Suburban Lawns - Biography
Suburban Lawns, from Long Beach, California, were one of the great California punk bands. Shamanic singer/keyboardist Su Tissue and bassist/singer Vex Billingsgate, who had both attended CalArts, formed the band in 1978 with guitarist/singer Frankie Ennui, guitarist John Gleur and drummer Chuck Roast. Initially they called themselves the Fabulons, then Art Attack, before choosing the name Suburban Lawns.
Former Doors roadie E.J. Emmons produced the band’s self-released first single, “Gidget Goes To Hell” b/w “My Boyfriend” (1979 Suburban Industria). Artist Mark Vallen’s pencil drawing of Tissue appeared on the cover of LA’s punk magazine Slash in 1979. Jonathan Demme and Jack Cummins directed a music video for “Gidget Goes To Hell” that Saturday Night Live aired the following year. Emmons also produced the next single, “Janitor” b/w “Protection” (1980 Suburban Industrial); Suburban Lawns performed the A-side, with its famous chorus “Oh, my genitals,” on Peter Ivers’s TV show New Wave Theatre.
The album Suburban Lawns (1981 IRS), again produced by Emmons, is the band’s masterpiece, an art-punk representation of its musical and cultural surroundings. On the first song, “Flying Saucer Safari,” a group of Southern Californians fill up their station wagon with junk food and cigarettes for a weekend trip to the desert to summon a UFO: “Don’t really care if they take us away / Long as we’re back for work Monday.” Though Suburban Lawns is up there with Repo Man (1984) as an outstanding work of art about Los Angeles and its environs, the album has been out of print for decades.
Richard Mazda produced the Baby EP (1983 IRS), Suburban Lawns’ final release. John Gleur left during recording and the band broke up shortly after. Following the breakup, Emmons mixed piano recordings Tissue had made in May 1982, resulting in her solo album Salon de Musique (1984 Adversity Ltd). The largely instrumental album—Tissue sings on “Salon de Musique,” the last of its three tracks—also credits a mysterious collaborator called Arspenlian Reeves. Tissue is rumored to have studied classical piano at Berklee College of Music after the Lawns’ breakup. She has not been seen or heard from in a showbiz context since she appeared in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986). Billingsgate (William Ranson) played in the Roulettes during the 1990s and formed Pulsator in the first decade of the new millenium with John Gleur (McBurney) and Chuck Roast (Rodriguez).
