There Must Be Some Mixtape: Tracks #6-10 – Variations on "Psycho"

In 1968, Leon Payne wrote a dark, little murder ballad called Psycho. According to Payne's daughter Myrtie Le Payne in an article on the Nashville Scene website, it was conceived out of a conversation with a fellow musician regarding the Richard Speck nurse murders that occurred in 1966, and then the talk continued to expand and include other famous killers throughout the century to that point. America's fascination with mass murdering fuckheads was still in the building stages – the term "serial killer" would not even reach the popular vernacular until the late '70s – and Leon Payne was simply as following suit. From out of that fascination, Leon Payne spun one of the darkest, strangest ballads ever put out as a single to the record-buying public. While the song has never gone on to be a real hit, it has been covered by a wide variety of artists, mostly due to the subject matter and the slyness of Payne's lyrics mixed with the song's oddly plaintive melody.

Leon Payne and his wife were both blind, but Payne had a long career as both a performer and a songwriter before Psycho came to him. Known as "The Blind Balladeer," Payne wrote hits such as I Love You Because and You've Still Got a Place in My Heart, but he is perhaps most famous for composing (and originally recording) a pair of songs that Hank Williams turned into huge hits: Lost Highway and They'll Never Take Her Love From Me. In 1968, he suggested his new song, Psycho, to his old friend Eddie Noack, who then recorded it as a single for K-Ark Records. The song really didn't go anywhere, but Noack's delivery made this the definitive version of the composition. 

Have a listen while you read along with the lyrics below...

Psycho by Eddie Noack (1967)
(Words and music by Leon Payne)

Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?
I'm as hungry as can be
Oh lordy, how I wish, Mama
You could keep the baby quiet 
'Cause my head is killing me

I've seen my ex last night, Mama
At a dance at Miller's store
She was with that Jackie White, Mama
I killed them both, and they're buried
Under Jenkins sycamore

[Chorus]
Don't you think I'm psycho, Mama?
You can pour me a cup
If you think I'm psycho, Mama,
You better let 'em lock me up

Don't hand the dog to me, Mama
I might squeeze him too tight
And I'm as nervous as can be, Mama
So let me tell you 'bout last night

I woke up in Johnny's room, Mama
Standing right by his bed
With my hands near his throat, Mama
Wishing both of us was dead

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I just killed Johnny's pup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
You'd better let 'em lock me up

You know the little girl next door, Mama?
I think her name is Betty Clark
Oh, don't tell me that she's dead, Mama
Why I just seen her in the park

She was sitting on a bench, Mama
Thinking of a game to play
Seems I was holding a wrench, Mama
Then my mind walked away

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I didn't mean to break your cup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
Mama, Mama why don't you get up?
Say something to me Mama
Mama?

I have a weird, knee-jerk reaction to most murder ballads when I first hear them; sometimes when I have heard them a thousand times. I laugh. I laugh despite myself. It doesn't matter how much gravity there may be in the singer's voice or how sombre the instrumentation. They sound odd to my ear, and part of this comes from a slight shock that someone would stoop to sing about such a thing as murdering another human being.

The second (and under-appreciated) Violent Femmes album, Hallowed Ground, has a tune titled Country Death Song on it, and I really love it. The title tells you exactly what you need to know before going into it and the lyrics do not hold back on the horror of killing one's own family to spare them the slow death of gradual starvation. And yet, when my friend Glenn asked me my thoughts on Country Death Song, I told him I thought it was hilarious. He seemed astonished by this and asked me to explain why, but I really had a hard time doing so. At the time, I just thought it was funny but hadn't carried through on examining exactly why I felt that way. I know now why I did. 

I thought it was because I found, at the time, the lowbrow antics of what I considered to be hicks, bumpkins and poor white trash ridiculous. But I know full well that I am no better than anyone out there, and that are very few of us who know how we might react in similar, desperate situations. And following my first hearing of Country Death Song, I began to listen with greater interest to the murder ballad genre – mostly because of Nick Cave; hell, he eventually even did a full album called Murder Ballads – and it finally dawned on me that my early laughter was a cover for my own nervousness. I was uneasy about hearing such such gruesome detail via music, in a completely opposite reaction to how I feel about the same topics in film and books. Or even sexual details in music; totally fine with it. But such violence was different. For me, there is something more intimate when hearing the human voice confess to low, dangerous behavior on a record that makes it seem more real to me.

