East River Pipe: Biography

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Formed:

Jan 1, 1989

Genres:

Pop Music, Rock Music, Alternative Rock Music, Singer/Songwriter Rock Music

Decades Active:

1990's|2000's

East River Pipe was the guise of singer/songwriter F.M. Cornog, who recorded his melancholy one-man pop on a Tascam 388 mini-studio in his apartment in Astoria, New York. Born in Suffolk, Virginia and raised in Summit, New Jersey, Cornog followed a difficult childhood with a series of jobs in a carpet warehouse, a greenhouse and a lightbulb factory. After a longstanding bout with alcoholism and an emotional breakdown cost him his job and left him homeless, Cornog hit rock bottom; while sleeping in a Hoboken train station, he met Barbara Powers, who eventually became not only his girlfriend but also set up the aspiring musician with recording equipment and his own label, Hell Gate. Fatalistically dubbing the project East River Pipe after imagining a connection between his music and the raw sewage dumped into a local river basin, Cornog began issuing home-recorded cassettes like 1990's Point of Memory and the following year's I Used to Be Kid Colgate before he and Powers raised enough capital to press several hundred copies of a single, "Helmet On." After the record won Single of the Week honors in Melody Maker, East River Pipe was signed to the legendary British independent label Sarah Records, which issued much of the material later collected on 1994's Shining Hours in a Can. After signing to the American indie Merge, East River Pipe returned in 1995 with Poor Fricky; Mel followed in 1996, trailed three years later by The Gasoline Age.

- Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide