In 1939 the Du Pont corporation adopted the slogan “Better Things For Better Living … Through Chemistry”. The inventors of Teflon and Lycra probably never expected the phrase to take on a life of its own as the 21st Century proceeded, but by the late 1960s the abbreviated “Better Living Through Chemistry” became a rallying cry for those experimenting with manmade chemicals like LSD and Quaaludes. As late as 1996, Big Beat supremo Fatboy Slim was celebrating the late 90s UK drug culture by claiming the slogan for the title of his multi-million selling album, and four years later a song of the same name made it on to Queens Of The Stone Age’s ‘R’ long player.

Drugs are a big deal in rock ‘n’ roll and the counter culture. And it’s definitely clear from the title of EAST RIVER PIPE’s sixth album— WHAT ARE YOU ON?—that they’re a big deal for F.M.Cornog, the man behind the EAST RIVER PIPE mask. But if you think you’re in for a riotous ride of psychedelic or amphetamine-fuelled hedonism, step away quietly and calmly from the stereo. Cornog may sing of such “better living” half way through the title track of his latest collection, but the characters that inhabit Cornog’s world are hardly party monsters. Many are creatures who rely on drugs for their survival.

“Prozac or alcohol?
This is my lucky day
Caffeine or Percocet?
This is my lucky day”

Such is the kind of chemistry on offer here, and it’s one that seeps throughout WHAT ARE YOU ON?, another magical, intimate EAST RIVER PIPE album, one that continues to justify Rolling Stone’s claim that Cornog is “one of our generation’s great eccentric songwriters”. With WHAT ARE YOU ON?, Cornog rewrites the musical drug book, and perhaps it’s about time that someone recognised so transparently that drugs are not only celebratory. The drugs here are not glorified in the traditional rock ‘n’ roll sense. They’re taken for desperate reasons, simply to allow life to become bearable. Whether they’re the pills and bongs and “dimebags flash(ing) up in Union Square” of ‘Druglife,’ the “Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax” of the title track, or the “cheap red wine / speeding up my spine” of ‘Dirty Carnival,’ these are drugs—prescribed or otherwise—to escape the everyday drudgery and difficulty of modern life, one in which the answer to the question “What’s in my head” is, quite simply, “Absolutely nothing.” Whether this response is good or bad remains open to interpretation—“Could have been something,” Cornog declares, but who knows which he prefers?

This is a world that Cornog has documented in miniscule detail since he first started recording at the start of the nineties, and it’s one that he knows far too well. A difficult childhood and a series of dead-end jobs eventually led to struggles with alcohol and, finally, destitution on the streets following a nervous breakdown. Cornog was, arguably, lucky: he was discovered sleeping rough in Hoboken Station by Barbara Powers, who took him in and provided him with a Tascam 388 mini-studio. His subsequent musical endeavours led to him releasing material for the legendary UK label Sarah Records before he signed to Merge in the mid-nineties. Sixteen years later Cornog and Powers are married with an adopted child, living in New Jersey, where Cornog works 40 hour weeks at Home Depot, a schedule around which he fits music lauded by the likes of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, for whom he has written a number of songs, and critics—Cornog’s masterpiece, The Gasoline Age,, was voted an Album of the Year in 1999 by the New York Times as well as UK broadsheet newspaper The Independent.

It sounds like a beautiful story, the stuff of Hollywood fairytales, but of course life is never that tidy. Cornog remains reclusive, happiest—if one can call it happy—when at work on his music, alone in his room. But perhaps his tale—in a strange way the reverse of the standard musical descent into a hell of drugs and self-loathing, since music helped him ascend out of such a world—also explains why so much of Cornog’s music seems to have such an optimistic spin. These fragile, fleeting miniatures—often so brief that they seem like musical haikus—are composed of shimmering trebly guitars and twinkling keyboard lines that whisper in the listener’s ear. They sound uplifting, even if only to those of a naturally melancholic disposition who find comfort in the knowledge that other people battle to rise above life’s struggles.

