Menright Tunes

NEW! Last Year at Surf City I've never been very good at love songs — they always turn out to be a lot darker than they should. No matter, this is still one of the best tunes I ever wrote. It 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 "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