US punk guitarist Cheetah Chrome is dead: loud, evil and doomed

Cleveland, Ohio, was just beginning to become the main theater of the US Rust Belt in the 1970s. The industrial city was already in economic decline, was losing residents and had to watch seemingly helplessly as the steel mills closed one after the other.

Perhaps that is precisely why the economic misery inspired the local youth to be more drastic: like a kite, Cleveland spat out the original soup of punk and related amphetamine-containing guitar saws: Pere Ubu, The Cramps, The Dead Boys, The Pagans. Its mysterious beginnings lie right here in the ruined city on Lake Erie.

“Everything that ever came from Cleveland was doomed,” says the website of the band Rocket from the Tombs, in which David Thomas, Peter Laughner and a certain Cheetah Chrome played between 1974 and 1976. Gene O'Connor grew up in a high-rise housing estate in Cleveland and called himself Cheetah Chrome as a guitarist in order to at least be able to mentally escape the misery.

Cheetah is what DC comics often called the female villains, ultra-fast human-animal monsters with tails, superpowers and a hard punch. In any case, Cheetah Chrome was the perfect pseudonym for a guitarist whose attack on the ax sounds like a technical knockout in boxing feels: the hardest pace, without regard for losses, boom!

Around 1975, Cheetah Chrome joined forces with musician friends who had similar-sounding penny-book stage names: Jimmy Zero, Johnny Blitz, Stiv Bators and Jeff Magnum formed the Dead Boys with Cheetah Chrome and, after moving to New York and chaotic concert tours, released two fearless albums that are among the most galvanized that the punk canon has ever produced.

Although the sound straddles back in time to raunch 'n' roll, the Dead Boys stagger happily forward to their own doom. “Young, Loud and Snotty” and “We’ve come for your Children” each contain songs that Cheetah Chrome had already composed during the time of Rocket from the Tombs, “Sonic Reducer” and “Ain’t it Fun”, both high-speed classics that continue the legacy of the Stooges and escalate in terms of annoyance and volume.

The fact that this semi-legendary rock 'n' roll existence took a toll was noticeable in the early death of Stiv Bators in 1990 and in the fact that Cheetah Chrome was rather inconsistent with reunion projects and sideman jobs after the Dead Boys disbanded. On the other hand, he persevered bravely throughout the decades and took his role as a villain seriously.

US guitarist Chris Brokaw (including Come and Codeine) reports in a critical appraisal how he once auditioned for Cheetah Chrome as a young artist. Chrome swooped into the practice room with a huge guitar case with a “Liquefied Meth” sticker on it. When he got a Gibson Explorer out of it, he strictly refused to play Dead Boys songs. It was supposed to be cover versions of Stones songs, but the audition fell through.

Cheetah Chrome died on Sunday at the age of 71, but is remembered as the red-haired Welsh devil of protopunk.