San Francisco. December 29, 1984.

All at once, a signal from Radio Moscow comes through Paul Pena’s shortwave radio. It’s a human voice, singing—of that he is certain—though not one he’s heard before. It bends and splits in the air, producing more than one tone at once: a low, deep growl, like humming at the bottom of an empty barrel. It feels ancient to him, elemental. Not forbidding, exactly, but insistent. It locates something in him, and he decides he must locate it in return.

Pena is blind and a musician. He’s built his life around sound. But this one will carry his life farther than he ever could have imagined, to audiences who had never heard his name, and into a music that seemed to have always been waiting for him.

First sound

Paul Jerrod Pena was born in 1950 in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, the son of second-generation Cape Verdean immigrants Virginia, an artist, and Jack, a master carpenter and bassist.

When he was a boy, a relative lugged home a baby grand piano from the town dump, thinking a musical instrument would be just the thing—the perfect “toy”—for a child born with congenital glaucoma and denied sight. Pena fell in love with the sounds the keys made and taught himself to pick out melodies and chords. Once he mastered the piano, he took up guitar, upright bass, violin, and trumpet, and soon discovered, in church and school choirs, that he could sing, too.

His father became his first great musical influence, exposing him to country blues, Latin jazz, and Cape Verdean ballads. At the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass., where he was a resident student from age five, Pena immersed himself in music of all kinds, performing everywhere he could—in the school’s dormitory “cottages” and at official school functions like International Week.

“Paul has a great love for folk music,” read his graduate profile in 1967. “He is a fine guitarist and a master on the bass. He can find his way around the piano keys with great dexterity. Paul’s deep bass will indeed be missed in the Chorus and Glee Club.”

After graduating from Perkins, Pena enrolled at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., but devoted most of his energy to performing at small clubs and coffeehouses around New England. Among his early admirers was Bonnie Raitt, then a Radcliffe student making her own moves on the same scene; she would later call Pena a “treasure” and “one of the most unique and soulful artists you’ll ever hear.” By age nineteen, Pena was sharing a stage with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival.

His own frequency

To his peers, Pena was sui generis. To record executives and most rock journalists, he was still an enigma. Every time he shuffled onto the stage, he cut a figure no one could quite categorize. He wore thrift-store blazers and baggy trousers. He had a scraggly black mustache, dust-bunny beard, and a rounded afro that obscured his face when he stooped toward the microphone. Sometimes he wore dark sunglasses to cover his eyes. He was Creole (his surname is pronounced Pee-nuh, not Pen-ya like the Latin surname Peña), but in his own quiet way, he belonged nowhere but to himself: a citizen of the world and its most cherished nomad.

Then he played.

His guitar work summoned all the ferocity of electric Chicago blues—with fluid bends, vocal phrasing, and vibrant, romping, expressive solos—yet retained a Bay Area looseness that allowed him to stretch out and command the rhythm. His voice could sound sly and smoky like Jimi Hendrix, warm and raspy like Ray Charles, or tremulous like a man weeping at his child’s grave. He was part folk storyteller, part Delta bluesman, part country diarist. In an industry that depended on categories, Pena refused to supply one.

At barely twenty years old, he scraped together enough money to cut a four-track demo at a small recording studio at 331 Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, called Intermedia Sound Studios.

He had no particular plan for what came next.

Signal gained

Gunther Weil had opened Intermedia in 1971. A German-born psychologist with a Harvard Ph.D. who was a core member of the “Harvard Psilocybin Project” led by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass), Weil aimed to create, as he once explained to the Boston Globe, “a situation where people feel comfortable personally, and the result is professional.” With 16-track recording equipment and a layout engineered to minimize ambient noise, Intermedia was state-of-the-art at the time. Aerosmith would record their eponymous debut there in 1972, and Bonnie Raitt would use the studio for mixing and overdubs.

One afternoon, an Intermedia recording engineer approached Weil with Pena’s demo and insisted he listen to it. Weil did, and he was knocked out by what he heard.

