TITLE: "No Reason To Complain"
ARTIST: The Lyres
ALBUM: Lyres Lyres
RELEASE DATE: 1986
Evidently, the Boston Red Sox won this year's World Series. Honestly, I'm not completely sure that that's true -- as I truly do not follow nor give a great goddamn about professional baseball -- but that's what I heard. In the wake of this arguably momentous event, a few of the online discussion groups I participate in were very suddenly aflutter with rapturous talk about the merits of Bean Town. While I feel no great affinity for the Mets or Yankees nor care a great deal about the acrimonious rivalry between New York and Boston, I felt compelled to make the odd dismissive comment about that fair city to the North, if only to stem the ecstatic tide. "Boston?" I smirked, "kind of a half-assed city, isn't it?" This comment was very justifiably ignored.
I've never lived in Boston, but I've had several friends call it home over the years. I've visited it many times, and have always found it to be a fun, warm and inviting place. I've slept in its youth hostels (as a high schooler on a bike trip across Massachusetts), sampled its splendid seafood, gotten drunk it its (many, many) bars, shopped for inane bullshit in Quincy Market and felt legitimately fearful in its fabled "Combat Zone" (do they still call it that?) But if there's one thing that truly redeems Boston of any of its purported flaws, it's the music scene. Sure, it gave the world Boston and Aerosmith (I own albums by both of these bands, I should admit), but it also gave us The Modern Lovers, The J. Geils Band, Mission of Burma, Volcano Suns, The Del Fuegos, The Cars, SSD, Gang Green, The F.U,'s, Slapshot, Pixies, Galaxie 500, Lemonheads, The Dresden Dolls and hordes more. Yeah, it also gave us crap like New Kids on the Block and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but why bring them into it? And despite penning the preeminent Bean Town anthem, "Dirty Water," the Standells were from Los Angeles. You figure that one out.
And while I think it's the Modern Lovers who truly belong at the top of that estimable heap, there's one more band from Boston who kick a man-sized platter of Harvard Yard ass, and that's The Lyres. Back during my senior year of college, while I was troubling myself with histrionic British goth rock by bands like The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim and The Mission, one of my roommates brought home a record that truly cleared the cobwebs out of the house, going into regular rotation next to Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction and Appetite for Destruction by Guns N' Roses. Lyres Lyres by The Lyres came in a eye-scorching pink sleeve (mysteriously adorned with an ersatz Helenic babe clutching a --- wait for it -- lyre), but from within came a primal blend of slobbering, thrillingly rudimentary garage rock that seamlessly recalled both the primitive fury of the Nuggets bands and the bracing urgency of Punk Rock's Class of `77. I don't really know enough about the band's history other than that prior to forming The Lyres, lead singer Jeff "Monoman" Connolly was in a similarly inclined late 70's band called DMZ.
History lessons aside, Lyres Lyres was just a fun, bracing blast of heroically simple garage rock, rife with clangy Rickenbackers, whiney Farfisas and Connolly's gruff, oft-incomprehensible yawp. There really isn't a bad song on the record, but "No Reason To Complain" has always been my favorite (followed close behind by "Not Looking Back"). I played it with maddening regularity as a disc jockey on my college radio station, WDUB, and never failed to get up and air guitar manically when I played it.
Years later, while visiting a friend in Cambridge, I managed to track down a copy of Lyres Lyres on disc (the New Rose edition, long out of print). Since then, it's been re-released (with a slightly altered cover). Seek it out. In the interim, enjoy "No Reason To Complain."
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