East River Pipe

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.

Yeah, look at the Beatles! They could fuck around with "A Day in the Life" or "Strawberry Fields..." 'cause by that time they were millionaires. I think they owned Abbey Road! You can just sit there and camp out. Christ! Elton John used to rent out a studio in France for three months and just sit there. I never liked the clock ticking over my head when I'm trying to do something creative. It's the antithesis of the creative mindset. "I'm paying $50 an hour for this..." I can't imagine the spontaneity level either, because of what I try to do...usually I'm just kinda diddling around on the guitar in front of the TV and I'll go, "This sounds like a half-decent song." So I'll just go over to the mini-studio and flip it on, play something, and it captures the moment. It captures the moment when you're actually really excited about the thing. With most bands, I guess the guy who writes the songs will do a little demo for his friends and then they'll practice it. By the time you get around to booking time or deciding you're gonna go over to the studio and record the song, I don't know if the idea's there any more. Or, you have to manufacture a spontaneity. Like, "Okay, let's try to play this like the first time we played it." Now, don't you wish you had a decent studio that you could capture that first time you play that song with your band? That's what I try to do. "Wow, I feel excited about this now, I'm gonna go in and I'm just gonna do it, right now."

Are a lot of songs written that way? Do you find that sometimes you sketch something out and never finish it?

Yeah, that happens a lot. I would say that about 10 percent of my stuff gets out. 90 percent gets trashed or recycled. Most of it gets trashed. I would think that those numbers would be pretty representative of just about everybody.

I hope so. Let's get technical. When you're using a drum machine. Do you print the effects on that?

Yeah. Whatever effects you hear on my records...I never add effects later, assuming that's what print means.

Yeah, sorry.

Okay, I learned a new term tonight! So I always print with effects, I add nothing afterwards.

A lot of times people don't have the balls to do that.

I'm just having a little fun here. If you like the way your guitar sounds, or your bass, your vocal. I like to sing with effects on 'cause I think it makes you more adventurous. If you just want to fuck around and experiment then fuck around and experiment. The thing I hate about all these tech people that are into the technical side of recording is they always tell you, "Naw, you can't do that, nobody does that." or, "I really don't want you to sing with the reverb on 'cause that'll be down on tape and we can't get rid of it." I'm like, "Why not?" I don't care. I'm just having fun here. That's one of the reasons I record by myself. Then I don't have some technical engineer guy telling me I can't do that. Not that anything I do is all that strange or weird, but for me, the technical process of this thing is just not that important, really. You should control the technology instead of the technology controlling you. Some of these engineers, they're kinda in this rut of the way they do things and they can only see it that way. "Why would you want to record two guitars doing the same thing when I can run your one guitar through this stereo flanger thing and we can get the same effect." That's a different thing. That's an artificial way of getting what I want and it's not the same thing. Don't tell me that that's the same thing--it's not. I'm very hard headed about that stuff. I just really enjoy dicking around by myself. All I'm doing is just dicking around. I'm not trying to make some great technological recording or something. I'm just trying to have fun. I don't have any rack mounted gear or anything. If I got a bunch of rack mounted stuff, I would spend so much time fucking around with dials I wouldn't get a song done. Or the songs would go in a different direction, and I think it would be an unhealthy direction. You would focus more on the technology of the thing, like, "Oh, maybe if I used this gated, reverse reverb instead of the room #2 reverb it would sound that much better." My philosophy is, "Fuck man! Just get it done." I'm just doing a home recording here. It's not like I'm the Beatles or Pink Floyd or something. I've always kept this set up really simple. I have about four guitar stomp boxes, and that's it. I've got a reverb — a stupid, little guitar reverb thing. I also bought a compressor thing which I very impressed with. And a distortion pedal--just a cheap little $40 distortion pedal.

That's the extent of your effects?

That's the whole thing.

What kind of reverb is that?

Let's see. It says, Boss RV-2 digital reverb. It's just a guitar stomp pedal and it's got six different reverbs on it and I don't even use half of them.