He soon became Pena’s manager, publisher, producer, friend, and, given that Pena was completely blind and came from a family of modest means, his caretaker, driving him to gigs and at times supporting him financially.

Weil, by his own admission, was a small-time operator out of Boston with no major-label track record. What he had instead was a Harvard-trained psychologist’s gift for persuasion and an unshakeable belief in his client. Within months, he struck a deal with Capitol. Pena assembled a band of musician friends and, in the fall of 1971, began laying down tracks for his debut, Paul Pena.

The budget allowed for eight songs in total, all but one written by Pena, with Jesse Raye on bass, Jim Wilkins on drums, Ed Costa on keyboards, and Jeffrey “Skunk” Baxter, who would later find fame playing with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, on pedal steel. Weil remembers Pena was “very much in the moment” in the studio—spontaneous and instinctive yet open to direction.

The eponymous title is apt. Paul Pena combines autobiographical lyrics and harmonic virtuosity to form a chronicle of a young man’s pain and search for artistic solace in a world that was both unforgiving and totally bewildering to someone who is blind. Take the opening track, “Woke Up This Morning,” which arrives with a latticework of acoustic guitar and Pena’s big, sonorous bass. “Woke up this morning/Hunger about to gnawin’ me through,” Pena begins in a pained, plaintive voice, delivering the lines almost as a spoken-word poem. “Just started thinking/Asked myself, ‘Tell me what can I do.’” As the song builds, Pena finds a way to fuse meditation, confession, and fury until he is practically shouting with defiant victory: “For I’ve tried for so long/Just to write me a song/People told me I’m wrong/I knew I was right all along.”

Or consider Side B’s opener “Something to Make You Happy,” a surly, snarling rocker that bounds forward with waves of guitar, organ, and drums for seven-plus minutes, smoldering with agitation about the fate of the country and the planet before crescendoing into a lover’s plea. Pena sings lines like: “I ain’t got no money, ain’t got no fortune/I wasn’t gifted by Venus’ grace and charm/Ain’t got no strength to move no mountains/I’ve got strength and love and warmth enough/To hold you sheltered in my arms.” As the song churns ahead toward its conclusion, Pena seems about to collapse under the weight of his own insecurities and hopelessness: “If there ain’t nothing to make you happy/There’s no reason for me to wanna live/If there ain’t nothing to make you happy/Ain’t no reason for me to wanna give.

The result is an album of rare emotional maturity, a musical diary of a young artist who knows his pain and struggle intimately, and still, somehow, holds onto hope.

The robin’s-egg-blue album cover captured the mood of the songs within, introducing Paul Pena to the world via line drawing, his face in profile, his eyes closed, and his lips parted in an expression stuck somewhere between concentration and surrender, as if he were working out some private reckoning. On the back, the liner notes read: “Paul Pena’s eyes are blind. His songs are see-and-look messages, opening others’ eyes, pulling pain and loneliness, faith and love through his voice and music for his friends and all the people. He delivers himself, reaching for our soul with such words …”

Paul Pena debuted in November 1971 and garnered almost universal critical acclaim. The most consequential notice came from The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics and one of the most reluctant tastemakers in the business.

“Certain hip blacks—Richie Havens is the perfect example—have developed a style of unspecified humanitarianism so wishy-washy it sends me scurrying to ‘War’ and ‘Ball of Confusion’. Pena’s outlook is similar, but for some reason—a combination of vocal presence that transcends conviction and acute instrumental virtuosity—he makes me feel it,” Christgau wrote. “Even the naivete of the lyrics works: such home truths are often unavailable to more sophisticated writers. The most moving first record in quite a while. A-”

Pena kicked off a tour to promote the album, starting in his native New England. In Chicago, an expensive bottle of cognac was waiting in his hotel room, courtesy of Bhaskar Menon, the head of Capitol.

But for reasons that still remain unclear, the album failed to sell. Capitol dropped him, canceled the rest of his dates, and, within months, hole-punched copies of Paul Pena found their way into discount record bins. Today, original pressings command as much as $350 on the second market, a remarkable sum for a record that, at the time, found almost no audience.

