The Completely Weird, Childish, Ridiculous and True Story of "Blind Man's Penis”

When John Trubee sat down to write "the stupidest lyrics" possible, he had no idea his song would become an underground hit (and catch the ear of an aspiring music writer named Matt Groening).

The first time I listened to it, I literally could not believe what I was hearing. There’s no way this could be real. And yet there it was, the irrefutable fact of it: On top of a C&W-inflected shuffle was the earnest voice of a cowpoke, spooling off the lyrics as if tossing down the saddle after a hard day’s ride:

“I got high last night on LSD.

My mind was beautiful, and I was free.”

I’m referring, of course, to the infamous “Blind Man’s Penis,” an “anti-hit” record if there ever was one. And yet for a brief, shining moment in early-80s LA, it was a bona fide sensation, played regularly on KROQ and inspiring a bright flash of celebrity for its creator.

When I first heard the song, sometime around 1991, I struggled to comprehend how it could even exist. Despite its preposterousness, it wasn’t lurking in a dollar bin or locked in some vinyl hound’s vault. It was hiding in plain sight, closing out Side 1 of The Enigma Variations, the 1985 compilation by the influential LA punk and indie label of the same name.

But apart from the credited artist—one John Trubee—there was little information to be found on the album, and nothing even approaching a reasonable explanation for what it was I was hearing. Call me juvenile, puerile, or worse, but I simply had to learn more.

Eventually, I would. As I’d learn, the story of “Blind Man’s Penis” hopscotches from the back pages of a supermarket tabloid to a Nashville recording studio to the experimental music scene of early ‘80s LA. Along the way it enfolds an unlikely cast of characters, among them the creator of the longest-running American animated series and primetime sitcom in history. (And yes: You can listen to the song here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Here then, for better or worse, is the story of “Blind Man’s Penis.”

The Artist: John Trubee

John Trubee is a poet, musician, and performance artist. He’s released multiple albums over the last four decades, many under the name “John Trubee & the Ugly Janitors of America.”

John: In a certain sense, you have to understand, I’m sick to death of the whole song, because it’s a prank I did when I was 19 years old. However, it spawned my tortured music career. What there is of it!

I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of a banker. So we were pretty well off for a while, and I was in some ways a preppy and a spoiled brat. Didn’t have to worry too much about stuff, but my parents were really strict, so I felt really oppressed and suffocated by them. I did prank phone calls and other subversive sorts of things, just to challenge this very restrictive authoritarian regime that I grew up under.

In 1976 I had skipped a year between high school and college. I worked at a convenience store for a little while, and I didn’t like being bored to death at a crappy day job. I would sometimes write out things at work, jot down anti-poetry. I came up with a phrase: “Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he is blind.” And I think this came out of just reading about celebrities—I have nothing against Stevie Wonder. I’m not racist; it wasn’t a mockery. Just like a throw-off phrase I made up to be obnoxious.

[One night] I was in my bedroom reading the Midnight Globe, which is very similar to National Enquirer, one of those crappy tabloid magazines. And in the back pages, in the classifieds, there was an ad that read:

“Co-write on a 50/50, basis, send your song poems to Nashville and have them recorded, make $20,000 royalties.”

I played guitar and I was interested in all things musical, so this really piqued my interest. And I also was highly skeptical; I thought it was just some sort of come-on or scam. The ad was placed by a person, or people, operating out of a PO box in Nashville, and the popular stereotype of people in Nashville is that they’re all hicks and hillbillies and dumb asses. However, with the rise of Maga, maybe it’s kind of accurate, I don’t know. I thought it would be funny to freak out the hillbilly hicks of Nashville.

So I sat down at my grandfather’s manual typewriter and I typed off the most ridiculous, obscene, stupid lyrics I could possibly think of. I wrote the whole thing in about five minutes and sent it to Nashville. And I wanted to get an angry letter telling me that I was crazy or stupid. I wanted to inspire some sort of really scathing rebuke. I didn’t seriously ever think that they would consider it, you know. So a few weeks later, I received the letter back saying:

“Dear Mr. Trubee, we found your lyrics very worthy of the Nashville production. For $39.95 you can have a simple production, or for $79.95 a full production.”

So I sent them the $79.95. Evidently, how [the producer] Ramsey Kearney operated was he had a library of pre-recorded music tracks. And he would simply make up a melody to the lyrics as he’s singing or half speaking the lyrics to whatever pre-recorded music track he put on.

I could get a record, which was an acetate, or I could get a reel to reel tape. I requested both. I listened to [the tape]. I started laughing. I thought it was really funny. As marketing research, I called my brother Jay up to my room and played the tape for him to see what he thought. And he started laughing, and that was a very exciting thing to hear, because I thought: If this will make my brother laugh, it’s possible to make the whole world laugh. You know, it was exciting to have this little, this ridiculous little prank.

The Documentarian: Jamie Meltzer

Jamie Meltzer is a documentarian and Stanford professor. His first feature film was Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story, released in 2003. In it, he documented the industry dedicated to turning written “poem” submissions into finished songs.

