JACK CONNERS’ PERFECT WORLD The master of so much northern Michigan music is still playing and producing, despite cancer diagnosis
By Ross Boissoneau You might not have heard Jack Conners. But if you’ve ever attended a live show at Northwestern Michigan College or Glen Arbor’s Manitou Music Festival, if you’ve listened to Interlochen Public Radio or albums by the likes of Peter Erskine or Jeff Haas, you’ve heard his work. In a perfect world, Conners today would be happy, healthy, and enjoying his retirement while working the control panel at his private home studio in Traverse City, Perfect World Studios. He would be ready to record music by any number of musician friends, play bass, and teach students the ins and outs of both digital and analog recording. Unfortunately, the world outside his control panel isn’t perfect. While he continues to play and share his expertise with students and professionals alike, Conners also continues to battle cancer. “I was diagnosed in 2019 with stage 4 lung cancer,” he says. “That was tough.” Tough doesn’t begin to describe it. A persistent cough led him to the doctor in January 2019, and he was told a month later it was cancer. What’s more, it had already spread throughout his body. “It was complicated — tumors in the brain, the gut, bones, virtually everywhere.” He went through a series of treatments,
including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. They helped. “I felt [the cancer] in my hip and couldn’t walk. Radiation brought almost instant relief,” he says of one part of this journey. But it wasn’t until he qualified for an immunotherapy treatment that doctors were really able to arrest the growth of the cancer cells. “My doctor said he’s never seen anybody who it worked better on. So now I’m maintaining the immunotherapy. I’ll take it,” he says.
the guy with the PA, mics, tape recorder. I could do sound on sound, could record more than one track.” That predilection led him to Baltimore after graduation. A school there offered a six-week course in recording engineering. “That’s where I really got the bug,” Conners says. He did so well that after successfully completing the course he was offered a job at the school’s studio. He continued to do live sound, as he’d done throughout his career. “I did shows in
“I decided I wasn’t going to be a rock star when John Entwistle died and Pete Townsend didn’t call.” REWIND Conners grew up in Prescott, near Standish and Tawas on the northeastern side of Lower Michigan. He started playing guitar at age 12 or so, met some friends, and started a band. “The bass player wasn’t very good, and I replaced him [when I was] 16. I loved [the bass].” While holding down the bottom end, Conners also typically provided the band with its sound reinforcement. “I was always
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Baltimore, Philadelphia — the Commodores, Eddie Kendricks, a lot of Black artists around the region,” Conners says. He never dropped his bass for long though, often picking it up to play in the same sessions where he was working the board. “I decided I wasn’t going to be a rock star when John Entwistle died, and Pete Townsend didn’t call,” Conners says slyly. “I liked sessions, engineering, and playing bass. I did a lot of radio jingles.”
Conners parlayed his mastery of playing and producing music into bigger gigs, in bigger music towns. He began working in studios in Nashville and California, where he helped install and demonstrate the large mixing consoles at studios such as Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Disney. THE RETURN He eventually made his way back to his home state, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Mary. He worked at Interlochen Public Radio in the summer and eventually was hired there full-time; he served as chief engineer and head of recording at the station. Conners’ skills made him the region’s most sought-after sound man, and he delivered a lot locally, providing live mixing year after year for some of the region’s popular live shows — Paul Keller at the top of the hill at The Homestead, at the Glen Arbor-based Manitou Music Festival, and for Leelanau Uncaged. After he landed a position as auditorium manager at NMC, he left Interlochen but continued to teach students at both institutions and eventually began booking the artists for both the renowned Dennos Museum music series and the Manitou Music Festival. Despite the demands of booking, engineering, recording, and teaching, Conners continued to play as well, with