Eddie Noack, the singer of this original version of Psycho, also released two other songs about a year later with K-Ark that each had very dark premises to them: Dolores, another murder ballad in which the narrator is singing to the woman he loves after he has killed her; and Barbara Joy, in which Noack plays the part of a man accused of raping another man's wife after she went to him for comfort. He begs Barbara to help him, singing "Say that you were willing/Don't let me die". These last two songs were written by Noack himself, so to say he was like-minded with Payne in those years is an understatement.

Psycho by Jack Kittel (1973)

Noack's version of Psycho didn't really go anywhere, and it would be a while before his song took on a cult status of its own. Psycho was resurrected five years later in 1973 by an obscure Michigan singer named Jack Kittel. (I'm not being mean by calling him obscure. It's just that Kittel doesn't have a Wikipedia page nor a biography on AllMusic, and if you don't rate a bio on AllMusic, you are obscure...)

Kittel's voice in this version is almost too lovely to sell the notion that the character is as psychotic as he is telling us he is. At the least, it is far prettier recording than Noack's quite stark original take on the song. This guy doesn't sound like he killed anyone, most especially "Johnny's pup". He might be a guy down the road relating a story he heard form the neighbors, but I doubt he did anything but make sure he put the empty milk bottles out on the stoop. Still, it is a nice version of the ballad, if nice is what you are looking for from it. I am not.

Psycho by Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1981)

Apparently along the way, Elvis Costello, whose musical interests are about as wide as anyone's ever have been, revealed a great fondness for Psycho. He would do the song live in the '70s, and eventually, a recording of the song was released as the "B" side to his other studio cover of Patsy Cline's Sweet Dreams, itself recorded during the sessions for his Almost Blue album in 1981.

While it seems at first that Costello's voice is almost as sweet as in Kittel's version, Costello has that "extra gear," along with a true sense of nervous urgency, both of which have served him well over decades of singing about a wide variety of not necessarily all-upright types. He can go from measured to manic in seconds and back again, and it is possibly that his accent adds even greater to the delivery. 

The hushed tone he starts with here, in concert with a steel guitar weeping in the background, almost makes the character seem like he is whispering straight into his mother's ear after he has already murdered her. The tentativeness of some of the lines he sings also lends a possible sense that he is crying during his confessions to his mother. While Noack's is the standard, especially for creepiness, this one is pretty good. It seems gentle, but there is a lot bubbling under the surface. Most surprisingly, this is a live track in front of an audience, but it sounds like a studio track for the bulk of it's running time. A terrific take on the song, and exactly what I except from Costello, one of my very favorite artists of all time.

Psycho by Beasts of Bourbon (1988)

The terrific Australian alternative band, the Beasts of Bourbon, released their own version of Psycho in 1988. I own a couple of the group's albums, and if it is good, sweaty, hard-edged swamp blues-rock (albeit a swamp from Down Under) that you want to hear, I can recommend them heartily. Some contingent of the band still exists today, but Psycho appeared on their very first album, when they were introducing themselves to the world as a kind of Aussie supergroup, featuring members from groups such as Hoodoo Gurus and the Scientists.

Highly charismatic, original lead singer Tex Perkins, who would go on to success in the '90s with The Cruel Sea, is the focal point of the video that was filmed for Psycho. With his mane of perfectly coiffed hair, his prominent brow, and his dark eyes pushed forward toward the camera lens, Perkins almost comes across in the video as a proto-troglodyte as he grimaces through the song. Are we really looking at a man or some monstrous creature as he sneers during some of the wickeder turns of phrase in the lyrics? This is a man we can fully believe is capable of the violence in the song.