Do you run your guitar direct into your mini studio and listen to it through your stereo while recording?

I play everything back and I mix through the stereo.

Do the neighbors like you?

Well, when I do a mix I [might] do 10 mixes. One guy upstairs was going, "Boy, you were listening to the same song today for 6 hours!" He doesn't even know I'm a musician, he thinks I'm some obsessive/compulsive person. The neighbors have never complained about anything, and I always play and sing and carry on pretty loud.

Does Barbara mind it?

She always likes it, because when I'm messing around with a song I'm not bothering her.

What kind of mics do you use?

One's a Shure PE15H. I've had this thing since I had my little Tascam Porta-One. This engineer guy said, "You gotta get a Shure SM 58." So I bought one butI don't like it; it's too sensitive. This PE15 thing, I'm so used to it vocal technique-wise. I have another mic I use when I do acoustic guitar. It's a Beyer Dynamic M69N.

Is that a ribbon mic?

I don't know anything about that! The only ribbon I know is for wrapping presents. I used to be really militant about having cheap stuff but I'll tell you, I got a cheap compressor 2 years ago, it was an Arion compressor, and the thing would pop. You'd hit a louder note and, "crack!" You could hear the compressor grab onto it. Recently I got this Boss compressor/sustainer and what a difference, it's amazing. I'm kind of getting rid of my bullshit bias for really cheap gear.

There's certain limits.

I got a little impatient with really cheap, low end stuff.

Is there any inspiration for your recording style?

Two years ago I was sitting around listening to all this hip alternative bullshit and after two hours, I put on Lou Reed's Magic and Loss. I put that on and it's just guitars--electric guitars, just really thickly done, no heavy-duty effects; recorded nicely. Clean guitars. And a voice, bass and drums. It was just so simple that it reduced those other albums to a pile of shit. It was just so obvious that that was the way to go. Wow, a simple song with simple chords, recorded simply (don't get too fancy) and try to communicate with people. Try to do something beautiful, but don't get complicated; keep it simple. That's been my mantra for a long time. When I picked up Lou Reed's The Blue Mask in 1983, that showed me how little it takes to really create a great album. That album just blew my mind. Listening to Lou Reed albums, I think the way those albums are recorded, that's what spoke to me, the directness of The Blue Mask or Magic and Loss seemed to speak to me in a way that was very direct and I said, "That's the ticket. The rest of this stuff is bullshit." Now, I love albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds . Those are also beautiful albums, but they're more ornate, perhaps. Late period Beatles records. I love Sister , by Sonic Youth. These are all different records that are all great records that create their own space. Production wise, what spoke to me were Lou Reed solo records. That's in your face, no bullshit.

It's funny, 'cause I'm trying to get you to get technical about how you record and we keep discussing songs. That's part of the reason for TAPE OP though, different perspectives on recording.

A friend of mine, who's much more technical than I am, was recording an album in a studio that cost about $40 an hour. He invited me down, just to sit there. I'd never been in a real recording studio. His singer in the band is singing this thing and it sounds really good to me. He's singing it through some Shure mic, like a 57. Afterwards, we're driving home and he's playing the tape for me and he goes, "You know, this is gonna be really good when he sings this with the Neumann mic." And I'm thinking to myself, "This guy's fuckin' insane." The performance was there, a great performance, and now they're gonna go back, it's not gonna be spontaneous, they're gonna have this

mic, it's not gonna be the same. He just doesn't understand what it's about. The recording using the 57 mic was great. Leave it. It has an intensity to it. Why go back and spoil a perfectly good recording just to get a slightly better sound?

I think that points out problems in the whole recording process.

And it also points out priorities that don't necessarily revolve around the performance, which is the important thing. Christ, let the music live. Let the band be the band. Keep that spontaneity there at all costs. A vast majority of these engineer types have always seemed rigid to me. Technical. They impede the creative process.