One riff made Cheetah Chrome's place in punk unmistakable: the steel-edged figure that opens the Dead Boys' 1977 recording of "Sonic Reducer." Chrome, the guitarist and songwriter born Eugene Richard O'Connor, died on September 13, 2026, at 71. He played guitar in Rocket from the Tombs and became a founder of the Dead Boys, bands that carried Cleveland's first punk eruption into New York and onto records that continued to define the form.

Chrome was born in Cleveland on February 18, 1955. In the autumn of 1974, he joined Rocket from the Tombs, a brief workshop for songs and musicians who later followed different paths through punk. The group tested its music on Cleveland stages. In 1975 it opened Piccadilly Club shows for Television and Patti Smith, then played its farewell performance that August.

By 1976, Chrome and drummer Johnny Blitz had joined singer Stiv Bators, guitarist Jimmy Zero, and bassist Jeff Magnum in the Dead Boys. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives identifies that lineup as a product of Rocket from the Tombs and places it within Cleveland's first wave of punk. The new band took the force of its hometown scene to the Bowery. CBGB founder Hilly Kristal recalled the Dead Boys arriving in the fall of 1976, when Joey Ramone directed his attention to the Cleveland group. Kristal heard the apparent contradiction that powered them: raw, high-energy spectacle delivered by what he called disciplined musicians.

That discipline mattered most when Chrome's guitar cut through the commotion. "Sonic Reducer" did not merely introduce the Dead Boys' sound; its opening figure gave generations of players a compact lesson in tension and release. The Austin Chronicle later described the 1977 track as an instant classic, singling out Chrome's riff and solo around Bators' vocal. Young, Loud and Snotty, released that year, put the song at the center of the band's debut. We Have Come for Your Children followed in 1978.

Chrome understood that music as the product of a place and a circle of people, not simply a style label. Looking back on CBGB in a 2014 interview with the Houston Chronicle, he said, "It was a very productive music period. There was a whole sense of community. It was a movement." The same interview connected the Dead Boys' sound to the industrial environments of Cleveland and England, with the Stooges and MC5 among the music that informed it. Chrome's guitar retained that hard-city clarity even when his work moved outside the band.

After the Dead Boys' original run ended, Chrome remained active in New York, playing with the Stilettos and leading Cheetah Chrome and the Casualties. His instrument also entered a different corner of rock history through Ronnie Spector's Siren. The album, released in 1980 and produced by Genya Ravan, credited Chrome on guitar.

Nashville eventually became Chrome's home and the setting for a second professional life. He had lived there for nearly 18 years by 2014, when he was working as head of A&R and a staff producer at Plowboy Records. The role put the veteran guitarist behind other artists' sessions. He told the Nashville Scene, "I really do enjoy the production end of things. I enjoy being in the studio and I love watching songs come together." His stated method was direct: preserve the band's own sound, offer ideas, and avoid treating the musicians as subordinates.

The unfinished business of Chrome's first band also called him back. In 2003, he reunited Rocket from the Tombs with David Thomas and Craig Bell, joined by Richard Lloyd and Steve Mehlman. The new lineup recorded songs the original group had left undocumented in the studio, issuing them as Rocket Redux. Barfly, an album of new material, followed in 2011. Those records connected the Cleveland experiments of the mid-1970s to musicians who could finally hear the band as more than a rumor passed among collectors.

Chrome kept finding new forms for the same body of experience. He and New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain formed the Batusis and released a self-titled EP in 2010. That November, Voyageur Press published Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy's Tale from the Front Lines of Punk Rock, his account of the musicians, clubs, records, and journeys he had known. Rupert Grint portrayed him in the 2013 film CBGB, and Chrome himself appeared briefly in the movie.

Also in 2013, Plowboy released Solo, Chrome's first studio collection under his own name. The seven-song EP joined material from a 1996 Woodstock session produced by Ravan with later Nashville recordings. Tracks that had waited years for release sat beside newer work, while "Sharky" gave Chrome room to lead with an instrumental. In 2017, the Dead Boys returned to their debut again with a 40th-anniversary tour and the rerecording Still Snotty: Young, Loud and Snotty at 40.

When Chrome died, his bandmates described him through both his work and his character. In the statement quoted by Variety, the Dead Boys said, "Cheetah was a true original, an architect of the punk rock movement." The description fit a musician whose career linked rooms in Cleveland and on the Bowery with later studios, stages, books, and reunions.

Chrome's enduring record is audible in the opening seconds of "Sonic Reducer," in the two Dead Boys studio albums, and in the Rocket from the Tombs songs finally recorded decades after they were written. It also runs through Siren, Solo, his memoir, and the records he helped other musicians make in Nashville. Together, those works preserve the sharp attack and restless curiosity that carried Eugene O'Connor from Cleveland into punk's permanent vocabulary.