you get to Hello Young Lovers?
It’s really crazy. Today we just did Halfnelson and Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing—we’re going back and trying to do at least two albums a day, but that’s hard. If you stop and deliberate on anything, it slips away. Everybody’s really dedicated to the cause, but it’s frightening—today was the first day we faced the challenge of going back to album number one after album twenty-one, and we got through both semi-unscathed. So it’s gonna work.
And this is all from memory? You and Ron don’t read music, right?
I don’t and Ron reads a little bit. Everybody at this point has got scraps of paper—250 scraps of paper. One per song. Even today, our guitar player was like ‘What’s that note say?’ You write little notes and can’t figure out what they’re referring to. It’s kind of haphapzard.
You’re both self-taught musicians?
Ron took piano lessons from like six to nine. They were pretty intense—for whatever reason, he stopped and didn’t pick it up again. But obviously he retained some of the stuff. He has a bit of training—I don’t. You don’t even think where things come from or how you do it—I think part of Sparks is the naivete of how we approach the thing.
Can you still be naïve after 21 albums?
In a certain way—not afraid to just try things. The mindset of a lot of bands is that things have to work in the live context—it has to fit in that way. We don’t ever worry—we don’t think about playing the stuff as a band. We just kind of record things. Of course, after the fact and thinking about doing the new album live—afterwards, we worry about it a lot! But the thing is the making the record as interesting and striking as it can be, and to not worry about it being a band. It’s limiting if you only think of what the band is capable of playing.
Now that you’re going back to learn every album for a live set, have you found anywhere you outsmarted yourselves?
The only instances where that happens is with some of the stuff that’s more electronic—where it’s computer-based and really rigidly sequenced, and a guy can’t sit down—or he can but it has a different flavor. We’re keeping those songs faithful to the way they were, so certain elements are augmented by the computer stuff. We prefer to keep each album kind of faithful to the original.
You said before you aren’t interested in revealing your own personalities in your music—what goes into the songs instead?
Speaking for Ron since he’s doing the majority of the lyrics—they’re more about situations. We’re writing stories in a way, and maybe if you sat down on a psychologist’s couch he’d say, ‘There’s actually a lot of you in that.’ By the manner they’re written or the subjects, they do tell you about us in a way—us choosing to write about ‘X’ does reveal something without saying ‘I broke up with my girl and now I’m feeling a heavy heart.’ You can learn about a person’s mind by the stories that person is telling. It’s not as literal as referring to your recent break-up—that’s a fine subject, but probably for someone else. If you think it’s important to hear somebody telling you about that, that’s fine. But we think songwriting can be about other things.
What’s your own favorite break-up record?
I don’t know if I think in those terms—like a record helping you out in that kind of way? Maybe it’s just the process of burying youself in your work and that can help you take your mind off whatever it might be—something that’s not living up to your expectations. Both of us are really deep into what we do. That can be a buffer from having to deal with reality!
Were there any ideas you abandoned because you knew you couldn’t get away with them?
There are songs we did do that we were disappointed were taken in different ways that prevented them from bring heard. Like ‘Dick Around’—when we do it live, no one in the public ever had a problem. But on the radio in England…We thought that song was really special—it had a whole structure that wasn’t conventional, and those things are very interesting to us, and the roadblock wasn’t anything musical. It was someone telling you that you can’t say ‘dick’ on the radio. But it’s ‘dick around’—there’s a difference. The last thing on Ron’s mind is ‘I can’t say that,’ so it’s really disappointing when something is censored for idiotic reasons. You just give up on humanity—not even humanity, but radio-station humanity. The public never has a problem with it.
You weren’t a little proud to be banned by the BBC?
It would have been better if it had been banned and got to number one despite that!
What did you learn from dubbing a song over a porno and submitting it as your video?
People at record companies don’t necessarily have a sense of humor. They’re not as enlightened as you’d think.
Did they keep the tape?
Somewhere deep down in the vaults at Atlantic is a porno tape with our song on it.
The rarest Sparks release ever?
If you unearth that—that’s the holy grail!
What will the final Sparks album be like?
We always really go at each album—like we’re doing now—to make it our ultimate statement we could make. You think ‘I don’t have anything left to say after this! I’ve given you everything!’ And then somehow with time, you can still dredge up more. I think with the last three things we’ve done—Little Beethoven, Hello Young Lovers and Exotic Creatures of the Deep—we feel totally spent. It’s a year out of your life minimum—Hello was two years. We spend a lot longer on recordings than other artists, and whether good or bad that’s how it is, and after that process, you think ‘I can’t do it anymore!’ So the ultimate album—I don’t even know!
What’s the first day of recording like?
It’s bizarre. There’s nothing there. We record all the stuff in a computer program, so you sit there and it’s almost sad—no tracks on the screen. And knowing how much has to be there before you can say it’s finished—after a year, there’s four billion tracks there. It’s like, ‘Oh no, we’re starting again—is there another way to do this?’
Why don’t you subcontract Sparks?
If we could trust somebody—both us would love that!

SPARKS PERFORM THEIR ENTIRE ALBUM DISCOGRAPHY LIVE STARTING FRI., MAY 16, AT THE CARLING ACADEMY ISLINGTON, N1 CENTRE, ISLINGTON, LONDON, ENGLAND. 7 PM / ALL AGES. ISLINGTON-ACADEMY.CO.UK. SPARKS’ NEW ALBUM EXOTIC CREATURES OF THE DEEP WILL RELEASE ON MON., MAY 19 ON LI’L BEETHOVEN. COMPLETE LINE-UP AND MORE INFORMATION AT ALLSPARKS.COM.