The Spongetones: Still rockin' after all these years

When the Spongetones first got together, covering their walls with platinum albums wasn’t necessarily on the agenda. They simply wanted to play Beatles music -- or at least make catchy, melodic tunes that captured some of that joy and that energy.  And we at Garagerocktopia were lucky enough to chat about that music with Patrick Walters, the band's guitarist.

More than 30 years -- and several albums -- after that decision, the Spongetones are still very much around, still in demand and most of all still playing music that lots of people care about.

While not exactly a fixture on commercial radio (which we here at Garagerocktopia don’t care about that much anyway), they still perform their brand of near-perfect power pop.

The Spongetones music strongly recalls the '60s British Invasion, yet fits right in to the hook-rich tradition which is so much the trademark of many other N.C.-based bands.


Their last album was 2009's Scrambled Eggs, but the Spongetones still command an international audience, and the band isn’t wanting for live shows. All in all, Walters thinks the ride is a good one.

"We’ve had a fair amount of success, but we’re also able to have normal family lives," Walters said by telephone from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. We’re talking  fresh after power outages courtesy of Hurricane Joaquin, which was pummeling parts of the Carolinas the day of the interview. "Record royalties will occasionally make some money for us – maybe an extra paycheck a year."


"The Spongetones are a mainstay in our lives," said Walters. "We may have periods where we don’t do too much, but it is a priority. We do focus on the Spongetones when we have to, and there’s always something to do with the band, but it doesn’t make our livings."

But cry not for Walters and the other members of the band -- Jamie Hoover, Steve Stoeckel, and Chris Garges. All have as much as they can handle music-wise. Stoeckel and Hoover, known as Jamie and Steve, write and produce for quite a number of artists. By day, Walters repairs guitars.

Thanks to Youtube, videos of the band’s very early days are readily available. Mostly, the band is performing covers with an occasional original sprinkled in. Just a few years later, with albums like Beat Music and Torn Apart, the group made some of the ‘80s best power pop with songs like “She Goes Out With Everybody” and “(My Girl) Maryanne.”

The band has also been tapped not once, but twice by the American television network ABC. Their song "The Skinny" intros a segment by the same name, and the band was asked to record the ABC "World News Now Polka" in 2008, which at the time of this writing is still being used.

As four musicians who already owned impressive resumes, songwriting was no problem, but they wanted to make it clear exactly who inspired their music.

"It was nostalgia," Walters admitted. "We loved the music of that era. But then we started writing our own songs. The approach was that the songs should hold up on their own, even if you change the tempos up. We wanted to make music that captured the excitement we felt when we heard the Beatles.”

“We started the Spongetones 15 years after the Beatles hit, and by this time we knew our instruments. When you’re learning to play, the Beatles' stuff is hard. We played it, but it takes a few years to really learn to play those chords – and it also takes the right combination of people.”

The subgenre of power pop is a bit difficult to define. Generally, it is good-time music, habitually harkening right back to the ‘60s, especially to the Beatles and other iconic bands of the time.
Some strains of power pop do lean towards punk or New Wave, albeit less snarly.

One thing that power pop must always, always, always have is memorable, catchy hooks, something the Spongetones have to burn. Walters said the inspiration for those hooks points straight back to the United Kingdom of 50 years ago.

"I think we’re a lot like millions of other kids at the time," Walters explained. "The British Invasion hit us at a certain time in our lives and it really spoke to us. But it was just a starting point. That music wasn’t the only thing we liked, but it did have a life-long influence."


North Carolina became something of a hotspot for new rock in the mid-‘80s, when artists and bands from various parts of the state, while maybe not topping the Billboard charts, were a visible presence on college and alternative radio.

Bands led by the likes of Let's Active, the Connells, the dBs specialized in songs infectious and pleasing yet not lightweight or trite. Producer Don Dixon – a collaborator with Jamie and Steve –practically had his own subgenre, which included Athens, Georgia bands like REM.

Later, even metal bands like Corrosion of Conformity showed no shortage of great hooks and well-crafted melodies. Nationally, the Spongetones hit just slightly ahead of that wave. But Walter recalls that the scene in North Carolina was already well-developed.

"(The music) was all happening pretty much all at the same time," Walters recalled. "They noticed us and we noticed them. When we met Easter, he had already been doing his own thing. This part of the state, especially at the time, was really laid back so that might have something to do with the sound."

By the mid-'80s, the Spongetones were getting noticed in all the right quarters. Rolling Stone and Billboard wrote favorably of the band. American Bandstand rated their songs four times. While still not heard a whole lot on commercial radio, the band did find airplay on college radio.

"We had a pretty good bit of notoriety in the ‘80s," said Walters, "and regionally we did quite well. Rolling Stone did a story, but distribution was so hard back then. You’d get your stuff out, but then it would lose money, and it wasn’t as easy to get noticed back then as it is now."

Like others in the band, Walters was no stranger to success. He was also part of a great song from the garage era, the shimmering pop “Abba,” on which he played guitar as a member of the Paragons.
Like so many other songs of the time, “Abba” was a blip – just another great song destined for the dustbin. But it’s terrific melody was just too good to die.

The Paragons

“Abba” is a catchy and simple song,” Walters said. “It’s the sound of teenage optimism and its just crazy the way it has taken off.”

Coming out in 1967, the song is not about the superstar Swedish pop group of the same name that would be so hugely popular in the decade to come (that group’s name is made up of the member’s initials).





The origins of “Abba” are a little murky, but what is clear is that the song was originally written by Walters' predecessor in the Paragons, Jim Charles.  Charles joined a group called the Abbadons, who also played the song. The song's name was partly based on a cartoon character whose catchphrase was something like “Abba, Abba.”

The Paragons were very young at the time the song came out. The oldest member was 16, and Walters, 14 at the time, was a ninth-grader. Needless to say, when even local radio was a huge deal, and especially before anyone could plaster a video on Youtube, having a song on radio was a gigantic deal for a teenager.

“When “Abba” was being played on radio, we were getting noticed by the girls and the jocks even stopped punching us in the arms for a while,” remembered Walters. “I remember thinking ‘maybe there’s something to this growing your hair out business.’”

“Abba” faded but never disappeared. It would turn up later on a volume of the Teenage Shutdown garage rock compilation and also be used on the soundtrack of the french film, "Mods." And, with the advent of streaming music and Youtube, almost nothing will ever again be completely lost or forgotten.

“The Paragons, after a number of years became like a message in a bottle, one that people found through the internet and the Spongetones,” Walters commented. “I’m proud that people still ask about “Abba.”
 
The Spongetones have always spaced out their releases, often going several years between releases. Their last album was 2009’s Scrambled Eggs. That may change – but Walters says don’t put your life on hold just yet.

“We’ve got something in the works, some very early versions,” revealed Walters. “I’m not writing songs right now, I’m just busy playing, busy doing other things. We don’t know when we’ll get it out.”

Speaking of Mods, our next post features one of today's best neo-Mod bands, the Absolude. If your at all interested or enjoy the harder side of first-wave British Invasion bands, you really need to check them out. The Absolude loves that era and does one fine job keeping that tradition going strong.