A Tribute to The Lyres’ Jeff Conolly, Boston Garage-Punk Godfather

Let’s raise a dirty glass to a true rock & roll legend: the Lyres’ Jeff “Monoman” Conolly. When the gods of rock built this guy, they broke the mold, probably on purpose. Conolly was a Boston rock kingpin, the garage-punk godfather who cranked out a string of ferocious indie records in the 1980s, snarling frantic raves like “Don’t Give It Up Now” and “She Pays The Rent.” Monoman died on July 31 of cancer, at 69, and the world already seems like a tamer place.

A Lyres show meant witnessing Conolly in full frenzy, swept up in the high-strung psycho attack of the music, a skinny tornado of a man whipping himself into a state of shamanic possession during “I Really Want You Right Now,” chanting that title over and over, banging on a beer bottle for percussion. One night at the Grotto in New Haven, in 1987, I saw him cap off the song by breaking the bottle over his head—then keep right on playing. It wasn’t the only time I saw him gush blood onstage. He was one of the most maniacally brilliant frontmen I’ve ever seen.

He was also a notoriously difficult character — tough on his bandmates, tough on the audience. He was constantly firing the other Lyres, or battling them onstage. “I love Jeff to death,” Mission of Burma’s Clinton Conley said earlier this year. “But I can say he’s the only person I’ve ever been in a band with that I wanted to strangle.” 

The Lyres were indie sensations in the early Eighties, with a string of raw singles like “She Pays the Rent” and “How Do You Know?,” all garage jitters with a raunchy edge. Conolly played his Vox Continental organ with one hand, while banging a tambourine on his thigh with the other. The band set the pace with their low-budget 1981 debut EP. with the anti-day-job rant “Buried Alive.” They started turning heads nationwide with the single “I Want To Help You Ann,” with its pulsing tremolo attack — it sounded like nothing else at the time.

But their big breakthrough was On Fyre, from the summer of 1984. “Here it is, THE beach-party album of the year,” Rolling Stone proclaimed in a rave review. “Don’t Give It Up Now” will always be their most famous tune, and rightly so — a rebel anthem riding a loosey-goosey guitar groove, with Monoman yelping over that one-note organ drone. They were absolute kings of tension and release — a Conolly song was all about quivering, letting the suspense build, then jumping in for the kill. As Burma’s Conley once told a journalist in the middle of a Lyres show at the Rat, in 1981, “Monoman knows more about the core of a rock & roll song than anyone else in this town.”

The Lyres were local heroes in Boston, yet they had a subterranean influence on bands around the world, especially in their mastery of loud/quiet/loud dynamics. Their influence spread largely via the Pixies, who learned the ropes in the 1980s Boston milieu where Conolly reigned supreme; you can’t even imagine their music without him. Play the Lyres’ “I Really Want You Right Now” back to back with the Pixies’ “Debaser,” then go to PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig” or Sugar’s “A Good Idea” or Nirvana’s “Sliver.” That will give a quick sense of the Lyres’ massive impact on Nineties rock. Even bands who never heard of this guy ended up copping his tricks.

He started making noise in the 1970s with the Stooges-style punk group DMZ, who fell apart after a killer indie EP and a terrible major-label album. But he went for a leaner, meaner, dirtier approach with the Lyres, on the Boston DIY label Ace of Hearts. The sound was rooted in Sixties garage rock, long before that was a style hipsters appreciated or cultivated. He was the generational bridge between the Nuggets originators and the Nineties inheritors.

By all accounts, this guy was a graduate of the Mark E. Smith charm school, constantly terrorizing his bandmates along with everyone else. His nickname “Monoman” came from his fetish for old-school mono records — but it also described his infamous tunnel-vision personality, which is why he burned through dozens of fellow Lyres along the way. WBUR’s Jim Sullivan recalled collaring him after a 1986 gig to ask who the new bassist was. Conolly replied, “Who cares?”

Yet he was a legend, especially in Europe. In his native New England, he was always revered, not to mention feared. If you’ll forgive a Red Sox metaphor, he was the Carl Yastrzemski of Boston rock, the toughest of grinders, suffering and sweating through even the meaningless gigs like they were life-or-death showdowns. Like Yaz, he was a constant presence, year in and year out, but never doing it the easy way, never leaving the field with a clean uniform. 

After the sad news of his death, even his biggest admirers were sharing their colorful social-media tributes to his let’s-call-it eccentric personality. Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster, a connoisseur of rock & roll weirdness, wrote, “My brother from a New Hampshire mother Warren Zanes has a tale of sitting with a shades-wearing Jeff Conolly at a Boston venue and pouring his heart out to him. Warren was at the beginning of his career as a Del Fuego and was telling Jeff how much his music meant to him as a young musician. After a while, Warren realized Jeff’s emotionless response was not an air of cool he was projecting. He’d been asleep the whole time.”

Some might say Zanes got off easy that night. “I had various interactions with the guy for almost 40 years,” guitarist Deke Dickerson wrote, “and I never had one interaction where he wasn’t a complete jerk or an asshole to me.” And this comes from a fond tribute by a fan who idolized him as “one of the all-time great rock & roll frontmen.” 

Conolly also worked at local record stores like Mystery Train and In Your Ear. (I once bought a Mingus album from him, but was way too starstruck to say anything.) He always had his own madcap sense of history — he loved to cover the Bo Diddley rarity “I Can Tell,” 40 years before Bob Dylan got to it. He reached a whole new audience with the 1998 Matador reissue, which collected long-lost gems like “She Pays the Rent” (the raucous two-minute original, not the awful later slowed-down version) and “Someone Who’ll Treat You Right Now.” 

Yet Conolly kept rocking to the end — the Lyres were still touring until earlier this year. The band’s final show was February 13 in Austin, right before his bladder-cancer diagnosis. When the news of his illness spread, there was a benefit in Boston, on March 12, gathering musicians who nobody expected to ever play together again. It united bands like the Flies, Classic Ruins, Unnatural Axe, the Dogmatics, and more, including — for one night only — his old friends in Mission of Burma. 

But Monoman couldn’t resist storming the stage, even at a benefit for his own health crisis. In a total surprise appearance, he slapped on a wig and came out to join Burma, for a romp through a classic by the Stooges. “He was done up like a nightmare Roy Orbison,” Conley told WBUR, “and joined us for a shambolic ‘1970’ that more or less crashed on take-off when he stumbled into the drums. Perfect.” 

We should all be so lucky as to go out fighting with that kind of spirit. Here’s to Jeff Conolly — forever a Lyre, forever on fyre.