Porter Wagoner: Rubber Room
A short clip of Porter singing “Rubber Room” with Marty Stuart. I’ve actually never heard the album its on, but the song acquired a cult following:
The studio recording features a lot of weird vocal effects and choruses that make it considerably freakier than what he could have done on stage. You might call the record “psychedelic country.” It deserves the title if any recording does.
The song is an odd minor key blues lament for those in mental lockup. It’s a sad tale, but then it shifts into the first person as the narrator realizes that he’s locked up in there with the other people he’s singing about.
As this kicks in, the tone of the song shifts from a lament into despair. He wails and gnashes his teeth, so to speak, as the weird fiddles and vocal choruses pile on. He adds some unfortunately heavy-handed reverb and echo effects that must have freaked the old folks out at the Opry. It sounds nothing like any country record you ever heard.
Yet undeniably it remains country. As his buddy Waylon Jennings once said, Porter “couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”
Reading this description, I could imagine some would-be hipsters taking this song for mere camp. They would be wrong. He works up a real palpable sense of dread and despair that can’t be denied. It works.
Indeed. Here are the lyrics:
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 strenght 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
It’s a sad day when people like Toby Kaith and Martina Macbride just go on living, and an actual artist like Wagoner dies. Plumb pitiful.
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