Nearly Famous – When Sparks Fly Mixes Level Heads And High Octane Punk In Recipe For Success

About five years into their career as a band, Dayton’s premier punk powerhouse, When Sparks Fly, are still waiting for their turn in the spotlight. And after spending better than an hour talking to these guys (and countless evenings getting my butt kicked by their explosive live set), the only natural explanation for that can be that not enough people have heard their pretense-free brand of high-octane punk. Taking cues from everyone from Alkaline Trio to Guns N Roses and Hot Water Music to Van Halen, When Sparks Fly have waited patiently on the fringe, while lesser acts have cooed and postured their way into major label contracts and big-name tours.

Despite challenges with their former label, changes in their line-up, difficult tours, and ofcourse a fickle musical climate that has fashion plates, and easy-sells in their sites, When Sparks Fly have stayed their course on do-it-yourself ethics, self-promotion, dedication to their fans, and acrobatic, gritty and unholy rocking. It takes mere moments of one of their almost-legendary Knights of Columbus Hall shows to make it abundantly clear that the band has earned every mouth that sings along, every fist in the air, every pogoing body, and every bit of energy their fans spend clamoring for the chance to sing along in an unoccupied microphone.

Lately it appears that things are finally looking up for Dayton’s unsung heroes; they’ve got a freshly-inked deal with Cincinnati’s Nice Guy Records, a brand new, seven-song EP titled, We Who Are About To Die, and a remarkably level-headed outlook. But above all, it appears to me that they’ve found a kinship with each other that borders on brotherhood. And that ain’t bad for a little band from Dayton, is it?

Bettawreckonize recently caught up with the entire quartet for a mouthful of Chipotle burrito (a band favorite) and an earful on their rocky history and high-hopes for the future.

Interview conducted in person by Tim Anderl. Photographs by David Maki.

Band: When Sparks Fly
Names: Lokie Lewis (vocals, guitar), Justin “Beav” Roseberry (vocals, guitar), Brandon Wolpert (drums), Tim Huling (bass)

Bettawreckonize: When did you guys start playing together? How long have you guys been a unit?
Wolpert: We’ve (Roseberry, Wolpert and Lewis) been playing together since December 2001.

BW: It has been longer than that, right? I remember seeing you (Roseberry) opening up for Chamberlain at Canal Street Tavern ages ago when you were still playing under the Phylum Idiota moniker.
Roseberry: I’m the only original member left from that line-up. Bruce (Hull) and I started the band together and our first show was on April 10, 1998.
Wolpert: Their old drummer was 30-years-old, so when they played the high school talent show, I played drums with them. Then their drummer, who was in the military or something, moved to Florida. The same day he called to quit was the day I came over for my first “official” practice with them. We practiced for a couple of months, played a few out of town shows and then Bruce invited Lokie to join the band.
Huling: I was still in diapers.

BW: How old are you then?
Huling: Twenty.
Roseberry: He was in diapers, but that’s not probably something that we should talk about. He’s had some disfunctions (laughter).
Lewis: Yeah, in 1998 we all still had long hair with the shaved sides (more laughter).

BW: So you guys had successfully built a fan base using the Phylum Idiota moniker. Why did you decide to change the name?
Lewis: It was old.
Wolpert: Everyone in Dayton liked it, but couldn’t pronounce it right. Everyone out of town kind of thought it was O.K., sorta maybe, but they couldn’t pronounce it either.
Lewis: When he (Wolpert) joined the band and I joined the band a month later, it really became a totally different band. We began changing songs, changing things up, and making plans to get out of the basement. We had planned to change the name then, but Brandon had ordered a website.
Wolpert: That is complete bullshit. I knew nothing about changing the name.
Lewis: Yeah, I guess Brandon sort of surprised us with the website, and Bruce and I were like, “We were going to change the name.”
Wolpert: Yeah, that $30 website kept us locked into that name (laughter).
Lewis: We just stuck it out and when we got “signed” to Confined Records we thought, “If we’re ever going to change the name, it is now or never. This is the last chance.”
Wolpert: Mainly we wanted to be taken more seriously. I’m an adult and here I am e-mailing the guy who runs Fireside Bowl in Chicago saying, “Hey, I’m in Phylum Idiota. We’re a punk band.” He probably thinks I’m a 15-year-old kid with a mohawk.
Lewis: He either thinks you’re a kid with a mohawk or in some kind of outrageous, hesher metal band. When I first saw the name Phylum Idiota on a flyer for their show with 23rd Chapter, I thought it was some ridiculous metal band.
Roseberry: Except for on that first flyer it said, “Pop punk extravaganza” (laughter).
Lewis: I always sort of had a problem pronouncing the name. In fact, when I joined the band I had to ask about it.
Wolpert: Every time we played out of town it was spelled a different way. Both words were spelled wrong…

BW: So people just weren’t receptive to the name…
Wolpert: It was making us work twice as hard to get half as far.

