For awhile there it looked like we had heard the last from local rockers Truman Sparks as back in April the band announced that they may be playing their last show together.  But as luck would have it, and aided by the feedback of select focus groups and a couple of burritos, Truman Sparks turned away talk of retirement and now they continue to “melt the faces” of music fans here in Charlottesville and beyond. 

Your next opportunity to catch this local four-piece in action arrives on Thursday, May 22, as Truman Sparks joins The Nice Jenkins, The Cinnamon Band, Invisible Hand, and Marshall Costan’s Awesome Few for one of the final shows at the Satellite Ballroom.  Doors open at 8pm.

We caught up with three of the band’s members on the eve of their final performance at Satellite for a little game we call 7 Questions.  Our queries and their answers can be found after the break.

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Before we get started I want to thank the members of Truman Sparks for playing along.  I provided the questions and Jon Hampton, Jon Bray, and Ray Szwabowski provided the answers.  Adam Smith, the band’s fourth member, was teaching a class on economics and could not attend.  As we begin, we’ll let Jon Hampton handle the introductions:

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MUSE:  Introduce us to the band: Name. Instrument They Play. Favorite Fruit.

Jon Hampton (JH): 
Me: Bass, Oranges.
Adam: Blue Guitar. Tomatoes, i guess.
Jon: Red Guitar. Chicken fingers.
Ray: Drums. Ray is vegetarian. Not Fruitarian.

MUSE:  For those who have never seen Truman Sparks live, describe for us the experience from the audience’s perspective?

JH:  Life changing
Jon Bray (JB): Four dudes who spend the majority of band practice making up names for non-existent sex-positions(e.g. “The Mississippi Compromise”, “The Virginia Vag Badger”, “The Louisiana Refund”) playing intense and intricate songs that have an average time length of about 5/12 minutes
Ray Szwabowski (RS):  Sweaty.  Energetic.  Loud.  Face-melting.

MUSE: Once a band retires they shouldn’t come back. It only leads to Reunion Tours and that’s never a good thing. Luckily you guys didn’t retire. But it was close. What made you guys decide to keep this band going?

JH:  Love of the music/No place else to go.
JB:  One day we were all in different corners of the tri-country area, and we all had burritos for lunch. That’s pretty cosmic, if you ask me
RS:  We held a series of focus groups and determined that key demographic responses, along with a number of economic indicators, suggested that Q2, Q3, and Q4 are poised to reap sizable profits for the corporation.

Wait. No. We just wanted to keep playing, actually. And we figured out a way to do it.

MUSE:  I saw somewhere that you list TROG as one of the band’s influences.  If we looked up the word TROG in the dictionary, what definition would we find?

JB:  A caveman/pirate who vomits milk and honey and wears a Native-American headband that can turn him into a wolf.
RS:  There exists no dictionary that can contain TROG.

MUSE:  What’s the #1, top-of-the-heap, all-time craziest Truman Sparks show?  Was there fire involved?  Were any instruments broken?  Was anyone wearing a mask?

JH: Personally speaking, in Nov. ‘05 we played a show in Boston after consuming approx. a half gallon of bourbon. I don’t remember playing and woke up naked next to radiator in an unused bedroom on the third floor of the house we played.
JB: I don’t think it got much crazier than our last show at Bennington College in Vermont during our Spring 07′ tour — I don’t think I’m allowed to say what happened that night. There was also the time where we played in Philly and I woke up in New Jersey on a floor next to a girl and a pretty glass bong.
RS: The only one involving fire was the time at Saxx Adam’s amp smelled funny after blowing some electronics or a tube. The post-show antics in Shreveport, LA also merit mention. And this one time we played a show in the woods, and some nearby camping dude told us the next day he emerged from his tent during our set, naked, standing in ecstasy or something. That’s pretty hawt, as the kids say.

MUSE:  If Truman Sparks was included in an episode of Celebrity Death Match, what band (from any decade or era) would you like to face off with?  Why?

JH:  Either Rush because we do it better, or King Crimson because they do it better.
RS:  When on tour with The Nice Jenkins, we had a running joke about who would win in a battle royale between the two bands.  I think it was decided that we would pull it off.  But with like one member standing (Jon. H).

MUSE:  Finally, 40 years from now, when VH1 produces “Truman Sparks:  Where Are They Now?”, where will you be and how will the last two sentences of commentary read before the screen fades to black?

JH:  I will be among the barbarian hordes thriving off the corpse of a collapsed society.  As for the last two sentences:

“Their final show resulted in the mass displacement of 62 million people and the redrawing of the eastern seaboard on all modern maps.  One can only hope that the scourge of Truman Sparks has been terminally silenced”

Fade to black.

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