When you first lay eyes on the oddball New Wave band Suburban Lawns, who only existed from 1978-83 in Long Beach, California, your eyes and ears will be magnetically transfixed by their lead singer reluctant star Su Tissue, a woman whose stage persona has been described as Little House on the Prairie meets the Manson girls. Singing the verses in a clipped moan, she screeches out something about janitors and genitals in the chorus to their song Janitor. Barely acknowledging the camera while grimacing into the microphone, she sounds like she has something in her mouth. Was she wearing braces on her teeth? No one looked and sounded like them. Fronted by singer Su Tissue (aka Sue McLane), bassist/singer Vex Billingsgate (Billy Ranson), lead guitarist John Gleur (John McBurney), rhythm guitarist/singer Frankie Ennui (Rick Whitney) and drummer Chuck Roast (Chas Rodriguez), the Suburban Lawns created unique music that has stood the rest of time. The proof is in a new first-time reissue of their self-titled 1981 debut and of their final release, the 1983 EP Baby – both of which are available on compact disc or vinyl. Billy the bands bass player went to art school at CalArts and while there met Su McLane (a.k.a. Su Tissue). We wrote a bunch of pretty funny songs and started playing around LA as Art Attack and then the Fabulons. Tissue’s detached anti-star presence set her apart from other front women on the scene at the time. Dressed like an elementary-school teacher with a passing resemblance to Crystal Gayle, Su wasn’t hip. Nor did she choose to cash in on her sexuality. Her singing is different from song to song. She can flatly deliver lines and come off as remote, or she can coo and shriek like some wild cartoon character. Yoko Ono was an influence. Her keyboard playing varies from colorful synth washes and textures to percussive piano. The band that would become Suburban Lawns arose when Minneapolis-born Sue McLane (later to pick up her Kleenex-associated alias) joined William Ranson’s group after meeting at Cal-Arts School in the late 70s. Following alterations in the line-up and band name, (previous iterations were called ‘Art Attack’ and ‘The Fabulons’) Suburban Lawns emerged in 1978, set to disrupt their namesake provincial monotony with lurching guitar lines and sci-fi sarcasm.
The group was signed to I.R.S. Records (yes, the same record label as The Go-Gos and at one time Oingo Boingo) and the re-release of their second single “Janitor” would become popular on the radio. But it was their single “Janitor” that would reach KROQ 106.7’s “Top 100 Songs of 1981” (KROQ is a legendary radio station in the ’80s and ’90s that played music that other radio stations would not play, and were known as a post punk/New Wave/Alternative rock station). “Janitor” would beat out songs like The Pretenders “Adultress”, X’s “White Girl”, Devo’s “Jerkin’ Back and Forth”, The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” and The Kinks’ “Destroyer”. Coincidentally, another band with a lead vocalist with cutesy vocals and dominated the KROQ 106.7 at No.1 that same year was Missing Persons with their song “Mental Hopscotch”. But 1981 was a big year for female vocalists, with Missing Persons, The Go-Go’s, Suburban Lawns and The Pretenders dominating the top 20. But the songs on their debut album are evenly split with the guys of the group and Su Tissue lending her vocals on other songs such as “Fly Saucer Safari”, “Anything”, “Gossip”, “Unable”, “Green Eyes”. There is no main lead vocalist for Suburban Lawns as vocalist as Frankie Ennui, Vex Billingsgate, Su Tissue and John McBurney lent their vocals for various songs. In the album, you will find tracks featuring primarily all the guys, the guys and Su or all Su.