BW: How did the relationship with Confined Records come together? Who approached who and how soon after you made an agreement with them did you put out the first CD?
Wolpert: It started with an e-mail from Mark Daily from Confined Records, which he said was in Eaton, Ohio. The whole e-mail was in capital letters with no punctuation and I seriously thought it had come from a 15-year-old kid. We were getting ready to go out of town for the weekend, so I just sat on the e-mail for a week. I got of work one day and sat down to reply to it, though I wasn’t taking it all that seriously. Then we all got together at Lokie’s house…
Lewis: We thought he had really good ideas and good intentions, and we thought that it was a good chance to find an advocate for our corner who would help us push the band a little bit farther. He did that to some extent.
Wolpert: We also thought that we could help him help us. It was a little more like us being out there playing every weekend and him picking up an ad every once in a while.
Lewis: What we needed was a label to hype our band, and he needed a band to hype his label, but I don’t think either one of us got that.
Wolpert: He eventually contacted me to build him a website. I did it in a weekend and it looked like crap so he replaced it a few weeks later. But, we would contact him and say, “Hey, we’re ordering stickers, we’re ordering buttons. Do you want us to order you some for the label?”
Lewis: We did quite a bit of work on behalf of the label, including getting the CD of the other band on the label (A Day In The Life) mastered and to the pressing place, including getting the art for their CD together, including putting that band on all our shows, and I was the one responsible for making sure that we got the CDs before the short tour we went on together. I don’t want to trash talk, but….
Wolpert: We just tried to help him out. Every shirt we printed had his logo on the back. The poster that we paid to design and print had his logo on it. We wanted to get his name out there, and that effort just wasn’t coming back.
Lewis: He had run a label before, and he did put up the money. Those were different times though. The Internet has completely changed music.

BW: Is he still operational then?
Roseberry: I don’t think so.

BW: So when Confined Records kind of phased out were you left wondering what you’d do next.
Wolpert: We had moved on. We knew pretty early on that it wasn’t working out and that we weren’t going to continue doing records with them.
Lewis: We put off recording our new stuff, or even demoing it because we thought we were going to do it ourselves. We just wanted to move enough of the other CDs so that we could pay Confined back and move on. We had to decide that we couldn’t take on running a label and doing our band.

BW: Where was that Confined record, Why Bother Waiting, recorded? Was that your first full-length together?
Roseberry: We did it at the Danger Room with Chris Common. It was our first full-length, our first time in a real-studio, with real equipment. I think we played the songs on that record to the best of our abilities at that time, and we’re pretty pleased with it.
Wolpert: There are definitely things that we hear now that we would’ve changed had we known what we know now. Post production stuff. Like every time that a lead guitar is getting ready to come in, you can hear some guitar noise two seconds before the guitar is supposed to be on the track.
Lewis: Some of that is on us, but I think for the time it was good. And it was a pretty monumental achievement in the life of our band. It was a big deal.
Wolpert: We sold 77 of them at the first show we played after finishing the record. We were able to sell about 800 altogether.

BW: So then after that record you hit the road with A Day In The Life for two weeks?
Wolpert: Yeah.

BW: Did you book that tour?
Wolpert: Back in the day I did all of the out-of-town booking and Lokie did all of the Dayton shows.
Lewis: That tour was a trainwreck though. It was fun, but A Day In The Life left the tour earlier then we did…
Roseberry: I got sick and had shit coming out of my ear?
Lewis: It was alright I guess. It showed us that touring would be hard, and we were able to take some experience away from it.

BW: How many tours have you done altogether then?
Wolpert: We’ve done three tours down the east coast and into Florida. Our second tour wasn’t much better than our first one, but we knew what we we’re getting into so we tried to make it more productive. We knew it was going to suck, but we did make sure every kid got on our mailing list, got offered the CD….we just made it more productive.
Lewis: There’ve been countless times where we’ve been supposed to go on tour.
Wolpert: People would say, “Hey, we can book for you. We’ll book for money,” and then nothing happened.
Lewis: We’ve been doing tons of weekends though. After that first two-week tour, we came back, had a weekend off, and then for the next 13 weeks we played all three days each weekend. Then we took another weekend off, and then went nine or 10 more weekends like that. Then we went on our second tour and it was time to regroup.
Wolpert: That year we may have only been technically on two tours, but we still counted up around a hundred shows that year. When Alkaline Trio was on Asian Man that was about how many shows they were doing a year. We thought that was pretty impressive.
Roseberry: After that second set of weekends was when Bruce decided to part ways with us too.
Lewis: Towards the end we were doing fewer, better quality shows and we were gearing up to put out an EP ourselves. We still take almost any show we can get on the off chance that there might be more people to there to play to.
Wolpert: And again, every kid is getting on our mailing list, every kid is getting offered the CD.

