An interview with "Sock"
Recently, I came across what seemed to be a demo from the band "Sock" (though, as it later turned out, this was NOT a demo tape. More on that later).
The tape was absolutely glorious, and I fell in love with it immediately. After doing some searching, I managed to get in contact with one of the members of "Sock". Specifically, their drummer (I assume), Brian Sprenger (the dude on the left)! The interview took place over only about 3 emails. His reply times were pretty quick, time zone differences considered. So if you ever came across this wonderful demo and wondered any of the questions below, then today is your lucky day!
(Please note that everything below is a DIRECT quote. Nothing was changed about the text sent over email.)
Q: When and why did "Sock" come to be? A: Sock came about pretty naturally once John and I met and started hanging out all the time. Both of us were in bands and discovered pretty quickly that we liked playing music with each other and had good chemistry coming up with stuff we thought was funny on the spot. We were both in high school at the time, he lived in Warminster and I lived in Southampton which was the next town over. It was either 1993 or 94 when we met and started spending most of our free time together. At first we would play in his bedroom with a guitar and a drum set switching back and forth with the instruments and making up songs while we were playing them improv style and recording them on a boom box cassette recorder. Some of those songs became Sock songs.
Q: Why the name "Sock", and how often were you guys mistaken for the like 30 other bands named "Sock"? A: We decided on the name Sock pretty randomly, I remember we were sitting parked in his van trying to decide what we would call the band going though all kinds of names, and I said "Sock" as I was looking at my feet and he kind of locked onto that, he really liked it, I didn't have a problem with the name so it stuck. I don't remember getting confused with any other bands called Sock, we were the only one we knew and you have to remember this was long before the Internet was a thing in any kind of normal life so if we didn't know of any other bands called Sock and nobody we knew did either, it wasn't an issue.
Q: The only album from the band that I was able to find from the band was a 1994 demo. But according to Joseph Genaro's Wikipedia page, there were at least two other albums. One from 1993 called "Starring at People Starring at Trash", and one from 1998 called "Demented Songs For Youngsters". Is this information accurate? And do other albums also exist? A: The link you sent Joe from YouTube that is labeled a demo is actually the first album Staring At People Staring At Trash. After we put that out we added our good friend Ed O'Toole to the band. He was the singer for a band that John was also in called Horsey Head that I think had broken up by then. All 3 of us would play pretty much any of the instruments and sing depending on the song or whatever the situation was while we were writing or recording, which was at the same time a lot of times. In fact a bunch of Sock songs were recorded live and improvised, meaning there was nothing written before we pressed the record button, we would just start playing and see what happened and if it came out decent or funny enough, that was it. It's Not Easy Being Fat was one of those for example. A few of those type of songs we did re-record like Anne and Goodbye My Car but most of the time we would just keep the first take if we liked it enough. Demented Songs For Youngsters was the 2nd album. After that we did an album called Yer Hinus and then Yer Hinus 2: Five Feet Long Without Breakin'. The last album was called Sock In A Cabin which we wrote and recorded in a couple days in a Cabin in the Pocono Mountains.
Q:While on the subject, do you have any copies of these albums? And if so, is there a chance for them to be re-released or reissued, or are they doomed to be lost for (presumably) ever? A: The first 2 albums were released on cassettes which we did ourselves, all the artwork and making copies, etc, and gave them away to people. The rest we made CDs, again making the art for them and all that, and I made them all myself on my computer at the time and again we just gave them all away, I don't think we ever accepted any money for any of our albums. I may only have the original DAT tape for the first album, although I do have the other albums I believe on an external hard drive. I don't have any plans on doing any kind of re-release but if someone was interested in doing that I wouldn't have a problem with it. If you're interested in hearing them I could try and see if Gmail would let me send you the tracks, I'm not sure if the files would be too big, there's a chance they are WAV files which was how we did the CDs, I'm not sure if I have MP3 files of the songs or not, I'd have to check. I do have CD copies of Demented & the Yer Hinus albums, with only Yer Hinus 2 still having the original artwork.
(Side note: I did later tell Brian that I am interested in hearing these. As of writing this note, he hasn't gotten around to sending them over to me. I do plan on uploading all of them to the Internet Archive for archival purposes once I get them, though.)
Q: A lot of the tracks on the 1994 demo tape give off heavy Ween vibes. Was Ween an inspiration for the band by chance? And while at it, what other inspirations did Sock have for its sound? A: I was definitely big into Ween at the time, we listened to all kinds of music and had a ton of bands we loved. The Dead Milkmen of course, R.E.M., Barkmarket, Pixies, Melvins, Beck, Nirvana, Jonathan Richman, really the list would be insanely long for me to go on but we listened to all kinds of stuff including classic rock, 80's pop, punk, funk, whatever we heard that we liked we took inspiration from, including local bands. I think the biggest inspiration for Sock to come into existence was an album by Touch Me Zoo called Wonderwear Music (made before we joined that band) which is still one of my favorite albums ever made. I think it's on YouTube.
Q: Some of the songs also sound very personal. Were any of them based on real people/events? A: Some of the songs were just us singing about real events like Anne, Goodbye My Car and a bunch of others. It was just a result of the kind of improv writing we were doing at the time. When you are just making up stuff on the spot, it can be easy to just start singing about something that actually happened.
Q: When and why did "Sock" CEASE to be? A: I'm not sure exactly when Sock ended, it's not like we broke up like most bands. It was more a result of life going different ways for each of us and as that happened, we had moved further away from each other which resulted in seeing each other less. But I guess by 2005 or so it was over. In 2008 John put out a solo album on CD called Toe Henry which I played on most of the songs too. It could kinda sorta be considered another Sock album although it officially wasn't.
And... that's it. Really glad I was able to learn more about this band. I enjoyed "Staring at People Staring at Trash" quite a lot, and it seems that most of the information available about them is outright wrong. Genuinely curious where the hell some of these people got their sources from... either way, hope you enjoyed this interview.
