East River Pipe is one man, Fred M. Cornog. He makes beautiful, dreamy pop records in a small apartment in New York, which he shares with Barbara Powers, who's not only his girlfriend but has played a large part in getting his music released. His music is so well crafted and recorded that many listeners never realize that what they are hearing is not a "full" band or even that there's no drummer, only an older model drum machine. Check out his CDs, Shining Hours in a Can, a collection of singles (on Ajax records), and Poor Fricky, the most recent album (on Merge records).
I remember reading that you were into Tom Verlaine and Television.
When I finally moved to the city, I was looking at this Television bin...one was Marquee Moon and one was Adventure. I was looking at the Marquee Moon and it was too scary to pick that up, 'cause that's a Mapplethorpe photo on the cover of that and it looks like their veins are sticking out, every hideous blemish on their face is amplified. I only picked up Adventure because it just looked less scary to me, more accessible. I started out listening to "Glory" and "Days" and "Foxhole" and stuff like that, rather than "Marquee Moon" and "See No Evil."
I think I actually heard Tom Verlaine's solo stuff before I heard Television.
There's kind of this drug element to everything Tom Verlaine does that I really like, although I don't take any drugs anymore! There's still this residual, leftover thing of acid in my head that will never go away. Television and Tom Verlaine stuff always seemed like really good drug music to me.
How did you start recording your own music?
When I was a kid, 15 years old or so, I had two little cassette players and I'd record a piano part and then I'd rewind it and play that back and play another piano part over that [previous] piano part with the other one on record. I'd essentially be bouncing off these cheap things. As soon as those mini-studios things came on the market, I knew I wanted one of those things. The first one I got was a Tascam Porta-One 4 track. I guess how I got into it is a fascination with song writing and tape machines at the same time. I put in a lot of time listening to records, and I still do. If you listen to late period Beatles records, put the headphones on and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" and one thing will be coming out of the left earphone, one thing will be coming out of the right, one thing will be going down the center...I didn't know how they did that, and I still don't, but that it could be done seemed really interesting to me, that it wasn't all just coming down the center of your head...it seemed like another world, an inner world. Listening to late period Beatles records and also wanting to write songs on my own, that's what's led to this disaster known as East River Pipe.
So when you realized there where these 4 track things you automatically understood what they were capable of?
Oh yeah! I was like, "Boy, I'm gonna get one of those!"
How old were you when you got your first 4 track?
About 23 or something. I've been messing around with it for about ten years.
What are you using now? Is it an 8 track?
I have a Tascam 388. It's an 8 track reel to reel but it lays flat and it's on 1/4" tape. It's incompatible with anything. You can't bring that tape into a real recording studio.
It won't play on a Fostex 8 track?
It won't play on anything. It doesn't sync up with it. What you'd have to do, if you were gonna bring that into a real studio, would be to bring the whole machine in. One person could carry it but it's pretty huge. I love this machine. For me, it's miles ahead of the cassette decks. You get a better fidelity. I'm not trying to get a bad fidelity recording. Why not try to make it as good as it can be? At the same time, I'm not a tech-head. I don't know anything about recording, I've never read the manual for this Tascam 388 because, quite frankly, I don't like to use things the way everybody else uses things. I never read the manuals for anything I get. I just turn the thing on and pluck the guitar and that's it. I just learned over time how to use it more efficiently or in a way that suited my music the best.
It seems like you've experimented with a lot of the sounds over time and have all this you can draw from to put things together.
Barbara and I got it [the 8 track] used in 1989. I'd say the first two years of stuff that I did sounded very shrill, kinda harsh and claustrophobic, but over time, it's just like everything else...you do it enough, you get better at it. I just kept doing it, day in and day out, and here we are 6 years later, with the same machine and it's still working, and I use it a lot. It's a really good, durable machine that sounds good.
I thought it was an 8 track cassette recorder.
I know that some people like to use these ADAT machines, those digital things. I don't like digital and I couldn't afford one to begin with. There's this kind of war going on between people that believe in digital or analog, and I'm not at war with anybody but I really believe in the analog sound. I don't care if the fidelity isn't as crisp or something. It just sounds natural, the way it comes over the speakers. Digital kinda reminds me of a cheap Formica table and analog reminds me of a nice, wood-grained table. There's something about digital things that I don't like.
What do you mix down to?
Well, I have a whole bunch of things. I have a cassette player. "Happytown" and "Times Square Go Go Boy"...that's where the masters for those came from. I have a reel to reel, which is a 2 track thing, and I have a DAT machine. I've been using the DAT machine more, recently, just because it's fast. It works fast...it's like a fancy cassette machine...it's growing on me--but not the sound of it.
Have you gotten a chance to do any digital editing for your albums?
I'm not up to that level of sophistication.
You just rent some studio time and you patch it all together on a computer.
There's a guy, his name's Danny Caccavo and he works at a place called This Way Productions in Manhattan and he masters my stuff. What we do, Barbara and I, is we give Danny a whole bunch of DATs or cassettes or reels and just go, "Okay, it's mix number three on this tape" and he'll sequence it, trim the ends, slightly EQ it and slightly compress it.
So that's being done, you're just not there.
I don't have a clue about that stuff. I'm so naive about the whole expertise of that. I just plug in the guitar and go. People wonder, "How'd you do that?" or, "That's amazing." It's really not amazing at all. All it is, is plugging in a guitar and then playing a part over that and then maybe adding a keyboard or playing bass. I think the hard part about this whole thing is writing a good song and getting a decent performance of that song. Writing a good song, that's the important part. It's the most simple thing but it's sometimes lost. Once you have a good song, how can you fuck up a good song, production wise? I was playing "Chicken Blows" by Guided By Voices and Barbara was going, "Oh my God, listen to that!" But it's such a great song, it doesn't even matter if all of a sudden this background vocal comes flying out at you. It works. It's very simple to me why that works, because it's a very good song.
Have you been working on any stuff lately?
I have a new album finished up, it's called Mel and it'll be out on Merge records in early September.
It probably facilitates what you want to do, having the little home set up and doing it all at your own speed as opposed to trying to take it into a pay-by-the-hour studio.
Yeah, I couldn't even imagine, aside from the money part. Even if it was 25 dollars an hour, I think it would cost a fortune to record an East River Pipe album in the studio because I like to use the recording process as the creative process. In order to do that in a real recording studio, I guess you have to either have a friend that owns the studio that's gonna give you a real cut rate, or no rate, or you're gonna have to have a lot of money to blow.
Like the Rolling Stones, or something.
