THE RUBBER ROOM - Porter Wagoner goes PSYCHO Listen

$

46

RUBBER ROOM
PSYCHOTIC PORTER WAGONER

THE LANKY, POMPADOURED, NUDIE SUIT-BEDECKED Porter Wagoner was once a familiar sight. For starters, from 1960 to 1979 the country singer hosted a syndicated program, reaching an audience of millions. His songs charted 81 times, and he had a notably grim streak to him. His 1970 LP Skid Row Joe: Down in the Alley, as an example, featured a photo of the singer dressed as a bedraggled drunk, reaching out a battered, upturned hat to a passer by, an empty pint of alcohol behind him.

Even knowing Wagoner's taste in downbeat songs, "The Rubber Room" is bizarre. This 1972 release is a relentlessly minor-key examination of madness, and, as is typical in a Wagoner song, is told in the first-person. Over stirring strings, a skittish electric guitar, and keening background singers, Wagoner dolefully describes life inside a mental institution -- and the lunacy that placed him there. "The man in the room right next to mine screams a woman's name, hits the wall in vain" Wagoner sings, sounding increasingly spooked by his own song. "A psycho in the rubber room," Wagoner adds later, in a stentorian near-whisper.

Wagoner's languid delivery of the song is terrifying: he genuinely sounds as though he were fighting the urge to gibber by phrasing his words with exaggerated care. As though this were not enough to indicate lunacy, the song offers some technological trickery -- at the end of certain phrases, Wagoner's voice is mechanically echoed. The effect is ridiculous -- it sounds as though Wagoner were singing into a fan -- but strangely effective.

It's the aural equivalent of the hackneyed visual effects used to represent madness in films, coupling strobe lights with fish-eyed lenses to create a distorted sense of space. As inadvertently comical as these effects may be, they are nonetheless jarring; One gets the unsettling feeling that the filmmakers, or, in the case, the sound engineers, might have actually gone a little mad themselves. [Dr. Mysterian]

In a buildin' tall with a stone wall around
there's a rubber room
When a man sees things and hears sounds that's not there
He's headed for the rubber room
Illusions in a twisted mind to save from self-destruction hmm
it's the rubber room
Where a man can run into the wall
till his strength makes him fall and lie still
And wait for help in the rubber room
From his blurry vision of doom
A psycho in the rubber room
The man in the room right next to mine
screams a woman's name hits the wall in vain
He's in the rubber room
I hear footsteps poundin' on the floor
God, I hope they don't stop at my door
Hmm I'm in the rubber room
Now they've come to get me but they find
I'm a screamin' pretty words tryin' to make 'em rhyme
I'm in the rubber room hmm
A psycho
I'm in the rubber room hmm

LISTEN TO PART OF THIS RECORD HERE!