Archive for February, 2005

If you were in these bands or can put me in touch with people who were, please get in touch.

Ed Gein’s Car, Double O, Cyanimid, Born Without a Face, False Prophets, Feederz, Gay Cowboys in Bondage, F, Iron Cross, Kids for Cash, Misguided, Morning Noise, Rosemary’s Babies, No Thanks, Plain Wrap!, Porcelain Forehead, RKL, Serial Killers, The Next, Really Red, Middle Class, Negative Trend, Code of Honor, Peace Corpse, Sluggo.

Die Kreuzen - Cows and Beer 7″ EP (1982 Version Sound)

Aside from cheese and beer, Milwaukee’s other greatest export was a band called Die Kreuzen. Their name was German for “The Cross”. The band consisted of:

Dan Kubinski - vocals
Keith Brammer - bass
Brian Egeness - guitar
Eric Tunison - drums

These same four gentlemen would be the members of the band all throughout their fairly lengthy career.

The band released this, their first record, in 1982 and then hit the road a toured the country, a lot. It would be two years before they would do another record, their self-titled album on Touch and Go Records. That would also end up being their last hardcore record as their sound would change shortly after its release.

One year after their first album, they released a follow up called October File. This album was well received by a lot of press back then, however with only a couple exceptions, nothing on it sounded like what came before it. They started playing longer, and slower songs that had more in common with rock than with punk, and they had this weird atmospheric sound to it. At the time it was pretty unique, and it was pretty good too. I actually liked all the Die Kreuzen records.

The records that followed (all of them on Touch and Go) were in the indie rock vein and were quite good for the genre. They never really seemed to catch on however and after a couple more albums and singles, they broke up.

As to where they are now, I have no idea. Most of their records can be found on CD through Touch and Go Records. This single was released as bonus tracks on the Gone Away CD.

This single had two distinct variations. There was a yellow sleeve version (the rarer one) and the more common white sleeve version. Both came with lyric sheets. A couple songs from this record ended up being re-recorded and were on the first LP.

As always, if you have any additional information or were a member of Die Kreuzen (or even were the guy who ran Version Sound) please get in touch.

Click to hear “Hate Me” from the record (right click and “save target as…”)

The Avengers probably need no introduction. From the first wave of 70s punk in Northern California (San Francisco to be exact), they were around for a very short time, but left their mark and influenced generations of punk to follow. They were one of the first female-fronted punk bands in the USA, and still to this day remain the best.

The story of this record is one wrapped up in confusion and turmoil. It seems that the label somehow strong armed the band into signing their life away, and also included the Dangerhouse recordings on this when in actuality they had no legal right to do so. This album also came out a couple years after the band broke up. Rumor has it that the band tried to reclaim the recordings and the label actually sued the band over it! When Frontier Records reissued some of the Dangerhouse Records catalog, David Fergusson, owner of CD Presents sued Frontier claiming rights to the Avengers Dangerhouse recordings which was proven not to be true and thus he lost the lawsuit. He promptly filed for bankruptcy upon losing the lawsuit, in an effort to get out of having to pay the enormous legal fees.

All controversy aside, this stands as one of the all time greatest punk albums and deserves a spot in every person’s record collection. Unfortunately no one can go out and buy it on vinyl, or any format anymore for that matter, with the exception of a poor sounding bootleg LP. The label, CD Presents, ceased operations years ago and the owner hasn’t bothered to reprint it even on CD, or even license it to anyone. It is as if the record is being held hostage and there is a whole new generation of music fans being cheated out of the opportunity to own this mandatory piece of plastic.

While it was available throughout the years, it came in a whole plethora of vinyl colors and variations and I believe this is the record I own the most copies of. If you are stricken with the need for completion, this one will give you quite a headache and a lot of sleepless nights trying to get them all.

The first pressing came on black vinyl. This was released in 1983.

It was then pressed on “Limited Edition Red Vinyl” and had a sticker on the shrink wrap indicating this. This was the version I bought originally when I was in high school.


After that, it was pressed on blue vinyl. It was at this time that a barcode was added to the back cover.