Jamie: [“Blind Man’s Penis”] is probably the song that most people know, if they know song poems. When I was making the film, I would go through the motions of explaining what the documentary was going to be about. And of course, nobody knew anything about this unless they were, like, an obsessive record collector. I would usually use “Blind Man’s Penis” as the example, because it sort of explains the whole thing in miniature, including the aspects of song poems sort of being scam-like, right?

Seth: In a distant way it’s a very analog, very primitive version of AI. Trubee wrote down these lyrics and sent them off into the ether saying: “Give me back something; I don’t know what it’s going to be.” What it happened to be was a ridiculous and also somehow compelling piece of music that, in fact, gets traction as the best-known example of this whole genre. And it feels like a feature of the pre-digital era; you were kind of putting a coin into a slot and waiting to see what would come out. It’s so unlike today, when we expect instant results and predictive effects and a sort of lack of uncertainty.

Jamie: Yeah, the irony that I don’t think [Trubee] wants to think about too much is that it ends up defining him, right? I ended up filming with Ramsey Kearney for a day. He’s kind of an interesting character, like a lot of the people on the other side of song poems; they’re people who made it in various degrees or didn’t in the music industry. Ramsey had written the song “Emotions,” which was a big hit for Brenda Lee, but was [also] doing song poems all along.

Songwriter and song poem producer Ramsey Kearney

And I was very nervous, you know, coming to see him. I was interested in a couple of songs that he did, one of them being “Blind Man’s Penis.” I just could kind of tell that this was going to be a challenge to bring up in the interview. Sometimes you wait till the very end because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. So I just said: “I want to play this song and just tell me what you think.” And I played him the recording. He listened to it, and he was like: “That was the worst song I ever recorded.” He clearly didn’t really remember it or register it, but couldn’t deny that it was him.

I ended up really admiring the folks who do these demos, because it takes a lot of musicianship; most of the session musicians would never see the charts or the lyrics before they were recording them. That was their talent. That was how you could do 40 or 50 in a session, to make the economy of scale work for this. It’s kind of making something beautiful or absurd out of anything, you know?

*You can rent or buy a copy of the truly excellent Off the Charts: The Song Poem Story here.

The Rift Connection

Born Robert Pawlikowski, the late Zoogz Rift was a musician, painter, and professional wrestling personality. Yes, really.

John: Are you familiar with the name Zoogz Rift? He put out a bunch of albums on SST. He and I were very close ever since we met in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1975. In the mid-70s, Zoogz got a demo together and went shopping his tape to record labels in New York City. He approached Craig Leon at Sire Records; Craig had worked with Talking Heads and Blondie and the Ramones and some other acts. [But he] told Zoogz that he didn’t like the recording, or it wasn’t commercial enough, or he didn’t see any value in it. And Zoogz took it really personally. He was really upset. For years afterwards, Zoogz would complain and namecheck Craig Leon as the face of the music industry that didn’t understand him.

I’m in LA in the early 1980s after I graduated Berkelee School of Music. Zoogz lived in LA at that time, and he invited me to be in his band, Zoogz Rift and his Amazing Shitheads. And we started playing out at little clubs here and there, and tried to get a following and it was very difficult. We played at a place called Al’s Bar with a band called The Fibonaccis, which are a great band that never went anywhere.

I would have these dubs of my music, like a cassette of my prank phone calls, my music, my electronic music experiments and “Blind Man’s Penis.” I would just give it out as a sampler, promoting myself. So this particular night, I gave the cassette to Ron Stringer, the guitar player from The Fibonaccis. A year later, Ron calls me and says:

“Hey, we’re working in the studio with a producer. We played your tape for him and he really likes the ‘Blind Man’s Penis’ song. Would you like to make a record out of it?”

The record producer was Craig Leon, so you can imagine how pissed off that made Zoogz! Craig was just a producer trying to sign up acts; sort of an independent operator. But he had some sort of connection with Enigma Records, down in Torrance. I was introduced to Bill Hein, the president. And Bill and I agreed he would just press up a bunch of copies of the single, and my payment would be 100 copies to promote myself.

So I started giving it out to people like Matt Groening. He was working as a clerk at Tower Records, but he wrote a weekly music column called “Sound Mix” for the LA Reader. I met Matt, I think, at a place called the Lhasa Club. Matt had written some blurbs in his column about Zoogz. Anyhow, I gave him a copy of the single. The next week, he devoted his whole column to the story of “Blind Man’s Penis.”

The Champion: Matt Groening

Matt Groening hardly requires an introduction. As the creator both of The Simpsons, the longest-running scripted primetime show in history, and the Life in Hell comics, he’s had an immense impact on the pop culture of the last 40+ years. And as fate would have it, he’d have an enormous impact on “Blind Man’s Penis,” too.