Side A of the group’s 1979 self-produced single “Gidget Goes to Hell” was a parody of the entrenched car-and-surf culture of southern California—think “Fun, Fun, Fun” by The Beach Boys as black comedy. A promotional video for the song was shot by Jonathan Demme and later aired on Saturday Night Live, but this would prove to be the high point for Suburban Lawns. IRS Records released an album in 1981 to little national acclaim or notice. The band never flourished outside of Southern California and petered out after a final EP in 1983. Over the years they’ve managed to find a tiny cult audience, but they remain eclipsed by many of their peers such as Black Flag, X, and The Dickies. As overlooked as they are, any reissue of their work seems unlikely. Su Tissue went on to study piano at Berklee College of Music, and in 1982 she released a modern classical record called Salon de Musique. She was last seen briefly in Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild. She never followed up with another record or tried to further her career in any way that I can tell. She never gave any details about herself or insight into her working methods, as she never spoke in band interviews. And she apparently prefers to remain anonymous, too. Others in the band have granted interviews in recent years and some have an online presence, but no one is saying what Su went on to do with her life.
Suburban Lawns were musically more expansive than many of their contemporaries. The band’s repertoire ranged from straight-ahead rock and funky syncopation to herky-jerky New Wave and polyrhythmic art rock. Their musical performances included creative costumes with Su Tissue delivering, according to Ennui a "full mind blowing impact". Though music journalists found her performances confusing, that she "looked so bored and uncomfortable standing on stage with all of these boys that looked like they were having so much fun". Their sole album, Suburban Lawns, produced and engineered by EJ Emmons and Troy Mathisen, was released in 1981 on I.R.S. Records, featuring new wave radio favorite "Janitor" (previously released as a single in 1980). Their air (and in some ways, their sound, too) was that of unsuspecting street corner-lurking teenagers who had stumbled into a UFO by accident, and were now boredly seeking to use art as a vehicle to both make sense of their strange situation, and poke existential fun at it.
And then there’s “Janitor,” the band’s closest thing to a pop song, their biggest hit. There’s a video of Su performing it, one of the very few videos of the band that exist on the web. In the grainy and distorted video, Su wears a baby yellow button-up and a high-waisted plaid skirt. She stands there, not dancing, not interacting with the band, not smiling. She looks bored. She looks like a Dickensian street urchin, or the Orphan from the movie Orphan. “All action is reaction/Expansion, contraction/Man the manipulator,” she sings, looking at the microphone. “Underwater/Does it matter/Antimatter/Nuclear reactor/Boom boom boom boom.” Her voice ricochets, gets louder, and inflates with imaginary helium. The success of the video as a strange post-punk ur text is largely because of Su and the way she moved. In the video, she sings like she’s in a trance, her brows furrowed, pivoting her body slightly, but more or less staying in the exact place. In one moment, a guitar solo erupts and Su stares at her feet. Like she wants to be anywhere else in the world, like she’s deliberately trying to fuck with you. It’s almost disturbing, vaguely satanic, the stuff of cults.
It has been said that the lyrics of "Janitor" were derived from a real-life conversation between Sue "Su Tissue" McLane and friend Brian Smith. According to Smith, the two were conversing in a loud room when they first met: She asked me what I did for a living. I said "I'm a janitor," and she thought I said "Oh my genitals." [Richard "Frankie Ennui" Whitney] overheard this and wrote the song. According to Richard Whitney, this story is somewhat backwards; the music and all of the lyrics apart from “Oh, my genitals! I’m a janitor!” were already written when Sue McLane added them herself: Su was definitely more of a poet than I have ever dreamed of being. The lyrics, except for Su’s contribution, are pretty straightforward science-nerd stuff about all things explosive. Su’s addition, whatever the source (and I have no reason to doubt what Brian Smith has apparently written about how Su came up with that addition), gave the song a poetical spin that added the dimension it needed to make it interesting. That’s exactly why, in my opinion, our best songs were those that were written collaboratively. With her hypnotic voice she could jackhammer her way from her rich, warm alto to a terrifying devil shriek. That’s what Su’s voice did: bungee itself from the low and meaty to the high-pitched and deranged. That’s what made Suburban Lawns tick the Geiger counter of the punk and new wave scene of Los Angeles circa 1981: Su’s voice. As the band gained momentum, writers began to comment on Su, specifically her stage presence, in increasingly comical and confused ways. “While her voice goes to Mars, her lanky, childlike body is in its own private Idaho,” wrote one critic after seeing the band play at the Starwood punk club. “That strange unfashionably dressed girl sang like others slip into the first stage of an epileptic fit,” wrote another. “As hard as it may be to believe, I think she’s really ‘like that,’” opined a writer for the LA Weekly. “In other, less tolerant societies, she would be dismissed as a ‘wacko’ or burned at the stake as a witch.” Here was this woman dressed like Miss Trunchbull from the book Matilda who looked so bored and uncomfortable standing on stage with all of these boys that looked like they were having so much fun. What do you do with a woman who doesn’t meet your expectations? How do you enjoy music when you have a frontwoman who basically wants to be left alone to yodel and then get off stage?
