Menright Tunes

Last Year at Surf City This tune (originally written for and recorded by The Ed Davis Band) had several sources. Brian Wilson and his "Ride the Wild Surf" recording with Jan and Dean was the starting point; I think "Ride the Wild Surf" has got to be one of the saddest songs ever recorded, particularly that line "catch the last wave and ride it in alone." I don't quote it in the lyric; the quotes are all from his other hit with the pair, "Surf City." I know I was thinking about Patti Smith, too, and Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad. This demo version comes from a cassette mixdown that was probably recorded in 1980. I date it from the tacky synth beats on the rhythm track, which came from a small electronic box I borrowed from my roommate David Solmonoff. I played my first New York gig with him, in 1979 or '80 at a "hipster rock joint" called Tier 3, with the concept band Cult de Ghouls. Play It

Theme from Hatari When I was very young my Great-aunt Ellen took me to the record department of the Lazarus department store in Columbus, Ohio, and told me to buy whatever I wanted. I chose the LP The Best of Mancini. It contained the themes from Charade, Experiment in Terror, Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky — all these incredible songs. Years later I was playing around with a broken auto-harp and a small slit drum and recorded this. Play It

Surfin' Shadow In the late summer of 1979, broke, evicted from the illegal sublet where I had been staying, I moved one afternoon into the Kenmore Hotel on 23rd Street. This place was later seized in a drug bust — the entire hotel, seized in a drug bust! — and appropriately dubbed "The Place at the End of the Line" in a 1994 article in The New York Times. This seemed a very low point. I lived on English muffins and sat in the middle of all my possessions in a room about the size of a cell. I watched the roaches crawl in and out of the sink, and listened to a guy in the next room yell "I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" at his television. One night I started to play a bass line, and got some ideas for a melody that would ride on top. I thought it sounded like a surf song. I recorded enough of it to remember it later and finished it up when I moved a couple of months later into an apartment on Avenue C. Play It

Kill the Dogs (Like China Did) This is a demo I recorded for Desi Desi and Desi of a song that later became our set closer. I was thinking about an 8mm movie my parents shot that shows me first playing with — then running away from — our dachshund Fritz. I do like dogs, by the way, despite the lyric. Play It

Xmas 81 Broke as usual at the end of 1981, I thought I might record this tune to make up for the fact that I couldn't afford any Christmas presents for my family. Also in the back of my mind was the factoid that Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" was the most often-recorded song of all time. I figured all I had to do was write a Christmas song and the royalties would flow in forever. Play It

Lovers in New York is a reggae number — we had been listening to a lot of Black Uhuru and Lee Perry stuff — and an attempt to write a love song that wasn't too honeyed. I made a couple of mistakes when I recorded it that kept it out of circulation for years. Through the magic of ProTools I fixed most of the problems, and the results are presented here for the first time. Play It

Take Out Your Pistols, Faggots is a call to arms and not a homophobic screed. The original lyrics were written for The Ed Davis Band in Cincinnati and later rewritten to reflect the harsher reality of NYC. This one was always a crowd-pleaser, probably because — as when nationalists misinterpreted Springsteen's "Born in the USA" — the skinhead crowds we began to see in '82 and '83 thought it was a gay-basher. Play It

BMT Class War became a standard for the Desis — punk crowds loved the hardcore chorus. Unfortunately after the chorus everything went Sonic Youth, and the crowd went to the bar. A solo demo version recorded in a small bedroom on Avenue C is presented here. Play It

Modern Love is about a boy and a girl and a boy — romance served straight with a twist. This is a demo intended for Fran Slater (see Desi Desi Desi) to sing, but the Desis never played it. I ended up preferring the gender twist and the simplicity of the recording. Play It