Les Paul: The Man Behind That Famous Guitar

August 13th, 2009 § 1

I read the news today, oh boy.

Today we lost a true legend of music, Les Paul. Most people knew him as the name on a famous electric guitar. But few know that he actually invented the electric guitar and as if that weren’t enough, he also invented multi-track recording too. And I wonder how many people know just how amazing a musician he was and that he had an incredible career as a recording artist.

The very artform of recorded music today would not be what it is without his inventions. There would be no Sargeant Peppers, no Electric Ladyland, no What’s Going On, no Dark Side Of The Moon, no Yellow Brick Road, no OK Computer without Les Paul. At this moment, I am seeing this slide show in my mind that starts with Muddy Waters, then Freddie King, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Billy Gibbons, Duane Allman, Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Slash. And they’re all holding the guitar that bares his name. They all changed music with his guitar.  

I got to see Les Paul do his thing in New York a couple times in my life; once at his steady forever downtown gig at Fat Tuesdays and the other years later at his last haunt of so many years, Iridium. Those times I saw him, and let’s say he was seventy-something the first time and then eighty-something the second, I will always remember the joy he gave to the people in the audience watching him play. His dexterity was phenomenal but more important was that he reminded you to enjoy yourself when listening to music.

Les Paul was a true living legend and he will be deeply missed. But it’s hard to be really sad about his passing, other than the fact that we don’t have him here with us anymore. He was 94, playing music until the end of his life, had an amazing music career, had been inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall Of Fame as well as the American Inventor’s Hall Of Fame alongside Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, was loved and revered by the greatest musicians of our time and created the greatest electric guitar in the history of modern music that will be played and cherished for many many generations. What else could he possibly have done?

A few years ago, I was at the New York AES show and in one of those strange acts of time and space conspiring to blow your mind, Eddie Kramer (legendary producer of Jimi Hendrix and so many more), Les Paul and I kind of ran into one another at the same time in the middle of an aisle. Well, of course, Eddie and Les knew each other and Eddie gave Les a big hug. But neither one knew me. So in that moment I said to each of them that probably because of those very two people and their seminal work, I have spent the better part of my adult life making music and trying to be the best guitar player and music producer I can be. Les, I own two of your guitars and I’ll never part with them.

Les Paul, you spent your life giving people the joy of music. There is no greater gift to give. Say hi to Duane and Muddy and Freddie if you don’t mind.

May you rest in peace,

Mark Hermann

New Evidence Suggests Paternal Link Between Michael Jackson and Eminem

July 17th, 2009 § 2

Now that the Michael Jackson feeding frenzy has somewhat subsided, I thought I might chime in from the cloud of funk I’ve been walking around in of recent. Watching the school of piranha pick clean the already gaunt bones of M.J. was abhorrent, and other than catching about an hour of the memorial at the Staples Center on television, I refused to be a part of the debacle and the debate over his legacy. Frankly, I wasn’t really sure how I felt about Michael now, although I was a huge fan of his in my youth. We weren’t pals. I never met him. I never saw him in person. If I wanted to hang out with Mike, I played his music, sang his songs, danced his moves, or watched his videos. Now that he is dead, none of that has changed for me or the countless fans grappling with how they “feel” about Michael. My sympathies go out to those who actually called Michael their friend. Their loss must be profound.

 

As a white kid growing up in the 70‘s and 80‘s in Pennsylvania’s blue-collar coal and steel country, I heard two kinds of music on the radio: Classic Rock or Country. There weren’t any R&B stations. I was lucky enough to be exposed to Grand Funk, Led Zeppelin, Chicago, The Beatles, and The Carpenters by my father who listened to great music like those artists as well as Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. I was exposed to and loved all kinds of music, but I was drawn to Soul and R&B.

 

I found a way to splice the wires from an old iron into the antenna of my stereo and use it as a rudimentary satellite dish so that I could listen to Power 99FM from Philadelphia who played “black music”, or as many of my fellow citizens, friends, and relatives preferred, “nigger music”. While my friends were listening to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Ozzy, I was in my basement listening to Grand Master Flash, The Sugar Hill Gang, The Commodores, Prince, and M.J., learning all of Michael Jackson’s dance moves and break-dancing with my brother Tony. When combined with my proclamation that I was going to wait until I was in love to lose my virginity, these things became fodder for endless and brutal ball-busting, mockery, and more than my share of fisticuffs. That break-dancing and moon walking and “rapping” was shit white kids didn’t do.

