Rudy Cheeks

Bruce McCrae, known throughout Rhode Island as Rudy Cheeks, was a musician, satirist, columnist and broadcaster who helped define Providence's underground rock and alternative-press culture from the early 1970s onward. He died on 19 September 2026 at the age of 76 after a long illness that followed a stroke about nine years earlier and a hip fracture in February 2026. His brother Scott McCrea confirmed the death. He was born Bruce McCrae on 12 January 1950 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

In the early 1970s McCrae co-founded The Fabulous Motels, a RISD-and-URI-rooted music and comedy troupe that also featured future Saturday Night Live cast member Charles Rocket. The Motels played colleges across the Northeast and the Mercer Arts Center in Manhattan before breaking up in 1973. In 1975 he reconvened with Dave "Sport Fisher" Hansen and Jeff Shore to form The Young Adults, adding guitarist Ed Vallee and other Rhode Island players. The band became a regional draw at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel and in Cambridge clubs, backed Bo Diddley on stage, appeared in Jim Wolpaw's documentary Cobra Snake for a Necktie, and issued the indie single "Complex World" / "Beer" on Genius Records in 1979. A later reunion soundtrack album, Helping Others, accompanied Wolpaw's feature It's a Complex World. Talking Heads, Roomful of Blues and the Farrelly brothers were among those who cited the Motels and Young Adults as part of Providence's creative lineage. In 2016 McCrae and bandmates were inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame; he had been a founding board member and ceremony emcee.

After the Young Adults' first breakup he built a second career in media. With Chip Young he wrote Phillipe and Jorge's Cool, Cool World, a long-running satirical column that began at The Providence Eagle, moved to The NewPaper and the Providence Phoenix, and continued in Motif Magazine after the Phoenix closed in 2014. Writing as the bemused "Jorge," he coined nicknames for Rhode Island politicians and treated being ignored by the column as a graver insult than being roasted. He co-hosted WHJY mornings with Carolyn Fox, hosted cable-access Club Genius, appeared as the movie-heckling Comediac years before Mystery Science Theater 3000, and directed radio services for In-Sight, a reading service for blind Rhode Islanders. Young died in 2022; tributes after Cheeks's death came from Roomful of Blues, Mark Cutler and others across the local scene.

McCrae's given name and stage name both remained part of how Rhode Island remembered him: Bruce to family, Rudy Cheeks to the cool, cool world he spent five decades poking, playing and refusing to surrender to the normal world.