Five minutes into my first-ever meeting with the Dead Boys, and already I have an angle, a metaphorical hook for my story on the band: scars. The Dead Boys, Cleveland's own incisive contribution to the global village of the New Wave, are into scars. Not that their publicity hadn't promised me as much—Dead Boys fans have reportedly made a practice of etching their heroes' arms with cigarette burns, in punk salute—but when I'm suddenly confronted with the mass of scar tissue that passes as Stiv Bators' upper lip, dangling rather ominously over my Heineken, the surprising reality of the hype hits home.

We're dining at an atmospheric place just off Gramercy Park in lower Manhattan, and Sire Records publicist Janis Schacht has just introduced me to Dead Boys Central, to the songwriting, image-making nucleus of the band: vocalist Bators, lead guitarist Cheetah Chrome, and rhythm guitarist Jimmy Zero. Jimmy, sitting at the other end of the table, beneath a giant sailfish stuffed into a comic, frozen leap, picks up on the unspoken cue of Bators' scarred lip. "My father," Jimmy announced prophetically, "had a hernia operation in 1951. Whenever we'd go to the beach, he's show off this big scar on his gut."

"Hey I can't believe you're from CREEM, you're so normal. -Cheetah Chrome"

Before Zero can expound on this fascinating bit of evidence that Dead Boyism may indeed be congenital, Cheetah Chrome is ripping open his Cub Scout uniform shirt to reveal a pair of wicked-looking scars in the center of his torso. Cheetah's impromptu strip has snatched him a quick victory in this first round of the disfigurement sweepstakes, but not before I've noted that some of the Dead Boys have fought some pitched battles with ol' Kid Acne over the years, too. Scar bright, first scar I see tonight ...

I could go ahead now, and cite the facial and psychic scars of youth as a prime cause of later punk behavior, I could tell you how the Dead Boys' teen years coincided with the pathless void of early 70's rock (the Dead Boys then hopelessly isolated Stooges and MC5 fanatics, beaten by the nuns at school by day, ignored by the Anglophile Cleveland rock establishment at night), but I know that you aware CREEMsters haven't come here for that kind of cheesy adolescent psychology. Besides, with punk rapidly becoming unfashionable with the rock tastemakers, both as a term and as an attitude, the Dead Boys aren't so sure they are punks, at least in the sense the media has been yapping about punks, any longer.

"I've been wearing this dog collar for seven or eight years, ever since I first saw Iggy," says orange-haired Cheetah, fingering his trademark ornament. "Well, not this collar, I lost the first one, but I got another like it." I'm about to suggest that Cheetah add a pet-I.D. tag to his collar to prevent this one from getting away, but Jimmy Zero is also responding to my general question about the future of the Dead Boys with the passing of punk: "Well, it's a style. I'm in style in my clothes now, and I'll still be style two years from now, whatever's going on then."

Jimmy seems uncomfortable with Bob Christgau's recent Consumer Guide description of the Dead Boys as "lovable little scumbags", arid perhaps hopes to dress up his ostensible scumbaginess with some more contemporary threads (check out that de-stroy reservoir end, and those di-vine pleasure dots!); certainly Jimmy is looking more mod these days than he did in the early publicity photos.

Cheetah Chrome is certain that the Dead Boys will remain intact, whatever happens to punk. "These are my best friends, Stiv & Jimmy & Johnny & Jeff, y'see we stuck together when we came to New York and didn't know no one, and we've stayed together, and we're going to stay together."

Cheetah is functioning as the spokesman, in some bizarre way as the conscience of the Dead Boys tonight, systematically heading.off my unasked questions about the rumored breakup of the group. He persistently recounts the band's past image problems, and their continued hope of making records ever closer to their live sound: "We Have Come for Your Children just sounded too clean, y'know? I figure we should be self-produced next time, we could say it was produced by the 'Jism Twins', like the 'Glimmer Twins', get it? Hey, I can't believe you're from CREEM, you're so normal. You remind me of my cousin back home—no offense—he's a mailman."

