The Memory Motel is an undistinguished L-shaped structure of small, cheaply furnished rooms with an asphalted parking area in front of each room’s battered wooden door. The Memory, as it’s called, faces on the main drag into Montauk town just a block short of the Green. Unless you know that The Rolling Stones’ long song Memory Motel was named in honor of this place, you might well forget you ever saw The Memory.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote:

”Hannah honey was a peachy kind of girl
Her eyes were hazel
And her nose were slightly curved
We spent a lonely night at the Memory Motel
It's on the ocean, I guess you know it well
It took a starry night to steal my breath away
Down on the water front Her hair all drenched in spray. . .

”You're just a memory of a love
That used to be
You're just a memory of a love
That used to mean so much to me. . .

“I hit the bottle and hit the sack and cried
What's all this laughter on the 22nd floor
It's just some friends of mine
And they're busting down the door
Been a lonely night at the Memory Motel.”

In the crook of the L is a dark doorway that leads into a surprisingly large room. To the left is a low stage with a few theatrical lights. To the right is a long, stained wooden bar with tall stools in front, and a decent distance away is a green baize pool table at which frolic the resident sharks, some of whom play as if the cues were their penises. Shots you would bet the farm against are made before your astonished eyes.

There is a now famous one called Colin’s Shot whereby Colin, a handsome young man from a Caribbean island, pops a cue ball in a perfect 14-inch arc over an intervening eight ball, and the cue ball exquisitely bumps the middle of a nine ball that rolls magnificently into the side pocket. Even the big DEA shark joined all the other sharks at the table and all of the astonished and laughing onlookers to touch and hug and fist-butt the laughing Colin’s hand to let some of his luck and skill maybe rub off. Colin was cool. He said that the shot was just one of the little ones he keeps in his bag but seldom has to use.

Colin’s Shot took place at The Memory on a recent Tuesday night,
the same night that a band well known as Suddyn in Ireland, the UK and Europe made its debut in Montauk. Locals know the group as The Montauk Bake Shoppe Band because by day the band’s musicians serve up pastries and confections in the East End’s greatest bakery, and by night they play music that makes strong men smile and pretty girls blush and cry.

How do they do it? For one, Brendan Connolly is a drummer who telegraphs impulses that no doubt can raise the dead, and he looks like a big, happy cherub as he absolutely beats the devil out of his drums and keeps the cymbals sensually whispering. Everyone except the hungriest of the sharks gets the message and one little blue-eyed grandmother with thin red hair stood with her fingers to her lips and said, “I love them.”

Alan Steil, with lemon meringue hair and surfer’s body, sings like dancer’s do, with their entire being. He likes to climb up on the speakers or even on a big drum, and call out ~ with his mouth open to its widest ~ meanwhile flexing his arms and wet T shirt torso so balletically that young and impressionable females commence to undulate, lick their lips and perspire.

Jarrett Steil on guitar and Colin O Dwyer laid back on this occasion and kept the undercurrent going. No description of the music of The Montauk Bake Shop Band (aka Suddyn) is as good as a YouTube visit and the song Letting Go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIh6cp2weW4&NR=1

By the end of their seven songs, the denizens of The Memory knew they had seen and heard a band of the future in the early fable making stage, while the boys are young and tireless and as yet untamed by too many horse whisperers. Witnesses to the evening can’t imagine why some TV producer doesn’t make a show of the guys’ lives during a Montauk summer?