The possible explanations for the failure of Paul Pena are multiple and overlapping. For one, Pena’s music may have blended too many genres for rigid radio formats. For another, his blindness made promotion—the press interviews and TV and radio appearances required to market a new artist—a logistical nightmare. Then there was Capitol itself, which was consumed with repackaging the Beatles’ catalog for American release.

Whatever the reason, Capitol moved on, and so did Pena. Perhaps owing to his ennui and the pull of a new scene, he moved to San Francisco. He found a home there among the hangers-on from the Summer of Love and psychedelic revolution, becoming a staple at venues like the Great American Music Hall, the Village, and the East Bay’s Keystone Berkeley. He toured and played the same stages as the Grateful Dead, Merl Saunders, and Frank Zappa, as well as blues legends John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and T-Bone Walker.

But even as he gigged relentlessly in the Bay Area, Pena committed himself to writing new songs. He knew there was still interest in his music among record executives, including Albert Grossman, who had managed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band, and The Weavers. Grossman had just launched his own label, Bearsville Records, in Woodstock, N.Y., and had secured a distribution deal with Warner Brothers. He told Weil that he could make Pena “the next Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles.”

Pena would get a second chance.

Static

Weil negotiated a “master purchase” agreement with Bearsville that gave Pena complete creative control—over the songs, the players, and the studio—along with roughly $50,000 to make a record. All Grossman required in return was the finished master.

With the stakes higher this time, Weil decided to bring in a more seasoned producer. Ben Sidran was already well-known as the keyboardist for the Steve Miller Band, and had just released his own album on Blue Thumb Records and co-produced The Old Bum’s Rush for Tony Williams’ Lifetime, the pioneering jazz-fusion group, at Weil’s own Intermedia studio in Boston. He was an obvious choice to produce Pena’s sophomore effort.

The sessions began in late 1973 at Intermedia, featuring an extraordinary cast of players, most of whom were connected to either Pena or Sidran. Sidran played with Gary Malabar in Jesse Ed Davis’s band in Los Angeles, and had admired his in-the-pocket drumming on Van Morrison’s Moondance. Malabar had also recently relocated to Rochester, N.Y., which made the trip to Boston easy. Adding to the rhythm section was bassist Harvey Brooks, a veteran of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew sessions who had come up through the Woodstock scene, playing on Bob Dylan’s New Morning, and Sidran himself on keyboards. Pena’s new San Francisco friends filled out the rest of the lineup: Jerry Garcia played steel guitar on several tracks, and Merle Saunders contributed keyboards. The a cappella vocal group the Persuasions brought their gospel harmonies to the infectious, autobiographical opener, “Gonna Move.”

At the center of everything, once again, was Pena.

“Paul was pretty much producing himself musically,” Weil told me. “He knew exactly what he wanted, including the arrangements and the side musicians.”

Sidran’s role as producer was to create the conditions for that to happen. Unlike a Steve Miller Band studio session, which could be methodical and painstaking, with 20-plus takes of the same instrumental part, the recording of New Train was relaxed, collaborative, and spontaneous. Sidran believed the best records were made live in the studio, not in pre- or post-production, and much of what ended up on New Train was invented on the spot.

The most striking example of this was the sixth track, “Cosmic Mirror.” One day, during a break in recording, Pena, Brooks, and Malabar started jamming, conjuring a slow, swampy, psychedelic groove reminiscent of Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” with Pena freestyling the words as they came to him. Sidran happened to be walking past the control room, heard what was happening, and quickly hit record.

“Cosmic Mirror wasn’t a song,” Sidran told me. “It wasn’t on our schedule. It was just them fooling around. And what we recorded was truly captured music. That rarely, rarely happens.”

To this day, Sidran holds up the song as proof that the best takes are often the ones nobody planned.

“The more you rehearse stuff, the more you have to remember, and the more you have to remember, the more you’re afraid you’re gonna forget,” Sidran said. “And when you get the red light turned on, that fear is always in the background. But with something like that moment, there was no remembering, there was no forgetting, there was no fear. It was just what was happening in the room.”