 

My first week as a recently de-virginized Freshman in college (I waited until I was in love), I nearly came to blows with my 6’ 4”, 270 pound defensive tackle of a roommate and several other guys on my hall who had taken it upon themselves to draw mustaches on my Prince and Michael Jackson posters which I had hung on the wall in my dorm room. These were the same fuckers in junior high and high school who would step on my brand new, immaculately white sneakers as soon as I stepped foot in the school. You know those dick heads? Drawing mustaches on those posters was an even greater matter of disrespect. I was fit to be tied. The laughter and the mockery that ensued over my reaction to this “harmless” vandalization of my property was unnerving. It certainly wasn’t the first time I had been called “nigger lover”, but I naively thought that by going away to college I had somehow escaped a certain amount of ignorance. I knew in that hallway that I hadn’t. 

 

Oddly enough, it was Michael Jackson who helped to turn a lot of that kind of racism on its ear. When he had Eddie Van Halen play guitar on “Beat It”, cultures collided, and before long Run DMC was bringing Aerosmith back from the dead, Metal and Rap were merging, white guys were spitting rhymes, and black guys were winning golf tournaments. An African-American became President of the United States. If Michael didn’t make it all happen, he certainly had a seat at the table of the cabal that did.

 

I don’t mourn the loss of Michael Jackson. He lived a life that non of us could imagine. It was tortured and blessed all at once, and it touched hundreds of millions of other lives. That is truly astounding. I mourn that he never found peace with his appearance nor, in all likelihood, his sexuality. I mourn what is to come, as every thing he ever did in his life will be scrutinized and exposed in an attempt to find the “real Michael Jackson”.

 

I doubt that even those closest to Michael Jackson ever really knew him. I doubt he ever truly knew himself. He was thrust into the spotlight and exploited at a very early age and never had a chance at a “normal” life. He was known and was loved around the world, and yet with the world at his fingertips, hated himself so much he chiseled away his beautiful face. Why would anyone do such a thing? Look at him on the cover of “Off The Wall” and tell me one thing he needed to change about himself. Even if you allow him a certain amount of celebrity vanity, what did he need to change about himself after “Thriller” sold a gozillion copies? Frankly, someone should have tackled him and taken him to see Dr. Phil. Even more frankly, before a child was ever left unattended overnight at Neverland, someone should have tackled Michael and said, “Yes Michael, you very well may be Peter Pan, but a grown man can’t sleep with children that aren’t his. Sorry.”

 

When you are given the moniker “King” of anything, you gain a privileged view, but lose a whole lot of perspective. Ultimately his fame, the media circus that surrounded him wherever he went and whatever bizarre thing he did, whosever sperm and eggs he claimed as his own, his financial woes, and his extremely poor decision making with respect to socially acceptable adult/child relations forced him into seclusion. In the middle of our War on Terror, he moved to the Middle East. How badly would you want to get away from the media to do that? 

 

It’s been a bad year for my idols. The recent deaths of my favorite actor and philanthropic idol, Paul Newman, and of George Carlin, who influenced my thinking as greatly as any teacher, philosopher, politician, or artist ever has were sad, but knowing that each of those men had lived a long and amazing life filled with love and success, and that their art will live on make it difficult to mourn. 

 

For those same reasons, I can’t mourn the loss of Michael Jackson. What have we really lost? His art survives and is selling as we speak, and his dance moves live on in white boys like me. It’s best that Michael left us with memories of him in his prime before he withered away as a decrepit shadow of a once mighty king. 

 

Long live the King of Pop.

 

Chris “Breeze” Barczynski, moonwalker.

Niche Marketing and the Primordial Ooze (Part 2)

July 6th, 2009 § 2

Just Because You Can Does That Mean You Should?

In the aftermath of this great digital armageddon, we are left with a most curious world; the world of DIY, where Sally in DeMoines can sell her handmade quilts from her bedroom, Frank in Knoxville broadcasts his radio show of his favorite new indie artists from the local Starbucks in town and Lola from Louisville Tweets chocolate chip cookie recipes from her Blackberry, while riding the bus to work.

In the new DIY music world, the most advanced technologies are now available to any musician with a dream and a credit card that can buy them recording studio quality tools once available only to the kings and queens, dukes and dutchesses who ruled from behind the great castle walls of the old music and recording industry.  It’s all been reduced to tiny, affordable little digital boxes and software plug ins you or I can run on a laptop that model new and vintage analog equipment costing many tens of thousands of dollars; amplifiers, microphones, recording consoles, even promotion teams! all just a mouse click away for anyone who can play three chords, and has the most rudimentary understanding of music and a Myspace page to upload their songs to. And so everyone can now have a music career. Everyone can record a CD. Everyone can have a record label. Everyone can promote themselves. That’s really great isn’t it? Or is it?

The Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, The Who, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Radiohead. Amazing artists and writers all, they still worked with a great team of professionals who helped them to realize their artistic vision and allowed us to enjoy some of the most seminal recordings in all of popular music. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Jackson Five; they didn’t even write those songs. So if these amazing artists knew enough that they needed just as amazing a team behind them to get them where they needed to go, what of the DIY artists today who must go it alone, without that team or that great big money train, flush with all this amazing technology but no one to really guide them? And what of the quality of the music and the level of artistic development in the new DIY culture?

I produce my group, Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge. I also play guitar, co-write a large portion of our material, engineer and mix. So by definition, I and we are very much a part of this DIY culture. But this is not entirely by choice. It’s largely a function of economics in the absence of major funding. But there is at least a basis for my band-appointed position, in the absence of that option for now.

I cut my teeth at one of the finest New York recording studios, Right Track Recording, where I started out at the very bottom of the heap making coffee and running packages around the city. Meanwhile, artists like Kiss, Foreigner, Bowie, The Stones, Billy Idol were coming through our studio. In that time I got to meet and learn from some of the greatest engineers and producers in the business. These were highly skilled and talented people who were proud to wear one hat, the one they were really good at, not the sixteen others people seem to wear in this new DIY world.  But even with knowledge and experience with all this technology, I would still love to kick back and let Bob Clearmountain take a crack at mixing my stuff. Why? Because I can admit that he’s a giant in mixing and could probably elevate my music to a higher place.

Yes, economics have forced many musicians to become engineers, producers, arrangers, web designers, promoters. And certainly some out there can and do wear those hats proudly and do create great work. But really, for a lot of the “content”  out there, do we actually think that if you can hammer a nail straight into a piece of wood that you can go out and start building houses?

Recently, I went to visit my brother out in Colorado who makes teeth with his partner, Ray. Ray was once upon a time a bit of a guitar prodigy back in the jazz fusion seventies. Not long ago he rediscovered his passion for music, kicked his wife out and turned his mountain home into a studio and bought some gear on eBay. I went to see his place and, having known that I spent a long time in recording studios, he told me he was having problems with a recent recording he was working on. He asked me why no matter how loud he tried to make the drums, they kept sounding small. I smiled, knowing the answer immediately. ‘They’re out of phase’, I said. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked. I tried to explain to him that when you use multiple microphones, say on drums, each one “hears” the drum from the other mic’s position.

There is a mathematical relationship of distance that determines when that sound wave reaches each mic. If you have that relationship wrong and put up all your drum faders, you might find that one sound wave for, say, the kick drum starts on an upswing and the other on a downswing (or 180 degrees out of phase). In the ocean, when the crest of a wave meets the trough of another, they cancel out and the wave is leveled. Likewise, in recording. So, no matter how much you push up the kick drum fader to try to make the track thump, it just gets smaller. So I told him to bring up all the waveforms for each track on his computer. I then showed him visually that kick drum and how its own mic had a soundwave starting on an upswing but the tom mics that also “heard” that kick drum, showed its wave upside down. The beauty of digital recording is you can tell the computer to invert a track (or turn the waveform upside down). I had him invert the tom tracks where you then saw that kick drum wave starting in the same direction on all tracks. When I had him play the drum tracks back, all of a sudden they came pumping out of the speakers, all fat and beautiful, like they were supposed to.

‘How did you know about that?’ he asked in shock. ‘A lot of coffee’ I said. You got to make an awful lot of pots before you learn how to brew a good record.

Peace,

Mark Hermann

Niche Marketing and the Primordial Ooze (Part 1)

June 30th, 2009 § 2

Does niche marketing to a niche culture produce niche level art?

I saw this article over the weekend in the New York Times Week In Review http://tinyurl.com/ma8c9p about whether Michael Jackson’s untimely death signaled the end of the pop superstar as we know them.  But what the article really shed light on for me is something much more important than simply pop culture, or you and I. It’s about us, our new 24/7 light speed digitized world and what history (in the archeological context, not tomorrow’s Tweet) will say of our time while we were here.

