Addicted To Noise Senior Writer Gil Kaufman reports :

Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome
remembers the sessions for the Cleveland punk
band's pug ugly 1977 debut, Young, Loud & Snotty
like they were just yesterday. At least he thinks he
does. He's pretty sure he was there, but sometimes
it's hard to say.

"That was the first time any of us were ever in a
studio," said the excitable Chrome from his home in
Nashville. Chrome was reminiscing about the Boys --
the band he and drummer Johnny Blitz, both former
members of Cleveland's Rocket from the Tombs,
formed in 1976 -- on the occasion of the release of
Younger, Louder & Snottier (Bomp), a track-for-track
re-hash of their debut culled from the (very) rough
mixes of those legendary sessions.

"We got in there and did the album in four days at
Electric Lady (in New York)," he said. "At night we
would all just walk around New York, because we'd just
quit our jobs in Cleveland and moved there to get the
album done."

The mixes on the album are indeed louder and snottier
than the original versions. The Boys' only "hit," the still
powerful "Sonic Reducer," is rawer and uglier, while
more juvenile songs such as "Hey Little Girl," "I Need
Lunch" and "Ain't Nothin' To Do," sound much more
like Cheetah said he wanted them to sound at first:
That is louder and, um, louder still.

"We were all real drunk, and taking Tuinals and speed
while we made the record," Chrome said about the
atmosphere in the studio. "We'd take the speed to
record, then the Tuinals to stop twitching so we could
play our instruments. We didn't have any groupies
hanging around, just these big, hairy Hell's Angels
drinking beer all day."

Chrome said the group -- "just snotty goobers from
Cleveland" -- got into several verbal sparring matches
with producer Genya Ravan, who kept insisting the
boys "turn it down."

"Genya guided us through and really brought out the
best in us. For someone who didn't even know us
before the sessions, she really did a great job," the
guitarist said about the songs that ended up on their
1977 debut for Sire Records.

Chrome claimed the rougher mixes on the new Bomp
collection, devoid of the Phil Spector-like Wall of
Sound Ravan found in the group's rudimentary
thrashings ("she found melodies where there weren't
supposed to be melodies, where we didn't want
them"), are a result of unheralded studio wiz Bob
Clearmountain.

"Bob was our bass player on those sessions,"
Chrome said of Clearmountain (who has since
become acclaimed as the studio whiz major stars like
Bruce Springsteen use to mix their albums).

"You're talking about ex-gang members in a punk
band and our aspiration was to be like the Stooges,"
said Chrome. "Genya brought out a lot of heart. But
when we listened to the record, with our 21-year-old
kids' point of view, we were pissed off because it
wasn't loud enough."

Although Chrome said he is now thankful that Ravan
was there to set the band straight, he nevertheless
added that once the album was done and everyone
had left to go to a party at CBGB's in Greenwich
Village, taking with them the "speed, Tuinals, cases of
beers and Hell's Angels," he, singer Stiv Bators and
Clearmountain, went into the studio and did some of
their own re-engineering.

"We stuck around because Bob wanted to play with
the board and the engineer sat us down and let us
blast a totally egotistical mix of the record. Bob was a
budding engineer then and he was fooling around just
like us," Chrome said of the sonically-challenged
results.

Chrome, who just finished work on a solo album,
Ricanstruction (produced by Ravan) for CBGB's
owner Hilly Kristal's label, said, if anything, these
mixes are "just more bullshit." He likens them to cutting
the fat off a steak. And "this is the fat," he added.