“Atlantic City (Gonna Make a Million Tonight)” – East River Pipe
(Words/music: F.M. Cornog, available on The Gasoline Age, Merge Records 1999)
I won’t try to rehash Fred Cornog’s journey from homeless junkie to reviled pop recluse because others have covered his biography better. You should go read the feature on Cornog from New York Magazine or the Allmusic entry for East River Pipe (or the recent Merge Records oral history Our Noise), because it’s difficult to separate the biography from the songs, specifically the idea of a guy making these weirdly charming songs with keyboards and drum machines in his bedroom.
The single element that stands out the most to me – more than the nine and a half minutes of running time (although the last minute is mostly just a sound collage), more than the hopefulness in Cornog’s voice – is the way the long keyboard notes and delayed guitar shine in the background like a fluorescent light. It ends up giving the song “soft lighting” as well – keeping the focus on the dream of becoming a millionaire rather than the impossibility of the feat. Eventually, I end up losing myself in the reverberations, as the delayed guitar decays into that strange hum of slot machines whirling. This is the point where Cornog’s dream fades into reality – one where (in my experience, anyway), casinos are far more depressing than those “Vegas, baby!” exclamations might make you think. For a long stretch of time tonight, every time the song hit the eight minute mark, I went back near the beginning and dropped the cursor, getting lost in that loop again for a few more minutes.
Then I thought of how its creator made this in his bedroom studio. At that point, I looked around at all the clutter in my bedroom, dropped the cursor back around the two minute mark, and closed my eyes in an attempt to fall back into the sound.
More on East River Pipe: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
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