Pop: Guitars, Cadillacs, etc, etc

`The car is like the gun. It's US individualism incarnate.' In his new album The Gasoline Age, FM Cornog - better known as one-man band East River Pipe - casts weird light on America's affair with the automobile. Drive carefully now.

In high school, FM Cornog played in a band with someone called Tom Manly. Guess who got to have the band named after them? FM was eventually dumped from the Tom Manly Band for not being able to play keyboards as well as Rick Wakeman, but when, years later, he got round to forming his own band, he didn't call it the FM Cornog Band, he named it after a sewage pipe that emptied into the East River a block away from his apartment in Queens, New York.

"I used to take walks down by the river," he explains, "and one day I saw this steaming sewage coming out of a pipe into the East River, and I thought that the world was the river and I was the pipe, and my songs were the sewage. So: East River Pipe it was."

As it happens, East River Pipe wasn't so much a band as a one-man labour of love, Cornog having neither the temperament nor the inclination to face the tribulations of band life - the performing, the promotion, the egos, and other people in general. Instead, he painstakingly put together songs on a tiny home studio bought for him by his girlfriend Barbara, who released them in a series of cassette and vinyl singles, then on CD. Four hard-to-find albums later, East River Pipe have made one of the finest albums of the year, an iconoclastic set of car songs entitled The Gasoline Age, which tells you more about the American condition than you'll learn from a month of CNN.

From the first few glowing bars of "Shiny, Shiny Pimpmobile", it's clear to all with ears that this is a classic, a work of rare warmth and energy that shines a new light on the American love-affair with the automobile. "I think in the great tradition of American car songs, the car stands for escape," muses Cornog. "In a way it's like the gun, it's our individualism incarnate. People think you can escape, but there is no escape, it's a myth, because all our lives coincide somehow, and feed into each other. In America, this whole idea of the individual is so awesomely important that the collective whole is just laughed at, this idea that we could depend on each other and draw from each other's strength." He pauses, then adds in mock-sinister tones: "I've been told that I have socialist leanings."

Cornog drew the inspiration for the songs on The Gasoline Age from cruising Route 22, near where he now lives in New Jersey. "It's like a 30-mile strip-mall," he explains, "all these neon signs, gas stations, Dunkin' Donuts, car lots. It seems so utterly American to me: here we have everything we can sell you, except your soul. The great American dilemma, for me, is so much wealth, yet so little wealth inside: the soul is still sick, the soul needs something you just can't buy."

He seems especially sensitive to this sickness of the soul. At high school in Summit, New Jersey in the early Eighties, while the likes of Tom Manly hankered after becoming the next Springsteen or Styx, Cornog was the only kid in school who fell in thrall to Joy Division's Closer, finding its odd, closed-off atmosphere much more appealing than the blunt literality of mainstream American rock. "It was about a deeper human condition that I felt I was experiencing, the disturbing feelings I felt," he says. "It was like shining a light in the corner of my mind where the dirt and the roaches were, the stuff that was unpleasant - seeking that stuff out and kind of enjoying it, in a way."

Today, the young FM Cornog would probably be sent for counselling, but back then he sought solace in drink and drugs, skipping school to take the train into Manhattan, where he'd walk to Central Park to score dope from a guy called Mel who sat by the boating pond selling loose joints. Years later, Cornog would name an album after Mel. "That album was about people who lived in our neighbourhood back in Queens, a lot of fringey, outcast types," he says. "I tend to gravitate towards the darker side, that's just my nature, and I find the winners in life less interesting than the losers. Our neighbourhood was populated mainly by losers, people struggling to get by - mentally-ill people and old guys, people who would look for bottles and cans all day to redeem them for five cents a can, alcoholics. Mel seemed to me to be the archetypal outcast kind of guy."

Before too long, though, Cornog himself was that archetypal outcast. Thrown out by his parents, he slipped deeper into alcoholism, and by his early twenties, he was living on the streets of Hoboken, sleeping in the town's railway station. "I was a hardcore alcoholic, drinking from the moment I got up in the morning," he admits. "Did you ever see that movie Barfly, about Charles Bukowski? My life was like that, only I didn't have women fighting over me like he did!" Occasionally, he'd play music with a drummer friend, who slipped a cassette of some of his songs to Barbara Powers, who became his girlfriend of 15 years standing now.

"Barbara was the one who took it upon herself to get me out of that," he says. "She bought me my first mini-studio, and she was the one who had the burning desire to get my stuff out to people. I didn't have any burning desire to do anything, really, except get fucked up! She was instrumental in anything good happening to me, because I was just utterly, utterly into self-destruction at that point.

"I laugh when I hear rock celebrities talk about their drug problems, `I was on the road doing all these drugs...' - if you have a serious drug problem, you can't go on the road, you're too busy getting fucked up, 24-hours a day. That's where I was, I wasn't trying to have a career in music, I didn't have any ambitions to be a rock star, my only ambition was to get fucked up on booze, and whatever else I could get my hands on - it didn't matter to me, I was a complete garbagehead, I'd do anything on offer."

Unsurprisingly, Cornog's earlier songs are wracked with the guilt and low self-esteem befitting a man who regarded his songs as sewage, despite their often winsome pop sheen; titles such as "Bring on the Loser" and "I Am a Small Mistake" speak volumes about his state of mind. For years, he lived on the fringes, doing odd jobs, painting houses and raking leaves to help finance his art. But with Barbara's help he was able to kick the booze and get his life into order, eventually hitting paydirt with the Mel album, which attracted the attention of both Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner, who has since covered several of Cornog's songs, and EMI America, which signed him to a five-album deal.

"The reason I liked the guys at EMI was they said: `You don't like to tour? You don't have to. You don't even have to do interviews. All you have to do is, every year and a half, slide a DAT through our door in the middle of the night, and we won't even bother you, we'll just put out your records.' I thought, how can I turn this down - it's just like being on Merge [his new label], which is barely a label at all, just four people sitting in a trailer in North Carolina."

Things got even better when, a few months after signing, EMI UK, the parent company, decided to completely shut down its American operation, which meant it had to pay off Cornog's contract in full - without ever releasing one of his songs. "That's what Barbara and I have been living off for two years now," he gloats. "And we bought a house on top of that, too." Reimbursed, revived and rejuvenated, he set about recording the songs which make up The Gasoline Age, an album which has clearly profited from the extra care and attention he's been able to lavish upon it. At last, it seems, life is starting to turn out right for FM Cornog. As for Tom Manly, the last FM heard of him, he was living in Idaho with his third wife, his music just a memory from a distant past.

East River Pipe's album `The Gasoline Age' is out on Merge/City Slang