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East River Pipe’s Nontrivial Things: Tom Verlaine

Stoutly refusing to record his passionate songs under anything less than his own terms (in his New Jersey home on a TASCAM MiniStudio), F.M. Cornog, under the name East River Pipe, has released seven albums since 1994 that can stand toe-to-toe with anything by your favorite indie rockers over the past 20 years. Although working full-time at the local Home Depot and raising a daughter with his wife may have curtailed Cornog’s recording time somewhat, the quality of the finished product remains unchanged. ERP’s latest, We Live In Rented Rooms (Merge), is further testimony to a man who refuses to play the rock-star game (form a band, tour, do photo shoots, etc.) and has come out the other side with a brilliant body of work—and with his soul intact. Cornog will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Cornog: OK, this is the stuff of blackmail. I loved Daryl Hall and John Oates in the 1970s. While you’re laughing hysterically, let’s see if you can write “She’s Gone” or “Rich Girl.” No, I didn’t think so. Anyway, back before Hall & Oates had their big-hair, ’80s heyday, I read an interview with them in Rolling Stone, where they were asked what they were listening to. They said Cheap Trick and Television. I already knew Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” and “I Want You To Want Me,” but I’d never even heard of Television. So I ran out to Tower Records (I lived in San Francisco then) and picked up their two albums, Adventure and Marquee Moon. Tom Verlaine was the leader of the group. He had a thin, reedy voice. His lyrics were allusive poems of the inner mind. But the guitar playing was the thing that blew me away. Verlaine wasn’t playing the usual white-boy, blues-based crap that every other guitar player was playing. He didn’t use distortion, either—just reverb, delay and tremolo. His note choices were unconventional, too, and he had a slightly Eastern feel to his playing, a glowing drone thing. Patti Smith once described Verlaine’s playing as the sound of “1,000 bluebirds screaming.” Listen to the original, 10-minute, studio version of “Marquee Moon,” and hear what blew me away, way back when, in my little apartment in San Francisco.