A few more acquaintances and friends from those Max's days just popped into my head. One of the greatest characters I ever met was Cheetah Chrome. He, with his glowing red hair, would have great verbal jousts with his wife who also glowed under the darkened bar lights. Sometimes they¹d be at opposite ends of the bar yelling at each other. Mighty couple squabbles.
The first time I saw Cheetah was when he was playing guitar with the Dead Boys. They often played the weekend headline gigs at CBGBs. I finally caught up with one of those shows, and it was rocking. Great straight ahead rock 'n' roll with a dark and twisted bent to it. The band was ugly as hell too. They¹d put on this garish green face paint to highlight their faces and give that hint of bruise and decay.
About the same time, a friend at Bard, a wealthy Westchester kid (who turned me on to much of what was happening in the punk scene in NYC circa 1976 with his mighty stereo system with the largest speakers I have ever scene for a home stereo and all inside a tiny single dorm room. I think it may have been the first and only time I heard Metal Machine Music (which I love even if I haven¹t played it since) in its entirety. He had some cool Patti Smith bootlegs and some early punk hits like New Rose by the Damned. I couldn¹t say what he turned me on to from this late view, but I¹m sure it was a lot.) was singing in a most profoundly ugly manner about Amphetamine (it makes you mean). The guy was already odd looking. His spine was slightly off kilter, a slightly askew S, and he would accentuate its unusual bow for the show. Like the Dead Boys wherein Stiv Bators would hang himself at the end of each set twice a night over a three night stint, my friend had a quite visceral gimmick. He would contort about the stage in a straight jacket. The band even gigged a couple times at Max¹s. The guitar player and the bass player were two attractive young men from Boston. I think they may have had some love relationship, but I don¹t know for sure.
Anyway, to bring up why I digress, the guitar player ended up playing with Cheetah (and he was good). (The bass player started a band that put out a couple slabs of vinyl under the name the Flies). I¹m not sure how long my friend played with Cheetah. I do remember visiting all three of them in their huge loft apartment pretty far East into Alphabet Land in the East Village. It was a beautiful apartments, the beginnings of the gentrification of the area. It was also only two to three blocks from copping central: 11th between Avenues B and C. And the occasions surrounding my visits complemented that coincidence. Like John, during those visits I saw the quiet side of Cheetah and could see the sweet soul clearer. Later encounters with Cheetah were all indirect. After having a surprising Bard connection, he had a surprising Minneapolis connection. Being a part of the scene here in the Twin Cities since the mid- eighties, I crossed paths with musicians who ended up playing in successful tours of Continental Europe with Cheetah. Sonny Vincent, who I may or may not have met over the years became a close compatriot with Cheetah during the late eighties. Cheetah even appeared on one of Sonny¹s band¹s (a mid 70¹s NYC punk influenced band called Shotgun Rationale or Shotgun something or other) LPs. The songs he plays his mean old guitar on are by far the best. Sonny brought in some of the people he knew from Minneapolis , his hometown, and they played together on the European tours. Along with a guy I knew a little, a clerk from a local record store I frequented, was a fairly close friend, Jamey, who had played in a co-worker¹s (at Cheapo Records in St. Paul where I worked and still work (except now I work a store in Minneapolis)) band called the Leatherwoods. Cheetah¹s unfortunate alcoholism whipping him into the wild beast rumor has it would get him pretty beat up in his old home town of Cleveland some time in the early nineties. I hear he¹s now gigging in Nashville in a band called L.A.M.F.!! I didn¹t know any of the band nearly as well as I knew Cheetah (which in itself was not a lot). I remember bumping into Stiv at a friend of mine¹s apartment, an upstairs waitress who had also at one time had Walter Lure over.. (In fact the last time I talked to John he mentioned seeing her in Chicago (which, as my wont, I responded to clumsily)). It looked as if after a night together Stiv was heading out into the Afternoon. Didn¹t learn much from the encounter except perhaps a confident cool, the dark cool of the lower quarter of Manhattan generating from his presence. In my early days at Max¹s, when it was my watering hole, I met this sleek petite black girl who fascinated me. She was young and wiry and not a little bit wild. I know I didn¹t impress her with my place which was at the time a room in the George Washington on Lexington and 23rd Street. It was a dingy little (to say the least) room. On the other hand her place was really cool, a fairly good sized apartment which looked out on the Chelsea Hotel on the Westside of 23rd. She had some roommates in (of course) a punk band called Slasher or something. The lead singer would cut lines into his chest a la Sid and Iggy as his gimmick. One Max¹s appearance he dug in too deep and cut some major artery and nearly died (actually I don¹t know if he survived or not. Max¹s had a lot of death in it.). The ambulance took him off in a stretcher.
From The Johnny Thunders Cyber Lounge
Last modified: June 10, 1998