By Jon Garelick

The “Monoman” was obsessive, exacting, and unforgettable.

Lyres, with Jeff Conolly second from right. Photo: courtesy of Ace of Hearts.

Back in the ’80s, I had a belt-driven Phillips turntable. It was probably the most “audiophile” piece of stereo equipment I’ve ever owned. At some point, the cartridge and stylus needed to be replaced.

Jeff Conolly — who I knew from the Boston music scene and the restaurant where we both worked — asked me if he could have the old cartridge. I had no idea why. It was a broken piece of equipment. I don’t think it was even compatible with Jeff’s system. But, yeah, sure. I think he just wanted it because it was an oddity and looked a little like a space capsule.

But he really wanted it.

There’s something in that story about the inexplicable quirks and obsessions that drove musician and rock legend Jeff “Monoman” Conolly, who died Friday (July 31) at 69.

Scores of stories have been popping up on social media since Jeff died. Another personal favorite regards one of Jeff’s exacting, exhausting rehearsals with his band Lyres.

“It’s ‘I really want you right now! I really want you right now!’” Jeff kept saying

A bandmember was dropping the word on the final chorus and Jeff kept correcting him. It’s not “Really want you right now,” it’s “I really want you right now.” It was easy enough to drop that first syllable on the endlessly repeated title line of the song, especially on the “response” phrases of that last chorus. But Jeff was having none of it. Lord knows how long that session went on. And this was a rehearsal, not a recording session.

Jeff was known to be a demanding taskmaster, rehearsing his bands relentlessly, orchestrating each musician’s individual parts, working on a single song for days. He liked nightly practice sessions, no matter what the gig calendar looked like. He wanted the musicians to feel like the band wasn’t just a kick, it was a job.

Lyres’ debut 12-inch for Boston label Ace of Hearts, with the single “Buried Alive.”

After Jeff’s death, the word “genius” popped up a few times on social media. And all tributes cited the monomaniacal intensity that gave him his nickname (a name he did not like). I recall a soundcheck at the Rat, where Jeff was working on getting the right sibilant over the system. “Psssshhhh! Pshhsss!” he hissed, spreading his arms wide, indicating — what? The kind of resolution and decay he wanted, perhaps. But this was the Rat, not Symphony Hall. The sound engineer was trying to beg off, but Jeff kept at it.

“It requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to be in that band,” the writer Brett Milano told the Globe’s Mark Shanhan for a story back in March about a fundraiser for Jeff, intended to defray medical expenses for ongoing cancer treatments.

Songwriter and bandleader Johnny Angel (Thrills, Blackjacks) recalled on Facebook that Jeff tried to recruit him to play guitar in his bands, first for DMZ and then Lyres. “I told him [regarding the second invitation, for Lyres] “that the most likely scenario would be him fiddling with my amp as I was playing (which I’d seen him do) and me socking him. Wasn’t gonna work. Didn’t mean I didn’t have the utmost respect for him.”

That respect is everywhere in the social media comments, even from people who professed to dislike Jeff personally. Because the proof was in the pudding. Monoman got results. He pushed those one- and two-chord raveups to the limit, sing-shouting his lyrics in a garage-rock heldentenor, goosed by his Vox Continental keyboard, his tambourine slamming his thigh. I remember asking a friend if he thought — as I did — that Jeff, on the album A Promise Is a Promise (1988), was intentionally singing the first held syllable of the line “I feel good” (that “I” again, in the song “Feel Good”) off pitch against the swell of that Vox major chord to emphasize the ironic despair of the line. My friend, an experienced classical musician, said, “I couldn’t sing that note against that chord.”

Clint Conley, bassist for Mission of Burma and someone who knew Jeff from high school years in Darien, Conn., once told the Boston Phoenix (and I quote from memory here), “No one understands the heart of a rock and roll song better than Monoman.”

Before that fundraising concert, Conley told the Globe’s Shanahan, “I love Jeff to death. . . . But I can say he’s the only person I’ve ever been in a band with that I wanted to strangle.”

The monomania extended to everything. If he made coffee for you at home, it had to be prepared a certain way in his French press coffee maker (I can no longer remember if he preferred the full-boil or near-boil temperature of the water, but I’m sure it made a difference). His attention to his record collection and stereo system is also the stuff of legend. (His nickname also extended to his preference for monaural recordings of his favorite ’60s psych-rock and proto-punk bands.)

And he had that particular personality tick of the true fan-collector: He wanted rarities. Somewhere someone has written about rock fandom being about the sharing of secrets. Jeff knew all the secrets. He wasn’t into Little Richard — he was into Esquerita, the guy who influenced Little Richard. When I interviewed him for a story in the Phoenix, he steered me away from any mention of the influential Nuggets collections of ’60s garage and psych rock. I should reference “Dutch beat music”; one of his heroes was Wally Tax (pronounced “talks”) of the Dutch band the Outsiders, who sang their hit “Touch” as a guest live track on A Promise Is a Promise.

The stories of shambolic Lyres gigs are legion — his firing and re-hiring musicians over and over; his extended, set-ending rants about inadequate stage monitor sound; or his own drunken breakdowns. But Lyres shows — when they clicked — were transcendent rock and roll, and people kept coming back for the magic. They wanted in on Jeff Conolly’s open secret.

Jon Garelick was an arts editor at The Boston Phoenix and is a retired staff member of the Boston Globe Opinion pages. He can be reached at [email protected].