Mr Pants. Deerlick Dave was wearing this shirt after finishing their set. I asked him where he got it – probably online he replied – and told him our story. Having recently lost his dog, Jim, Dave said “Wait right there” and disappeared through the staff and artists’ door, reemerging moments later with a fresh shirt on, he hands me his PANTS t-shirt with the apology “it’s a little damp,” and hugged in condolence for our lost pets. RIP Jim, Pants, Pocket

Stag Nation is a mix of snotty pop punk: “She’s My Chemist,”  the extremely short and extremely silly “Skate,” the excellent rocker “Hey!” and some twanging Americana “On a Cloudy Day” that has both mandolin and harp, mixed into the late 80’s/early 90’s sound which just a year or so later would be called grunge, or at least grunge-adjacent. The liner notes are fun as my sister-in-law (Joe’s sister) and her ex-husband (who were are still friends with) are the third and fourth people thanked, plus a bunch of bands I saw in the 90’s after I moved to Milwaukee in ’93 and clubs that mostly gone (The Unicorn and The Odd Rock) and other assorted acquaintances in the Milwaukee music scene. That The Mighty Deerlick are still around and playing is pretty amazing, though the lineup has changed a bit over the years, the most tragic one being the loss of Dan Franke who died a year or two ago after battling some serious health issues for a long long time.

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The rest of this post will focus on Milwaukee’s Brain Bats. We caught them play this past weekend, opening for The Spits along with one of my favorite local bands, Gallery Night, and another MKE group, Sex Scenes. Brain Bats play punk rock, heavily influenced by – as if the artwork didn’t make it obvious – creepy underground horror comics and a lot of cheesy B-movies from the 50′s, 60′s and 80′s that “get thrown in a blender to flavor the songs.” During their performance, singer Dillon Hallen commanded the floor with a frenetic vicious stomp that never stopped (and made it exceedingly difficult to take live action shots).

Fortunately he lives and works in our neigborhood so I was able to get him to slow down for a few minutes to chat about the split single. The tracks on the 7″ are a couple of leftovers from the 2017 recording session Brain Bats did with Shane Hochstetler at Howl Street Recordings, that session also supplied their debut 7″ release, “Road Kill From Outer Space.” “Feed It” is a punk rock ass-shaking screamer with a killer groove and “The TV That Ate My Brain” is a space-alien hard rocker, big metal guitars and thundering drums.

Dillon also was able to elaborate on a really cool story that our mutual friend Bill kinda told me at the show but that I was unable to recall the next day (it was loud, there were drinks, Bill is a highly entertaining but rather non-linear conversationalist and was getting distracted and off-topic about golf – if you know Bill you know exactly what I’m talking about). Besides singing for Brain Bats, Hallen has a new and extremely cool project in the works with a few friends called TV Tombs. They are in the process of collaborating with a couple of artists to produce a read-along printed book and vinyl record, the kind popular back in the 60′s and 70′s, especially with Disney movies (I had one in the 70′s from 101 Dalmatians that I listened to/read so much that my parents took it away for, like, a year). Like Brain Bats, the material filling the book and record are influenced by 80s monster and alien movies and will be family-friendly, kid appropriate. Called “My Best Friend the Monster,” the book will finish its publication later in June and the record should be pressed by the end of summer. Be on the lookout for this! Dillon was gracious enough to share a sneak peak at some of the book’s content.

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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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