Photograph titled "Fall" by Takeichi Hotta, 1958
For me, the initial charm of East River Pipe (New Jersey songwriter F.M. Cornog) was in the story - I tracked down a copy of Shining Hours in a Can after reading Cornog's tale in some music mag. His background made his debut album more interesting and engaging to me, and over the years I retold the story to lots of people. At some point, I started to wonder if the story is too good - I was in the middle of telling the story to someone when I realized just how unlikely it sounds. Did Cornog really start out as a homeless dude singing songs for change in a Hoboken train station? Did a wealthy woman named Barbara Powers really fall in love with him by chance and bring him home to her apartment? Did she really buy him a synthesizer and help him put out cassettes of his songs, one of which got him a contract with UK-based Sarah Records?
It shouldn't matter, but I really hope the story is true. I think it adds a poignancy to songs like "Times Square Go-Go Boy", originally released by Sarah Records on the "She's a Real Good Time" single. Most people who've heard the song, though, found it on Shining Hours in a Can - the first East River Pipe long-player compiled his early Sarah singles. "Times Square Go-Go Boy" is toward the end of Shining Hours, stuck in after the epic "40 Miles", but it's one of the album's highlights for me. It sounds like a song you'd write if a string of dead-end jobs and bad habits left you penniless in a Hoboken train station - "Buy yourself a ticket, but that ticket isn't really where you want to go."
"Times Square Go-Go Boy" by East River Pipe
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