Yes, the old model brick and mortar arts & entertainment industry as we know it had to fall in the face of the new digital revolution. We evolve or we die and I bought into the new technology wave back when it was only a tiny swell. I wrote an article for Mix Magazine on mobile direct to disk digital audio production back in 1993 and had a Number One song on MP3.com in 1998, while my friends were still trying to figure out how to upload a song. And from an indie band PR budget of exactly zero, got interviewed by CNN, Rolling Stone and Wired Magazine so I knew then that this was our future. 

But if technology, the internet and social networking have “leveled the playing field” for all to participate in this global conversation (one that my group is very much a participant, too) and find their own special niche, has it also lopped off the mountain ranges’ highest peaks?; those remote, dangerous to climb but magnificent places where many may have ventured but only the bravest and the finest dared and had the skills to forge their path to the summit? And in doing so, sometimes risking death (or more accurately, obscurity) those select few served to show humanity what was possible to achieve and to inspire theirs and many generations to follow to reach for greatness. By that I mean the books that will be read in a hundred years or even a thousand, as I find myself still reading Rumi translations from a millennium ago; or songs by artists today that will be discovered by your great , great grand children as people still discover Mozart today or as I believe they will one day discover Dylan, Hendrix or The Beatles in a hundred years.

Will the next Hemingway really emerge writing 140 characters or less? And where will the next Sgt. Peppers, Dark Side Of The Moon, Thriller, or OK Computer come from? What is different about these great works of yore to today is that they were born of time and focus, commitment and let’s face it, money; time for an artist to develop and grow, to find their path, to focus on attaining mastery; time bought with big budget record company or publishing company money that allowed them to just be the artist or writer, or film maker, not software developer by day, blogger, self promoter and finally artist by night. (Yes, I know I’m generalizing  but few are exempt from multitasking in some form these days to be able to continue to make their presence known). Somewhere in there if you really want to be great, you have to sit down at that piano or typewriter and really work hard on your craft and then work a whole lot more. (A little kown fact is that The Beatles wrote some 200 songs and threw them away before the world heard ever heard Love Me Do or Please Please Me). So what does that say about today’s average songwriter who can learn three chords, record them into their laptop, upload it today and blog about it tonight?

And would Pitchfork.com review The Beatles favorably if they were starting out today and threw up a Myspace page? Or would they trash the hairdoos? Would you know if you even found Love Me Do today in a sea of 10 million songs on Rhapsody that this group would one day change the world or would you delete that playlist after a week because your friend just turned you on to five more of their favorite new artist playlists and forget all about The Beatles? Another MP3 for the digital scrapheap of yesterday’s songs.

Are we as a culture truly content to simply hold court in our bedrooms as the kings and queens of our own little fiefdoms of followers where we rule with an iron hyperlink to the virtual store that houses whatever we’re selling? Are we really that self involved to think that the sum total of all of our own thoughts, songs, home movies, Flickr photos, will actually be remembered in the great expanse of time in the absence of some vehicle that can effectively filter through the infinite daily supply of new content available and find the real cream, with the resources that can elevate it high enough and preserve it long enough to etch something of true substance about our culture into the minds of future generations that they may be inspired to want to learn more about us?

In the last millennium, there was a lot of hoopla surrounding what NASA would send off to the heavens as the essential representation of Earth culture, should aliens find the capsule, open it up, know how to read and figure out how to hit the power button.  One thing they decided to include, along with copies of the Magna Carta and the Bible, was Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. Evidently, the highest intellectual minds on planet Earth put their heads together and decided that in the very foundational building blocks of all universal life lies the instinctive desire to boogie. That’s so awesome!

It warms my heart to think that if those pesky little aliens ever do find that twentieth century time capsule floating around in space and end up rocking out and duck walking to Chuck Berry, I can proudly say that this too was the music that inspired me to pick up a guitar and spend the rest of my days rockin’ and a reelin’. But this time in 2009 is also my time and I sure hope that we have something more substantial to send up in the next capsule than an OK Go video (oh sorry, that’s so 2006). My bad.

Peace,

Mark Hermann

iPhone app Elevates Band To Stardom!

June 12th, 2009 § 3

Really? This happened? From an iPhone app? Which one?

Well, no, not actually as written in the past tense. This will happen. It’s all about the numbers.

See I’ve put it out to the universe to ask The Source  if he’ll assign one of his archangels who needs to fill his quota of good deeds for humanity, to build us this app. I’m going to say this archangel likely resembles your typical, geek-chic, Bonaroo-going kind of a guy. He wears Vans and a cool faded T-shirt, sips green tea Snapple and, at the very moment that we just happen to need such a thing,  has suddenly conceived of this app himself and is about to embark on several sleepless nights coding this little gem, though he’s not sure why. But his iPhone is all aglow in a strange new light. So he begins.

