Penthouse And Pavement
This month’s discarded URGENT! fax in rock’s recycle bin. NYC art-punk of urban angst, isolation, yuppies, and nuclear paranoia.
Steve Piccolo Domestic Exile MATERIALI SONORI, 1982
“DOMESTIC EXILE didn’t really evolve,” explains Steve Piccolo, “the ideas just sort of just exploded out of me in a very short period… [the album was] supposed to be like cinema verité, a painfully honest, vulnerable, unposed narration of everyday experience in a certain place at a certain time.”
At the dawn of the 1980s, the New Hampshire-born musician and artist was working on Wall Street programming computers. A voracious reader and art enthusiast, as well as a habitué of New York hang-outs including the Mudd Club and Tier 3, Piccolo was influenced by “Dada, Cage, Fluxus, Rimbaud, sound poetry, acoustic ecology, psychogeography, Situationism, Burroughs/Gysin, Sun Ra, William Carlos Williams, Warhol etc”, and also the lyrical genius of Randy Newman and Tom Lehrer. “Wit in song,” he explains. “A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash, David Bowie, Zappa, Your Molecular Structure by Mose Allison…”
By the time Piccolo came to record Domestic Exile he’d ditched the Wall Street gig and was playing bass with John and Evan Lurie’s hip downtown jazz savants, The Lounge Lizards. “I’d known Evan and John since high school when we played in a series of blues bands,” he says. “We used to say we were like members of a native lost tribe, deep in the jungle, who find a battery-powered radio and hear jazz for the first time, and then attempt to incorporate it syncretically into their ancestral music. I enjoyed that type of postmodern reasoning, while it lasted.”
But Piccolo had another foot in the world of electronic music and performance art, where the songs on Domestic Exile began to take shape. “For Young And Ambitious,” he says of his latter activities, “I’d come out wearing six or seven suits of clothes and run around the room at a frantic New York pace while attempting to act out all the things described in the song. I would strip off the suits of clothing one by one as the ‘day’ in the song progressed, like layers of an onion.”
Through a friendship with Gerald Lindahl at the Public Access Synthesizer Studio, Piccolo heard about a grant to record at the ZBS Foundation in upstate New York, with sound engineer Bob Bielecki, who’d previously worked with Laurie Anderson and La Monte Young.
With its mix of Evan Lurie’s pulsing Farfisa organ, Piccolo’s angular post-punk guitar and “corny, romantic” chords (the artist’s own words), plus the surging sine waves of Lindahl’s analogue synthesizers and the singer’s soporific, dispassionate delivery – was Stephin Merritt listening? – parallels can be drawn between the sound of
Domestic Exile and that of fellow New York artists Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell and even the aphoristic street koans of Moondog. But Domestic Exile also feels unique. From the stop-start sci-fi paranoia of cold war lullaby The Bell to the ansaphone panic attack of Fast Life, here were dreams and nightmares caught between the urban and the domestic, day and night, success and failure, love letters, suicide notes and interior monologues passed from penthouse to sidewalk.
“I’ve always loved the oxymoron ‘domestic exile’,” says Piccolo, “and that was a time of contradictions. Substance abuse also has a clear role in these ups and downs. When I wrote the songs I was living a pretty healthy life, day job, nice house, etc [but the] songs were weirdly prescient, or ‘self-fulfilling lies’ as one of the tracks puts it… Stray Man was about watching bums on the street and empathising with them, but later I actually experimented with homeless drifting, though not entirely out of necessity. It was pretty intense.”
There were a few intimate live shows to support the album, and a lot of solo gigs in Europe with just bass and voice (“That was hard to pull off! Sometimes people threw things”). Meanwhile, the proto-Magnetic Fields love song, I Don’t Want To Join A Cult, became an underground hit in Manhattan, with Debbie Harry threatening to do a cover version.
The album was released on questionable quality vinyl, but it sold well in Europe, and even after Piccolo moved to Milan and established himself as a performance artist and curator he’d still receive letters from fans asking for a CD. Listening back to it for its new remastered reissue, Piccolo now hears “hesitations, glitches, wobbles… new technologies have trained us to expect robotic perfection.” He also recognises that many of the songs feel prophetic regarding today’s America: Businessman’s Lament, which alternates between Santo & Johnny dream-state and angry ARP synth-amped rant, might be the anthem of the modern sociopath CEO, while the romantic piano ballad Superior Genes (“I want to demonstrate my dominant traits/So that I can attract a suitable mate with excellent genes”) could have been penned by the current US president.
“Sad to say but sort of true,” says Piccolo. “Lots of people didn’t understand that song. I guess I was convincingly ugly in my play-acting, even though if you read the lyrics I’m obviously making fun of those assholes. I don’t think I was foreseeing anything, though… the world has always had its monsters.”
Andrew Male
“I’d run around the room… I would strip off the suits of clothing one by one.” STEVE PICCOLO