Jeff Conolly, the singer and bandleader of Lyres, died on Friday, July 31, after a bout with bladder cancer. He was 69.
For readers searching his name today, the news marks the loss of one of Boston’s most distinctive rock voices, a man who pushed a 1960s garage-rock sound through snarling songs, a Vox Continental organ and a tambourine thrashed onstage. Lyres grew out of his 1970s band DMZ, and the group’s catalog included hook-filled songs such as “She Pays the Rent,” “Don’t Give It Up Now” and “Help You Ann.”
Conolly’s music was built around urgency and grit. In 1986, he said the aim was to make songs about pain while still rising above it, and that mix of bruising attitude and melody helped define Lyres. The band issued three studio albums for Ace of Hearts, ending with “A Promise Is a Promise” in 1988, and Conolly also carried the nickname Mono Man because of his love for monaural 1960s records. Later, after his second marriage, he wanted people to call him Jeff.
But the picture of Conolly never stayed simple. Lilli Dennison said he could be incredibly sweet and helpful, but also wicked and selfish and diabolical, and that he had his own language. She said his humor could be hard to decode, even as he would finally land the joke with a sparkle in his eye. Another Boston voice, Oedipus, described him as one of the city’s true eccentrics and iconoclasts, a man with major flights of fancy and big demons that he knew he carried.
That split helped define how he was remembered in Boston and beyond. Lyres changed shape constantly, with at least 30 different musicians passing through over the years, and Conolly often clashed with bandmates even as he remained the center of the project. The group’s final show came on Feb. 13 this year at the Carousel Lounge in Austin, Texas, and a planned spring tour with the last Lyres was canceled shortly before his cancer diagnosis. No replacement dates were announced, leaving that cancellation as the last live chapter in a career that ended with his death.
