What can you say about someone like Cheetah Chrome, the Cleveland born-and-raised guitarist for legendary punk band The Dead Boys who passed away on September 13 at the age of 71? Even in a genre like punk, packed with outsized, outrageous personalities, Cheetah stood out as one-of-a-kind, instantly recognizable with his fiery red hair and pink face. Everyone who crossed paths with him had a Cheetah story.
Cheetah — born Eugene O’Connor, a name he never used after getting into rock & roll until a dispute with Facebook forced him to — first hit the Cleveland scene with a brief stint in Rocket from the Tombs (who morphed into Pere Ubu), and the pre-Dead Boys semi-metal band Frankenstein, which paired him with future Dead Boys vocalist Stiv Bators.
After causing mayhem in the local scene, the Dead Boys decamped for New York where they stumbled on until 1980 (save for periodic reunion tours), released two albums for Warner subsidiary Sire Records, did too many drugs, and got into a lot of trouble. That era left Chrome with a 20-year drug habit that he finally kicked after getting married and moving to Nashville in the mid 1990s.
When Bators died in June 1990 after being hit by a taxi in Paris, a memorial show was held at Cleveland’s Babylon-a-Go-Go (then located across the street from the West Side Market). Cheetah, drunk out of his mind, spent the entire night picking fights with others in the club, and heckling the speakers and musicians onstage. Several remarked that it felt like the wrong Dead Boy had died. He also threw a bottle at my head (I told you we all have stories). Luckily, as drunk as he was, his aim was bad and it shattered on the wall.
In 2010, he published his autobiography Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale from the Front Lines of Punk, entirely (if unintentionally) self-written, no ghost writer. It was a vividly eloquent story of Chrome’s journey through the underbelly of punk rock, neither boastful nor apologetic, and his recall of events that happened during his drugging years was astonishing. It’s one of the most clear-eyed rock & roll biographies I’ve ever read.. It’s out of print; find it if you can.
While Cheetah became less contentious once heroin was off the table, there were still stories. Many remember the insult-filled exchange on Facebook with Mike Hudson, the frontman for Cleveland late 70s punk rockers the Pagans, who passed away in 2017. Presumably, they are going at it now in some type of afterlife that looks a lot like vintage CBGB’s, or maybe Cleveland’s Pirate’s Cove.