The Cocks | NEWS

New Songs Posted...YAY!

Check out the Media page on this website...we have posted a couple new songs on there. Keep an eye out in the future as we will be slowly adding more tracks as we get them mixed down. In the meantime we hope you enjoy these.

Help Save Internet Radio!

Calling all music lovers; musicians and listeners alike:
Internet radio as we know it is in serious danger. On March 2, 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which oversees sound recording royalties paid by Internet radio services, increased Internet radio's royalty burden between 300 and 1200 percent and thereby jeopardized the industry’s future.

At the request of the Recording Industry Association of America, the CRB ignored the fact that Internet radio royalties were already double what satellite radio pays, and multiplied the royalties even further. The 2005 royalty rate was 7/100 of a penny per song streamed; the 2010 rate will be 19/100 of a penny per song streamed. And for small webcasters that were able to calculate royalties as a percentage of revenue in 2005 – that option was quashed by the CRB, so small webcasters’ royalties will grow exponentially!

As you probably know, Internet Radio is a great source for discovering new music and is a great tool for new artists to get heard by a larger audience. If these new royalty rates are allowed to go into effect, this essentially amounts to a death sentence for a majority of existing Internet radio sites which run on little or no funding. Please take a moment right now and visit savenetradio.org for more information and to help the fight to stop these royalty hikes.

A spledid time was had by all

Yes indeed, we had a lot of fun playing the Delaware Music Festival...as always. The weather was a bit on the iffy side: it was wet and cold as hell for a mid-April weekend. I think this really kept a lot of people home as it always seemed there were better crowds at past DE music festivals.

With so many bands and so little time we didn't get a chance to catch half the bands we wanted to see. Got to hang out with our friends Tony Travalini & The Still Lifes through most of the night. This is a great local band who've been on the scene here in Delaware for far longer than either of us care to mention. Unfortunately they played the night before and we missed their set. But it was great fun catching up with those guys...just like the old days huh?

We started off the night with an acoustic set by Cliff Hillis and his brother Roger at the Lighthouse. Now this guy is a workhorse; he just got done playing a set with Love Seed Momma Jump, played his acoustic set and then ran off for a 3 hour drive to Pheonixville, PA to play another show with Love Seed later that night. Man, this kid is goin' places, literally. After that we headed back to the Rudder to catch sets by The Venus Transmission (hey, wasn't that Shane from MNBLR on guitar?) and The Collingwood. Then we played our set...yada yada yada. After us was a tight set by Fat Daddy Has been and then on the inside stage we caught a rockin' (can you say that about a bluegrass band?) set by Delaware Rag. Those guys got the stage literally bouncing as members beat various percussion with their feet and as always put a big smile on my face. Oh, but it didn't stop there...oh no.

Then there was the party back at the hotel room. As you can see, those DE Rag boys sure know how to party! Thank God Ryan Cormier was there to document it all (the top 2 pics are from Ryan's blog, thanks Ryan!)...before the cop came...and then came again and busted up the party...and then the party moved to another room in the hotel.

And wait, who's that fella in his tighty-whitey's and guitar?

More tales from the recording booth...

...or, how I learned to stop fearing digital recording and embrace Pro Tools.

So what's the score now, game fans? 2 years and counting?

Geez, who knows, but it seems as if this tale of the tape has been going on longer

than a Dostoevsky novel. Back and forth through smoke and booze-hazed Monday evenings we had trudgingly committed to tape our collective output one song at a time. Lovingly rendering each instrument, each note as if it were our last. Filling reel after reel of what remained of this Earth's final few thousand feet of untouched 1/2" Ampex 456 Grand Master recording tape. When it seemed as though we were finally getting this beast off it's ass and moving forward...we hit that proverbial brick wall: the limitations of 8-track analog recording.

**SMACK** It was a gory scene, but I won't burden you with the details. At this point we had way too many ideas for new songs...we had rough tracks recorded for about a 1/2 dozen songs...what we did have on tape sounded like shit (sometimes that's what you get when you Do It Yourself). This was spring 2005 and The Cocks were NOT

delivering the goods. Thus the decision was made...we said "Fuck IT!" and decided to finish our new songs and start playing some shows.

Thusly, shows were played. Hell, it was a veritable world tour (at least in our minds). The Cocks were on a roll...no one could stop us now! This was a really productive period for us. New songs were just coming out all over the place and our repertoire was growing by leaps and bounds. But, godammit, we don't have any of this stuff recorded. We're doing all of these shows and people keep asking if we have a CD. And what are we to say but, "Um, no, we haven't recorded anything yet".

OK, so we lied...a little. But the stuff we did have was unfinished and it was crap, anyway. We're not about to start handing out this stuff...we're a group of highly trained professionals who are not about to release this sub-par drivel and put our hard-earned reputations on the line.

Whoa, lighten up, Francis...sorry about that...got a little carried away. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the recording. Now let's fast forward to October 2005. We had just finished playing the Hurricane Katrina benefit in Wilmington and thought what better time to just fall off the face of the earth (again)! Ah, the pressure's off, no more shows booked...kinda hard to book more shows without a demo right? Right! Can't just get bookings off of our good looks (or can we???). Let's hunker down boys and get this shit done!

And hunker we did...been hunkerin' the past year...lotta hunkerin' going on at Cocks central. But seriously folks, we've been busy as hell. I swear! And did I mention something about Pro Tools? Oh, yeah, well I'll get to that in my next post. In the meantime, go over to our media page and check out one of our new songs to get a taste of what we're working on.

Until then...