Everyone left Weil’s Boston studio believing they had cut a masterpiece that was sure to make Pena a star. Sidran thought the album would open doors for him as a producer, and Weil considered every song a potential hit.

They just needed to convince Grossman.

Signal lost

Late that December, in 1973, after the record was mixed, Sidran and Weil traveled to Woodstock to deliver the finished album.

They were anxious. Pena, for all his modesty and warm-heartedness, gave no artistic quarter. He spent all his time writing and performing music that excited and challenged him, and no time doing all the things musicians do to get noticed and rich. This rankled the hard-charging, business-minded Grossman. In one telling episode, Grossman demanded that Pena relocate from San Francisco to the hamlet of Bearsville, near Woodstock, where Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and The Band lived, wrote, and recorded in a feudalist enclave under his domineering control. Pena refused. He was already spending months at a time on the road, which was difficult for any musician and a nightmare for someone who is blind. But more than that, Pena distrusted Grossman.

The third track on New Train, “Jet Airliner,” gives voice to the strain of the situation. How long after Grossman’s ultimatum Pena wrote the song, or whether the lyrics also draw on a lifetime of travel frustrations particular to someone who is blind, is impossible to know. (Weil himself is unsure when Pena wrote the song, but the timing is suggestive). The hook-laden song is ostensibly about travel, airports, and obligations, but beneath its rolling rhythm runs a current of ambivalence and defiance, of promises made and pressures mounting.

Goodbye to all my friends at home

Goodbye to people I’ve trusted

I got to go out and make my way

I might get rich, you know I might get busted

But my heart keeps calling me backwards

As I get on the 747

Ridin’ high, I got ’em tears in my eyes

You know you got to go through hell

Before you get to heaven

In the final lines, Pena makes his feelings known explicitly:

Big old jet airliner

Don’t carry me too far away

Big old jet airliner

’Cause it’s California where I’ve got to stay

The night before their big meeting with Grossman, Sidran and Weil were holed up in a motel in Woodstock discussing pitch strategies. As Sidran recounted in his memoir, Ben Sidran: A Life in Music, Weil spent a good part of the “evening standing on his head, reminding me of Frodo the Hobbit preparing to do battle with the dark forces of Mordor.”

The meeting did not last long. Minutes in, Grossman declared that if Pena was not willing to move to Woodstock and hand over the management of his music and career to him, he would not release New Train.

Shaken, Weil took the offer back to Pena. “Paul said, ‘no’ without hesitation,” according to Weil. “And this is a quote: ‘I’m not going to be his house nigger.’ Paul told me, ‘I want to work with you. You’re my friend. You’re my manager. I trust you.’”

Grossman then went scorched earth. He claimed New Train was “technically insufficient.” In their master service agreement, Grossman had inserted a clause stating that if the recording quality fell below a certain standard, he could withhold the album’s release. (Technical sufficiency was one reason Weil hired Sidran.)

Pena, Weil, and Sidran were devastated. In retrospect, Weil said he believes the money Grossman had advanced them to record New Train—and the creative control he had relinquished—was a “long con” to control Pena’s music and career. “All of it was basically a bait-and-switch for him to pull the plug at the eleventh hour,” Weil said.

This was 1973, and Grossman’s empire was collapsing. Dylan had cut ties with him after discovering the full extent of his manager’s greed, and Janis Joplin, his most commercially successful client after Dylan, had died in 1970. Grossman’s aggressiveness toward Pena may have been the desperate maneuverings of a cornered man.

“In the end, it all just got to be more than Albert could handle,” Jonathan Taplin, a longtime associate of Grossman’s, told journalist Rory O’Conner, writing for Musician magazine in June 1987, the year after Grossman died. “He made everybody move up to Woodstock, then lost his heart for the music and started getting into restaurants and real estate. As far as Bob goes, Albert just got too greedy. He kept a huge percentage of Dylan’s publishing rights at a time when many other artists completely controlled their own publishing.”

