I've been grooving on this very odd and infamous Porter Wagoner song from 1972, a little thing called "The Rubber Room." Best I can tell, it wasn't any big hit, but Porter was near the top of his fame with the television show with as many as several million viewers a week, so he managed to put the thing in front of a lot of people. I would have been about nine at the time, and it made some freaky impression on me. It has sunk into obscurity since then, and it took weeks to find it even on P2P.
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.
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