Menthol

by David Robbins

Balthazar de Lay is the lyricist/guitarist/front-man of Champaign, Illinois' Menthol. His father is a professor of literature with emphasis on French erotica (ooh la la). He taught himself to play guitar, and he developed his own tuning when he got bored with the conventional (seeing Menthol in concert is worth it just to see how he tunes his guitar). He played bass with Hum until he decided he'd rather play guitar in his own band. RAD talked with him for a bit before they opened for Gene at a recent show.

Balthazar:: We went for about three years being called Mother when we first started in about 1981. We found so many other bands called Mother in this world that we ended up changing about three of the letters to form Menthol, so it's basically just an anagram for the old name. Yeah, we got together in about 1991 in Champaign, We'd just moved to Chicago, Illinois, basically because we'd spent most of our lives growing up in Champaign which is a town of about 70--80,000 people. It was getting a little bit old. It's kind of a cosmopolitan enclave in the middle of nowhere, out in the middle of cornfields. So we went to the city to sort of see what that was about, and we haven't really even been there because we've been on the road for more or less six months now. It's the home that we never see, more or less.
RAD:: What did you release as Mother?
Balthazar:: We released an album on Mud Records which is out of Champaign called the Gold Record LP which came out in 1993, I think? Late '93? That's really the only thing we did as Mother and then we just did our Capitol thing which just came out about four weeks ago.
RAD:: How does the Menthol LP sound different from the Mother stuff?
Balthazar:: I think the menthol LP is a collection of songs. We didn't really try to extend our agenda or our musical vision past whatever song we happened to be writing. I think on the album before that there might have been a secret agenda. I think it sort of wed two styles together--the punk rock we grew up listening to with a lot of the southern rock, hippy rock that our parents would listen to. We got over that relatively quickly and just got about the task of writing songs we liked to play. That's how it differs.
RAD:: For people who've never heard Menthol before how do you describe your music?
Balthazar:: It tends to be a high minded, very loud, mildly pornographic rock that's basically aimed at sort of well-read, literate type people who've been obviously drinking. I think that about spells it out.
RAD:: So you've been on tour as Menthol for how long?
Balthazar:: About six months. We toured with Matthew Sweet, and we played with Better Than Ezra for a while and also just out on our own just out in the Midwest and around the south. We went out to CMJ in New York.
RAD:: How much longer will the tour go?
Balthazar:: 'Till Halloween.
RAD:: Then what?
Balthazar:: Then we're touring with Triple Fast Action, a band from Chicago, and a band called the Presidents of the United States of America, which is a band I think is from Seattle. The touring will never end . . . in the foreseeable future.
RAD:: Do you have plans to start working on another album, anything?
Balthazar:: No, not really. I think we're going to take time and do what I call a slow build on this record in the sense that we love touring we love playing these songs still. We want to play them for a while. We don't want this to be a big deal and then have it just kind of be over with. So we're going to tour for a while before we do a video or try to put a song on the radio, just kind of do it the slow way. No, we don't have any plans to make another record until probably the middle of next year. At least.
RAD:: So you're just going to tour till then?
Balthazar:: We're gonna tour. And I guess make videos. I don't know why. (Laughs) But we will.
RAD:: That might be the best way to get some exposure right now.
Balthazar:: More or less, yeah.
RAD:: You mentioned punk rock and southern hippy rock your parents listened to. What else influenced the way your music sounds?
Balthazar:: I think the same things that have influenced people our age, people who all grew up listening to one music source, MTV, sort of the earliest MTV, the British invasion bands. All the stuff that we are ashamed to say we really liked or still like possibly, but that we all have stuck back in the collective archive of musical influences.
RAD:: You mean like the Go-Go's and Duran Duran?
Balthazar:: Yeah, Thompson Twins, you know, yeah. Adam Ant. I draw from a lot of stuff like that--music my folks listened to, like totally indie rock, stuff you couldn't help but heal a lot of growing up in a Midwestern college town, really sort of an eclectic conglomeration of things. I have no idea how the influences translate into what we do, it's sort of paradoxical thing--we're a very loud band, but we're also sort of word smithy. I don't know where the influences formed the kind of rock that we make.
RAD:: What do you think about the O.J. trial?
Balthazar:: I think this is the three strikes for American justice--you know, Oliver North, William Kennedy Smith, O.J. Simpson. You had these three TV trials where you had the notoriety, and the circus aspect and all the money being thrown around meant that maybe justice couldn't be served. One funny thing about it is that, with the trials being on TV, and with us extending the freedom of information ideas to the courtroom means that everyone thinks they're a juror and knows as well as the jury who did it or not, so we're all sitting around thinking we all know better, or we don't know better. That's the O.J. trial. Everyone's a critic.