“Gidget Goes to Hell” a mischievous single that featured, as would all subsequent songs by the band, childish instrumentalism foregrounded by equally-childish — though at some points, profound — poetry. Driven by the sort of simplistic, bass-heavy approach post-punk outfits like the Minutemen would go on to habitually emulate, the track tells the (at first) lighthearted story of the titular “Gidget,” a schoolgirl who lives on daddy’s money, and goes on to wear her “bloody bikini” to hell moments after “flashing white g strap.” Upon release, the single caught the attention of Jonathan Demme, one of several upstart film directors making names for themselves in Southern California’s ashes, and he went on to direct a dingy music video for them, scoring an unlikely Saturday Night Live premiere in 1980. Chuck Roast remembers meeting Demme: ''That was a great experience for us. Jonathan was a cool cat, very funny. That was shot at Malibu, right where Gidget and Moondoggie met. He came to one of our shows at Madame Wong’s West and brought a couple his stars. He was shooting Swing Shift, with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. When we were on tour, he came to see us at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. Frankie and I went to breakfast with him. He had some thoughts and suggestions on the show, and what he thought could make it a better.'' The D-I-Y flick compiled strung-together bits of found footage, compellingly-little effort put toward making any of it appear thought out. Like the song itself, the video, too, came to an abrupt end, this time with the added cause of Gidget’s bloody bikini being an off-camera shark attack. The music video ended up airing on Saturday Night Live, and the band went from being DIY freaks who booked their own shows to being beloved freaks who regularly drew crowds on the Los Angeles club circuit. They were no longer semi-anonymous Long Beach guerillas who trekked into Los Angeles for the occasional gig, they were a band on TV.
In an interview she gave with the Los Angeles Times in 1981, she’s described as being quiet and withdrawn—like she doesn’t want to be there. Within the first few beats, she speaks about how when people singled her out for special attention they “don’t understand what this project is about.” And then quickly goes on to say that she thinks that interviews were “obsolete,” which can be interpreted as Su being punk (which she was) or Su being reluctant about being put on any form of a pedestal. In reality, it was probably both, and as a result, she maintains an air of unknowable mystery. Later in the interview, when she’s asked to talk about her thoughts on songwriting, she’s even more cryptic. “I just like music. I didn’t even think of people singing words.” Su and the Suburban Lawns treated their music like an art project or an accident. Everything they did was part of a performance of being in a band and being public-facing. Maybe that’s why they burned out so fast. They couldn’t sustain that momentum, literally-go-fuck-yourself level of punk rock anonymity.
“Gidget Goes To Hell” was B-Sided by “My Boyfriend,” a semi-urgent romance ballad that simultaneously invokes the Ramones’ “I Just Want To Have Something To Do” and something the Red Hot Chili Peppers might have made in the early 1980s. “My Boyfriend” was on Thurston Moore’s Top 10 List in Rolling Stone. Much of its lyrical content is left obscure and open-ended, each verse offering a loose hint towards a storyline until, much like poor Gidget, the central plot point comes to a heartbreakingly sudden end. It’s a pattern well exemplified by the track’s concluding stanzas: “Yeah, nobody knows how much I love you,” Su Tissue starts, using the remainder of her spiel to drift indistinctly between speaking directly to, and wistfully about, an unnamed love interest. “He’s my boyfriend / I could never count on him to / I still really want you so.” By the track’s sudden end, the love she speaks of is nowhere to be found, its disappearance explained as succinctly as possible. “You found another little girl. He doesn’t love me anymore. He doesn’t love me.”
