Music fans are mourning the loss of Jeff Conolly, longtime frontman for Boston rock band Lyres.
The New York Times reports that Conolly passed away at his home in Boston.
His wife, Marie Stevie Conolly, told the newspaper that his death had been the result of bladder cancer.
Frontman for Lyres
Per the Times, Conolly and his band had carved out a niche in the Boston rock scene with a retro garage-rock sound.
He was also known by the nickname “Monoman,” due to his extensive collection of obscure vinyl LPs, recorded in mono — primarily British Invasion bands and garage-rock acts from the 1960s.
In the Times’ obituary, Conolly was remembered for his distinctive “raw, desperate vocals and combustible personality onstage and off.”
While Lyres never experienced the mainstream success they deserved, Conolly led the band for decades as “a standard-bearer for the 1980s garage-rock revival and was a college radio staple.”
An Indifference to Fame
In fact, fame and fortune were never a motivating factor for the quixotic rocker.
“I don’t promote Jeff Conolly,” he told The Boston Globe, per the Times.
In an email interview with One Chord Progression, Conolly admitted he was indifferent to the trappings of stardom, particularly fashion. “Usually, I am wearing the stuff that I find at the laundromat,” he said.
‘All About the Music’
According to Lyres drummer Paul Murphy, Conolly’s motivations were pure, telling the Times that “everything was all about the music. To have fun would mean that the band played extremely well on a live set or in the studio. Anything else was not fun. It was all work.”
Over the course of Lyres’ decades-long career, fans could always count on Conolly and the band to kick out the jams and give it their all in electrifying live performances.
“They were like a weather event, a force of nature,” Warren Zanes, of Boston band the Del Fuegos, told The Globe. “Rock ’n’ roll in its purest form.”
‘They Broke the Mold’
Describing Lyres and Conolly for Rolling Stone, writer Rob Sheffield recalled seeing the band perform in 1987, when Conolly provided percussion with a beer bottle.
“I saw him cap off the song by breaking the bottle over his head, then keep right on playing,” Sheffield wrote.
“When the gods of rock built this guy,” Sheffield added, “they broke the mold, probably on purpose.”
Boston music critic Jim Sullivan paid tribute to Conolly in a piece he wrote for public reation station WBUR.
Sullivan spoke with Boston radio deejay Oedipus, a long-time friend of the late singer. “He had major flights of fancy,” he said. “He was one of Boston’s true eccentrics and iconoclasts. He had his demons, big demons, which he acknowledged.”
A Mercurial Genius
Conolly’s former bandmates described him as both a genius and tough to deal with, which led Lyres to cycle through dozens of musicians over the years.
As Lyres drummer Murphy noted, Conolly “was hard to work with. He wanted to have a certain sound, so he’d look for the guitar player to play a certain chord a certain way.”
Conolly himself acknowedged that aspect of his personality, describing himself to One Chord Progression as a “slightly/mostly mixed-up person exactly like anybody who mostly knows what he’s doing but also at the same time knows absolutely nothing.”
