1984: Salon de Musique, Su Tissue

By Imogen Bergin

Their front door opened into the kitchen, and the aromas collided with me intensely every time I visited. It’s easy to talk about smells, and their strength in memories – the science is well-documented – but it’s special when everyone else who knows this house agrees about the power of the way it smelled. Old dogs, old friends, sweaty hugs; a spice cabinet spilling over; drying fruit, chopped vegetable; oil paints, somewhere; the woody odor of old reeds upstairs; the tart, intoxicating smell of living deeply in a place, of pressing firmly and lovingly with all of your body into the mold of a home so your print always stays stamped there. This house, it had a small piece of everything. Joe and Sonja were everypeople, painters and musicians and writers and poets and singers and feelers and healers and listeners and laughers and thinkers. Joe, he was all hum. He would grunt aloud when listening, when he heard something in the music that we played. Sonja would rock softly, nod her head, and look at you with attentive, thankful eyes.

Perhaps it’s a late start, but I’m learning to wonder about where the truth is and, just as importantly, what the truth feels like when it courses through my body. I’m getting better, more discerning, more attentive. Being more honest with myself, and my body, has helped. It gives everything more clarity, and it makes things harder, sometimes. I am saying goodbye to certain things, so I can offer myself to other moments. I can leave and I don’t have to come back. I’ll be somewhere new tomorrow. I’ll be someone new tomorrow. I’m already someone new today.

One of the truths I’ve known for a while is that I miss that house, their house, Joe and Sonja’s house. The house with the smells. With the gallery in the carpeted basement, with the fancy track lighting. With the cuckoo clock and the sunroom with dial-up internet. Every room a “salon de musique”, a music room. We would go there on the weekends I was with my dad to play music and sit for an afternoon, talking, usually eating together, too. I would bring my Gameboy Advance and sit outside while they gabbed, then go in to play whatever violin piece I was working on in my private lessons for them. They had a gentle greyhound named Saskia, and then they had another greyhound whose name I’ve forgotten.

When I was in college I always wanted to bring certain friends to Joe and Sonja’s house because I wanted my closest friends to know a very interior part of me. The world of my scents. I asked a couple times but never picked a real day. It wasn’t very far, it would’ve been a day trip. I never really considered doing it alone. It was on a running to-do list of things that I never did with all the time I thought I didn’t have. Nobody really knows this part of me. All I can hope for now is that my house smells like theirs sometimes, so when my friends walk in my front door they feel certain truths: I am warmed, I am welcomed, I am heard, I am loved here, what’s cookin’?

Joe and Sonja are in a little bit of my everything, and I don’t want to forget them. Writing is a security against forgetting. I suppose all my art is a guarantee against the sweeping promise that I’ll be forgotten, or that I’ll forget; whichever happens first. I think that’s every artist’s intention, at least for a little while. Then, maybe, you grow out of it. Not necessarily up, but out. Su Tissue was the frontwoman of the post-punk band Suburban Lawns before writing and releasing Salon de Musique in 1982 while at Berklee School of Music. It’s a three movement fantasia featuring her playing piano and singing. It’s a repetitive, postmodern classical piece, an arpeggiated piano phrase architecting its personal space in three pseudo-variations with uncredited instrumental solos from a quiet, fuzzy guitar and a warbling saxophone; a significant departure from the sound Suburban Lawns had been crafting. It was the only solo piece she recorded before disappearing from the public music world, not necessarily growing up, but growing out. 

You can leave and you don’t have to come back. 

— — — — — — —

When I first listened to Salon de Musique, I heard Joe on the saxophone in “Train Station.” I can see him rocking back and forth on the chair with his sax tucked under his arm, waiting for his moment to sing. My brain heard the microtonal brassy bleats and thought, That’s Joe.

Thought, That has to be Joe.

Thought, I know it’s Joe.

I know it’s Joe, and when the long river takes me to where he’s waiting, I’m gonna tell him how much I loved his recording with Su Tissue. I’m gonna tell him how I picked up a copy of Salon de Musique re-issued on a cassette tape without knowing what it or Suburban Lawns sounded like from a shop in my city called Shepard Records because the album art said something to me, made me think, this one’s for me. I’ll play it for both of them and I think Sonja will like the singing in the title track, because it makes me think of the way she sings, too.

Maybe they’ll ask me what else I’ve been listening to, and I’ll play some more songs for them. Maybe I’ll share my own songs, and in that way, share the secret of myself and my body that I wove into those words. Some things by accident, some things by design. We’ll sit and listen, sit and laugh, sit and eat, sit and sit.

Or, maybe they’ll say they’ve never heard of Su Tissue before. Maybe my fantasy doesn’t quite touch the roots of reality. Give a dream an inch and it’ll take the whole river. Giving grief to a dream has helped me to be honest with it. Because the reality is, it could be too good to be true, or it could be just possible enough to be likely. I’m sad either way. The more I navigate myself, my skin, my memories, my feelings, the more I know that a truth doesn’t always fit neatly into the body it belongs to. Sometimes a truth is just something you tell yourself so you can leave, go home, open the door to the kitchen, and smell what’s cooking.

Imogen Bergin (they/them) is an artist based on Erie land in so-called Cleveland, OH. In addition to being a writer, they are a self-taught film photographer, a songwriter, a classically trained violinist, the bassist in Sasha and the Valentines and Spirit Ghost, a dog handler, and a bartender. Maybe a couple of other things, too. You can find more of their work at imogenbergin.com.