John Trubee’s The Communists Are Coming to Kill Us! is a Lost in the Grooves exclusive, available now from Maryatt Music Group. Click to sample John’s singles collection or purchase.
John Trubee’s legendary Prank Call CDs, available as MP3 samples, downloads or full CDs:
Greatest Prank Phone Calls Of All Time Vol. 1
Greatest Prank Phone Calls Of All Time Vol. 2
Greatest Prank Phone Calls Of All Time Vol. 3
Greatest Prank Phone Calls Of All Time Vol. 4
Review:
John Trubee and the Ugly Janitors of America The Communists Are Coming to Kill Us! (Enigma, 1984)
Mr. Trubee is best known as the man behind “Blind Man’s Penis,” a demented poem with lines like “Warts love my nipples because they are pink/Vomit on me baby, yeah, yeah” that was sent to a song-poem mill and turned into a deadpan country song which subsequently became an underground novelty hit. Lesser known, but far stranger, is his follow-up album. Trubee got the ball rolling by sending a fake suicide note to several associates, including L.A. Reader rock critic Matt Groening and Enigma’s Bill Hein, who agreed to meet with Trubee and negotiate a record deal. In Trubee’s words: “It was no negotiation. I wanted to do the record badly–that was obvious. It was similar to a horny teenage boy negotiating with a supermodel to lose his virginity. There is no deal–he just gets with her fast before she changes her mind. I told Bill I’d do it for no money. He set up mastering time at Capitol and I walked in … with a brown paper bag full of reel tapes and cassettes of teenage poetry rants, prank phone calls, aborted horn chart recordings from music school, and other weirdness. I had the flu and I sat with Eddie Shierer for six hours editing all this madness into an album.” What resulted was an extremely unique and, well, odd record. I came across it in a used bin shortly after it came out. It was both annoying as hell and insanely captivating, a collage of atonal avant-jazz, primitive electronic compositions, and spoken rants against stuck-up college girls and the suave men who slept with them, plus those juvenile prank calls, a revelation long before the genre became a pop cultural phenomena. If the record that was attached to the Voyager space probe had contained the sounds of all the alienated, pissed-off, shat-on people on earth, it would sound something like this. (Chas Glynn, from the book Lost in the Grooves)