BW: One of the things about your music, especially in the climate now where everything is a fashion statement or hairdo, is that you are telling all these really positive punk-rock truisms. You’re writing about being at the shows, and friendship, and that kind of stuff. Is it hard to be a positive band in a climate where fashion and what record label someone is on seem to be what the kids are paying attention to?
Wolpert: It is hard. We don’t look good. We don’t dress the dress. We’re not on the “it” label.
Lewis: This may be off the subject, but we have listened to the older kids in the scene who were telling us to work hard, book tours over the phone, and we were taking that ethic to heart. And we’re hoping that taking that route will get us where we’d like to be. It is starting to seem that the bands who are getting huge, or are breaking through, aren’t putting in the same kind of legwork. If we were on Equal Vision and they posted us on their website as an addition to their roster, I’m sure our fanbase would grow without anyone ever hearing a note. That may be why you’re seeing some bands come up out of nowhere, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it may be why those bands break up pretty quick.

BW: They haven’t been in the van and had to drive 1,000 miles to a show that totally sucks…
Roseberry: They haven’t had to roll down a van’s window while it’s snowing out because the person in the back has the nastiest farts you’ve ever smelled (laughter).
Huling: They haven’t had to wait 40 minutes outside of a gas station at four in the morning while someone’s bowel movements are becoming complete (laughter).
Lewis: Yeah, I think it is too bad that people won’t give you a chance right of the bat. Not that our band is the best in the world, I think that if we’re given a chance, we’ll leave some type of impression on the people who hear us.

BW: One of the most noticeable changes in the somewhat recent history of the band is obviously Bruce leaving? Was that amicable?
Roseberry: There’s no hard feelings between me and Bruce because me and him went to a titty bar last night.
Lewis: It was a big deal to me when he quit because we were friends. I did take it hard and I did wait outside his house in the early morning for him to come outside to go to work so that I could beat him up. It did suck that he quit, but I can totally see why. I have the same doubts and it is hard work. But at the time he quit, we were really onto something. We had a show booked with Gunmoll in Florida, we’d just got done playing Hessfest, we were writing some of the best songs we’d ever written, we were going to have what I thought was this amazing tour booked, and he said, “Guys I can’t do this anymore.” But it is all good. We’ve had to back track a little bit, and reprioritize things a little bit, but I’m not mad about it anymore.
Wolpert: Things did change musically. I know that it would sound easy to replace a bass player who didn’t really sing, but he did do a decent amount of the songwriting.
Lewis: He was the guy I wrote most of my songs with. We wrote most of the songs that I sing together.
Wolpert: He just had some really great ideas. But, he was writing his own songs, bought a recorder, and his own think-tank was taking off. That may be what moved him out.
Lewis: But our new bass player, Tim, was in the local band Just 4 Kids. There were a couple people that we probably could have picked, but we wanted someone easy going, who we could be friends with, and that was wanting to take baby steps forward with us.
Roseberry: One of the things I noticed right away when Tim joined the band was that his energy and enthusiasm made me more enthusiastic about playing. Toward the end, Bruce just wasn’t having fun. Tim is having so much fun that I get hit with a bass head just about every time we play.
Wolpert: We had played tons of shows with his band, we’d traveled with his band. I sort of saw part of myself in him too because he was booking their shows, driving the van, and just doing the business end of their band.
Lewis: It also made Justin and I work with each other even more. It changed the writing dynamic. I had to force myself to write more rather then relying on Bruce.

BW: How does that work out then with having two singers in the band? Do you write songs independent of each other and then flesh them out as a band, or do you show up to practice and come up with your songs on the spot?
Roseberry: We’ve done it both ways. But mainly, either I’ll have an idea while playing guitar or he’ll (Lewis) have an idea and then we’ll sing on the songs we’ve written. But there are times that we’ve collaborated and written our parts together. We do some compromising while we write if one or the other of us doesn’t like a part. It isn’t a dictatorship.
Lewis: I wrote a lot of the second song from the CD at home, and then I brought it to Justin and we adjusted it together. The rest of the stuff is either Justin writing most of the song, or coming to the band with an idea and wanting know what to do with it.
Huling: I knock the sissy out of the songs.
Wolpert: We are also writing songs that are a little more linear, rather than verse, chorus, verse songs. They’re made up of multiple parts.
Roseberry: The parts themselves are catchy, but there isn’t a hook that repeats.
Wolpert: There is no single chorus, and you can tell that this is coming from the new ways that we’re working together.

