Cheetah Chrome, Bob Pfeifer and Mike Hudson

Whether you think it’s the Best Location in the Nation or the Mistake by the Lake, it is undeniable that Cleveland in the 1970s—when the Cuyahoga River burned and the Indians languished as cellar dwellers—produced some of the most wild and innovative rock & roll of the decade. Musical history has been kind to Cleveland and the bands from that era, which linked the music coming out of places like Detroit and New York City in the late ’60s and early ’70s to what later emerged as a little thing called punk rock.

In an odd bit of kismet, three of the more legendary figures from that heady time and scene—Mike Hudson of the Pagans, Cheetah Chrome of Dead Boys and Rocket from the Tombs, and Bob Pfeifer of Human Switchboard—have recently released books. Hudson and Chrome have autobiographies—Diary of a Punk (Tuscarora Books, $19.95) and Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy’s Tale (Voyageur, $24)—and Pfeifer’s The University of Strangers (Smog Veil, $15.99) is a proactively batshit fusion of fiction and nonfiction (more on this later).

These days, only someone who was in a band as seminal as the Pagans could get away with titling a book Diary of a Punk. The Pagans were/are the soundtrack to a street fight—the epitome of the real raw rock & roll that was a template for so many bands to come—and Hudson’s prose is as noir, tough and unpurple as the lyrics to songs like “What’s This Shit Called Love?” Hudson chronicles the gigs, minor successes and chronic frustrations of a band that didn’t get its due, along with the wild adventures and dark times after the Pagans.

With Patti Smith’s recent memoir Just Kids winning the National Book Award, perhaps Cheetah Chrome’s 364-page magnum opus could get a nod from the Nobel Committee, or at least a Pulitzer. Best known for playing in Dead Boys, a notoriously obnoxious band with such classics as “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth” and “I Need Lunch,” Chrome offers a surprisingly detailed (what with all the drug abuse and all) recollection of fast times with the Dead Boys and encounters with everyone from John Belushi to Gore Vidal. Seeing how Dead Boys were obviously on the opposite side of the artier punk spectrum as represented by Smith, I was a bit worried that this would be a slapdash, half-ass affair. But as it turns out, A Dead Boy’s Tale makes a worthy companion piece to Legs McNeil’s classic punk-rock oral history, Please Kill Me.

University of Strangers by Bob Pfeifer, a co-release from local label Smog Veil and Hudson’s Power City Press, is one of the more unusual books you will read in this too-short life. Roberto Bolaño writes a deathbed letter to a group called “The Strangers,” a collection of artists diverse enough to include Iggy Pop, Pedro Almodóvar, Woody Allen and Alison Mosshart from the Kills, encouraging them to uncover the truth behind American college student Amanda Knox’s incarceration in Italy for the murder of Meredith Kercher. An oral history unfolds on the page, wherein actual articles on the Knox case are interspersed with conspiracy theories about The Strangers from Stephen Colbert, Denis Johnson and, of course, Hugo Chavez. It is a bizarre, exciting, profoundly paranoid book—like Burroughs and Kafka filtered through the prism of contemporary pop culture—which explores the role of the capital-a Artist in these oversaturated over-mediated times.

Hudson, Chrome and Pfeifer read at Quimby's April 2, but we thought you might appreciate an early warning.