Mike's Blog: NYC, Sparks and Les Paul

This month, my column is going to be more like a blog. Except I hope it's more readable. First things first, I finally made my way to the Big Apple. Yep, 37 years on this planet, and I'd never been. Spent most of my time in Manhattan, and I'm already hankering to come back. It makes the busiest parts of Chicago look like Crossville, Tennessee, almost.

One of the reasons for my visit was to go to Central Park and see Sparks perform a free show at the Summerstage. It was the first Sparks gig in New York City in 20 years. Two days before, I went to the Greenwich Village Tower Records, where Sparks did an in-store. In typical Sparks fashion, Ron and Russell Mael did something different. Rather than perform their songs or do a Q & A, the in-store was reading of lyrics from their Lil' Beethoven disc. Ron Mael took to the podium while his brother Russell sat in a chair. After an introduction where Ron apologized, noting that he, unlike his brother, was not a trained vocalist, he proceeded to read some of the lyrics.

This was interesting, as the new record has by far the most spartan and repetitive lyrics of any Sparks album. Hearing Ron intone "My baby's taking me home/my baby's taking my home/my baby's taking me home/my baby's taking me home..." was strange – made funny by the utter serious with which he intoned the simple words.

I queued up to have some discs signed. The person in front of me in line gave me a camera to take his picture with Ron and Russell. After I got out of line, he thanked me and told me that he had taken my picture. I gave him a business card and wrote down an e-mail address. A few weeks later, I got the picture. It looks like I'm a customer who has mistakenly come to Sparks to ask for assistance. While in the picture, I'm clearly talking to Ron, I just babbled out some stuff about how cool it was to see them again after 20 years. I have about 10 hours of questions in my head, but when push came to shove, I was like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, not able to say to Santa what I really wanted to.

Two days later, it was a rainy New York Sunday. Dodging raindrops, having some fab dumplings at a Chinese restaurant and blundering about Canal Street passed the time until the skies cleared and it was almost showtime. The Summerstage is a cozy set up where a few thousand people can check out music for free. Fans got a bonus, as chart climbing Danish dance poppers Junior Senior were the support band. Their lightweight antics didn't fulfill me over their 45 minute set, but their good cheer and junk and pop culture saturated bubble-boogie was pleasant and got the crowd going.
The Sparks set was very entertaining, though not a complete success. I was with friends and we staked out a position about 10 feet from the stage. Sparks had a video screen backdrop. The band played the new album in its entirety. Augmented by a guitarist and drummer and numerous backing tapes, Ron and Russell threw in some vaudevillian theatrics that added to the entertainment.

The biggest problem was that the Summerstage P.A. was adequate, but it wasn't fully up to the challenge of allowing for enough sonic space so that Russell Mael's live vocals could be distinguished from the dense choral vocals (which are all Russell's voice, too). If you weren't listening carefully, it might have seemed that everything was lip synced. This is why I am glad that when a song lent itself to being stripped down to just Ron on keyboards and Russell singing, they went with that approach. It might not be feasible to bring a big chorus on tour to do all the backing vocals, but it helped to have some stuff that was 100% live music, no tapes needed.

As for the stage business – Ron, who was not onstage for the opening number, came out for "How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?" wearing large (six feet at least) prosthetic arms. During "What Are All Those Bands So Angry About?", he would sit in front of Russell holding his lit cigarette lighter in the air. The video screens were put to use during the choral interlude of "I Married Myself", with Ron chasing after images of brides that would fade away before they could be reached. And during "Ugly Guys with Beautiful Girls", while Russell sang, Ron strolled around the stage with a beautiful blonde on his arm.

One bit of stage business was subtle and priceless. During "Your Call is Very Important to Us (Please Hold)", after a minute or so, during the "your call is very important to us" part, Ron would get up to a nearby microphone, but as soon as the vocal said "please hold, please hold", he'd sit back down at his keyboard. He proceeded to do this at least a dozen times. This commitment to absurdity is laudable.

The band only got to do four songs after doing the new album, due to an early Sunday curfew. They did "I Predict", which sounded fine, "When I Kiss You I Hear Charlie Parker Playing", which just isn't that strong of a song, a version of "Cool Places" that was missing something, and a triumphant finale, "When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way'". The core of Sparks fanatics near the stage regaled the band with applause. After the gig was done, Ron Mael took the microphone and gave a very sincere thank you to the audience, saying that Sparks would be returning soon.

I hope that this wasn't an empty promise. Lil' Beethoven was my favorite release of 2002, and now it's garnering them a bit of attention here in the States. I harbor no allusions as to Sparks finally achieving stardom. However, as a long time fan, I do think that they are one of the most criminally overlooked bands ever. And the fact that they are doing some of their best work now, and its work that, in many ways, unifies a lot of their best ideas, is very special. If they do come to your town, catch them.
Les Paul won't be coming to your town, most likely. You will have to come to New York City to catch Les Paul. At 88 years old, the guitar innovator from Waukesha, Wisconsin is still packing them in. Every Monday night, he plays two sets at Iridium, a Manhattan jazz club that sits almost directly in between Radio City Music Hall and The Brill Building. Paul plays with a trio – two guitarists and a bass player.

Paul looks great for his age. Whatever he has lost in speed, there is no discernible loss of tone and texture. Paul's musical taste has always leaned towards standards, and the set he played was full of those. He was generous with his colleagues, who each got a few chances to show off their licks. Paul even brought on a vocalist. She did a few numbers, including a dazzling rendition of "Summertime" (and later that week, I was lucky enough to see Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent do a corking job on that very same tune).

Still, if you go see Les Paul, the music almost takes a back seat to his stories and jokes. The night I went to see him, the club experienced some power problems (a foreshadowing of the outage to come?). Paul handled it like the seasoned pro that he is, with some witty asides. Probably the most interesting sequence was when he started off a monologue by noting that a lot of people had been asking him if he knew Bob Hope and how did he feel about his passing?

After noting that he didn't know Hope that well, Paul mentioned that he was friends with Bing Crosby (who helped Paul get his first record contract with Decca) and then spun a story that started with watching Hope and Crosby rehearse one of their Road pictures. Paul said that both Bob and Bing had their own writers, who would keeping feeding them new lines – all in an effort to top each other. By the time the process was done, the original script was a memory. This tale segued into more Bing stories and ended up with Paul mentioning that he saw Judy Garland's final show at the Palladium. Living history.

History. That's been big with me too. This will have to wait for another column, but I think that I'm finally maturing as a music fan. I've always appreciated blues and jazz and such – now I'm actually listening to them. I'll get into this more later, but for now, I'll just recommend checking out the new Slim Harpo singles collection on Hip-O and the Rounder compilation of Alan Lomax field recordings – it's 22 songs that have been popularized by rock artists. Gimmicky, educational and entertaining, three goals I strive for every column.

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