Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Porter Wagoner
The Rubber Room
(Omni, 2006)
The high gothic nightmares of country’s greatest tragedian.
Sometimes, record labels can be astonishingly ahead of the curve. There was I, this time last year, wondering if, in the wake of his recent death, I could interest a record label in compiling a CD of Porter Wagoner’s more lunatic compositions, and then I discovered this terrifying gem. Compiled by the oracular David Thrussell in 2006, The Rubber Room is subtitled “The haunting, poetic songs of Porter Wagoner” and it should have a Parental Advisory sticker on the cover, such is the horror contained within these gore-soaked two-and-a-half minute playlets. A not entirely welcome Christmas gift, it sound-tracked January 2007, filling the cold January days with ghoulish tales of death, murder, and dipsomania set in the fetid pool rooms, shuttered gaming houses and treacherous front rooms of country Babylon. From the storytelling wife-killer of The First Mrs Jones to the cuckolded husband of The Cold Hard Facts Of Life (who walks in on his wife’s wild sex party and stabs the participants to death), every song seems to starts with a jaunty perk of slide guitar and ends in a blood bath.
Whether wallowing in sodden self-pity or boiling with the righteous anger of the red-top tabloids Wagoner never strikes you as one of life’s liberals, and a compilation like this – whilst highlighting his unease around native Americans and unmarried mothers – also reveals a streak of true evil – as on a song like Woman Hungry, in which the narrator holds that “When a man gets woman hungry he will find a meal somewhere”. Christ! The best country tales are often the stuff of Greek tragedy, in which man is powerless in the face of overwhelming fate, but these songs are pure baroque opera that push further into the mouth of madness than even George Jones or Ray Price at their craziest. It’s perhaps fitting that, in one of his last recordings, Wagoner was back in the rubber room, with Committed To Parkview a song written by Johnny Cash about the time Wagoner spent in the “rest home” in the mid ’60s. Welcome to his nightmare.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 9:30 AM GMT 05/01/2009
Further Listening
Porter Wagoner – Wagonmaster (Anti, 2007)
Ray Price – Burning Memories (Columbia, 1964)
Killdozer – 12 Point Buck (Touch & Go, 1988)
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