Can't Start A Fire Without the Sparks

Beachwood Sparks Sept. 13 at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $15 in advance, $17 day of show.

“I think everyone was just burned out,” says Beachwood Sparks’ Aaron Sperske, more than happy to indulge this interviewer with every ounce of candidness in his body. “By the end of the last tour, it just seemed really pointless to me. I wasn’t excited about the band, or even playing music. I was just sour and in a bad way. Three years of touring, and having labels and all of that kind of stuff—the ups and downs and the jerking back and forth—that wears on you, if you’re not the hot-shit major-label band of the week…I personally was just blasted, devoid of inspiration. And when you are, it’s just not fun to play. Your instrument becomes a burdensome weight.”

Bands dissolve. Life goes on. One member of Beachwood Sparks toured with Interpol in Europe. One went to school to study experimental psychology. One got married, bought a house and started running an art gallery down in Florida. And then, of course there are the other bands—All Night Radio, The Tyde, The Mystic Chords of Memory, The Lilys, The Frausdots. The list goes on.

Hiatuses, as it turns out, sometimes fade as well, and when your former label asks really nicely whether you’d be interested in getting the old band back together to help celebrate its 20th birthday, those initial catalysts for dissolution sometimes seem less clear.

“As soon as we got back together, it sounded great,” explains Sperske. For all his talk of exhaustion, the drummer couldn’t possibly be more revved up that he is at this moment, discussing how the cards fell in place for The Beachwood Sparks, that turn-of-the-millennium bastion of jangly Southern California psychedelica.

“We’ve returned to zero point,” Sperske continues. “But not without having the experience of everyone having gone off on their own trip. It’s like a journeyman kind of experience. We all did our own thing and found ourselves, and we’ve somehow managed to come back and do this with a whole new meaningful way, but yet with a shared vision, as tuned into each other as we ever were.”

When Big Sur’s Folkyeah Festival (where yet another side project, Sperske’s own Winter Flowers, was scheduled to play), asked the band to tack on a second day to its one-off reunion less than a week later, the matter didn’t require much debate. If anything, Sperske insists, Beachwood Sparks’ own self-imposed exile has left the band far stronger than it was before parting ways some half-dozen years ago. “I’ll leave this up to other people to judge,” the drummer begins, “but I feel like the band is tighter and just more musical than we ever were. We’re playing the same songs, but they just feel better—better played, better songs, written better—I don’t know what that is.”

The band is also bigger than ever before, having swelled its ranks to seven. “Six was the most we ever hand in the original lineup. That was for the first Sub Pop seven-inch [1999’s Midsummer Daydream],” explains Sperske. Multi-instrumentalist “Farmer” Dave Scher rejoined the band after those initial two shows, having been tied up by his aforementioned obligations to former major-label indie darlings Interpol. But never mind, Sperske insists—one of the charms of Beachwood Sparks is its nebulous nature. “We’re [almost a collective] in a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young way—not to sound cheesy,” Sperkse says. “It’s almost like a family-style band. People can just come and go, aside from maybe me, Chris [Gunst], or Brent [Rademaker]—we’re indispensable, I would say, just because it’s guitar, bass, drums.”

And now, seven members strong, with a recent West Coast tour under its belt and a handful East Coast dates nearing their close, there’s no end in sight for the new and improved Beachwood Sparks. And as I put forth that inevitable question toward the close of our interview, an invigorated Sperske tells me exactly what I want to hear: “We talked about making a record, and that’s what we’re going to do.” “Everyone can go back to their lives and send things back and forth, and nowadays everyone has ProTools, so we can send stuff in the mail, and then once we get back together, we can record it.”