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Sparta: Turn The Page
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 12-Jan-07 @ 05:49 PM|
Back with a new label, a new lineup and a great new batch of post-hardcore epics, SPARTA seem more focused than ever. And all it took was breaking up. Story: Trevor Kelley That night, Jim Ward finally gave up. It was April of 2005 and the band he had spent the last five years singing and playing guitar in had just finished performing at a tiny club in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Things had gone surprisingly well. Ward fondly recalls the acoustic encore and being greeted backstage by a pair of teary-eyed fans. "I don't know why it was that show," he says, reflecting on it now. "I actually had a really great show. It was awesome. I remember feeling really good. But I think I felt good because I had already made the decision." The decision that Ward is referring to was a quiet one. He didn't check into rehab or vent about it the next day on Absolutepunk.net. After growing exhausted by the music industry, he merely decided to step away from his role as the humble, every-dude leader of Sparta. By that point, Sparta--bassist Matt Miller, and his fellow alumns from the legendary punk act At The Drive-In, guitarist Paul Hinojos and drummer Tony Hajjar--were in a rather shaky state. Their second album, 2004's Porcelain, tanked, further alienating them from the higher-ups at their then-label, Geffen. That winter, they asked to be removed from Geffen's roster and began taking meetings with a handful of interested suitors. This did not go so well. Many of the A&R reps that Sparta met with asked them to demo new material before they would even consider signing them--which, in the music industry, is a move that's usually reserved for clueless modern-rock bands found wandering the Sunset Strip in hopes of being "discovered." But what was even more concerning than Sparta's label situation was that Ward pretty much had no interest in his own band anymore. He had hit a wall--both creatively and emotionally--and after the aforementioned show in Lancaster, he announced that he was bailing on the group. He quickly went back to his home in El Paso, Texas, where he stopped answering his cell phone and occasionally sent out emails to let people know "that I was still alive." Though his decision to abandon Sparta would last no more than a couple of months and would have an overwhelmingly positive affect on the group, Ward doesn't remember feeling very optimistic at the time. For a while, he says he was "genuinely miserable." "It didn't feel good to me," he insists, "and it didn't seem like there was any reason to go through the motions." While his bandmates supported the decision ("Nobody would ask me to stay if I didn't want to be there," Ward says), a few of them ended up scattering in different directions. In the months that followed, Hajjar sat in with a Los Angeles-based rock act called Manic, recording a full-length album with the band last summer. (According to their MySpace page, Manic's original drummer was mysteriously "sent to jail" just prior to the album's tracking.) As for Hinojos, he quit Sparta shortly after Ward's announcement, choosing to join former ATDI bandmates Cedric Bixler Zavala and Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez in the Mars Volta. Hinojos was eventually replaced by ex-Engine Down frontman Keeley Davis, but for a while, it seemed like the Virginia native's services wouldn't be necessary. By that June, Ward still hadn't figured out if he wanted to continue with the band. As time passed, however, he pinpointed and, more importantly, confronted what had driven him to a breaking point in Lancaster. For as long as Sparta had been a band, Ward says, he had fretted over the expectations that his record label and the fans of his previous group would set in front of him. "It was, 'Why aren't we bigger?'" he says. "'Why do people tell me how much they love our band and things are going downhill? Why did this record not sell as much as the last record?' It did weigh on me." But as Ward spent that summer hiding out in El Paso without the expectations of a record label--Sparta didn't technically sign to their current home, Hollywood Records, until late 2005--the now 30-year-old singer began to gain some much needed confidence. Ward stopped thinking about all the fans and bottom-line-minded record execs and reconnected with his bandmates, spending a week with Hajjar in L.A., where they began writing material for Sparta's new album, Threes. When sessions moved to El Paso last fall, Ward had become so inspired that he wrote what he describes as "hundreds of hours" of new material. "Jim was so creative this time," Hajjar says, somewhat in awe. "He was throwing out songs left and right. It was like, 'Wow... he's back.'" That sudden surge of creativity had a lot to do with Ward's decision to abruptly walk away from Sparta back in Lancaster. "It was the first time I had ever checked out for a little while," Ward says proudly, "and I think this record is living proof of stopping and smelling the roses. It will make a substantial difference in your life." For the rest of the story, pick up AP 221 below... |
