Jeff Conolly, the volcanic frontman and songwriter for the Boston-based neo-garage band Lyres, who was known for his raw, desperate vocals and combustible personality onstage and off, died on July 31 at his home in Lynn, Mass., on Boston’s North Shore. He was 70.
The cause was bladder cancer, his wife, Marie Stevie Conolly, said.
Lyres — no “the,” Mr. Conolly insisted — had occasional intersections with the mainstream. Rolling Stone called the band’s 1984 debut album, “On Fyre,” “THE beach-party album of the year.”
Propelled by Mr. Conolly’s vocals, which recalled Van Morrison’s with his early group Them, Lyres never tallied a Billboard hit, but it became a standard-bearer for the 1980s garage-rock revival and was a college radio staple.
From his early days, Mr. Conolly was known as Monoman for his single-minded devotion to the 1960s mono records of British Invasion bands like the Kinks and first-generation garage-rock acts like the Seeds (“Pushin’ Too Hard”) and the Standells (“Dirty Water”). Lyres relied on obscure covers plucked from his collection of thousands of vintage LPs, as well as his searing originals, like “Help You Ann” and “Don’t Give It Up Now.”
Mr. Conolly had no interest in rock-star fame. “I don’t promote Jeff Conolly,” he told The Boston Globe earlier this year. In a rare, brief interview with the site One Chord Progression, conducted by email, he described his fashion sense: “Usually, I am wearing the stuff that I find at the laundromat.”
To Mr. Conolly, “everything was all about the music,” Paul Murphy, the band’s longtime drummer, said in an interview. “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.”
Fans who turned out to gigs at clubs like the storied Rathskeller (the “Rat”) in Boston and the Middle East in Cambridge saw Mr. Conolly laying down screeching lines on his vintage Vox Continental organ with one hand and, with the other, seemingly bruising his thigh with his tambourine, while wailing out lyrics filled with passion and desperation.
“They were like a weather event, a force of nature,” Warren Zanes, the writer and guitarist for the rootsy Boston band the Del Fuegos, told The Globe. “Rock ’n’ roll in its purest form.”
In a recent Rolling Stone appreciation, the writer Rob Sheffield recalled seeing Lyres in New Haven, Conn., in 1987; Mr. Conolly was using a beer bottle as a percussion instrument. “I saw him cap off the song by breaking the bottle over his head,” he wrote, “then keep right on playing.”
“When the gods of rock built this guy,” Mr. Sheffield added, “they broke the mold, probably on purpose.”
In a remembrance for WBUR, a Boston public radio station, the critic Jim Sullivan wrote about taking in Mr. Conolly backstage after a 1986 gig, waving a bottle of wine and musing about a hypothetical next album: “It will be called ‘Playpen,’ and on the cover I’ll be in an adult-sized crib with bottles of Stoli and porno magazines going: ‘Wah! Why did she leave me?’”
Mr. Conolly was as exacting as he was mercurial. He was a genius, said Mr. Murphy, the drummer, but he “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.”
With his complicated personality and the band’s shoestring budget, Mr. Conolly cycled through so many bandmates that Lyres’s third studio album, “A Promise Is a Promise” (1988), featured a sprawling family tree of past members of the band and its predecessor, DMZ, on its gatefold cover.
As Mr. Conolly told One Chord Progression, he was 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.”
Jeffrey Lynn Conolly was born on May 14, 1956, in Albany, N.Y., the fourth of five children of Harry Conolly, a steel and, later, mining executive, and Nancy (Goodhue) Conolly, a former flight attendant.
He was 10 when his family settled in Darien, Conn. As a student at Darien High School, he played in a garage band called Punky and the Benders. After graduating in 1974, he enrolled at Boston University, studying liberal arts and music, but dropped out after a few months.
He remained in Boston and took over lead vocals for DMZ, a relatively accessible template for what became Lyres; it opened for major acts like the Ramones and the Jam and released a self-titled 1978 album on Sire Records.
The label dropped the band shortly after, and Mr. Conolly formed Lyres with Ricky Carmel (guitar), Rick Coraccio (bass) and Mr. Murphy. Lyres, with varying lineups, continued to perform for decades.
His first marriage, to Priscilla Becker, ended in divorce. In 2007, he married Marie Gomez. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Nina Conolly Stimson, and three brothers, Neal, Mark and Jay.
Lyres were beloved in Boston, but Mr. Conolly did not seem to think about the group’s legacy there. When One Chord Progression asked him what he thought was the greatest Boston band ever, he responded: “While there is no one ‘best’ Boston band, I would probably say ‘the Red Sox.’”
The post Jeff Conolly, Manic Garage-Rock Frontman, Dies at 69 appeared first on New York Times.
