Looking for info. about John Trubee, I stumbled on to The American Song-Poem Music Archives, an entire site devoted to the "song-poem" genre.
There's a full explanation on the site, but in brief, what they call "song-poems" are what results when suckers with stars in their eyes respond to ads like this:
Then, in return for a fee, they get a "professional" recording of their words set to music, with the never-fulfilled promise of "promotion," royalties, etc. It's like a sound recording vanity press. (Just like this whole innernut publishing thing, as Ken would probably say.)
John Trubee's "Peace and Love" (more popularly known as "Blind Man's Penis") is beyond question the most famous song-poem there is, and is one of pop music's most demented treasures. It never fails to make me giggle, even having lost the vital element of surprise due to literally hundreds of listens. Here's Trubee's own version of the well-known story behind the song, if you haven't heard it.
"Peace and Love" is, I'd imagine, the high-water mark of what can result when a conscious ironist joins forces, so to speak, with the "straight" confidence men of a vanity publishing outfit. Part of the boundless appeal of this recording is the tension arising from the question of who's been conning who. You can hear it in the bemused voice of the singer Ramsey Kearny, whose deadpan delivery cannot mask the pathos of a professional performer, presumably with the hopes, dreams, regrets, and bitterness of all show-biz aspirants, having come to such a pass that he must mutter "warts love my nipples because they are pink" into a microphone as part of a comic-book swindle in order to pay the rent. And, of course, this pathos is a kind of mirror of that of the song-poem sucker who sees the comic book ad as a door to a bright future in the music business. In "Peace and Love," we're in on the joke, while the singer isn't, or doesn't appear to be. It's funny-funny, it's strange-funny, but it's also just a bit sad-funny.
Article comments
1 - VO
Here's a link to a story about jazz-er Ellery Eskelin's father who wrote the music behind these song poems and performed them too:
http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1045636
VO
2 - Peter Petrisko
Trubee is a true renaissance man for the postmodern age.
Besides the 7" single mentioned above, Enigma also released:
"The Communists Are Coming To Kill Us!" (1984)
"Naked Teenage Girls in Outer Space" (1985)
Both LPs are by John Trubee and the Ugly Janitors of America.
The first is a potpourri of one-off noise pieces, prank phone calls, ironic "poetry"/rants, and the occasional foray into melodic improv-jazz (a la Zoogs Rift.)
The latter tends more toward structured songs with a laid back rock/jazz feel, with Trubee finding a sardonic lyrical voice on cuts like "Field of Corpses" and "Leper in the Shadows". Good stuff, Maynard. Also, a few more recorded prank calls are included.
I know Trubee used to trade tapes - I still have a number of them, which are filled with spacey synth improvs and prank calls, respectively - but don't know if his address listed at the end of the article you hot-linked under 'John Trubee' is a current one. We haven't corresponded in quite a few years.
3 - alienboy
He's history, JB