Don't give it up now

The Lyres are still on fire

by Brett Milano

If I could pick one moment to sum up the eternal genius of the Lyres, it would be a New Music Seminar showcase gig back in 1988. The band were booked into the Big Kahauna, a short-lived Manhattan spot with a really tacky beach theme (sand on the floor and all), and their rough-and-real garage rock was a surreal match to the surroundings. "Look, man, we don't really care about getting rich," frontman Jeff "Monoman" Conolly noted between songs to an audience likely surprised by the sudden show of sincerity. "That's why we're playing this shit club! For no money! For all you Seminar assholes!" With that the Lyres kicked into their eternal anthem, "Don't Give It Up Now," and a snotty moment turned into a celebratory one, with Conolly giving a rousing pep talk to the fans he'd dissed a few seconds earlier.

Less a band than a force of nature, the Lyres have now been with us for 19 years (longer, if you count their previous incarnation as the Conolly-fronted DMZ). They're a little more stable now than they were in the '80s -- heck, I haven't seen Conolly fire anybody on stage in at least four years. But on a good night -- like the last time I saw them, in a marathon show at Club Bohemia in Boston last New Year's Eve -- they maintain a direct connection to the primal, elemental stuff that powers rock and roll. Which is no surprise when you consider how much energy Conolly spends searching for that stuff. (His record-collecting ways are legendary around town, as are his control-freak tendencies -- both being sources of his nickname.) Whatever a great rock outfit is supposed to do -- save your soul, restore your faith, or just provide a good excuse to get blasted -- the Lyres still do it as dependably as anyone around.

The band is presently celebrating Matador's re-release of the band's '80s output (originally on the Ace of Hearts label) on four CDs: AHS 1005 (the 1983 EP, expanded to album length), On Fyre (originally 1984, with nine extra tracks), Lyres Lyres (a straight reissue of the 1986 album), and A Promise Is a Promise (the 1988 album, with added live tracks and a studio cut, "We Sell Soul" from two years later). This is the first time any of them have been on American CD, though New Rose imports were readily available for a time. The new editions sound much improved, with a more vivid drum sound and a restored bass end -- no surprise, since Conolly and original producer Rick Harte apparently spent more time remastering the albums than they originally had making them.

"It's the first time it's ever been mastered professionally," Conolly explains. "We went to the most expensive facility in the world -- for some ungodly reason Matador got [parent company] Capitol to pay for it. That was the most genius part of all. Now we can finally go forward; I didn't want to put anything new out and have it conflict with an old reissue. It went according to plan to have all the reissues out first; the only thing accidental was that it took so damn long. If Matador thinks enough of the band to put these out, we must be a big deal to somebody."

When these albums were originally released, the Lyres were a big enough deal in Boston that some local-industry types were moved to claim that "Boston's not just a garage town" -- though other local kingpins like the Del Fuegos, Scruffy the Cat, the Zulus, and even Mission of Burma would have argued that there was nothing wrong with its being one. Still, Conolly made no apologies for the inspiration he took from the primitive teenage rock of the '60s -- "Louie Louie" references would be in order, though the Lyres have performed that song only a few times (they'd rather cover, say, a Dutch single that sold 50 copies.) The essence of their sound is summed up in the first 10 seconds of "Buried Alive," the opening track of the first EP, with Conolly's vintage Vox organ doubling a tremolo guitar chord and a tambourine kicking it along -- it's as much a signature sound as Sonic Youth's feedback squalls or the Ramones' buzzsaw guitars. You just know that the walls are gonna shake when the full band kick in.

On Fyre has most of the hits, including the still-resonant "Don't Give It Up Now" and "Help You Ann" -- where Conolly vows to save his girlfriend from a life of prostitution, if only so she'll quit charging him (he does better financially in the disc's other classic, "She Pays the Rent"). Lyres Lyres is the heartbreak album, with a fast-song/slow-song structure allowing for more ballads than usual -- this one revealed the soul behind the bluster. And the debut EP is fleshed out with seven songs from an unreleased mini-album. Although the sound of the latter tracks is relatively cruddy (they were dubbed off a mono cassette found in drummer Howie Ferguson's house), they catch that line-up's live sound better than the official release did -- guitarist Peter Greenberg (later of Barrence Whitfield's Savages) was a hot live player who tended to choke up in the studio.

The wild card in the batch is A Promise Is a Promise, which is the nastiest the Lyres ever got -- some fans hated the album, and even Conolly isn't especially keen on it: "The band was in serious need of recharging. You can tell from my singing that I was gonzo then -- I was completely fried." True enough, but the energy was positively fearsome: check the psychotic overtones of his vocal on "Feel Good" (whose title is the entire lyric), or the screaming frenzy of "On Fyre." The frayed nerves and the tension between Conolly and then-guitarist Jack Hickey produced a punk outburst on the same exalted level as the Stooges' Raw Power or the Dead Boys' Young, Loud & Snotty (the Dead Boys' singer, the late Stiv Bators, harmonizes with Conolly on the token pop number, "Here's a Heart"). And the handful of live tracks (some of which have been deleted from the New Rose CD) are wonderfully out of control, to the point where the speakers get overloaded on a cover of the Sonics' "Witch." Even the album's title says something about band life at the time: "A promise is a promise" was the heading of a letter that Conolly received from a jilted girlfriend in Europe -- a letter he turned around and reproduced on the front cover.

Lately they've been toning down the impulsive rock-band behavior somewhat. And despite their long history of personnel changes, there hasn't been one since guitarist Steve Aquino joined in 1994; the other two guys (drummer Paul Murphy and bassist Rick Coraccio) are original members. "This line-up has lasted longer than most of your crappy, whiny, angst-ridden indie rock bands," Conolly points out. "We may move at a snail's pace, but we're talking about guys who live in houses with their mortgages and kids. They can't just drop their families and their jobs; that's what they made us do in the '80s. There's no money in garage rock; we just do this kind of music because it's all we know how to do. We don't know how to put samples and electronica into our music."

Conolly writes off the Lyres' three '90s albums as rush jobs (the most recent, 1994's Those Lyres on Norton, was the best of the three), but he says they're about to go into the studio and start work on a real comeback disc whose tentative title is Along for the Ride. And the new material they've been playing on stage suggests this could be a good one. As usual, it's hard to tell the songs Conolly writes from the ones he gets off obscure '60s singles, but one of the recent standouts is an exception. The latest in their string of Kinks covers, the Dave Davies song "What's in Store for Me," is a three-chord strut where the singer wonders whether his life is going to take off or fall apart. Lately they've been segueing that song into "Don't Give It Up Now" -- a move that answers Davies's question and says something about the restorative power of rock and roll. Like the man said, a promise is a promise.