Cheetah Chrome, a snarling, red-haired guitarist who kicked out the jams for two of the earliest and most influential punk bands in America, Rocket From the Tombs and the Dead Boys, died on Sept. 13 at 71.
His ex-wife, Anna O’Connor, confirmed the death but did not provide further details.
Rocket From the Tombs never recorded any songs, never toured widely and broke up after less than a year. But in that brief time, it laid down a whole new approach to rock, tapping deep veins of raw energy and emotion with nihilistic lyrics, driving guitar and anarchic stage shows.
The music critic Lester Bangs called the group “the original legendary underground rock band.”
Propelled by Cheetah’s hard-charging guitar work and drawing influence from proto-punk bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, Rocket From the Tombs burst onto the Cleveland music scene in late 1974.
“Our sound wasn’t preconceived,” Cheetah told The Chicago Tribune in 2003. “It just erupted when we started playing together. We knew we sounded odd compared to mainstream rock, which was getting stale.”
The band drew the attention of avant-garde groups charting a similar course in New York City, and in July 1975, it opened at a Cleveland show headlined by one of them, Television.
As the urbane New Yorkers saw to their horror, the band members were as chaotic as their music. True to the punk ethos they were pioneering, their copious drinking and drug use fueled fights onstage and off. Cheetah fell on his back during the opening song and played the rest of the set supine.
“A lot of very nasty things got said — everything came to a head that night,” he wrote in the liner notes for a 2002 collection of Rocket From the Tombs songs, “The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs.”
The band played one more show and then broke up. Two of its members, the singer David Thomas and the guitarist Peter Laughner, formed the band Pere Ubu, while Cheetah and Johnny Madansky, known as Johnny Blitz, formed the Dead Boys (originally called Frankenstein) with the singer Steven Bator, known as Stiv Bators.
In 1977, Joey Ramone, the lead singer for the Ramones, persuaded the Dead Boys to move to New York, where a diverse scene of groundbreaking acts was forming around the music club CBGB.
The Dead Boys included several Rocket From the Tombs songs in its repertoire, including “Ain’t It Fun,” “What Love Is” and “Sonic Reducer.”
With Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB, as the group’s manager, the Dead Boys became a mainstay of New York music in the late 1970s, even if it sounded different from more polished acts on the scene, like Blondie and Television.
“They had their own following,” Richard Lloyd, who played guitar for Television, said in an interview. “They were potent, and people loved them.”
The Dead Boys released two albums, the seminal punk record “Young, Loud and Snotty” (1977) and “We Have Come for Your Children” (1978), both on Sire Records.
But the raging fire that was punk music burned out quickly, and by 1979, Sire was pushing the Dead Boys to chart a new path and even change its name. Cheetah refused, and the band split up in 1980, leaving behind enough recordings and memories to inspire a generation of rockers, including Guns N’ Roses, the Beastie Boys and Pearl Jam.
“I think our mentality when we first came out was more like the five of us against the world,” Cheetah told the magazine Goldmine in 2008. “We would have killed for each other at the beginning. And we would have killed each other at the end.”
Eugene Richard O’Connor was born on Feb. 18, 1955, in Cleveland, where his mother, Janice O’Connor, worked in a department store. His father was not a part of their lives, and Cheetah never revealed his name publicly.
In his 2010 memoir, “Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale From the Front Lines of Punk Rock,” he wrote that he always hated the name Eugene and adopted “Cheetah” after his speed on the school running track. Chrome, he figured, was a natural surname.
He was working in a lighting factory in 1974 when he answered a want ad for a guitarist that had been placed by Mr. Thomas and the founding members of Rocket From the Tombs.
Six years later, after the breakup of the Dead Boys, Cheetah settled into a career as a solo and studio musician, first in New York and then Nashville. He also played in reunions of Rocket From the Tombs and the Dead Boys.
He and the Dead Boys were planning a tour next year, timed to the 50th anniversary of the release of “Young, Loud and Snotty.”
He married Anna Kennedy in 2001. They divorced in 2016. He is survived by their son, Rogan.
In his memoir and in interviews, Cheetah spoke openly about his struggles with substance abuse during the peak of his musical celebrity, but he remained proud of the music he made.
“We didn’t realize at the time that we were one of the first punk bands,” he wrote in his 2002 liner notes. “We just played what we felt.”
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