Cheetah Chrome is a bad-ass. That’s for sure. His new autobiography “Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale”, spends most of its 350 plus pages detailing his mis-adventures as a teengenerate through his Punk Rock “stardom” era and the subsequent dark days of junkiedom.
However, despite his notorious reputation, “A Dead Boy’s Tale” reads as a friendly, brutally honest and cautionary tale of a guy that was made for the era he was born into.
His friendship with fellow Dead Boy Stiv Bators is given top billing, as the opening chapter details his learning of Bators death in 1990.
The book than flashes back into the following template: Cheetah’s formative years, The Dead Boy Years and the obligatory downward spiral (with redemption).
Cheetah’s youth in Cleveland is rather routine (that is, for a future criminal). Combining a hard scrabble lower middle class single parent upbringing with episodes of juvenile delinquency, drug abuse and petty crime, the former Eugene O’Connor has his life saved by rock n roll when his mother buys him a guitar. From there it’s a life of bands, alcohol, booze and mishaps; as he joins the legendary Rocket From The Tombs and later forms the Dead Boys.
Cheetah tells many tales of insane and assholian behavior, especially during the period he describes in the book as “Dead Man’s Tale’s”. Through violence, overdoses and rampant destruction, Cheetah opens the vaults on what it was like to be a (albeit nominal) rock star in the 1970’s, with carte blanche to misbehave spectacularly. The Dead Boys were a brutal, nasty and violent band; and Chrome relates many examples.
Although it might seem like braggadocio, the reader does not get that feeling. Rather, Chrome is looking back almost nostalgically on the era. Later, as his life decays into heroin addiction, he makes no apologies for his fall into a “living death”. In fact, Chrome advises, if there is one thing you take away from his book, it’s that heroin is horrible and should be avoided at all costs.
Chrome’s style of writing is direct and open. It feels more like you’re sitting with a buddy telling stories than it does a standard autobiography. There’s no glory in the pages, and at no point is his life one the reader would want to emulate. His survival and middle aged contentment as a father, husband and (with The Batusi’s) a musician seems to surprise him as much as anyone.
Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale fits nicely in the punk rock bookshelf along with other books reflecting on the time, such as the Punk Rock classic “Please Kill Me” and the Iggy Pop biography “Open Up And Bleed”.
