"The Thin Man"

By Peter Cooper, Staff Writer for "The Tennessean"
Published: July 9, 2000.

'Opry' legend Porter Wagoner strikes again, with first new album in 20 years.
Porter Wagoner's psychedelic album remains, 28 years after its release, a thing unto itself.

"Doom, doom, doom, zoom, room tomb ... rubber room," sang The Thin Man From West Plains, as waves of reverb richocheted through the soundscape.

"People thought I was crazy, man," Porter said, sitting in his impressively furnished dressing room at the Grand Ole Opry a week ago. "I mean, actually crazy. They thought I'd lost my mind."

Missouri native Wagoner is 72 now, and most people don't think he's crazy any more. Off-kilter, perhaps, but not crazy.

His career as one of country's edgiest, most innovative forces (as evidenced by the aforementioned Rubber Room), has been validated by enduring fan support and by his position as an unofficial ambassador for the Opry and for Nashville itself.

Wagoner's unfathomably sparkly suits, "y'all come" demeanor, and joking stage antics sometimes obscure the true highlights of what has been an extraordinarily creative and important career in country music.

"I stand in awe of Porter Wagoner," said Buddy Miller, a highly acclaimed Nashville singer, guitarist and producer. "I think of him as a visionary."

Miller affords that status to Wagoner on the basis of a series of concept albums -- including What Ain't To Be Just Might Happen and The Cold, Hard Facts of Life -- that offered unified, thematic song sets at a time when country albums usually featured a couple of singles and a lot of filler.

Those albums (now mostly out-of-print), combined with a popular and influential syndicated television show, groundbreaking production work and inventive choices in sidemen (electric banjo player Buck Trent's instrument sounded almost like a steel guitar and preceeded Junior Brown's guit-steel by more than 20 years) reveal Wagoner as much more than a singing foil for Dolly Parton or a kindly Opry regular.

"I don't always get credit for having talent, so to speak," Wagoner said, his silver, rhinestone-enhanced boots scuffed a bit at the heels from years of wear. "My biggest accomplishments tend to get overlooked.

"I always thought you owe it to yourself to stretch out once in a while and do something dangerous," Wagoner continued.

"Rubber Room was off the wall, but Chet Atkins told me it was the most creative song I'd ever done. Every now and then you've got to rattle the cage a little."

But Wagoner had not rattled the cage in years when he received a tape in the mail from farmer Damon Black. "It turned me completely around in the music business," Wagoner said of the tape, which contained songs just released on his first new album in 20 years, The Best I've Ever Been. "I didn't care much about doing new material, because most of the stuff I heard didn't say a whole lot.

"Damon's tape wanted me to get back in the (recording) business."

A regular performer on the Opry since his induction in 1957 (the same year the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series), Wagoner would not have been counted as out of the music business by most observers. But he was essentially living off past victories, performing The Carroll County Accident; Green, Green Grass of Home; A Satisfied Mind and other hits from long ago.

"I started listening to these songs one night at 8 p.m.," Wagoner said. "At 4 a.m., I was still listening, and trying to commit them to memory."

According to Wagoner, Black had achieved a financial windfall after he sold a large chunk of land to a major big-box retailer.

"He told his wife, 'Now I'm going to do what I want to do, and what I want to do is write an album for Porter Wagoner."

The completed album, released on Nashville's Shell Point Records, contains several songs that measure up to Wagoner's best work, and his vocals should surprise any critics who had written him off as an oldies act.

Never a golden throat, Wagoner's husky baritone is nonetheless capable of embuing a lyric with emotion through little turns and yelps that augment a way of singing that sometimes blurs the lines between song and spoken-word.

More than anything, the style is sincere, a quality that -- while it may seem strange coming from a man who routinely flashes his audiences with the rhinestone "Hi" studded on the inside of his jackets -- has served Wagoner quite well.

"The guy wanted someone who could hold a product up and say, 'Look, this here's great,' " Wagoner said, recalling a television scout who came to the Opry in 1959 looking for someone to host a show. "When he gave me the job, he gave it to me because I was believable."

That believability, combined with Wagoner's abilities to find and promote talent, helped his show expand from its 1960 inception. At its peak, the show drew more than three million viewers, some of whom had never before been exposed to country music.

"It was a very important program," Wagoner said. "Dolly sang her first song on television on my show. There's one show where one of the Osborne Brothers said 'I want to sing a new record called Rocky Top.' That song is now the state song for Tennessee."