You see, the numbers tell us that right now there are people out there in the world, millions in fact, to whom our particular brand of Harlem Soul Rock ‘n Roll music is exactly, precisely what they are looking for, if only we could connect to one another; people who, when we do actually connect will sit staring transfixed at their iPods in shock as though this music was sent to them on the wings of angels, straight from the voice of God, which it would be more accurate to say was actually God’s servant but we’re splitting hairs. There’s definitely devine intervention at work here. And hey, this isn’t all about us. This app can work for so many great bands out there. I just happen to have a vested interest in this one.

OK, so why does God really need to assist an indie band and why does anyone have to try to make Steve Jobs any more money, you might ask? All fair questions. Simply because we’ve seen this time and again. Someone writes in from Bumphis, Idaho who stumbled upon us after clicking on one of those ‘If you bought this you might also like…’ flips out and writes us a killer review. Mary from Murfreesborough just can’t stop playing us in her cubicle. Her co-workers are starting to talk. And so on, but the issue for us is it’s like one person over in Seattle, four from Saudi Arabia, three in Dusseldorf, six in Sau Paulo. Mind you, they all manage to surf to CDBaby, Rhapsody or iTunes to buy our music and all have PayPal accounts, bless them. And each of them 99 cent transactions finds their way back into our digital kitty. Thank you very much. Come again. Ka Ching! Don’t get me wrong. We love the fans we already have. But remember the numbers, the numbers!

What if you could fast forward the painstakingly slow process of finding each and every one of those fans in this great big world;  your God-given, statistically accurate fair share of the global market who are desperate to find you and exactly the thing you do? The numbers tell us that in sales, a small percentage (3% ?) of any group will absolutely buy whatever you are selling, no matter what. But let’s be ultraconservative here in a highly diverse global population. Let’s say .1% have to find you. OK that’s 6 billion people x .001 = 6 Million people. 6 MILLION PEOPLE ARE DYING TO FIND EXACTLY YOUR MUSIC RIGHT NOW!!!

So let’s see, that’s 99 cents a song,  we currently have two CDs to choose from, you gotta figure at a bare minimum, just on iTunes alone they’re going to like 3 songs of 11 from each CD. 6 songs, 99 cents. That’s $35,640,000!!! and we haven’t even gotten to T-shirts, bumper stickers or condoms yet.  I can start shopping for that Italian villa if we can start getting busy here, no?

So, Mr. Green Tea Bonaroo geek angel, here’s where I’m going with all this. I need you to come up with an iPhone app that somehow aggregates all the Mary from Murfreesboro-like commentary about us, marries that with all the Amazon ‘If you liked so and so then check out Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge’ comments, blog reviews, podcast plays, Facebook, Reverbnation quotes, aggregating all that into a sort of conceptual consensus of the universal mind that clearly defines our music into a unique and ultra-specific niche. Then it would have within it some kind of comparative compositional pneumonic harmonic sonic spectrum analyser that compares our music to a database of all the music ever recorded at least since the birth of recorded music, input that into the commentary aggregator extrapolator, spider the web with this ultra niche music match maker, connect the dots and spare us a few decades of searching that we’d rather spend touring the world and playing for all these nice folks because we found them all much sooner with your great new app.

Get it? The fans are happy. The band is happy.You get rich. We get rich. It’s a big win-win love fest for all. So what do you say? Can you help us out on this one?

Father’s Day is upon us and this one is kind of important to me as I have my second child on the way in a few weeks. And since we’re talking numbers here, and it’s all about the numbers, if you run the numbers on my age when that kid graduates high school, that’s a number that doesn’t rock my world. If you also run the numbers on probable college tuition costs by then, you’ll understand why we need you to get busy. So on this Father’s Day my new geeky, winged friend, no I’m not asking for that iPhone. Maybe you could talk to the Big Guy and have him help out with that AT&T 3G network first. I just want to see your new app on every single iPhone in the world so I can start thinking about the kind of numbers we need our accountant to translate.

 Amen and Godspeed,

Mark Hermann

It’s a boy!

April 19th, 2009 § 0

Born: Contrary Radio on Friday, April 17th at 2:35AM weighing in at just over 1000 pounds. The strapping young CD was handled expertly by mastering engineer, Tom Brick at Absolute Audio in Highlands, NJ with producer and guitar player, Mark Hermann on hand to listen for the heartbeat and receive the walloping bundle of joy. The proud parents, Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge, handed out fine Cuban cigars to anyone who happened to be passing by at that hour in Highlands, NJ (there are still a few cigars left in the box as a result). The band is resting comfortably and can’t wait for this fine young lad to take his first steps in the world. And the village rejoiced!