Around this time in 1981, they began working on their first and only record, which would eventually be released by IRS, the same label as the Go-Go’s and R.E.M. They recorded at Paramount Studios late at night, on the cheap, with producer EJ Emmons, whose goal was to faithfully translate the energy of Suburban Lawns as a live band on tape. The songs they recorded in those sessions became Suburban Lawns, a devious cocktail of surf rock, post-punk, and new wave. The best songs are the ones Su sings on, like “Gossip,” which glows green like vaseline glass as she sings and chants at the low end of her register, like a sleepwalker. “Lies/Paradox/A parade of rest,” she sings as a guitar cuts through the song like a rusty steak knife. Or “Flying Saucer Safari,” where the band sounds like they’re all wearing tinfoil hats and contacting each other purely via ESP. “Flying Saucer Safari” is track one on Suburban Lawns, and it uses a loose, comic-book-friendly storyline to introduce an unsuspecting gang of curious young people seeking to explore UFOs. Through childish, endearingly-annoying soundscapes that sound like what you might hear in an 8-bit video game, the gang cruises down the barren deserts of Interstate 10 in a station wagon “full of Fritos, Coke and Twinkies, stale Doritos,” scheming to concentrate in silence until they’re able to “psychokinetically” pull one of the extra-terrestrial vehicles down for further inspection. This same scene-setting verse is repeated twice, the only difference being the contents of the station wagon. (The second time around, there is now “Taco Bell and filter kings, Correctol and onion rings.”) The last words we hear from the crew are, instead of the lofty answers their plan seemed to promise, more questions. “Will they have protruding brows?” Su Tissue asks of her exo-planetary interests, with a voice that registers like that of an infantile, directionless cyborg. “Will they breed us just like cows? Will there be some tests to run? We’ll be guinea pigs for fun. Don’t really care if they take us away — as long as we’re back for work Monday.”
Su was reluctant to have performances recorded and was notoriously shy, stating “I like music more than I like talking.” Yet, from the few surviving scraps of documentation, an intriguing and contrary figure emerges. Menacing in her aloof introversion, Su had a stage presence of “tense abandon.” Eloquently surmised in a 1979 live review in Slash Magazine: “when she finally decides to do her singing full time…your lame little heart knows that here is one of the fuckin’ toughest, most unique, most outstanding performing creatures you’re ever likely to see and hear […] so strange is her presence, so surprising in her way around the songs.” On stage, Su does not dance or cavort but stands slack as her voice warps what it means to sing; a stark contrast to other front-women of the time who prospered off riotous displays of flirtation and fury. Photographs show an equally incongruous frontage, at times dressed like a demure, buttoned-up librarian, or donning futuristic blow-up trousers; Su’s unconventional appearance is reminiscent of her gaudier UK counterpart Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex (insofar as both were a female front-women with a predilection for synthetic materials, when asked about her preference for wearing plastic clothing, Su replied “I just like them because they’re like bin bags.”) Perhaps some would argue that the legacy of Suburban Lawns, and Su Tissue in particular, is negligible without the interest surrounding Su’s ‘disappearance’. Symptomatic of the modern digital condition – an expectation and ease of access to information – the underground renaissance of Suburban Lawns swelled in the last decade. Resurrecting a band that had fallen through the cracks, a popular Facebook group ‘Whatever Became of Su Tissue?’ examined bootleg recordings and swapped rumoured sightings or dubious facts about Su’s whereabouts. Online forums and YouTube comments declare that Su has become a house wife, or a lawyer, or a teacher; bemoaning “She is known for being elusive and aloof, but this is ridiculous!” Members of Suburban Lawns have given the occasional retrospective interviews, yet shed no light on the quest to find Su; drummer Chuck Roast testifying that “I myself have not seen nor heard from Su since the Suburban Lawns split.
