"Rocket From the Tombs never recorded any songs, never toured widely and broke up after less than a year."

"But in that brief time, it laid down a whole new approach to rock.... Propelled by Cheetah’s hard-charging guitar work and drawing influence from proto-punk bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, Rocket From the Tombs burst onto the Cleveland music scene in late 1974.... The band drew the attention of avant-garde groups charting a similar course in New York City, and in July 1975, it opened at a Cleveland show headlined by one of them, Television. As the urbane New Yorkers saw to their horror, the band members were as chaotic as their music. True to the punk ethos they were pioneering, their copious drinking and drug use fueled fights onstage and off. Cheetah fell on his back during the opening song and played the rest of the set supine. 'A lot of very nasty things got said — everything came to a head that night,' he wrote in the liner notes for a 2002 collection of Rocket From the Tombs songs, 'The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs.'"

From "Cheetah Chrome, Guitarist for Pioneering Punk Bands, Dies at 71/He played with Rocket From the Tombs and the Dead Boys, whose snarling nihilism opened the door to an entire music genre in the 1970s" (NYT).