Cheetah Chrome, the guitarist widely regarded as one of the architects of American punk, has died at the age of 71.

Born Eugene Richard O’Connor, Cheetah Chrome died on Sunday, September 13, in Nashville. He is survived by his wife, Anna, and his son, Rogan.

Cheetah Chrome was born and raised in Cleveland, and by the mid-1970s he was standing at the very centre of the movement that would become American punk.

In 1974, he co-founded Rocket From The Tombs, the proto-punk band whose ranks also produced Pere Ubu, one of the most influential outfits to emerge from Cleveland’s underground scene.

From there, Cheetah Chrome went on to form the Dead Boys, the band with which he would become most closely associated. Alongside frontman Stiv Bators, the Dead Boys became fixtures of the legendary New York club CBGB, helping shape the sound and attitude of the emerging punk scene.

The Dead Boys’ 1977 debut album, Young, Loud And Snotty, remains a landmark of American punk, featuring songs like “Sonic Reducer” and “Ain’t It Fun”, both largely driven by Cheetah Chrome’s guitar work. Nearly fifty years on, those tracks still carry the same raw force that made them essential listening in the first place.

Rocket From The Tombs, the band Cheetah Chrome helped form in Cleveland in 1974, only lasted a short time in its original run, but its influence on the wider punk and post-punk movement proved enormous.

Members of the band went on to form both the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, effectively splitting one Cleveland outfit into two of the most important groups to come out of the American underground.

That Cleveland scene fed directly into New York’s CBGB, where Cheetah Chrome and the Dead Boys found their spiritual home. Sharing bills with bands like the Ramones, Television and Blondie, the Dead Boys brought a rawer, more confrontational energy to the club, and Cheetah Chrome’s playing was central to that reputation.

At a time when punk was becoming increasingly mannered and art-schooled on both sides of the Atlantic, Cheetah Chrome stood apart as the genuine article. He was a guitarist who played as though his amp was on fire, seemingly unconcerned with who was watching or what anyone thought.

The Dead Boys weren’t performing danger for an audience. With Cheetah Chrome at the centre of the band, they simply were it, and that authenticity is a large part of why the band’s legacy has endured for so long.

Cheetah Chrome never stopped working. In the decades that followed the Dead Boys, he released a string of solo records, continuing to write and perform under his own name while remaining closely tied to the punk community that had shaped him.

He also took on a creative director role at Nashville’s Plowboy Records, putting his decades of experience to work behind the scenes as well as on stage, helping guide the label’s output and championing artists in the same spirit that had defined his own career.

In 2010, Cheetah Chrome published his memoir, A Dead Boy’s Tale From The Front Lines Of Punk Rock, offering fans a first-hand account of the scene he helped build. The book reads exactly like he played: loud, honest, and without filler, giving readers an unflinching look at the early days of American punk from someone who lived every minute of it.

The memoir became essential reading for anyone wanting to understand punk’s true origins, offering a version of events unfiltered by nostalgia or myth-making. Cheetah Chrome’s willingness to tell that story honestly, warts and all, only added to his standing as one of the scene’s most trusted voices.

Across his career, Cheetah Chrome’s influence stretched far beyond the Dead Boys and Rocket From The Tombs. Generations of punk and garage rock guitarists have cited his playing as a touchstone, and the songs he helped write remain staples of the genre to this day.

Over the years, Cheetah Chrome also worked alongside a wide range of collaborators outside the Dead Boys, lending his guitar work to other projects and continuing to record new material well into his later years. He remained an active and visible presence in the punk community, playing shows, giving interviews and mentoring younger musicians drawn to the sound he helped invent.

Cheetah Chrome’s death marks the loss of one of the last surviving figures from punk’s first wave, a period that reshaped rock music and whose influence can still be heard across countless bands today.

His combination of raw talent, defiance and unmistakable style helped define what American punk sounded like, and what it stood for.

For MNPR Magazine and for punk fans everywhere, Cheetah Chrome’s passing is a reminder of just how much that first wave of American punk shaped everything that followed, from hardcore to garage rock to the countless bands still drawing on the blueprint the Dead Boys laid down almost fifty years ago.

Tributes have begun to pour in from across the music world, with fans and fellow musicians remembering Cheetah Chrome as a true original whose contribution to punk rock cannot be overstated.

Many of those tributes have pointed to the same qualities that defined Cheetah Chrome throughout his life: an unwillingness to compromise, a fierce loyalty to the music, and a guitar style that never lost its edge, even decades after punk first broke into the mainstream.

Cheetah Chrome is survived by his wife, Anna, and his son, Rogan. He leaves behind a body of work, in the Dead Boys, Rocket From The Tombs and his own solo material, that will continue to influence punk rock for generations to come.