Years ago a friend of mine gave me a mixtape filled with the Ventures, Dick and Dale, and this one incredible song by the Butthole Surfers called “Johnny Smoke” from their album Hairway to Steven. Is there anything by this band that sounds remotely like this song? Is this the only surf rock performed by the Butthole Surfers?

JOHNNY SMOKE

This here a song is about John W. Smoke, Jr.

It’s about bein’ in love
and lovin’ the love that’s hatin’ the love,
the love and the love and the hate that love revolves around the love that’s hate that’s the hate that’s the love and that love’s the love that’s the hate that’s hatin’ the love, it’s lovin’ the hate.

It’s about John W. Smoke’s mom.
It’s with his mom.
It’s about his mom.
It’s about his mom.
It’s about lovin’ his mom and bein’ without his mom,
and lovin’ the hate that’s hatin’ the love and his mom and all the time they’re there hatin’ the hate that’s lovin’ the hate it’s love it’s the loveless hate.

And it goes somethin’ about like this:

Johnny Smoke,
oh Johnny Smoke.
John Smoke.
oh Johnny Smoke.
oh Johnny Smoke!
Johnny Johnny Johnny Jahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

John.
John Smoke.
Johnny Smoke.
Here we go.

John… John was a little crippled midget lesbian boy
but he stood ten foot tall with a knife

Pretty soon a mole had appeared on John’s left leg
and, rope-like, it extended out 469 different miles
and verily, verily, it was 69 different nuns
speaking simultaneously to John in 69 different languages.

And then it evolved itself
and it was the legless dog
that become a cyclone in John’s bodily forehead.

And there it was
like a twinkie with a halo storm in it
and it revolved down into the sky
and talked to John like he was a little puppy himself.

And John said that,
“I am not the magma, I am not the crust, and I shall evolve.”

And the rain had come down and it washed on John.

And he said that,
“I will be a cigarette butt before it’s all done with.”

And they said,
“No. You are the flame itself and you shall burn pure in the South American sky where the blood-dogs worship the still.”

Johnny Smoke.
oh Johnny Smoke.
oh Johnny Smoke! OW!

Johnny Smoke
John Smoke.

oh Johnny
Johnny Johnny
Johnny Johnny Johnny Johnny Johnny
Johnny Johnny Johnny Johnny Jahhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

And so,
brainlessly,
leglessly,
hairlessly,
the Foil Tip,
come of itself,
and revealed to John
that the Q.E.2 luxury liner
had extended out of John’s left side.

And so,
it had reached through him [to] Mars
with a slam backwards
and upwardly they did evolve.

Downward they fell
like a thin sheet of waste product
that had come over John’s body.

His body was no longer the prime vehicle to express itself.

And he could not be the dog.

And the dog’s eyes,
which had blood comin’ out like they were
roped around John’s leg
and pulled him up like he was a canoe.

And he floated on the life essence himself
through South America where he was in love

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Johnny Smoke” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.