"Sure, Cheetah," I toss back. "That's CREEM's secret, employing the most normal writers they can find. Where are you from in Cleveland?" "I grew up in the Projects, down at 28th & Detroit," begins Cheetah, but Stiv Bators interrupts with a wiseass, "Yeah, he got suspended from high school for throwing a rake at his horticulture teacher. He only took horticulture 'cause he thought it was the study of hookers!" "Naw," says Cheetah, obviously pleased at this creative revision of the C. Crome legend, "I quit school right before I finished the 12th grade, I had been goin' to William Dean Howells, and that's like the bottom, y'know, only morons went there . . ."

Down the table, Janis Schacht flashes me a quick smile whenever our eyes meet during Cheetah's monologues, as if to say, "Isn't he just the punkiest? Are you holding up to it okay?" Janis seems to be sitting on the Ramones' needles and pins, half-afraid that the Dead Boys may just decide to live up to her own Sire publicity releases, and do something . W-E-I-R-D!, something to offend the restaurant personnel and/or the visiting, impressionable rock writer.

As if it's been reading Janis's anxieties, a chair at the vacant table behind us suddenly, mysteriously falls to the floor with a resounding crash, and everybody at our table automatically stares at Cheetah (caught with the meat in your mouth, weren't you, sucker?). I suggest that it was a case of telekinesis, perhaps even projected by a certain dandy at a nearby table, who has already tried to impress his date by inquiring, in a loudly-Enalish accent, about the perimeters of the wine list, but Cheetah's all set for the martyr role; whenever the absent-minded waiter passes our table from then on, Cheetah -yells out, "I didn't do it!", drawing an appropriately blank look from the beleaguered fellow.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 46

In the hubbub, no one has noticed that Stiv Bators has slipped a bread stick into his fly, and is busily jerking it off, so he has to call our attention to his starchy self-abuse. The joke recognized, Stiv stops well short of orgasm, and returns the stick to the bread basket, to await patrons more into oral sex. The table talk buzzes on a bit longer, until, with Bators just concluding an anecdote with ". . . and that was the third time in my life I was in a menage a troisl", we decide to break up the dinner, so that the Dead Boys will have time to prepare for their appearance at Hurrah later this evening.

Cheetah and I walk over to the nearby apartment he shares with Dead Boy bassist Jeff Mangrum and their ladies; Cheetah has found out that I haven't yet heard the Stooges' Kill City LP (not on that mailing list), so he's determined to rectify that glaring omission in my rock critic's education. We walk into the apartment, a tiny tworoom place complete with kitchen and bath, and I'm greeted with the overwhelming scent of (black) leather, which is reputedly the staff of life among these punks, after all.

These Dead Boy rooms are literally jammed with all the tools of their concentrated life style: the floor and beds are covered with records (Stooges, Flamin' Groovies, Ramones, Dead Boys themselves), with well-thumbed copies of CREEM and other worthy rockzines, and with leather garments of various configurations. For all these signs of rockstar glamor, though, every available dresser-top countertop, is covered with the complementary impedimenta of domestic life: hair dryers, bottles of balsam shampoo, creme rinse, protein conditioner, dishwashing detergent, cans of hair spray and roach-killer ("City Strength"). A pair of pink rubber gloves, Devo-style, is draped intriguingly over the sink faucet.

Cheetah takes me on into his own bedroom to meet his beloved lady, Gyda Gash. She rises up on one arm in bed, her yellow-orange hair cascading over the covers, and smiles rather wanly at me; Gy da's left shoulder is heavily bandaged, as she actualized her own adopted Dead Person's surname at Hurrah last night, suffering a nasty gash to her shoulder in some sort of hassle with the Invaders, the Dead Boys' support act. "I'm sitting out there in the waiting room, and I can hear these little animal-like screams—I know my old lady's voice, y'know—and I can tell they're stitching her up," recalls Cheetah, wincing at the fresh pain of the memory.

Gyda's cutting is a little too closely reminiscent tonight of that notorious turning point in the Dead Boys' saga, that early morning incident in the East Village last spring, when Dead Boy drummer Johnny Blitz was stabbed almost to death in a street fight. Blitz recovered to sit behind his drum kit again, thanks in part to the enthusiastic outpouring of funds as last May's Blitz Benefit at CBGB's (organized by Cheetah and Gyda, and emceed by the irrepressible Cheetah), but the Dead Boys hadn't counted on their punk ideals slashing back home to them quite as rapidly as Blitz's stabbing seemed to promise.