But beneath this shiny exterior lie harsh truths, a world of “trivial things” that Cornog describes with a world-weary air: a place where “money com(es) in, suckers stumble out,” “little girls” get “played,” “dreams can kill you” and, frankly, “life is a landfill”. It’s a universe of artifice, enforced by the drugs that protect Cornog’s characters and in which they fall in love with “robots” and “crystal queens.” It’s a bitter world, too, in which the God who oversees it tells his “slaves” to “Shut up and row, you stupid fucks,” an astonishing line matched in its ferocity value by the uncharacteristically fearsome instrumental section that immediately follows.

Fortunately the chasm between the sweet music and the twisted environment it describes is bridged with a sly humour, like the reference to The Beach Boys (the harmonies towards the end of ‘I’ll Walk My Robot Home’) and the succinct epithets about human pretensions in opening track "What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" Here Cornog sings about a character who reads “half a book then … say(s) 'Take a look! T.S. is my new best friend'” when in fact all they seek is attention, “showbiz kisses from Hollywood bitches.” In fact Cornog’s personalities are frequently but gently undermined: “she sure looks fine,” he sings in ‘Dirty Carnival,’ before adding “from a distance, fine.” Then there’s the arched-eyebrow inevitability of "Druglife:" “If it comes down to the drugs or you,” Cornog concedes, “Baby, we’re through.”

What sets EAST RIVER PIPE apart from the millions of bedroom recording artists now enabled by the advent of simple technology is the poise, elegance and simplicity of his work. Cornog’s lo-fi recording techniques reflect his lowlife subject matter, allowing a vulnerability and realism to shine through. The frugal nature of his recording is reflected in his writing style, with every song stripped to its essence. This may at first seem unsatisfying: songs are free of distraction or decoration. But therein lies their considerable, minimalist charm, as every song lays itself open to close inspection like a detailed enamel cameo. Full of sentiment though the songs may be, they’re never sentimental or self-piteous, but instead exquisitely perceptive. When the heartstrings are plucked, they play a heavenly tune; when the knife goes in, it goes in deep.

It’s hard to tell how much of Cornog’s music is genuinely autobiographical. It would be easy to see it all as such, especially given the intimacy of the recordings. It’s also no secret that Cornog knows what he’s singing about. But it’s still merely conjecture: the characters he sings about are cyphers, delicate sketches that tell us about the human condition and its needs. Who they are is irrelevant. What they do, and how they do it, is what matters.

Better living through chemistry? Who knows? In this life you do what you have to in order to survive. With EAST RIVER PIPE it’s always been that way ….


—Wyndham Wallace (Berlin, Oct 2005)

East River Pipe

East River Pipe [cs] (Hell Gate) 1989
Point of Memory [cs] (Hell Gate) 1990
I Used To Be Kid Colgate [cs] (Hell Gate) 1991
Axl or Iggy [7"] (Hell Gate) 1991
My Life Is Wrong [7"] (Hell Gate) 1992
Make A Deal With The City [7"] (Hell Gate) 1993
Helmet On [7"/cd5] (Sarah) 1993
She’s A Real Good Time [7"/cd5] (Sarah) 1993
Firing Room [7"] (Hell Gate) 1993
Goodbye California [10"/cd-ep] (Sarah) 1993
Ah Dictaphone [7"] (Hell Gate) 1994
Shining Hours In A Can [cd] (Ajax) 1994
"Bring On The Loser" b/w "Fan The Flame" & "Sleeping With allboy" [7"] (Merge) 1995
Poor Fricky [cd/lp] (Merge) 1995
"Kill the Action" +2 [cd5] (Merge) 1996
Shining Hours In A Can [cd] (Merge) 1996
Mel [cd/lp] (Merge) 1996
"Cyber Car" on split w/ Baby Bird [7"] (Hell Gate) 1999
split 7" w/ Baby Bird [7"] (Merge) 1999
"So Much Hate" on Oh, Merge comp. [cd] (Merge) 1999
The Gasoline Age [cd] (Merge) 1999
Shining Hours In A Can [cd] (Merge) 2001
Garbageheads On Endless Stun [cd] (Merge) 2001
What Are You On? [cd] (Merge) 2006