As the program was beginning, Wagoner found himself in the midst of a fast Nashville crowd. Stories of that time are legion, and few make their way into print.

"Oh, I used to howl," Wagoner said. "I used to get out and roar with guys like Mel Tillis, Johnny Cash, Carl Smith, Merle Kilgore, and Merle Haggard when he was in town."

Holding court backstage at the Opry, Wagoner told about joining up with a diet pill-addled group including Cash and Kilgore. According to Wagoner, the men went on a mission to buy junk food and give it to their departed friend Johnny Horton, who died in a 1960 car wreck but who Kilgore claimed had been reincarnated in the form of a just-born colt on Carl Smith's farm.

The story ended with Smith's shotgun aimed squarely at his buddies, who were excitedly attempting to explain about Horton's miraculous rebirth.

"All these guys were taking these pills, man, and they had these big eyes," Wagoner said. "They looked like a treeful of young owls. Carl just finally turned around and left."

While starring on the show and on the Opry, Wagoner strung together some big hits, including Skid Row Joe and Misery Loves Company. In 1967, he replaced sweet-voiced "girl singer" Norma Jean with young Dolly Parton and began producing duet albums ("A lot of the stuff I produced for Dolly and for myself, I didn't get credit for, because RCA didn't allow outside producers at the time," he said.) that endure as high water marks in 1960s and '70s country music.

Seeing Parton as someone with limitless commercial potential, he helped orchestrate virtually every aspect of her climb to superstardom. By the mid-'70s, the union was irrevocably broken, with both parties claiming the other had done wrong.

From stage, Wagoner still jokes about that time, telling the crowd about tabloid reports that Wagoner's then-wife found he and Parton in bed together and shot both of them.

"There wasn't nothing to that," he winkingly explained. "She didn't even hit Dolly."

The audience laughs at that, but, in a more serious moment, Wagoner admits the breakup was painful.

"I was always honest with her, and I gave up a lot of my career to work on hers. There was a lot of negativity that was really heartbreaking, but Dolly and I are cool now with each other."

The time and trouble with Parton loom large in public evaluation of Wagoner's career. Peers are not as quick to brush Wagoner's contributions aside, though.

"Porter's music is a big deal," Miller said. "Even the harmonies on early stuff like Satisfied Mind, very few people were doing things like that. That's some of my favorite music."

Miller is considered a leader of the burgeoning alternative country movement, which seeks to find ways to tweak traditional country arrangements, songs and instrumentation without straying too far from the genre's wellsprings of Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family.

Wagoner may be seen as a kind of forefather for alternative country, as was evidenced by his recent set at the sweaty Exit/In club, where he delighted a crowd far younger than the average group of Opry listeners.

His eagerness to try new venues and record new songs puts him on a different career path than his buddy, Little Jimmy Dickens, who claims to have little interest in recording again.

"I think Porter's singing better than he's ever sung," said Dickens, who is quick to remind that it was he, not Wagoner, who first wore rhinestones on the Opry. "You know, Porter's the same guy he always was. He never changes."

Dickens and fellow Opry member Mike Snider speak of Wagoner's skill at fishing and golf, solitary pursuits that contrast sharply with his gregarious stage personality.

"Oh, he's one of the greatest at fishing," Dickens said. "I don't know why. He just has a technique somehow. And he could have been a professional golfer, but he quit playing."

For the time being, Wagoner will likely continue to be defined more by his image than by his music.

He plays his part willingly, whether showing off his clothes onstage or grinning for pictures with the sweaty minions at Fan Fair, covertly raising a small sign just before the camera flashes. When the pictures are developed, the fans see a gleam of mischief in the legend's face and a sign in his hands reading, "I'm naked from the waist down."

He rarely mentions that it was he who pioneered a bigger, stereophonic piano sound on country records, that he brought funk icon James Brown to the Opry, that he received Grammy awards for his work with the Blackwood Brothers, or that he penned hundreds of songs.

Backstage, he listens to publishing company demos between shows, raising the volume on his Onkyo stereo to pounding levels that can be both heard and felt outside his dressing room door.

Inside that door are pictures of Porter standing with most every important country figure of the last 40 years. One of those pictures is of Wagoner with Dolly Parton.

"Oh, you sang with Dolly?" a visitor asked jokingly, well aware of the personal and professional links that bind the two.

"No, no," he said, suddenly stern, then unable to conceal a growing smile. "She sang with me."

Tennessean Staff Writer Peter Cooper can be reached at:
259-8220 or by e-mail at: pcooper@tennessean.com