Suburban Lawns LP – Self Titled c.1981

This album used. Vinyl = M/NM, Jacket and Sleeve = VG

Tracklist

Review ala Pitchfork

Before Su disappeared, she was an extraterrestrial in her city. This was Los Angeles in the ’80s: the cokey, sad, grayscale Los Angeles where what you did was go to porno theaters and go to gigs on the Strip to listen to hair metal. This was also the era of Los Angeles that Bret Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero, where the vibe was disaffected and rich kids took joy rides in their parents’ cars to pick up drugs. This era, the primordial ’80s in LA, was tinged with that flavor of pleasant numbness, of swerving under the influence, putting on Mötley Crüe and tuning out. But it was also an era of punk rock coming alive. It birthed Su Tissue and the Suburban Lawns. And in 1981, they released a self-titled LP that felt awake. Suburban Lawns presented an alternate reality where you join a cult and light cars on fire, where you dress up like a Manson girl and obliterate your brain on post-punk.

For a small, mighty, and disaffected sect, the Los Angeles of the early-’80s was all about rebelling against any notion that the city was a generic backdrop, a place to reinvent yourself into another pretty face. X, Circle Jerks, and Fear were writing nihilistic, disaffected punk rock. It was the era of Madame Wong’s, a Chinese restaurant that also featured performances from local punk bands and the short-lived Jett’s. Somewhere in between lay the Suburban Lawns: They weren’t really a punk band, nor were they really a new wave band. Most of their songs were a minute and a half long and not particularly compositionally complicated. And when it came to Los Angeles, they wrote about it from the margins, freeways, and from a deep anger towards the superficial quality of Hollywood. They wrote about West Coast disaffection not from the vantage point of punk rock but from something more feral and strange. They were post-punk Vivian Girls.

They weren’t so into revealing too much about their true identities. The cold hard facts are sparse. They were probably art school kids. They all had stage names: Frankie Ennui, Vex Billingsgate, Chuck Roast, John McBurney, Su Tissue. Su and Vex lived together in an old corner store in Long Beach where the band also practiced. At first, they released their own music and put on their own shows; this was 1979 or 1980 and people weren’t really doing that quite yet. The band self-released an EP called Gidget Goes to Hell in 1979, and a young, newly famous director named Jonathan Demme found out about it and made them a music video that involves a girl in a pink bikini trying to have some fun at the beach and ends up getting eaten by a shark. It 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.