And so it’s time now to send this little bundle of rock ‘n roll joy that’s been gestating for over two years out into the world so that the world can get a look at him. But alas, we don’t want to shock the little guy. So what we are proposing is to allow our friends, family and loyal supporters from our mailing list to view the babe first. Very soon we will have a secret page up on the website that we will share with our close friends as an email invitation. You’ll be able to get your first exclusive look at the strapping young lad and while he is brand new, he responds best when you turn it up and even play a little air guitar. He likes that.

For a limited time, we’re also going to allow you the choice of downloading it for free or to pay what you think is fair for our efforts. What’s most important at this time is that you comment back to us with your thoughts. We encourage you to write reviews, which we’ll feature on the website. And most of all, share this new effort with your friends and turn them on. A lot of hard work went into this new offering and we need to hear back from you, the folks who’ve been loyal enough to hang on until we delivered. By the way, make sure you update your contacts as our band email has changed. It is no longer info@citizensofcontraryknowledge.com. New band email address is: band@cockrox.com.

For those of you reading this who are not yet on our mailing list, you will still be able very soon to stream the new CD to check out for yourselves. And rest assured, there will be a big CD release announcement coming very soon so you too can buy the CD or individual songs, and see the band perform this new material.

Well, I’ve got to run now. I smell something funny and I don’t know if you’ve ever changed a rock ‘n roll diaper before but nothing like the smell of poop and black leather…(I’m coming, don’t cry little buddy).

Peace,

Mark Hermann

The Rites Of Spring

March 28th, 2009 § 0

Well, I finally felt the warmth of the March sun on my face today, sitting on a park bench watching my little girl play in a Harlem playground. And I couldn’t help but think to myself, ‘Spring is finally here!’

Well, it’s about F!@king time, I say! Nothing like a cold, dreary New York winter to get you all in a ‘Let’s Save the World, Love your brother, Peace and good will to all men’ frame of mind, no? Yeah right! Another month wrapped up in sweaters and scarves with cold rain, no snow and another parking ticket to battle the Man and I’m about ready to go ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy‘ Nicholson on the world. But alas, I digress.

The truth is there is much to celebrate here in the land of Contrary Knowledge. For in this season that celebrates rebirth in the cycle of life, we Citizens are, too, in a sense reborn.

First off, if you are reading this, you no doubt have noticed that we have a brand new website with a whole new look to celebrate. To this we owe big props to our web guru, Reid Hawkins, for his killer design and creative input. Please bear with us for a moment as we finalize the small details of the new site. But in the mean time, please chime in and tell us what you like, what you don’t like and any suggestions you have that will help make your visit to the land of C.O.C.K. a better and more lasting experience that will make you want to return and hang out with us on a regular basis.

And can we talk for a minute about the real reason we have to celebrate? Our new CD is FINALLY complete!!! and we can’t wait for you to hear it!!! It has truly been a long and winding road to get here (more than two years) but we can assure you, it will have been well worth the wait. There are some surprises on this record that may well, um…surprise you.

For example, on this new CD you just might hear some avant garde jazz trumpet, pelican stories, a rapping guitar player, celestial symphonies, Italian women swooning, a nice Jewish boy who plays a fierce blues harp, soul sisters that would make Lincoln Hays proud, and even a small child reprimanding you. But hey, rest assured those surprises still hold true to our original mission statement, which is to always remain Contrary.

We are truly grateful to our amazing musician friends, who have contributed their stellar crafts to this effort and without whom this CD could not have turned out anywhere nearly as cool. And only in music could you tell someone you love them by calling them the Baddest Motherfucker On The Planet but to all our friends, hey, what else can we say to you? It’s true. All of you are just the baddest motherfuckers!

Right now we are in the final stages of mastering and completing artwork for the CD. Very soon we will be announcing the big CD release party. But for now, to all of you fellow Citizens who have been so patient, who have been asking us for months to come out of hiding and come out to play, we say thanks for sticking it out. It’s a brand new day, a brand new show and a brand new CD. We hope you are as proud of this new effort as we are. We are truly grateful for your continued support and inspiration.

So let’s get this party started already. Spring is here!

Peace,

Mark Hermann

Hello world!

March 26th, 2009 § 1

Our Blog is coming soon!