Contribution by Steve to fanzine on view at abandoned newsstand in Palermo transformed into an artspace by Fabrizio Basso. The text is an annotated portion of the song Young and Ambitious from Steve’s album DOMESTIC EXILE (about to be re-released on CD and vinyl by Guerssen (Mental Experience).
Young and Ambitious
Though in many of the songs I am playing a fictional character, this one is a self-deprecating autobiography. By adding some footnotes I can reveal a lot of background, though some may prefer not to know… after all, by keeping things general, they can become almost universal, in a way. At least if the universe is that of the not-so-adorable yuppies of the late 1970s early 1980s.
Young (1) and Ambitious (2)
Now I am waking
Lying in bed (3)
Look in the mirror
Am I at home? (4)
Now I am hearing
Trucks in the street (5)
Now I am drinking the coffee (6)
I bought from a man in a store (7)
In the Village (8) who recently
Quit and went far away
It’s sunny and gray today
I think I’m where I want to be
What is my place in history, anyway?
I’m doin’ what I think I oughta do
And if I’m wrong I guess we’re through, anyway
Now I am walking from her (9) house (10) to my house (11)
Now I am turning the key in the door
Now I am washing the dirt off of my face
Now I am taking the bus to my office (12)
Now I am working in a room that is cool (13)
There are no windows
And it’s very messy in here (14)
And if I’m fighting for a cause
Is it because I like to fight?
And if I win the world’s applause
Is it because they think I’m right?
Now work is over
I’m gonna go out
Now I am buying
Something to eat (15)
Something to wear (16)
Something to read (17)
Now I am spending the money I earned
When I was working a short time ago
That is how things work
This I have learned
It’s not really raining
I want a drink but it’s time to go home now
Take off my suit
Open the mailbox
Turn on the radio (18)…
AND SO ON. I won’t annotate the whole song. This is more than enough.
NOTES
(1) I was 23-24 years old when I wrote these songs etc etc
(2) I was working as a systems analyst on Wall Street, where I had clawed my way into that position after starting as a lowly bookkeeper, a role that always made me think of Bartleby the scrivener, and his delightful way of telling his boss “I would prefer not to” when asked to perform some task.
(3) A mattress on the floor. I don’t think I knew anyone who had an actual bed in those days.
(4) The answer was no, or maybe yes. I wasn’t sure.
(5) This refers to Kenmare Street in Lower Manhattan, which is the main route for trucks from the Williamsburg Bridge to the Holland Tunnel. The small loft was on the second floor, with large windows on the street, practically right in the middle of very intense and noisy traffic.
(6) You could still get Jamaican Blue Mountain, until the Japanese bought it all. Second choice was Hawaiian Kona. Ground from the beans at home before making with Melitta paper drip filter.
(7) The store was McNulty’s, which still exists.
(8) The West Village.
(9) Her was my wonderful GF, a brilliant performance artist and intelligent person.
(10) See note 5. Later our houses converged into one apartment near Washington Square, in a building that used to be a hotel and still had doormen in livery. The song Superior Genes was also a way of puncturing my own ego balloon when I thought about living in that building, the sort of place you walked past in childhood and thought “wow, someday I wanna live there.”
(11) My house, before the move in note 10, was a ground floor streetfront flat on Avenue A. It was pretty scuzzy. I had very few possessions, since prior to this I had been living in a strange esoteric commune, almost a cult (see I Don’t Want To Join a Cult). I never spent any time in that apartment, except to sleep. Never ate there, not even breakfast. Never invited anyone over. Fortunately it didn’t last long.
(12) The office was in a building right on the Hudson River, at the end of Houston. Computer facilities had to be kept away from residential neighborhoods, because the huge computers were hooked up to generators that would noisily kick in if there was a blackout or even just a brownout. Without constant energy, all the data in the computers would be lost.
(13) It was cool because the mainframes also needed constant chilly air conditioning. I did not work inside the sterilized space with the machines, but the whole building was always kept quite cold. In one of the photos on the front cover, you can see my office cubicle. Note that there is not even a monitor. Programmers worked on paper, using very nice mechanical pencils to write code into little boxes. The cardboard box contained all the current manuals. To the right there is a photo of Picasso.
(14) Computer programmers were a messy bunch back then. Most were self-taught, brilliant and very non-conformist. Among my colleagues there was a biker who wore a Hell’s Angels vest, and some brilliant entrepreneurial minds with whom it was fun to go to lunch and discuss what a few years later was going to be a real revolution in personal computing. The Internet was not on the agenda. Just three or four years later, however, I was putting my acquired skills to work on a Commodore, and later on an Atari. So the years as a systems analyst were not wasted.
(15) I had a charge account at Balducci’s!
(16) For work duds the place to go was Barney’s, though as I got into the Wall Street norm (there was a lot of pressure to conform) I dumped my skinny YSL and Cardin (which even had sort of flared bellbottom trousers) in favor of Brooks Brothers. For Lounge Lizards gigs, Brooks could almost cut it, though we mostly wore vintage stuff.
(17) In those days I spent huge sums on real paper books.
(18) FM radio was pretty great at the time, with lots of interesting options. Favorites were WBAI, WKCR and WBLS (black radio… the voice would say things like “it’s a black afternoon on black radio in black New York”).
