El Duce was born Eldon Wayne Hoke on March 24, 1958 in Seattle, Washington. He was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hoke. Eldon had a brother named Steven and two sisters named Christina and Annetta. Hoke attended Roosevelt High School in Seattle, Washington. Bald, bearded, and portly, with a rough gravel voice, a wickedly funny sense of blithely crude'n'rude irreverent humor, and a friendly happy-go-lucky demeanor, Eldon was without a doubt one of the single most amusing, colorful, and entertaining figures to achieve iconic status in the late 1970's/early 1980's punk music scene. Hoke was best known as the drummer and lead singer for the outrageous and controversial "rape rock" punk group the Mentors, which he was an original founding member of in 1977. Eldon not only was featured on a handful of albums with the Mentors, but also recorded several solo albums. Hoke was notorious for his gleefully obscene and offensive antics on a few talk shows: He was a delightfully boorish and outspoken frequent guest on "Hot Seat with Wally George" -- he was usually forcibly removed by security personnel on this particular program -- and made an especially memorable appearance on a January 31, 1997 episode of "The Jerry Springer Show" entitled "Shock Rock." Outside of music, Eldon worked as an extra in films, music videos, and TV shows. Hoke claimed that Courtney Love offered him $50,000 dollars to kill Kurt Cobain; he took a polygraph test to confirm the veracity of this claim and passed said test with flying colors. His last live performance was at Al's Bar in downtown Los Angeles on April 18, 1997. Eldon died at age 39 when he was hit by a freight train while intoxicated on April 19, 1997 in Riverside, California.