But is this a trick of the video used to sell the song to the public? Do we only believe him because of Perkins' almost frightening conviction (i.e., overacting) into making the viewer believe he is insane (obvious twitching, sneering, smirking) along with the way he is filmed (lighting him to create those dark shadows over his eyes and having him lean forward constantly so that he utterly dominates the frame)? In the background, a father figure sits on a couch reading a paper, unaware that a domestic drama is erupting at the kitchen table between a mother and her son. As Perkins continues to sing and glare, the unheard drama becomes more and more heated – as other members of the band, playing their instruments, glide past on an unseen track behind the couch between the drama and the unaware father – eventually culminating in the son picking up an axe and swinging it at the mother. Has he killed her or is the drama just a manifestation in Perkins' mind of what he wishes he had the courage to do? (I ask, because if you look very closely at the corner of the frame, you can see the mother's leg sneaking back into the kitchen. Perhaps the drama is simply going to recycle itself?)

Listening to the song apart from the video, the Beasts of Bourbon deliver a faithful version of Noack's original, though updated to their style with bursts of wistful slide guitar accompanying Perkins' solid vocal turn. Perkins, who is definitely less monstrous-looking elsewhere and has been considered something of a sex symbol over the years, is given a fair shake by the recorded version of the song, delivering the dark threat of the narrator's words with the proper impact while still not denying the honeyed undercurrent in his voice as he relates his grim tale. I think this is a marvelous version of the song, and while the corresponding video is a lot of fun, give the song a listen apart from actually watching the video to hear it properly.

Psycho by Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra with Adrian Stout and the Singing Saws (2012)

I have one final, rather prominent version of Psycho that I want to get to, and it is one from more recent years. If there is a properly recorded version done by this pair, I am unaware of it, but there are loads of live videos available online, which is how I ran across it...

I will state outright: I really, really like Neil Gaiman, but I hate this version of the song. This is along the lines of me really, really liking Stephen King, but wishing he wouldn't act or attempt to direct feature films. Stick to what you do best. If it turns out that you are also really good at doing another thing, that is fine too, but you had better be really good at it.

I know that Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer were regularly performing this song when they were touring both before and after they were married a few years ago. Gaiman would mainly do staged readings as his part of the pairing, but they would come together for the occasional song like Psycho. Whether the selection was a favorite of Gaiman's or Palmer's I have yet to find any proof, though I am sure Gaiman has an interview somewhere where he discusses it. (Whether I take the time to find it, I doubt it.)

As said, there were a lot of videos of the pair doing this song, but I selected the one that had the best sound to give the song half a chance. And it may turn out that this version is right up your alley. Not mine. To me it is a case of "hipsters ruining everything". Some people get into that "whatever happens is fine" aspect that seems to be at large in the videos I watched for the Gaiman-Palmer version of this song, but that is not my thing. Cabaret shows, saws as musical instruments, spoken word versions of country songs... all of those elements are just fine on their own. Here, the mix of those components just doesn't come together for me into anything I consider as memorable. Or as anything that I would like to hear repeated.

I have some friends who like Amanda Palmer, either with or without the Dresden Dolls. I have met others who really hate her. I have a couple of songs she has done, but I have to say I remain largely unimpressed with her. (Believe me, when I like something even halfway, I tend to stock up on it.) I am glad that these two weirdos found each other, because all of us weirdos need someone to love too, but that doesn't mean that I have to like everything they produce. 

And I did not put their version of Psycho here at the end because I wanted to save up and give a bashing to Palmer – because I would if I really felt the need to – but only because it was the most current version, and I waited to write this bit about it until I had heard it several times over a couple of weeks. (I first heard them sing this a couple of years ago, which is how I remembered it.) I wanted to give the song a fair shake, but to me it is mere novelty, and really unworthy of any reverence.

I am sure now that I will hear from those who worship at Amanda Fucking Palmer's feet, and that is fine. Tell me song titles and albums; point me to videos where her talent is clear. I have looked and have thus far come up empty. I welcome your input as to why I should get into her music, but believe me, I have tried again and again to find that entry point.

I guess Neil Gaiman beat me to it...

RTJ