Oh, I mean, we didn’t know. Obviously, back then we still had rock stars. We
never really -- I would say yeah, we wouldn’t have turned it down. But we
always thought ourselves more of like a Stooges, MC5 kind of, you know, alsoran.
Like an underground success?
Why?
Kind of. We always kind of sounded...like we are. But the record company
-- we were in it for the long haul, but the thing is that after a couple of years,
Seymour pulled the old divide and conquer on us. And there was a certain -I’m not gonna name names here, but certain members were going, “Oh, okay,
we should go in a more power pop direction.” And I will say that Stiv was one of
those guys, because you’ve heard Disconnected, but there was other guys that
were too. And I was never one of them. Power pop, if it’s worthy songs, fine. But
to go get matching suits and crap? No, they don’t make those suits in my size.
No, I wasn’t gonna do that. To me, it was a band wagon. All those things they
were trying to do had been done, and to tell you the truth, we weren’t as good
at it. The harmonies, we didn’t have. We were good at the hard stuff. And it
didn’t interest me. So that was where it kind of fell apart for me.
We’re big fans!
Do you like Disconnected?
I usually go off on my fans, I usually get violent when they try to interview me,
yeah.
It’s okay. I like it better now than I did when it came out. It’s a little upsetting
because some of the stuff that got done with that Georgie Harrison, whatever
his name was -- George joined the Dead Boys after I quit, when I broke my
wrist and it took six weeks to recover. During that time, I was getting paid for
the gigs, he was filling in -- and wearing a flannel shirt on stage. (Laughs) So
I didn’t tour, and basically they were going out and doing gigs, and I’ve got a
roadie coming around and giving me cash at the end of the week, while I’m
just sitting around Chelsea Hotel taking drugs. And that was a thing where a
couple guys in the band started plotting -- “Well, this guy can play the songs!”
So they kinda saw a power play, and they took it.
For his work with the Dead Boys and Rocket from the Tombs, Cheetah Chrome
has easily secured a place as one of the greatest guitarists and songwriters in
punk rock history. We met up with Cheetah for a drink just before SXSW, and he
shared some stories with us.
--Miranda Fisher
I’m a little bit nervous. I usually don’t get nervous, but…
I guess we were right to be nervous, then. So, let’s just go kind of
chronologically here...“Sonic Reducer” is a song that you wrote with David
Thomas in Rocket from the Tombs. And that kind of became the Dead Boys’
best-known song.
Yeah.
How did David Thomas feel about that?
He hated it. Well, he always hated -- he did not like the Dead Boys at all. He
thought we were just nasty little pieces of work. To him, we were commercial.
David sees himself as quite the artiste, and he loves the pretension and
all that crap that goes along with that. I mean, he loves it! He knows he’s
pretentious, he don’t care, he embraces it. That’s why we’re still friends, ‘cause
there’s nothing phony about him. The Dead Boys version of “Soni