An early ’80s VHS tape uploaded to the internet and viewed within the clean frame of MacBook Air. A hand drops a microphone and a quick cut to a grid of white dots on a black plane suddenly resolves into the sarcastic smile of a man in black sunglasses and a rain poncho. “We’re here with one of L.A.’s most exciting new music bands, made a great impression with ‘Gidget Goes to Hell’ and their recent national appearance on Saturday Night Live,” he announces. “I’m wearing this outfit to protect me from the sprinklers… SUBURBAN LAWNS! JANITOR!” When the band, a Breakfast Club-looking mix of jock/nerd/depressive types, begins playing, it dives into an upbeat, almost goofy chord progression. A camera meanders above, wandering through oversaturated stage lighting before finally landing on the lead singer, an awkwardly serious young woman in what looks to be a Victorian-era blouse, intoning surreal and vaguely menacing lyrics with prim affectation: “All action is reaction Expansion Contraction Man the manipulator Underwater Does it matter? Antimatter Nuclear reactor Boom boom boom boom” She clutches the microphone almost nervously, her muted Nancy Drew-style outfit accentuating her awkwardness. She channels Yoko Ono when delivering the chorus, squealing lyrics with the earnestly playful antagonism of a performance art project: “I’m a janitor Oh my genitals, I’m a janitor Oh my genitals Oh my genitals I’m a janitor”
According to her bandmate Frankie Ennui, “You had to see Su do her thing live and in person, in front of a crowd, to really get the full, mind-blowing impact. So many contrasting ideas and emotions were being transmitted. What Su did was real. She really put herself out there, exposed and vulnerable, but aggressively sarcastic and in your face at the same time. Brave. Amazing. Disturbing.” When the band split, Tissue went to Berklee College of Music and released a solo album, Salon de Musique. She cut off contact with her bandmates and has lived in obscurity ever since, causing fans to set up Facebook pages in desperate search of the influential musician. Yet, Tissue’s privacy deserves to be respected, and luckily, the Facebook page in search of her current whereabouts has since been deleted. Instead, we can celebrate her contributions to Suburban Lawns, one of the most enthralling short-lived acts from the late 1970s/early ’80s. “I like music more than I like talking,” Tissue once said. Clearly, for Tissue, music was of central importance, but so was her privacy. Giving little away in interviews, aside from a brief appearance as Peggy in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 movie Something Wild, in an understated cameo as a former wild girl-turned-housewife in the 1986, Tissue’s story remains somewhat of an enigma, yet it deserves to stay that way.
But the basic truth is that no one can find out what Su Tissue is up to now, because Su Tissue no longer exists, and Sue McLane herself is more than our ideas. Rumours are that she was a lawyer in California; she was a piano teacher in the Boston suburbs; she was a housewife. But none of these rumours were backed up by any hard evidence. There’s a whole universe of content about Su Tissue as muse, as an untouchable, unknowable cool girl. Suburban Lawns are a band whose mystery is intrinsic to their identity. So much is left unsaid, and in that empty space, the band lives on.
In the history of music, Su Tissue doesnt loom large. In another person’s, perhaps its the esoteric folk-rock artist Bill Fox or the one-album soft rock wonder brothers Donnie & Joe Emerson, or Connie Converse who vanished in 1974. They’re the ghostly fragments of minor figures, exalted out of proportion. The desire to uncover more about Su Tissue is to misconstrue what makes her so captivating and bewildering in the first place. Su Tissue is, or was, a contradiction. Her agency lies in being passive, asserting herself not through boisterous provocation but in peculiar sincerity. Vanishing without a trace was her greatest assertion yet. As stated by Suburban Lawns’ producer EJ Emmons, “She was quiet and sort of withdrawn. I thought she was perfect because she wasn’t bigger than life. She was smaller than life, but at the same time she could hold an audience in her hand.”