At this point I’m not sure what order these were released in. They were…

Green vinyl,


Clear vinyl,


Purple Vinyl,


Orange vinyl (which seems to be the hardest color to find),

and another on black vinyl with a barcode on the back cover and a different label

There were two different test pressings for this, the original one,

and the second one from 1988 when CD Presents pressed their records at a plant in Mexico.

To further add to the confusion, there was an alternate sleeve. This sleeve was meant to be the one used when this was originally slated to come out on Go Records before it was taken over by CD Presents. There were covers printed in anticipation of this release but they were scrapped. Some sleeves were salvaged and were floating around, then later on 200 were filled with blue vinyl records and sold by CD Presents as a limited edition.

An interesting note that most of the later color vinyl pressings featured much darker cover printing than the earlier black and red vinyl copies. The album was released on CD officially in the 90s but sadly it is out of print and a reissue doesn’t look like it is going to happen anytime soon.

I came home last nite and Lady Combustion informed me that the Tivo got some update and there was a message on it. I read it and it turns out that with the new update that it received, I now have the new Tivo to Go gimmick. What this does is allow me to transfer the shows off my tivo onto a computer, and even burn them on DVD if I want to. Since I already have my Tivo hooked up to my network at home, all I have to do is install one piece of free software on my PC and I’m set. This sounds like it is going to be really cool, especially if I want to take some shows with me if I travel somewhere and watch them on the laptop while on the plane.

Of course, that would mean traveling, which unfortunately I have no immediate plans to do. Unlike last year, I don’t think I’m going to get a half dozen free work trips to CA this time out. I do plan to visit there though once things around here settle down, which I hope happens soon.

It seems that people liked the “Many Flavors of…” feature so I am going to make that a regular feature. I am going to have the second installment tomorrow. I’ll try and do those once a week if I have the time to keep up with it. Thanks everyone for the nice comments.

Doggy Style - Work as One 7″ EP (1985 Mystic Records)

I believe I first heard of the band Doggy Style by reading the pages of Flipside fanzine. They were a bunch of hardcore kids from Southern California who were also into skateboarding, and since what I was into at the time were “both kinds of music” punk and hardcore, and I spent every free second not at school or a record store on my skateboard, it was a no-brainer to check this band out.

This would be their first release, which I picked up after I got their first album on Flipside Records. The record came out in 1985 and must have sold pretty well over the years back then as there were quite a few pressings. The first pressing had a hard glued sleeve and then would later be repressed with a xerox sleeve with either the mystic or Superseven logos on the front, and it also came on colored vinyl at one point too (500 pressed).

After this single, they put out a really good album, Side By Side, on Flipside Records. A couple of songs on this single were re-recorded on the album. Perhaps their most famous song is called “Donut Shop Rock” a song about, well, donuts.

A one-sided live album followed on Flipside a year later called Live at Sun City. It was a green silk screened record that came in a clear bag with a sticker on the bag with the record info on it. After that release the ugly happened. The band splintered into two separate factions and feuded over the name. At one point there was basically two Doggy Styles, similar to what happened with Life Sentence. One version put out a Doggy Style II album out on Flipside, and the other put out The Last Laugh on National Trust Records. The Flipside version must have lost out, and the remaining Doggy Style, by now a pretty bad rap-rock band, put out one more album on Triple X Records called Don’t Hit Me Up then called it a day.

Brad X, founding member and his brother Spike were in another band in the mid 90s called Humble Gods with Doug Carrion who was in the Descendents. Brad X is now in the Kottonmouth Kings who seemed to have garnered a bit of a following but have absolutely nothing in common with punk rock. I do not know what became of the other members of the band.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the Doggy Style records are available in any format. It would be nice to see the Flipside releases compiled together on a CD someday.

As always, if you have any additional information or were a member of Doggy Style, please get in touch.

Click here to hear “10 on 1″ from the record (right click and “save target as…”)

In contining catching up with Mr. Potato Head’s mysterious travels, I received a big batch of photos from Indiana of our carb filled friend in action. Seems that Mr. P is something of a race car fan. These came in an envelope postmarked from Indianapolis.

There were more, stay tuned for the next exciting episode of the travels of Mr. Potato Head.