About

The RoosterCow Tale

The history of RoosterCow goes back several decades, the mid-1980s in fact, when I was a mere teenage punk rock fan. The name comes from a plastic animal my mom found while working in the garden. With the head of a rooster and the body of a cow complete with udder, this toy figure became the mascot of a made-up record label. On every mix tape I made for myself or for friends, I wrote RoosterCow Records on the j-card.

RoosterCow Records also served as a fake record label for the fake band, The Woodrows, that my friend Max DeZutter and I created out of sheer high school boredom. I used the fictitious label well into the 1990s for the comics version of that fake punk band. Sometime in the mid-1990s I started using the name for cassette releases by my band Team Satan. Did this make it an official label? I didn’t think so.

It wasn’t until 2001 that RoosterCow went legit as a real record label, again as a home for my band’s projects. This time it was Reagan National Crash Diet and our inaugural release, the Administration CD. Since that time, I released over two dozen CDs, vinyl 7 records, a full-length LP, digital EPs and singles, and even a cassette tape. Most of the bands on the label, RNCD, Soft Targets, and Empire Smalls, I was a founder of and active member in, but there were a few releases by friends’ bands like Kaspar Hauser, the Mediums, Decibators, The Means, and The Clerics.

RoosterCow Press started in 2014 with the publication of Reglar Wiglar #22. The purpose was to publish my own comics and zines. In 2022, I published the first book by an artist other than myself, Steve Stelling’s The Air Waves Goodbye. 

​

I would describe RoosterCow as a micro-label and very small press publisher and that’s what it is today.