Happy Birthday John Lurie!

Celebrating John Lurie's birthday with a Lounge Lizards TV appearance from '99 and some episodes of "Fishing With John."

Happy Birthday Arto Lindsay!

Celebrating the birthday of guitarist/composer/producer Arto Lindsay with a few performances and interviews worth checking. 

R.I.P. Curtis Fowlkes, 1950-2023

Sadly, trombone great and Jazz Passengers co-founder Curtis Fowlkes has passed away at 73. He'll be greatly missed. 

LINKS

The Free Jazz Collective Curtis Fowlkes

R.I.P. Anton Fier, 1956-2022

Sadly, drummer/producer Anton Fier (The Feelies, Lounge Lizards, Golden Palominos) has passed away. He'll be greatly missed. 

LINKS

NME – Anton Fier, Golden Palominos founder and early Feelies drummer, has died 

Rick McGinnis – Some Old Pictures I Took: Anton Fier

Whaddya mean you don't know Steve Piccolo

Guerssen recently reissued Steve Piccolo's NYC no wave gem Domestic Exile from 1982 on their Mental Experience subsidiary.

Here's the scoop...
Steve Piccolo has been in active since the mid-1970s in music, theater, performance art, sound installations, video and film soundtracks. In 1979 he started with the Lurie brothers the “fake jazz” / No Wave band the Lounge Lizards. “Domestic Exile” was recorded one year after the seminal Lounge Lizards debut, at a time when Steve was living a schizophrenic existence: working at Wall Street by day and going to clubs and art spaces almost every evening (he was one of the artists filmed for the “135 Grand Street New York 1979” No Wave documentary).

Early on, Steve was influenced by Mose Allison, Tom Lehrer, Randy Newman and “people who put thoughtful witty lyrics onto rather standard pop music”. In just two weeks, Steve wrote the collection of songs which would form "Domestic Exile". Somebody described them as “Neurotic City Folklore” - as the lyrics dealt with living in NYC, urban angst, isolation, yuppies, nuclear paranoia…Titles like “Young and Ambitious”, “Modern Man”, “Businessman's Lament”, “Bleecker Street”, “Superior Genes”…The idea was to use these songs for a sort of “side project”, originally conceived more like a soundtrack for performance art and less like a band.

The recording took place at the ZBS Foundation in New York, engineered by Bob Bielecki (a collaborator of Laurie Anderson and La Monte Young). Steve sang, played electric guitar, bass / double bass and percussion. He was joined by Lounge Lizards bandmate Evan Lurie on Farfisa keyboard (the same one he used on the first Lounge Lizards album) and G. Lindahl on synth.

The trio even played live a few times, including a benefit concert for Public Access Synthesizer Studio at CBGB.  After “Domestic Exile” was finished, Steve played the tapes to some record labels in New York and although one of the tracks, the catchy “I Don’t Want To Join A Cult”, was an underground hit in Manhattan - even Debbie Harry (Blondie) wanted to do a cover version - no one expressed interest in releasing the album.

Soon after, Steve went to Italy and “Domestic Exile” was finally released on a local label, housed in a cover very similar to the first Lounge Lizards album. The result was a minimalist art-rock masterpiece which could be described as a lo-fi version of John Cale’s “Music For A New Society”.
Sadly, the quality of the original pressing was not very good (cheap, noisy vinyl) and there was a mistake with a couple of song titles / running order on Side 1. These issues have been fixed for this new reissue.

“I was always fascinated by society’s total dropouts, and by the idea of surviving completely outside the system, without an identity, papers, money, job, family. But not without friends… that would be unthinkable, unnecessary cruelty.” – Steve Piccolo

Get a copy of Steve's Domestic Exile reissue right here. Listen to a couple tracks below.