BW: There is definitely a difference in this EP (We Who Are About To Die) from when you guys were a little more pop punk oriented. It is definitely less pop punk and is taking on a little more of a hardcore bent while you’re developing your sound.
Roseberry: There’s some pop on there.
Lewis: For this recording we were definitely trying to make the hard stuff harder and the poppy stuff even poppier. But we wanted it to mature from where we were at.

BW: This recording does sound a lot more mature. It sounds older than anything you’ve done before. You had always sort of been taking cues from Hot Water Music and Alkaline Trio, but now it sounds like you’re figuring out where you fit in and what your sound is.
Wolpert: I think I pay very little attention to what other bands are doing as far as what I’m playing goes.
Roseberry: I’m not listening to many of the bands in this genre of music lately either. I’m listening to more Van Halen and AC/DC.
Wolpert: You can only play so many shows, listen to so many bands, and so many CDs. In fact, I know a lot of rock bands who only listen to rap. It is like they are doing what they’re doing, but when they’re done, they don’t want to listen to bands that are similar.
Lewis: Tim is really into hardcore and that is what I listened to when I was his age, but we’re definitely listening to more rock. He brings that to the table…

BW: If I were to go around the table and ask who your musician influences were, maybe not even a band, but a musician you’re taking the most cues from, who would you say?
Roseberry: I’ve liked Eddie Van Halen since I was ten. I like Slash from Guns N Roses. There aren’t really guitar players in our style of music that I admire, but Slash and Eddie Van Halen are my favorites.
Lewis: My biggest influences are New Bomb Turks, who were a no frills kind of punk and rock and roll band. The Afghan Whigs may be where I got my darkside from. Seaweed. I’m not trying to throw out anything obscure for the sake of sounding cool.

BW: Right. I can hear all of those.
Lewis: Some of the newer bands I like are Hot Water Music and Gunmoll. I get compared to their voices a lot. Hot Water Music is a big influence on me because they are that bare-your-soul, no rock star type of band. Those are my biggest influences.
Huling: My biggest influence in punk rock is probably Lagwagon. They got me away from whatever mainstream stuff I used to listen to. I also used to compare this band to Lagwagon long before I ever joined. Going out of town and getting to play with amazing bands who haven’t gotten that far yet is always a touchstone I guess.
Wolpert: I know you can pick up certain styles from somebody, but I also think you can either do it or you can’t. I know people who can do drum rolls I cant and there are things I can do that they can’t. As far as when I was growing up and playing music, I might pick something up from the Ataris’ drummer, Midtown’s drummer, Capture The Flag, maybe Saves The Day and try it. Even Chris Common who recorded us, watching him at shows has been an influence on me. As far as just popping something on to hear some good ass drums, I’d probably go with Neil Peart from Rush. The new Converge. He does some of the most ridiculous runs I’ve ever heard. I can’t even air drum it.

BW: It seems like you guys, at least locally, are focused on putting together and playing all-ages shows rather than bars. Is there a rule of thumb that you go by in terms of where you focus your energy on playing and playing for?
Roseberry: We aren’t opposed to playing bars. We just want everyone in our fanbase to be able to come to shows.
Wolpert: We’ve always been pegged as the kids’ band, the all-ages band, but we can play a bar, get paid $75 bucks and have 40 people sort of watch us, or we can play an all-ages show, get $75 bucks, have 200 kids watch us, and sell a shitload of merch.
Huling: I like all-ages shows better. I’m still not 21 and there are clubs that I can’t go to. What if one of my favorite bands was coming to town and I couldn’t get in to see them?
Lewis: That is the biggest thing. We all grew up going to see bands at all-ages shows – Workhorse, Legbone, Eco-Tox. So when we started playing out we thought, “Why shave our demographic?” I feel bad when we play a bar show and I get a dozen e-mails from kids who want to know if they can get in. When we get a chance to play with a band that we really like and it is at a bar, then we’re down to do that. But as far as doing our own shows, we want anyone and everyone to be able to come.
Huling: At the all-ages shows you know that everyone is there for the same reason, to see the bands who are playing.
Lewis: Out of town, we’ll take what we can get. But we definitely prefer and all-ages show.
Wolpert: We played at one of the most popular bars in Cleveland with one of the most popular bands in Cleveland and ten drunk people watched us, five of them were in a band. A week later, we played in bum-fuck Pennsylvania, at some bum-fuck hall, and three hundred bum-fuck kids watched us (laughter). They gave us a place to stay, they fed us, it was just a much better situation.

