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Noack’s “Psycho” was something new. It starts on grim but conventional ground, with a double homicide triggered by jealous rage, then veers far afield, unhitched from conventional motive or morality.

Don’t hand the dog to me, Mama
I might squeeze him too tight
And I’m as nervous as can be, Mama
But 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

Across six verses, three choruses, and one key change, the song tallies an array of less and less comprehensible killings. The singer recounts them vaguely, as if through a somnambulist fog. Identities are unclear (who is Mary? Johnny? – and whose baby is crying?), highlighting the compulsive nature of the crimes. You think I’m psycho don’t you, Mama? goes the chorus, and the singer counters with a Norman Bates smirk: If you think I’m psycho, Mama / You better let ’em lock me up.

Film stills: M (Fritz Lang, 1931; YouTube)

The song’s final verses up the transgressive ante: the singer murders a child but, trancelike, has no memory of the incident.

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

Song-craft excels here, less-is-more style. The scenario recalls the abduction scene in Fritz Lang’s proto-Psycho film M (1931), where the camera stays unnervingly still as Peter Lorre’s whistling child-killer buys a balloon for his trusting prey … then walks casually out of frame, her little hand in his. Lang later shows us the balloon, lost and tangled in overhead wires, and our minds fill in the dreadful details.

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

Such nuanced writing (Then my mind walked away), plus Noack’s measured vocal, set “Psycho” apart from a slew of morbid novelty tunes – the kind collected on campy anthologies of country weirdness like the Omni label’s Hillbillies in Hell series. That “Psycho” shows up on some of these (including Hillbillies in Hell) is predictable but ironic: its subject may be grind-house sensational but it’s several cuts in quality above bizarro fare like Red River Dave’s Manson-inspired “California Hippie Murders” or Billy Barton’s echo-drenched dialogue with the diabolical, “The Devil, My Conscience & I.”

Hillbillies in Hell, Vol. 1
(David Landis, 2015; Omni Records)

These collections are trashy fun but court condescension. Often they’re consumed by non-country fans laughing at country music – mocking its bedrock sincerity while conflating the genre with its most extreme progeny. Still, “Psycho’s” kinship with this material raises eyebrows. What were Noack and Payne – the former a past-his-prime but still respected artist, the latter a Nashville Songwriters Hall-of-Famer who wrote standards like “I Love You Because” and “Lost Highway” – doing slumming with the suicide/insanity/and Satan crowd? Critics asked the same of Alfred Hitchcock in 1960. Today, Psycho’s Fine Film status is unquestioned, but upon release some sniffed that the director had degraded himself by dabbling in the exploitation field. Hitchcock admitted the dabbling – at 61 and four decades into his career he was trying to stay vital and viable by adjusting to changing tastes. Noack and Payne may have had similar motivations: if darker, more explicit fare was the future why not execute it artfully?

Leon Payne (unsourced promotional photo, 1960s)

The artistic bona fides of both are unimpeachable. Payne released a reverent tribute to folk music in 1963 called Americana: Rare Ballads & Tall Tales. Noack once called country “the only true American music” and refused to sully himself by branching into rock and roll. Neither man would have risked degrading the form he loved. “Psycho’s” B-side was a Noack-penned character study of an ex-con struggling to survive on the outside called “Invisible Stripes.” It’s the kind of thoughtful, socially relevant song Noack hoped to be remembered for. One suspects he’d have preferred the record’s A- and B-sides reversed.

“Psycho” has a final trick up its ghoulish sleeve. After one last You think I’m psycho don’t you, Mama? chorus, we learn that Mama – unresponsive throughout the song – is unmoving as well. The singer’s monologue is a soliloquy after all – sung to a corpse. This O. Henry-by-way-of-EC Comics twist provides the song’s single instance of unambiguous black humor. As the track fades, Noack deadpans: Mama, why don’t you get up? … Say something to me, Mama … 

It reads as both a tension-breaker and a kind of “I’ve been putting you on” wink from Noack – as if he’s retaken control of the song and is letting you in on the joke. If so, it’s worth considering the nature of the sendup. At whose expense is he laughing – the listener’s? Country music’s? His own? In the context of his life – a trajectory fraught with disappointment and unfulfilled potential – it may have been all three.

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