Tribute to Kevin Tyler, aka Conor Savage
I wrote a blog yesterday called “Ships That Pass in the Night,” reminiscing about all of the musicians with whom I have shared shows.
While making the list, I stumbled upon an obit from November 25, 2015, for my friend Kevin Tyler, making the theme more poignant.
I’m crushed.
Kevin Tyler is a beloved Flint musician, known for his stage name Conor Savage. He ran an open mic in Fenton at the Coffee Beanery where many of us got our start.
(Here’s Hannah Fralick playing in 2007!)
Kevin also was a regular performer at the Michigan Renaissance Festival in Holly, a master at performing Celtic music.
Kevin was an early adopter to technology for music, one of the first musicians I knew with a Myspace account, a Youtube channel, and a uStream channel.
He filmed folks playing his open mic and posting them regularly. He was playing online concerts before that was a thing, using uStream.
Here’s a clip Kevin posted of me doing a poor rendition of Radiohead, experimenting with a key too high for my voice. Here’s another moment of Kevin being too kind and letting me play electric guitar (probably too loudly) at his open mic.
I was hanging out with Kevin the week he retired (from Flint GM, if I remember correctly. He was a UAW member). Kevin had just bought a new Taylor guitar, a new video camera, and a new computer. We were sitting at BW3 in Fenton after the open mic, passing our Taylor Guitars back and forth, and he was sharing his excitement about the renewed time he was going to have to dedicate to music now that he was retired.
And Kevin never retired. He just pursued music with a passion and fervor that most of us inspire to maintain.
This made a deep impression on me, as a 20-something-year-old teaching English, barely finding enough time to do music myself…Kevin seem to breath, bleed, and exhale music where ever he went, even before “retirement.” How does one do that?
I’m not sure if he ever sounded better then when he sang with his daughter, Jamie.
He lived a full life, and Kevin is going to be missed at the upcoming Renaissance Festival, St Patrick’s Day pubs in Flint, and the musical corners of the world that he touched. He influenced a lot of us Michigan musicians in the Flint area. He taught me the chords to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; and my guitar sheds some tears with this late news.
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