Die Kreuzen “Cows and Beer” 1982/2014, reissue on Beer City Records, blue vinyl. Cows and Beer is Die Kreuzen’s debut release, an EP of six songs so fast that they easily fit onto a 7″ pressing. Also pictured is my very own bottle of Die Kreuzen imperial pumpkin porter (thankfully I do not have my own Die Kreuzen cow).

I’ve been slogging through the book Brick Through the Window: An Oral History of Punk Rock, New Wave and Noise in Milwaukee, 1964-1984 and am just now hitting the early 80′s portion when Die Kreuzen came onto the scene. Growing up in Wisconsin and attending a gazillion punk shows in the mid-80′s, it was easy to see Die Kreuzen frequently (which I did) and perhaps overlook their standing in the punk rock genre (which I also did – at the time – but now know many consider them iconic: Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore wrote “Man, there was a point there when Die Kreuzen were the best band in the USA”): they opened for a litany of legendary punk bands – Husker Du, the Damned, Flipper, the Zero Boys, the Minutemen. In fact, “the Minutemen wrote a song about them and, from what Danny Kubinski [Die Kreuzen vocalist] told me, that song was faster and shorter than most of the Minutemen’s light-speed repertoire.” (Eric Beaumont in Brick Through the Window).

Bassist Keith Brammer states that Cows and Beer, originally released on Version Sound, was the outgrowth of Die Kreuzen’s inclusion on a comp tape called Charred Remains put out by Bob Moore, who decided to pay for half of the 7″ release. Brammer says, “Some girl had recorded us already on a tape for a project she was doing in sound school, so we didn’t need to pay for recording….and Moore knew about pressing plants so he took care of that for us. We pressed 500 and we sold the for a dollar.” Now those originals go for around $300.

The six songs on Cows and Beer include two that appeared on the above mentioned Charred Remains cassette comp: “Pain” and “Hate Me” Two other songs, “Think For Me” and “Enemies” would also appear on the 1983 Last Rite’s comp America’s Dairyland (along with other Milwaukee bands, including The Crusties and Sacred Order). The other two tracks are “In School” and “Don’t Say Please.” All six songs hover around the one minute mark, the longest, “Think For Me” clocks in at around a minute and a half. All are tense, venomous and lightning-fast hardcore punk