We leave the bedroom so Gyda can dress, Cheetah introducing me to a couple more members of the Dead Boy entourage on the way out: "This is 'Ace'," he says, gesturing toward a guinea pig cheeping at us with bucktoothed idiot glee from a glass gerbiltank on the dresser. "You can see he's got orange hair and a punk haircut like me."

I'm looking at a Wizard of Id comic strip taped to the bedroom door (in the final panel, the King is instructing a giant ape to stone a hapless wrongdoer: "Let 'im have it, Cheetah!"), when I notice through the slightly ajar door that the real-life Cheetah Chrome is liberally daubing the armpits of his freshly-showered Cleveland Projects body with stick deodorant. "Where does middle-class morality end," I wonder, "and punk liberation begin? Or are they always this inextricably linked?"

☆ ☆ ☆

Hurrah, for all its haute-punk West Side location, turns out to be in a rather nondescript warehouse (loft?) building; on the directory in the hallway, it's announced simply as "Hurrah 203", as unprepossessingly as all the wholesale knitwear outlets sharing the directory. But inside, Hurrah is a long, open room, complete with bar, mirrored walls around the stage, and a large dance floor, already filled with kids discoing to Devo and Patti Smith.

I meet Janis Schacht again, and find her in something of a quandary between her loyalty to Sire, to insuring that this quiet rockwriter from the provinces gets a proper exposure to the Dead Boys, and her desire to rush home and switch on the TV, as no less personages than the Rolling (sigh!) Stones are appearing on Saturday Night Live tonight, at this very moment, in fact! (Live! From New York!) Janis assures me that she and the Stones go way back ("My father could never understand me sitting in front of the TV, crying my eyes out for Brian Jones"), but I avoid confessing to Janis, as I've put off telling the Dead Boys, that I date from the Stonesinspired generation of rockfans, too; all I know tonight is that I'm more interested in seeing the live Dead Boys than reprocessed Stones.

When the Dead Boys and their ladies and their guitar-toting roadies file through the discoing couples, it's strictly 1978 once again; the Dead Boys take the stage, launch into their crunching "Sonic Reducer" theme, and immediately manic pogoers in the center of the floor are shooting high above the crowd, like amphetaminesped dolphins. Is this the real LondonNew York punk axis in action, at last?

Cheetah Chrome is bouncing about the stage behind Stiv, Cheetah's slashing guitar licks cutting huge gashes into the amazing adrenalin roar of the Dead Boys' sound; Jimmy Zero stands tall, anchoring the stage with his emerging sex object-appeal, Jeff Magnum provides bass runs with his usual cool authority, and an ever-stronger Johnny Blitz flails away at every square inch of his drum set.

The Dead Boys' songs, especially those from the raw first album, may be brutal and misogynist in content, but their hooks (musical and lyrical) seem tougher and more urgent all the time. In their own, probably half-intentional way, the Dead Boys have become master pop song writers, assuming that you've adjusted your definition of pop song virtue upward to the realities of the 70's. Dead Boy tunes like "All This And More", "I Won't Look Back", and especially the astounding "Not Anymore" (which captures the cock-in-mypocket existentialism of workaday despair better than just about anybody else since the original Animals) should be undeniable pop music classics by now, beyond all questions of taste and genre. The Dead Boys are giving all their songs knockout readings tonight.

Stiv Bators has managed to avoid the clawing fans most of the evening, but his Iggy Stooge racial unconscious finally gets the best of him, and he takes a header into the stage, cutting a huge chynk out of his chin . Ever the trouper, Stiv rams his fingers into his wound, and daubs bright red blood all over his forehead and cheeks, still shouting out the Dead Boy catalogue all the while. As he finishes the set, Stiv looks like a Plains Indian, all war-primered up to massacre fellow Ohioan George Custer.

When Stiv comes out of the dressing room afterward, he's tight-lipped with pain, and is pressing an ice cube against his rapidly-purpling chin. The crowd has gone back to dancing to the latest discs, with the mind-controlling DJ now spinning the Stones' "Miss You" and Devo's "Mongoloid" album cuts at 45 rpm, just enough out of rhythmic synch to work wonders on your central nervous system.

