The thing that hits first is how unlikely it feels: a band that only managed four shows in the 80s suddenly dropping a 2024 board recording that lands harder than most modern noise-leaning live documents.
Proto sludge punks Drunks With Guns were never built for posterity, yet here they are—dragging those old songs into the present without touching up a single bruise.
When Mike Doskocil was asked what angle he preferred for this piece, he cut straight to it: “I just wanna keep the spotlight on this live CD. Anything from yesteryear is in the liner notes of the last LP/CD ‘Fucked Up on Beer & Drugs’. We wanna get the live CD eventually done on vinyl this spring, then get in a real studio and do a new album of new material.” No mythology, no grand reclaiming of history—just a live record that finally shows the band hitting with the weight people always insisted was there.
The Austin set that became “Live” came from the 2020s lineup, a version of the band capable of hauling those early tracks back into daylight without polishing them into something they never were. The recording doesn’t attempt to rewrite anything. It just documents a group still uninterested in nostalgia and still operating at the same crooked angle that made them an outlier in the first place. Jeff “Kopper” Kopp, who released the CD through Trouble in River City Records, described it as “hostile, blown-out, and completely uninterested in nostalgia or polish”—a board tape that accidentally turned into a clearer statement of purpose than the band ever had in their original run.
Back then, from 1984 to 1987, Drunks With Guns were Fred Broadhacker, Mike Doskocil, Stan Sietrich, and whichever bass player could make it—Mike DeLeon or Jim Broyles.
Three studio sessions, four live shows, and that was the whole lifespan of the original unit. The story has its own strange internal logic: the multitrack tapes from the first two sessions were erased by the studios so they could be re-used “for more viable projects.” The early 7″s—“Drunks With Guns” and “Thirst for Knowledge”—were pressed straight from rough cassettes recorded on the spot, without overdubs, effects, or even mixing.
The third studio they tried wanted nothing to do with them; the staff refused to let the band come back to mix the material. Belleville resident Dave Reeves salvaged it by owning the same kind of multitrack machine and applying some basic effects, making those tracks—by accident—“arguably the band’s most proficient to date.” Three of those seven songs ended up on the “Alter Human Industrial Fetishisms” 7″, the last release the original lineup actually considers legitimate.
Everything after that is fracture. Stan kept releasing recordings—some from the original 7″s, some new—without Mike’s approval. He involved a 12-year-old vocalist named Melissa, worked with Mark Turner of Chopper Records, and put out a so-called “black album” that the others viewed as an inferior bootleg dropped without permission or input.
As Mike put it, it was “a shameless and opportunistic money grab.” Stan also filed paperwork claiming he was the sole creator of the first two 7″s. Another bootleg LP, “Second Verses,” followed in 1990. For Mike and the others, those releases have nothing to do with the band they played in. By the time that dust settled, continuing wasn’t an option.
The new live recording isn’t framed as a victory lap or an attempt to rewrite the past. It’s simply the first time the band’s material arrives in a form that matches its internal logic—mid-tempo, hostile, stripped down, and delivered with the blunt force that later scenes would pick up on without always acknowledging where it came from.
This version of the band isn’t interested in revisiting the 80s beyond what’s needed to perform the songs.
They’re focused forward: the plan is an East Coast tour in February, vinyl for the live album in March or April, and a new studio album next summer. As Mike put it, “That’s about it. There’s really nothing more to say.”
What the Austin tape captures is the rare moment when a band with a messy, fractured, half-missing discography finally gets a document that feels representative—not cleaned up, just correctly weighted. For a group built on misfires, lost masters, and unwanted bootlegs, the 2024 live CD ends up being the clearest version of Drunks With Guns yet—not because it updates the past, but because it leaves the past where it belongs and shows the songs operating in their natural environment: loud, unfriendly, and uninterested in fixing their own legacy.
