Max "Bunny" Sparber

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. As a performer, his songs charted 81 times, and he debuted Dolly Parton to an initially unwelcoming public in 1967. Their duets together found their way into the top 10 on country music charts 14 times.

For a popular artist, Wagoner 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. The album featured songs such as his self-penned "The Silent Kind," a mournful first-person narrative about alcoholic indigents, and a stark rendition of Dolly Parton's "Bottle of Wine," an ode to the blissful forgetfulness that drunkenness brings. Wagoner had a sometimes unnerving habit of singing his most harrowing songs in first-person, such as his ballad of domestic violence, "The Cold Hard Facts of Life." "Lord you should've seen their frantic faces," Wagoner sings, telling of a man who has walked in on his cheating wife. "They screamed and cried please put away that knife."

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 strobing colored 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 this case, the sound engineers, might have actually gone a little mad themselves.

LISTEN TO "THE RUBBER ROOM":



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