Dylan had gotten out. Pena had not. He was twenty-three years old, broke, with one critically adored album that nobody bought, a second locked in a vault, and a contract with Bearsville that barred him from recording anywhere else in perpetuity. His career seemed over.

“It knocked my head off,” Pena said years later in an interview with the Boston Globe. “Knocked me off for a long time. It was a lovely record and—boom—it got shelved. It was very stupid, very aggravating, very disappointing. It just knocked my lights out. I was really hurt.”

So were Sidran and Malabar, who, after getting the bad news, played Steve Miller the unreleased tapes. Miller immediately recognized the commercial potential of New Train and decided to record one of the tracks, “Jet Airliner,” for the band’s upcoming Book of Dreams album. (Miller, a famously calculating musician who never recorded a song he did not own, purchased the publishing rights to every track on New Train as well.) “Jet Airliner” became a top-ten hit in 1977, an enduring landmark of the rock-and-roll canon, and the one thing that stood between Pena and destitution for the rest of his life.

Pena may have lost his standoff with Grossman, but the song would outlive both of them.

Low signal

The headline of a 1980 article in The Boston Globe captured the years that followed: “Paul Pena: bitter, frustrated, but still trying.” He returned to Massachusetts that June in hopes of reclaiming some measure of his early promise. He still had fans and supporters in the Boston area, and he badly needed the money. His wife, Babe, whom he had met in 1967 while both were enrolled in a special program at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass., had lost her remaining sight and needed a new kidney.

“She used to be a real reader … she had so many books,” Pena explained to Globe writer Dave Johnson. “But we sold the books the other day because she can’t read them anymore.”

But whatever struggles Pena faced in his life, he had a gift for inspiring loyalty in people; those who knew him tended to want to help him in any way they could. During his brief return trip to New England, for example, Boston-area club owners and musicians organized benefits for him and Babe, and for several weeks Pena performed paying gigs.

The years of struggle would continue, however: no ability to record new songs, no New Train in record stores. Pena and his wife survived on the royalties from the Steve Miller Band’s recording of “Jet Airliner.”

Then came the Radio Moscow broadcast on his shortwave.

Receiving

For nearly eight years, Pena searched for the source of that mysterious singing. In 1991, in the wake of his wife’s death, he finally found his first clue at Round World Music in San Francisco’s Mission District: a CD of music from Tuva, a landlocked republic the size of North Dakota between Mongolia and Siberia, which is now part of the Russian Federation.

Within weeks, Pena mastered the Tuvan vocal techniques known as khoomei, sygyt, and kargyraa, in which two notes are sung simultaneously. He had to translate the lyrics from Tuvan to Russian, and then from Russian to English, using Braille dictionaries, to fully grasp what he was hearing.

Two years later, a troupe of Tuvan throat singers toured the United States for the first time, performing at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Pena waited in line for hours to secure a seat in the front row. After the concert, he introduced himself to the musicians—among them Kongar-ol Ondar, Tuva’s most celebrated throat singer, a figure said to be the country’s Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, and Michael Jackson rolled into one—and sang several of their traditional songs back to them.

Ondar was astonished to meet a master of Tuvan throat singing who was not Tuvan. On the spot, he invited Pena to travel to Tuva to compete in the next triennial throat-singing contest, set for 1995. He also bestowed Pena with a nickname: Cher Shimjer—“Earthquake”—a tribute to his rumbling, gravelly vocal style.

Pena flew to Asia courtesy of the Tuvan-American Friendship Society, the same group that had put on the concert and managed to get Tuvan musicians in the Rose Bowl parade. He made the trip with some friends and a film crew, which produced the documentary Genghis Blues about the journey.

The film may be the most intimate portrait we have of Pena as both artist and human being. We encounter him not as an aloof genius or music-industry casualty, but as a gentle seeker of truth and beauty in a disconnected world. He navigates the country just as he did through musical genres, with warmth, curiosity, and an almost radical grace, only now with even greater stakes of the soul.

When he meets Ondar again, Pena smiles widely and says, “Oh, my teacher!” Ondar becomes Pena’s guide, sage, and champion, holding him by the arm with an ease that makes the bond between them feel natural and unbreakable.