Jimmy and Johnny and I catch a cab back to CBGB's, to end the evening on a more organically Dead Boy note, and in the taxi, a philosophical Johnny Blitz gives me his good word for this story: "You see those cunts just standing there, see in their eyes how much they want you, and sometimes you just can't stand it anymore. After all that time thinking that was just what you wanted." Right, Johnny, ho doubt that's true, just don't write any songs about it; reflecting on the wages of fame is the death of any good rock 'n' roll band.

Down at CBGB's, it's going on 4 a.m., but the Erasers are still going strong, and so is the indefatigable Cheetah Chrome, who's determined that I get my money's worth of an interview with the band. Despite his exhausting workout at Hurrah, Cheetah's still ready to pursue the rock biz; he thrusts one more beer into my hand, and starts discussing possible producers for the Dead Boys' next album. He wants my expert rock critic's opinion, but I'm too tired, and too drunk, and the Erasers are too loud, for me to think coherently any longer. I apologize to Cheetah, and head back to my hotel.

☆ ☆ ☆

It's daylight again, and I'm having a slightly hungover breakfast at a little coffee shop on 3rd Avenue. The guy at the other end of the counter, who for an unexplained reason strikes me as a French leftist radical of 1968 vintage, suddenly snarls out, "Bah! I want milk for my cereal!" and throws the sugar shaker to a shattering crash on the floor. The proprietors stand shuffling their feet, staring shamefacedly at the glass shards and spilled sugar, uncertain just how much outrage they can admit to this potential psycho killer at the counter. The harried Arab waiter becomes even more deferential, rushing to bring a glass of milk to his demanding customer. Nobody dares sweep up the wrecked sugar shaker until after the quasi-Frenchman has deposited his quarter tip and has left the restaurant. A punk is a punk is a punk, I remind myself one more time.

Later I trek over to W. 23rd St., to the Chelsea Hotel, the home of Jimmy Zero and Stiv Bators when they're in New York. I walk into the historic Chelsea lobby, rich in literary associations, including novelist Thomas Wolfe, whom I idolized in my adolescence the way the Dead Boys worshipped Iggy Stooge in theirs. Wolfe was involved in some noteworthy literary brawls, and died young, but otherwise didn't indulge too much in the punk ethic back in the lean days of his 1930's.

Upstairs, Jimmy and Stiv, and the visiting Cynthia, of Toronto's "B" Girls new wave power trio, are watching an old Burt Lancaster Western frequently interspersed with discount floor covering commercials. Cheetah and Gyda didn't make it all the way home last night, and are still lying passed out in the other bed, here at the Dead Boys' Chelsea digs. Gyda's swirl of orange hair sticks out of one end of the blanket, and her stiletto-heeled black boot out the other.

When Cheetah notices that I'm back, he bounces out of bed, still clad in his cheetah tights, and is ready to be interviewed all over again. "Are you sure you're going to remember all this?" he asks me, eyeing my suspicious lack of a tape recorder. "I can't believe CREEM is doing a real-live feature on us."

"How about a story angle that 'the Dead Boys are the new Beatles'?" I ask, hoping to give the Dead Boys some encouragement to continue putting out their great pop songs. Jimmy and Stiv find my hyperbole a bit excessive, and I have to admit that I actually regard the Ramones as the Beatles of the 70's (for those with ears to hear) after all, but that the Dead Boys are certainly right up there with the Gabba Four.

"Oh, yeah," says Cheetah, when the talk has swung back to the Dead Boys' punk competitors, "I wanta get it on record that we don't have no quarrel with Sid Vicious, we get along okay with him."

☆ ☆ ☆

Sid Vicious didn't have any quarrel with his fellow scar-connoisseurs in the Dead Boys, for sure, but somebody must've crossed him, as a few days after I get home from my Dead Boys trip, I read in the papers that Sid Vicious has been arrested and charged with stabbing his girlfriend in the Chelsea Hotel, no less. Poor Sid, he shoulda taken up horticulture when he had the chance.