Boston rock frontman Jeff Conolly died Friday, July 31, at 69 after a bout with bladder cancer. The Lyres singer and bandleader had been a central figure in Boston rock since the late 1970s, when his reach went well beyond one group’s lineup.
Lyres and Boston
Conolly built the Lyres around 1960s garage rock energy and a rotating cast that eventually included at least 30 different players. He also wrote songs including She Pays the Rent, Don’t Give It Up Now and Help You Ann, and the group’s run produced Lyres, Lyres and A Promise Is a Promise, released in 1988 as the last of three studio albums for Ace of Hearts.
Lyres played its final show on Feb. 13 at Carousel Lounge in Austin, Texas. A planned spring tour with the last Lyres was canceled after Conolly’s cancer diagnosis, cutting off what would have been the band’s next public step and leaving that final performance as the closing marker on the schedule.
Lilli Dennison and Oedipus
Lilli Dennison, who booked Lyres numerous times, said, “Jeff had his own language.” She also said, “He could be incredibly sweet and helpful, but also wicked and selfish and diabolical.” That split tracks with how Conolly was described by people around him: a frontman who could be generous one minute and impossible the next.
Oedipus called him “one of Boston's true eccentrics and iconoclasts” and said, “He had his demons, big demons, which he acknowledged.” The contradiction is part of the record here, not a footnote; Conolly’s reputation was built on the same volatility that kept the Lyres shifting over time.
From DMZ to the Lyres
Conolly’s earlier band DMZ set the stage for what became the Lyres in the 1970s. By 1986, he was already talking about the project in his own blunt way, saying, “The goal is to do songs about such pain, but rising above it,” and, when asked for advice for a happy life, “Get some pets and a nice girlfriend who likes animals.”
He also answered “Who cares?” after a gig in 1986 when asked who the new bassist was, and backstage that year he joked about the next album, saying it would be called Playpen. That kind of offhand provocation was part of why he stood out inside Boston rock, and why his death closes a very specific chapter rather than just another obituary line.
For readers who followed the Lyres, the practical endpoint is simple: the planned spring tour is off, the final show already happened, and the band’s recorded run remains fixed at three studio albums. What is left now is the work of memory, and the harder task of sorting a legend from the noise he made around himself.
