The Dirty Names, Harrison Cofer

For fans of: The Rolling Stones, The Black Keys, The Faces

The four members of Rock & Roll outfit, Dirty Names, started playing together early in life. Drummer Matt Rose and bassist Sam Wetterau have been friends since age 10 and played together in a band at age 15. Lead singer Harrison Cofer moved to their town of Annapolis, Maryland for his high school freshman year, upset that he had to leave his last band in Michigan.

"I show up and Matt and Sam were playing on stage for the opening assembly," Cofer recalls. "I was sitting there pissed off and said 'I'm going to play with these guys.' Sure enough, they asked me to play acoustic guitar on a Rolling Stone cover a couple of months after that for a battle of the bands, which we ended up winning."

Wetterau went off to college (before coming back to re-join his friends) and Cofer got kicked out of his high school. He landed at another school where he recruited lead guitarist Kit Whitacre.

The band teamed up with a short-tempered music enthusiast with a wicked record collection who began to manage the band. At that time, they were simply called The Names. The story goes that they were tossing around possible band names, getting more and more ridiculous, as bands do, until Rose shouted, "I can't take this anymore! Let's just be all of them. Let's just be The Names." (Later, they found out another band in Belgium already had the name, so they just made it a little dirtier.)

Their manager locked them up in a garage studio for two years with few live shows. He drilled classic and rare rock recordings into their heads working them towards a record release. Towards the end of this phase, Wetterau returned from college and joined the band. As tempers flared, the band split with the manager and they realized that the best thing for them to do was play live as often as possible, touring all over America including two festivals in Toronto Canada.

In a similar short feedback loop fashion, the band started releasing EPs. Last year in 2011, they released the five-track ROCK AND ROLL MIND CONTROL, which features "Salt Water Jackie," a track with an award-winning music video that takes place in a ballet studio and shows the band using their music to once again corrupt. The first EP was recorded in a shack-like garage studio of a friend.

Earlier this year in 2012, they released SWEAT BOX, a six song EP recorded shirtless in a warehouse on a hot July day. The recording includes songs the band has been playing for a couple of years live but just hadn't recorded yet. Dirty Names combined their two EP's with a a new song for a debut record titled Double Your Pleasure.


Harrison Cofer is a musician and songwriter living in Brooklyn New York