BW: Let’s get to Nice Guy and how that deal came about…
Lewis: We’ve know Jaime for a long time and we’d known him from different bands he was in. We were fully prepared to do the EP on our own because we just wanted to get our music out there. Anyway, I talked to Jaime and he basically told us that whatever we sold on the road, he could match using his distribution. He could make our music available in Japan, make it available at Best Buy, send stuff out to fanzines. He wants to push his bands, make a living doing his label, and have full-time bands. While we aren’t really a full-time band, he knows that we’ll work hard and he likes our music. And he’s known us for a while.
Wolpert: We were kind of starting out as a band as he was starting out as a label. So when the momentum of our last CD was slowing down, I happened to hop on his website and saw Best Buy banners flashing, and that his bands were doing Warped Tour, and I was just impressed with how he’d had his shit together.

BW: So did you approach him then?
Lewis: We contacted him and let him know that we were demoing. He asked to hear them. When I told him that we were planning on doing an EP he said, “Aww, we want full-lengths.” But then when he heard it, he said he wanted to do it, but he still wanted a full-length. So he asked us to send him the finished recordings to hear. So he said he’d do the EP, but he also wanted a promise that he could put out the full-length. So we signed for this EP and our next full-length. He is really trying to hype us up, and is putting a ton of effort into this.

BW: Where was the EP recorded?
Roseberry: It was done at Workbook Studio in Columbus with Neal Schmitt from Pretty Mighty Mighty.
Lewis: He did stuff for The Sun’s album and did the last New Bomb Turks record, which doesn’t mean much in the states, but in Europe that is a big deal.

BW: Why did you choose him for this?
Wolpert: We had time booked with Chris Common, but he had to cancel on us when he decided to go on tour with Waking Kills The Dream in Europe. We decided to put off recording until he got back, and then he cancelled on us again so we started looking for someone else.
Lewis: We were looking for someone with a little more of a producer influence anyway.
Roseberry: He (Neal) definitely didn’t let us get away with anything. If we did something that was shitty, he told us it was shitty and made us do it over.
Lewis: We met him, were impressed with his work ethic, and he was able to offer a lot of ideas about production that we hadn’t considered before. He had a lot of equipment at his disposal too – tons of little amps and guitars.
Roseberry: And the girl from Playboy, from the Girls of the Big Ten issue, posed there. This girl from Ohio State posed at Workbook and held the guitar that I played on the CD against her naked body (laughter).
Lewis: He had a lot of toys, had a lot of ideas, he was on our asses about the vocals, which was good. He took Justin’s vocals to a whole new level.
Roseberry: I learned that I should open my mouth a little wider when I sing, and that I should stop smelling the guitar that the Playboy chick was holding (laughter).
Lewis: He had great ideas. Like on the end of “Can We Kill Them” when he took two small, old amps, plugged them into each other, plugged headphones into the input jack of one of the amps, put the headphones around an acoustic guitar, and I tracked the end guitar part with that. Then I went back and did three electric guitar tracks with tons of reverb over the top of that. He was awesome. He knew all the studio tricks and was willing to try really creative things to make us sound better.

BW: It doesn’t surprise me that a dude like Neal, who’s band has been kind of this obscure Columbus, Ohio indie-rock band and who, for whatever reason, just hasn’t blown up despite the fact that they’re awesome, was able to help out, and develop a working relationship with you guys. You are from a very similar set of circumstances.
Lewis: They have a great studio and I’m sure Workbook will be blowing up any day. The other engineer just got off tour doing sound for The Hives/New Bomb Turks tour. The Sun also cut a bunch of their demos at Workbook, and a few of the songs that were recorded there made it onto their final, major-label release over songs they’d cut later on.

BW: Anyway, what are your plans for the upcoming months?
Wolpert: We have a CD release show (happened November 22), we’re booking a bunch of shows for two and three months down the road, and are planning on getting out to support this new record as much as possible.
Roseberry: We’ll also be writing new songs.
Wolpert: We should at least be doing the local Warped Tour date too. Jaime is opening up some doors for us, and the new CD is opening up some doors…
Lewis: The harder we work, the harder Jaime will work, and that will hopefully push the band just that much further. We’re about to explode and sparks are about to fly (laughter).