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Danny Kubinski of DeadFinger at Shank Hall

DeadFinger at Shank Hall

We just saw DeadFinger play again last week, this time at Shank Hall opening for H.R. of Bad Brains. They sounded amazing: Dan Kubinski’s voice is really strong, clear and honestly sounds as good or better live than on their excellent album. They played several tracks from the mostly cover song-filled DeadFinger including Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” (I shot about a minute of video of them in October ’21 playing that song, you can view it here), Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream,” Hüsker Dü’s “Don’t Want to Know if You are Lonely,” and “Dancing Barefoot” by Patti Smith, which Kubinski introduced by telling the audience about how he saw Smith in concert a few years ago and that it changed his life. They also the DeadFinger original “Ghosts” which is, as the song title suggests, dark and haunting. The rhythm is stark and insistent over which Kubinski’s voice swoops and soars; it’s gorgeous and eery.

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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

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