Rudy Cheeks, an iconic figure in Providence’s creative underground and a Providence Phoenix columnist known for delightfully tweaking Rhode Island’s most powerful politicians, died over the weekend at age 76 after a long illness.
Cheeks, whose given name was Bruce McCrae, first became known for performing with The Fabulous Motels and The Young Adults in the mid-1970s – a time that coincided with the emergence of the Met Cafe and Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel as top destinations on the local rock circuit.
“The mid-‘70s also marked the beginning of the alternative newspaper boom downtown, which acted as a stimulus to the music club scene,” Cheeks recalled in a 2015 story. “The first to appear was The NewPaper, an arts and entertainment alternative weekly that, by the mid-‘80s, was bought out by the Phoenix group of papers based in Boston, eventually becoming the Providence Phoenix.”
Cheeks achieved perhaps his greatest celebrity as half of Phillipe & Jorge’s Cool, Cool World, a weekly column that he penned with Chip Young for decades in various publications, mostly the Phoenix.
Writing in the fictitious persona of two fabulously gay “superior behaviorists” who resided at a mythical Casa Diablo while being attended to by Lars the houseboy and downing quantities of Pernod and grapefruit, Cheeks and Young satirized and poked fun at what they considered pompous political behavior.
They also commented on the news and coined nicknames for an array of Rhode Island politicos and personalities, ranging from Bruce “Captain Blowhard” Sundlun to Sheldon “Sherbet Whitebread” Whitehouse and Katherine “Faster, Kittycat, Kill! Kill!” Gregg, the longtime Statehouse reporter for The Providence Journal.
By the time of a 25th-anniversary celebration of Phillipe & Jorge at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, the column and its creators were an institution, as seen by how Whitehouse – clad in quintessential preppy attire – expressed mock outrage about how the column savaged “my people.”
In a 2020 recap in Motif, Cheeks and Young recalled the birth of P&J at a bygone hotspot in Providence Jewelry District: “The Cool, Cool World was hatched around a table at the legendary Leo’s, full of lunatics and dozens of empty Rolling Rock beer bottles. Its inspiration came from the English news/satire magazine, Private Eye; and Alexander Cockburn’s ‘Press Clips’ column in the once estimable and now defunct Village Voice.”
So convincing was the satire dished out by Phillipe (Young) and Jorge (Cheeks) that during my tenure as news editor of the Phoenix, I once fielded a complaint from a woman who was convinced their fake identities were actually true.
By the time the Providence Phoenix ceased publication in 2014, same-sex marriage was legal in Rhode Island – a cultural shift from how, when the column started in 1979, “there was a lot of discrimination against gay people,” Cheeks said.
While Young was mercurial and prone to hot takes, Cheeks took a more bemused and philosophical view of human foibles and life’s ironic twists.
Some of the books he once gave me while culling his stacks – Robert Draper’s Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History and Dear Muffo: 35 Years in the Fast Lane, about the basis for Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Harder They Fall – offered a window on his interests and passions.
Phillipe & Jorge had a long run as a must-read. Yet although Rhode Island politicians were often stung by the words in Phillipe & Jorge, being ignored in the column was considered a more grave insult.
Cheeks was a longtime morning co-host with Carolyn Fox on WHJY-FM and the host of a cable access show, Club Genius.
He was a founding board member of the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame. Using the name Comediac, he commented on kitschy movies as they screened at the One Up, a former dive bar on Steeple Street.
Young died in 2022.
Tributes flowed to Cheeks on Facebook.
From the band Roomful of Blues: “Farewell to our good friend and comedic genius Rudy Cheeks. RIP Bruce, you gave us so many laughs. Your huge and wonderful contribution to our RI music community will never be forgotten. You will be sorely missed. Fly high my friend.”
Musician Mark Cutler wrote that when Cheeks accepted him and a fellow musician as friends, “I felt like I was given keys to the cool underground art scene of Providence. And believe me, it was a very cool world. He refused to surrender to the normal world and inspired so many of us to follow our own paths.”
