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Angry Samoans, Dickies, Suburban Lawns and more in a cable TV report on L.A. punk (c. 1980)


 
What’s Up America was a newsmagazine show that ran on Showtime from 1978 to 1981, covering “topics such as BB guns; female boxers; urban cowboys; Elvis Presley impersonators; chariot racers in Pocatello, Idaho; and a couple who lived year-round on Liberty Island in New York Harbor,” as well as pay TV premiums like “pornographic film actors, strippers, prostitutes, and a nude beauty pageant.”

One segment, roughly contemporary with The Decline of Western Civilization, profiled the Los Angeles punk scene. There are not-so-familiar faces and voices, like those of Orange County’s Nu-Beams, and slightly more familiar ones, like those of Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy and Phranc of Catholic Discipline, BÖC lyricist and VOM singer Richard Meltzer, and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer.

Speaking of Rodney, the warm feelings showfolk used to pretend to have for one another are not much in evidence on this broadcast: the Angry Samoans name the former English Disco owner as one of the people they would like to murder, along with Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, and “Rockefeller” (Nelson?), who, as one member points out, is already dead. The report opens with the Samoans at Blackies (the club Black Flag’s then-singer Ron Reyes mentions during the introduction to “Revenge” in Decline), playing their love song “You Stupid Asshole.”
 

 
The Suburban Lawns are in there, performing their self-released first single “Gidget Goes to Hell,” then in its second pressing. (I think this dates the show to ‘79-‘80, or else the Lawns would be plugging “Janitor.”) Bassist Vex Billingsgate expresses the wish that a record company will soon relieve the band of its independence. The show saves the Dickies, the first L.A. punk band signed to a major label, for last. Singer Leonard Phillips spells out the Dickies’ ethic, or lack of same:

We’re not really aggravated about a producer taking our live sound and transforming it into a commercially successful product, because we’re capitalists, and if it’s going to help us sell more records, I certainly would make a compromise.

Watch it after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.16.2017
08:29 am
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Suburban Lawns: Lost Pioneers of Post-Punk
01.04.2016
01:24 pm
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Cover Art for the Re-Release of Suburban Lawns' Debut
 
I would rather be sorry than safe. But the price is going up, up, up, up.
Lost pioneers. Consuming new frontiers.

The fields of punk and its equally wild little step-brother, post-punk, were rich and woolly for a short period of time. London, Paris, Munich and the twin coasts of America, just to name a few key places. California was particularly ripe and out of the sun-soaked section known as Long Beach hailed a band both so quintessentially American and beautifully weird that their sonic imprint remains virtually untouched thirty plus years later. Formed by two Cal-Arts students, Su Tissue and Vix Billingsgate, Suburban Lawns were an outfit that seemed to be spawned out of the awkwardness of human relations, 70’s static-laden pop culture via a dodgy, foil-covered TV antenna and a keen knowing of how absurd such an existence truly is.

With members Frankie Ennui, Chuck Roast and John McBurney filling out the ranks, Suburban Lawns made their first impression with their 1979 song, “Gidget Goes to Hell,” which was used by now famed director Jonathan Demme for a suitably demented short film of the same name for Saturday Night Live. Couple that with a classic appearance on Peter Ivers’ groundbreaking New Wave Theater and the band already had insta-built cult status.
 
Single for
 
Flashing white teeth snap
Bloody bikini
Ohhhhhhh, Gidget goes to hell! Ohhh!

 

 
Luckily for us, the band didn’t rest on their quirky single laurels for too long and in 1981, released their self titled debut in 1981 via IRS Records. The album begins with the opening track, “Flying Saucer Safari.” There is no track stronger than this to fire off the proceedings, between Billingsgate’s galloping bass, Su’s otherworldly voice and lyrics like “Taco Bell and filter kings, Correctol and onion rings,” which reek of pure Americana-pop-culture-trash. If you’re making the modern day equivalent of a road trip playlist, then it is a near moral-imperative to have “Flying Saucer Safari” on it. (It would be roadtrip heresy otherwise.)

“Pioneers” follows, featuring some good and jagged-with-a-purpose guitar work that borders on funky and the sentiment, “I would rather be sorry than safe.” Indeed. Things get progressively more strange with the valium-drowned vocals of “Not Allowed” and then Su’s languid-languor intonations with “Gossip.” As the album progresses, her vocals take on a form of a mutated Zarah Leander, the Nazis-era chanteuse. This is a good thing. Tonally, the album switches gears to the paranoid with the moody “Protection.”
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Heather Drain
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01.04.2016
01:24 pm
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Gidget Goes to Hell: Meet enigmatic punk/New Wave legends Suburban Lawns
10.23.2014
11:34 am
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Su Tissue on the cover of Slash Magazine, 1979
 
They don’t make them like this anymore. One of the great Californian punk/new wave bands, Suburban Lawns was formed by singers, multi-instrumentalists and CalArts students Su Tissue and Vex Billingsgate in 1978. Joining with drummer Chuck Roast and guitarists Frankie Ennui and John Gleur—in Long Beach, of all places—they called themselves the Fabulons and Art Attack before choosing the name Suburban Lawns.

A former Doors roadie named E.J. Emmons produced their first two self-released singles, “Gidget Goes to Hell” and “Janitor,” as well as their classic self-titled album on IRS. It is an outrage against common sense, basic decency and public opinion that this stone masterpiece has languished out of print for decades. The band’s final EP, Baby, also enriches collectors’ hoards.
 

 
I don’t have any evidence that Ray Manzarek ever said “Su Tissue was a shaman,” but if he didn’t say it, I bet he wished he had. For my money, she is the single most fascinating and enigmatic figure of the West Coast punk scene, Darby Crash be damned. Tissue released a solo album of piano recordings called Salon de Musique in 1984, after Suburban Lawns broke up, but her trail runs cold following an appearance in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. (Demme and Jack Cummins had co-directed a video for “Gidget Goes to Hell” that Saturday Night Live aired in 1980.) Wherever she is, I hope she’s enjoying her studiously showbiz-free life.

There’s not a lot of the group represented on YouTube. Here’s the gorgeous video for “Janitor,” directed by Denise Gallant, a video graphics pioneer who invented an analog video synthesizer in the 1970s. It may not seem like it now, but when this came out, it was positively high tech-looking!
 

 
More Suburban Lawns after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.23.2014
11:34 am
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Su Tissue, Superstar, Part II: Salon De Musique
08.24.2009
04:42 pm
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image
 
I first wrote here about my many year devotion to the more traditionally-named Sue McLane.  But outside her highly recommended work with Suburban Lawns (Baby, Suburban Lawns), further Su Tissue material has been limited to her long out-of-print solo album from ‘82, “Salon de Musique.”  It’s a less poppy, piano-driven side of Su that’s lovely in its own right.  If you’re curious as to what a “chilled-out” Su might sound like, follow this link over to Dualtrack.  Like I said, lovely!  And for more Lawns-style surfpop, here’s the Jonathan Demme-directed video for Gidget Goes To Hell.

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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08.24.2009
04:42 pm
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Su Tissue, Superstar, Or…The Greatest Video Of All Time!
08.05.2009
06:10 pm
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image
 
Meet Su Tissue, n?ɬ

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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08.05.2009
06:10 pm
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