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Twenty-five years after his untimely death, the memory of Dead Boys singer Stiv Bators lives on. A photo exhibit in Cleveland's Colllinwood neighborhood revisits his early days in rock 'n' roll with never-before-seen photos of Bators taken by his former neighbor, Dave Treat.

(Dave Treat)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It's hard to imagine Stiv Bators collecting Social Security. Not just because the singer of the Dead Boys is, well, dead.

Bators, who passed away 26 years ago at the age of 40, embodied the die-young-and-leave-a-good-looking-corpse ethos better than anyone to ever crawl out of the Cleveland music scene.

He was a rock 'n' roll badass - always provocative, sometimes confrontational.

Yeah, that was him, with the microphone cord wrapped around his neck as he pretended to hang himself onstage. He did that often when the legendary Cleveland punk outfit played "Son of Sam" - a song about New York serial killer David Berkowitz.

Stiv was also the guy that sang, "I wanna be a dead boy, I'll die for you, if you want me to" in his trademark snarl.

That was Stiv the world knew.

But there was another side to the Cleveland punk legend, who passed away on June 4, 1990, in Paris. (He was hit by a car the previous day, but got up and went home - only to die that night as he slept.)

"He was funny, super smart and a good guy," says Cheetah Chrome, who played guitar in the Dead Boys. "He was like a brother to me -- even apart from the band, he was just fun to hang out with."

Chrome was roommates with Bators, who moved to Cleveland from Youngstown in 1975.

"Stiv told me, 'I wanna be famous, I'm going to move to Cleveland,' " says Chrome. "And he ended up living in his car when he got here. That's the thing about Stiv: He was funny even when he wasn't trying to be."

Bators ended up living with Chrome in an apartment in Lakewood on Giel Avenue.

"The place was party central," says Chrome. "There were a lot of people coming and going. Stiv always had a lot of friends."

One included Dave Treat, a student at the now-defunct Cooper School of Art in Cleveland.

"Stiv was so easy to talk with - we just met and quickly became friends," says Treat, who lived in the same apartment building. "He was soft-spoken and could talk about a wide range of things - he was completely different from his stage persona."

"I asked him if he'd like to be the subject of my portfolio," says Treat, who turned shoots with Bators and the Dead Boys in a 2015 photo exhibition and book. "Stiv was easygoing and was happy to do it."

He was struck by Bators' ability to turn his person on and off for the camera, just as he did for fans.

"He was like a really good model and understood what I was looking for," says Treat.

Bators knew what he was looking for when he asked Treat to photograph the Dead Boys weeks later - photos that are also featured in "Stiv: 1976."

"He wanted to shoot on Prospect Avenue, which looked much seedier back then," says Treat. "They wanted to shoot in an alley, with a punk feel - harsh, hardcore, with the walls falling down."

This was before bassist Jeff Magnum joined the band, which also included Jimmy Zero on guitar and Johnny Blitz on drums.

"As a result," says Treat, "the photos were never used."

They sat for years - that is, until Treat walked into Blue Arrow Records and struck up a conversation with Brittany Mariel Hudak, who co-curated the show with Cleveland photographer Bryon Miller.

"I was wearing a Stiv Bators T-shirt when Dave walked in and we started talking about Stiv, and then he brought these photos he had laying around for years," says Hudak, an art historian. "He ended up coming back some weeks later and brought the photos; I couldn't believe how great they looked."

The show is broken up into two parts: Stiv and Dead Boys shots. The photographs will also be compiled for a book, according to Hudak.

"The photos are historically significant, because we see the Dead Boys coming into their own as a band," she adds.

After a short stay in Cleveland, the band relocated to New York - after Joey Ramone booked the Dead Boys to play the legendary punk club, CBGB.

"We met the Ramones when they were playing Youngstown, and Joey kept telling us to come to New York," says Chrome, via phone from his home in Nashville. "Which was fine by us, because we couldn't get gigs and no one seemed interested in us in Cleveland."

By 1977, the Dead Boys released its debut album, "Young, Loud, and Snotty," containing one of rock's great anthems, "Sonic Reducer."

"Stiv was pretty much the same the whole time," says Chrome. "I remember him jumping on an amp and it rolling off the back of the stage with him on it at CBGB. All I kept thinking was, 'You broke my amp.' "

Bators went on to play in Lords of the New Church and appeared in the John Waters film "Polyester." But he never changed, even years later, says Treat.

"When I'd see him, it was always as if we were still back on Giel Avenue," he says. "If you were his friend, you were his friend, which made it hard to associate the Stiv I knew with the guy onstage. Offstage, he was a good guy, a good friend."