Then came the competition. Accompanying himself on guitar, Pena fought through anxiety and self-doubt to forge an unlikely Asian-American fusion, melding the chantlike overtones of traditional Tuvan throat singing with the ache and drive of the Delta blues. The audience went very still. A beat. Then thunderous applause. By night’s end, Pena was named the winner of the Kargyraa Division and recipient of the Audience Favorite Award. A Tuvan man in a denim jacket materialized on stage and placed a bouquet of flowers in Pena’s hands.

“Honor is a small word to describe what it feels like,” Pena says.

For a man who had spent a lifetime moving through a world that was not built for him, the moment was hard-won and fragile. Pena found himself disoriented often in Tuva, despite his embrace of the people and their culture, and the trip almost had to be cut short when his antidepressant medication ran out. But he forged ahead, with resolve and a faith in the music that had taken him this far.

Received

Genghis Blues was nominated for an Academy Award, sparking a modest revival of interest in Pena and his music. In 2000, on the strength of the film, his friend and attorney Jon Waxman negotiated a deal with Grossman’s estate to release New Train. Pena performed “Jet Airliner” on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. National magazines and newspapers carried profiles and curiosity pieces about him. By this time, however, Pena was battling pancreatitis (at first incorrectly diagnosed as pancreatic cancer), too ill to tour or even grant live interviews. Bedridden and ailing, he was nonetheless flooded with letters and messages from fans around the world.

“It is very humbling to realize that so many people care about one personally,” Pena wrote in an open letter on March 18, 2001, posted to his website, paulpena.com. “I have read each and every message that has come to my personal email address over the past five months or so. Some letters, which were sent to someone else to be read to me, have also been forwarded to me. In each and every case, the genuine love and kindness that you all tried so sincerely to convey was not lost on me! I wish, here and now, to express my deepest gratitude for those good feelings so clearly apparent in your correspondence. Like good memories, they are treasures to be saved in the mind and heart forever to give aid and comfort during the bad times, and to increase the joy and fulfillment to be had during the good times. Well, on with the show!”

Pena would die less than five years later. He was 55.

Resonance

When I first discovered Paul Pena’s music and learned his story, I felt anger on his behalf. If he is remembered at all today, it is as another artist undone by industry greed. His two albums remain extraordinary documents of timeless originality—full of emotional honesty, musical invention, and a singing voice that had the raw, penetrating quality of a steel-tipped drill—yet survive mostly in the collections of dedicated record hunters, appreciated far less often by wider audiences than they deserve.

More of the world should know about Paul Pena, especially his struggles, because his achievements are even more extraordinary in light of them. His glaucoma left him in constant pain, his depression made him inert and agitated, and his attempts to cope led from cannabis to heroin and eventually methadone. Those who knew him remember the chaos he often left in his wake. He struggled with the practical demands of life, and even the royalties from “Jet Airliner” brought new problems when unpaid taxes caught up with him.

Even amid the disorder, Pena had devised a remarkably effective operating system for surviving the world. Sidran remembers walking him to his room at the Tropicana Hotel in Los Angeles, then watching him drop to his hands and knees and crawl across the floor to find each electrical outlet by touch, assembling a precise map of the room in his mind. Then Sidran watched Pena stand and turn on the television. He always turned on the television the way a sighted person might turn on an overhead light.

But to frame Pena’s story in grievance and resentment is to miss what he ultimately achieved. Pena spent his entire life searching—for a musical language, a sense of belonging, a place where his gifts could fully connect with others. He found all three in the unlikely world of Tuvan throat-singing, after hearing that Radio Moscow broadcast in 1984. “Now, that’s for me, man,” he told the documentarians of Genghis Blues. “That’s something I can really get off doing.”

Through the purity of that search, Pena found acceptance and affirmation—and, at last, the commercial recognition that had long eluded him. Too little, perhaps, and too late. Yet this final chapter only confirmed what his life had always suggested: that his art and his spirit were inseparable, and that in remaining true to both, he had already arrived.

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