Dead Boys and Rocket From The Tombs Guitarist Cheetah Chrome Dies at 71

Cheetah Chrome, the guitarist for Cleveland punk originators Rocket From The Tombs and Dead Boys, has passed away. The Dead Boys' social media accounts shared the news that Chrome died on Sunday. No cause of death has been reported. Chrome was 71.

Cheetah Chrome was born Eugene Richard O’Connor in Cleveland. In 1974, when he was 19, he joined Rocket From The Tombs, an anarchic Cleveland band that was influenced by the Stooges and the MC5. Rocket From The Tombs never released anything while they were active, but a bunch of their music was reissued years later, after various band members went on to prominence in other bands. (Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas, another ex-Rocket From The Tombs member, died last year .) In the '00s, Chrome spent a few years touring with a reunited version of the band, and they released an album called Barfly in 2011.

Rocket From The Tombs broke up in 1974, the same year that Chrome joined the band. Immediately, he got together with fellow ex-members Stiv Bators and Johnny Blitz to form a new band that was initially called Frankenstein before changing their name to Dead Boys. Thanks to encouragement from kindred spirit Johnny Ramone, Dead Boys moved to New York in 1976, and they became a key part of the early punk scene at venues like CBGB. In both look and sound, Dead Boys were pretty much the ideal prototypical punk band. Their perfectly titled debut album Young, Loud And Snotty came out on Sire Records in 1977, and it opened with "Sonic Reducer," originally a Rocket From The Tombs song, which has endured as a punk standard.

Dead Boys broke up shortly after the release of their second album, 1978's We Have Come For Your Children . That record ended with "Ain't It Fun," another track that started off as a Rocket From The Tombs song and eventually gained legendary status. After Johnny Blitz was stabbed in a 1979 street fight, the Dead Boys performed with John Belushi at a benefit, but they didn't last long after that.

After the Dead Boys' breakup, Cheetah Chrome played shows with a few other bands, including his own Cheetah Chrome And The Casualties, and he played on Ronnie Spector's 1980 solo debut Siren . He backed up musicians like Nico and GG Allin and released some solo albums. He published a memoir in 2010. Stiv Baors died in 1990, and Dead Boys reunited a few times in the '10s, with singer Jake Hout taking his place. In 2024, Jake Hout quit the band , claiming that it was because Chrome wanted to do a Dead Boys 50th-anniversary tour with an AI-synthesized version of Bators' voice.

Below, check out some of Cheetah Chrome's work.

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2511290/dead-boys-guitarist-cheetah-chrome-dead-at-71/news/)._