Matt: I was pawing through the $.50 albums at a record store. And my good buddy Richard Gehr, who later became a rock critic, pulled out this album Idiots on the Miniature Golf Course by Zoogz Rift. And we fought over who was going to buy it. He bought it and we couldn’t believe it; it was an amazing album. And then we saw they were playing in North Hollywood at a little club. So we went out and I took a bunch of friends, and there were more people on stage than there were in the audience. And they basically couldn’t believe that anybody…they were quite stunned. And [then] I found out about Trubee.

Seth: Can you go back to your first hearing of “Blind Man’s Penis”?

Matt: Well, it was…it was hard to believe that this thing existed. I mean, it was stunning from the very first time I heard it, and it felt, what’s the word…dangerous or degenerate. It was such an eccentric vision; at the same time, it was completely hilarious.

There were a bunch of people in Los Angeles who were doing kind of eccentric things on the edge of punk rock, right? And [John Trubee and Zoogz] sort of slipped in because anything went and there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on. I would put Zoogz and Trubee at one far end of the spectrum. But there were a lot of very eccentric rock combos and performance art stuff all kind of mixed in.

Seth: It makes me think of bands like Screamers….

Matt: Definitely Screamers. There was a performance artist named Johanna Went. I saw her at the Whiskey-Go-Go once, dancing around with a band backing her up and taking out a big machete and chopping a goat skull—or it was probably a sheep. At the very end she tossed this sheep’s skull, you know, completely furless, out into the crowd. And the crowd screamed, as one would. And then I went out into the street and there, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and San Vicente, there were the punks kicking the sheep’s skull like a soccer ball.

Seth: Would you say that “Blind Man’s Penis” had an effect on your art?

Matt: I would not, no. Only as an extreme example of, you know, anything goes. I love the idea of it, of the completely uninhibited and funny. That’s the best of Trubee, to me: his super funny stuff. There’s also an element of John Cage in it, in the chance. I mean, John Trubee did not know the outcome of his starting the whole thing off by sending his lyrics to the song poem company….

Seth: Although the ad was preying on people’s expectation of actual pay. The come-on was basically: Send us your poem, and we’ll give you the potential to earn…$20,000 I think, was the figure in the ad. And, of course, I would say statistically, about 0.0% of the song poems have actually earned money. In a bizarre way, John’s is the most successful, right?

Matt: Yeah, it’s amazing. And of course, that wasn’t the original title of the song. It was “Stevie Wonder’s Penis.” Probably for a million reasons, it’s better that they changed it.

Seth: I would agree.

Matt: But I mean, that song still floats around in my mind. It’s been, how many years since I first heard it and memorized it? I have to be honest, I haven’t played it in a couple of decades. But it is definitely a part of my, you know…it’s definitely an ear worm.

Seth: Tell me why.

Matt: Well, it’s a combination. First of all, the lyrics are hilarious…John Trubee’s lyrics are demented and brilliant. But the added value of that singer singing it completely heartfelt, right? It’s so great for the actuality of the song, but also what must have been going through his head. And you know that this guy dealt with a lot of screwy lyrics. I have a few anthologies of song poems. And you know, many of them are close to unbearable, or beyond.

I became a huge fan of John’s, and I went and saw him perform solo a number of times. It was just him with a microphone and then an echo machine, and he’d recite his poetry with a lot of echo. And some of that stuff was certainly some of the best poetry I’ve ever heard. What’s stuck in my mind is that in the middle of some kind of long rant, he said:

Luke and Laura

Obadora

Luke and Laura, they’re fucking in debt.

They’re fucking in bed

With the Grateful Dead.

Although you know, Trubee also is a very serious composer and very, very well versed in music, and does these absolutely solemn or serious, almost maudlin ballads. And I actually like that. He does that because his crazy fans are looking for the weird stuff, right? He also gives them extremely, extremely straight stuff. I respect him greatly for that. I’m not the only John Trubee fan, I’m certain, and certainly not the only “Blind Man’s Penis” fan. It’s a landmark of 20th century Pop Art. You know, it’s truly outsider music.

John: I also sent a copy to Elvira. You know, Mistress of the Dark? [Her name is] Cassandra Peterson; she had a show on KROQ. She sent me a postcard back saying: “Well, I’ll try to play this, but the lyrics are sort of off, so I can’t promise anything.” That Sunday, my friend Richie Hass from the Zoogz band called me up and said: “Hurry up and turn on KROQ!” Sure enough, they were playing the single. And Richie told me that when Elvira was queuing up the record, she said:

“This is a strange record and the lyrics are kind of weird, but if you have any complaints about it don’t bother to call the station. I’ve already left because I don’t want to take any shit from anybody about it.”

And so I got this support from people like Elvira and Matt Groening, just because it was a weird novelty thing, and it took off. “Blind Man’s Penis” sort of started my tortured supposed music career, and I was able to make a number of albums after that, just because of the notoriety.

Seth: What’s the takeaway?

John: The irony of hooking up with Craig Leon and the irony of how things worked out. It’s just the world is totally capricious. Whenever I did something fun, something magical came out of it, and whenever I did something on purpose—like try to get a job or make money or pursue social connections, stuff like that—there was always a block there. Stuff has come out of these ridiculous pranks. It’s amazing. That’s what I take away.