About Me
"...Despite the overwhelming evidence that at best St. Louis is and always has been a mediocre rock & roll town, there was, around 1985, a bona fide Punk Rock Beast as hard, rough and tormented as anything that existed at the time. And it came from St. Louis....Their sordid tale is filled with lots of alcohol, opening slots for some of hardcore punk's great names of yesteryear (Samhain, 45 Grave, Battalion of Saints), a couple of cassettes, a total of three 7-inch singles ("among the most highly sought-after indie 45s of the '80s," according to one obscure indie compilation that featured them) and, in the end, countless ridiculous lawsuits.What Drunks with Guns did was no great breakthrough- the music was an obvious blending of the bottom-heavy riffage of Black Sabbath with the fury of hardcore. Their music was, like their name, kinda dumb- hell, they were drunken idiots. But whereas in the mid-'80s the goal of most hardcore was loud-fast-louder-faster, the Drunks had the nerve and good sense to slow the whole rush down to a crawl. Drunks with Guns did in 1984 what the Melvins and Mudhoney and all those damn Seattle bands, proud as peacocks, claimed to invent in 1987. And while the Seattle dudes were waiting for their hair to grow long enough to be rock stars, Doskocil was screaming at the top of his lungs, "SUNDAY! SUNDAY! AT THE KIEL AUDITORIUM... FUCKED UP ON BEER AND DRUGS!"Granted, what Drunks with Guns did was inevitable; somebody somewhere was bound to slow hardcore down. But there was such an anger and energy inside their heads that when they grabbed those three chords the results were pure, primal magic. They repeated these chords over and over again, a relentless pound that drove a riff to its logical extreme. But then, after constant repetition of the riff, when most bands of the day got bored and moved on to the next song, the Drunks took it past the point of tedium and and into the realm of excruciating mantra.Take "Wonderful Subdivision," their opus on the glories of suburban living. The song begins at a crawl as one by one the instruments appear: a slow, malevolent pound of the drums begins and carries it throughout; a deep, persistant bass enters the fray creating a rhythm as solid as concrete. The two move along slowly for what seems like an hour. Then Seitrich's frazzled guitar joins in. All three are locked together in the single groove that is the song; there's no change- ever. The only variation is Doskocil, who moves from condemnation of suburban living to philosophizing to pure animal grunting, culminating in him burping and gagging on the word "wonderful" for a minute straight, until finally, as the song ends, he vomits it up.As did Iggy Pop and the Stooges in their prime, Drunks with Guns found a pleasure in wallowing in their own filth. They were never pretty, they were never wonderful. In their songs, they got guns, got punched in the head, practiced autoerotic asphixiation and swam in blood baths. But in the midst of this mess, they came as close as any band has ever come to touching that nasty place where shame and degradation lie. What separated them from all the others: When they got there, they thrived.Then came the lawsuits. Somebody quits or gets kicked out, either Seitrich or Doskocil, the other tries to take the name "Drunks with Guns." Somebody claims to have written all the songs, the other disagrees, and so on and so forth until the two despise each other and- get this- both start releasing records under the same moniker. There was Seitrich's Drunks with Guns and Doskocil's Drunks with Guns. Most of it was complete crap, although Seitrich did, at one point, hire as his lead singer a 12- or 13-year-old girl named Melissa who was pretty effective, especially when she screamed, "Mommy, I'm a zombie!"The rest is garbage, though, except for the splinter groups without the DWG name, who, along with Drunks with Guns, form the holy triad of freak-o, semi-famous-outside-of-this-city rock bands. Seitrich and a gentleman named Fritz Noble started a band with the catchy name the Strangulated Beatoffs, and, by their own admission, spent more time thinking up names for their songs than they did on the songs themselves, although their concept was as good as Sigue Sigue Sputnik's. Bassist Mike Deleon went on to form Fruitcake, a band that's released four or five remarkable singles, although they have since called it quits.But none of the splinter groups captured that furious teenage punk-rock angst as well as Drunks with Guns. For anyone interested in the history of punk rock, Drunks with Guns (the Behemoth Records CD listed above) is absolutely essential."--originally taken from the Post-Dispatch???by the way, this is a tribute page... i'm not affiliated with the band in any way.
