Punk & Hardcore
Cheetah Chrome died on Sunday 13 September, aged seventy-one. His Dead Boys bandmates announced it on social media. No cause has been given.
«We are incredibly saddened to announce the passing of our beloved friend and bandmate Cheetah Chrome,» they wrote. «He was a true original, an architect of the punk movement. A one-man hurricane tearing through the musical landscape with ferocious riffs and manic energy. And beyond all that, he was a really sweet guy who loved rock and roll.»
«Rest in peace, dear Cheetah Chrome,» added Duff McKagan, of Guns N’ Roses. «Your playing and your guitar attack taught me so much about tension and precision, within punk and beyond it.»
He was born Eugene Richard O’Connor, in Cleveland, in 1951. Between 1974 and 1975 he played in Rocket from the Tombs with David Thomas and Peter Laughner, a band that never released a record while it existed and that half the scene traces back to. With singer Stiv Bators and drummer Johnny Blitz he put together the Dead Boys, who signed to Sire and released two records: «Young, Loud and Snotty» (1977), home to «Sonic Reducer», and a second before splitting in 1979.
In 2003 he re-formed Rocket from the Tombs with Thomas, with Television’s Richard Lloyd taking the place of Laughner, who’d died in 1977. Thomas died in April 2025. Chrome published the memoir «Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale From The Front Lines of Punk Rock» in 2010, was creative director of Nashville’s Plowboy label, and put out the EP «Solo» in 2013. He’s survived by his wife, Anna, and a fourteen-year-old son, Rogan.
Text by Marçal Bonastre