I have known about Jeff Cherep's guitar playing in Submachine since I was old enough to know about music which was around 1996. I had seen the flyers for their shows hanging all over the South Side and Oakland while I would ride the 54C back and forth from high school.
It was difficult to see Submachine when I was under age because Pittsburgh could give a shit if you're under twenty-one and like music. “There's booze to be sold so fuck off” is the stance of most venues even to this day. And because of the age difference, I was way too young to see Doomwatch so I completely missed his time with that band.
Once I had a part time job and a little money in my pocket, I started to amass every Submachine record I could find. The bulk of which came from the record store Brave New World which was down the street from my job and I would regularly turn two weeks pay into records without hesitation. I had a less than reliable turntable that I inherited from a relative and did not want to risk playing my records on it too frequently so I couldn't listen to the band as much as I wanted to. Luckily, the Sawed Off Shotglass CD that compiled all of their vinyl releases came out and I was set. I burned those songs into my frontal lobe and never looked back.
Listening to recordings of Jeff play was one thing. Seeing him do it in person was an entirely different thing. It was incredible to witness. No one could play like Jeff. He had a savant level of genius when it came to playing guitar.
The first time I had any personal interaction with him was at the 31st St. Pub when HR, from the Bad Brains, was playing a solo show. Jeff plunked down right next to me at the bar and started talking to me like we had been friends for years. Little did I know at the time that he would come to be a major force in my life years later and one of my best friends.
Through the dark times of the early 2000s where I was dumb enough to make the mistake of trying to live a “normal” life, I still tried to make it out to the Submachine Halloween shows and I even saw Jeff play in the Plastered Bastards a few times.
One of the upsides of trying to head off a nervous breakdown and mid-life/existential crisis is that I started going to shows again around the end of 2017. I would go to see Submachine as much as I could to try to make up for lost time. By the end of 2018, I had put a camera back in my hands and by the end of 2019 I was helping the band load in and out of venues in the area.
Once things started to loosen up during the COVID-19 pandemic and the band resumed practicing, I was invited to the House Of Apathy to watch the band rehearse. Pretty much every Friday for the past three years I had the opportunity to stand next to Jeff and watch him play.
Every so often, when the band couldn't decide which song to play next, I would be asked to call a song out. I always chose a newer song like “We're All We Got” or “In Spite Of Everything” because those were the songs where Jeff sounded like he was on fire when he was playing. The leads on those songs were blistering and he looked like he was having the time of his life when he played them. Jeff's playing was evolving and going somewhere fast and I wanted to see where it would end up.
As people are telling stories about Jeff and the wild days of yore, I think I got to know a different Jeff in his later years. He was still big and boisterous Jeff when we were out at shows and he was still one of the sweetest and big hearted people you could find. But, along with severe back and knee pain, he was grappling with the loss of multiple people in his life and never seemed to recover from those losses.
Those of us that have a sadness about us and struggle to carry the weight of our own existence can easily spot our own. Even when we're laughing through the sadness we stick out like a sore thumb. The more time I spent with him the more I started seeing parts of myself in him and vice versa. Every now and then one of us would say something that a "normal" person would find to be quite fucked up and the other would raise an eyebrow and nod in acknowledgement of how correct the statement was.
The only mistakes that I made during our friendship were giving him my phone number and bonding with him over stand up comedy. At all hours of the day and night, he would send me comedy bits that he came across while taking a deep dive down Youtube. I would give anything to be startled from a sound sleep one more time because Jeff found something funny on the internet.
I made sure to pay more attention to him at shows and made sure that he had what he needed in order to play. The only way I knew how to help him was by taking care of some of the menial tasks involved with setting up his gear. I had this thing in my head where I thought for every show I worked and helped him out that that would get Jeff and the band to one more show. Like I was buying them more time every time I would run around like an idiot before and after each set. Well, that plan failed miserably and time has run out.
I always felt that it was a great privilege to have been invited into Submachine's circle. I made sure to never take that for granted and always tried to put in as much work as I could. I feel so lucky to have seen Jeff play so many times in recent years, at practice and at shows. I will cherish those moments forever. But more importantly, I'm glad that I got to spend so much time with Jeff and got to know him outside of the mayhem that comes along with being part of a local Punk scene.
I have many other memories of time spent with Jeff but those are mine and I'm not ready to share those yet and I might never be ready.
The last time I saw Jeff was on Friday, June 23, 2023. He was having car trouble and needed a ride home from the garage that he limped the car to. I happily volunteered to get him home. On the hour drive from the North Side to Plum, our conversation consisted mainly of how the universe was conspiring against us both and how pretty much everything that either one of us touched would blow up in our faces. It was a cheerful talk.
I helped him into the house, Jeff thanked me, gave me a hug and sent me on my way. Two days later he was gone.
I am to the point where I don't know where to put all of the grief and it feels like I'm drowning in it. And I know I'm not the only one in that situation. The devastation of Jeff's loss reaches across multiple time zones and continents and will be felt for a very long time.
As I have shared previously, we lost a titan, a brother and a friend.
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