In 1974/6 maverick actor Rip Torn starred in the movie ‘Payday’ (also known as ‘King Sturgeon’75’) based on the life of legendary hard drinking country singer Murton Grange.Torn sang all of the songs live himself and made a recording of the soundtrack at Appalachian Zulu’s Symbiotic Mud Shack recording studios in Horseheart City,Illinois in the Fall of that year.His speaking voice was also performed by himself.He made studio recordings of ‘She’s Only a Country Girl’,”Baby, Here’s a Dime’ by Shel Silverstein (who would go one the write ‘Salvia’s Mother’ for Mr. Hook(sic)) and ‘A Cook’s Breakfast Ain’t Worth a Shit’ by Snooky Fisk as well as this damaged first take jam of ‘Be My Goddam Wife’.Torn had first heard the song on the set of ‘The Man Who Fell onto Earth’ the previous tri-mester when his English co-star,the singer and mime artist David Bowie, had shown Torn an early incarnation of the song to be played on a ragtime or player piano or rancid Italian piano accordion. At the time,the Englishman had been toying with the idea of a country album in a departure from his white funk theatre experiments with apocalypse gloss.He discussed with Torn the possibility that the American could perform to a pre recorded vocal track as an analogue or proxy for Bowie,like the Corns Thing That Went Wrong.He was famous for his secretive showboating.Some kind of mirror phase was getting tooled up with jack and roadhouse corn.Like a chasm chaser.Bowie asked Torn’s advice on the name of his new persona but he poured scorn on the stage names and concept as he did not want to be remembered as Bowies’ new character, Euclid Rathbone Jnr. Deflated by the rebuke, the world would never get to see this country iteration,Bowie retiring the concept before it even existed.
Torn might not have got on the bus, but is said to have recorded this track as well as country versions of V2 Schneider, Sense of Doubt, Chilly Down and Bus Stop,which Bowie hadn’t written yet.He was already five years older, and his brain hurt a lot.The session was recorded by a Texan with a broad but hard to pin down accent and a surprisingly English sounding name,one Phillip Jeffries, who was said to moonlight for the ATF and had infiltrated militia gangs and Apocalypse cults through his encyclopedic knowledge of juke joint bar blues and astral incantation.It is Jeffries who was pinned as the thief who stole the PayDay master tapes and the reason they have been lost to the world until now, or rather, then.The Mud Shack burned to the ground backwards.Now we won’t talk about Judy no we won’t talk about her at all.The recovered tapes,in Jeffries possession until 1983 when he goes off the map and chops the fabric of time with a machete,reappeared 10 years later exhibiting sonic damage from spectral trauma,and they got cropped on a zone jag, mislabeled as Larry Sander’s audition tapes,and stored in a fictitious storage area until the lewdies saw plenty dook deng and it wasn’t no Hen Korn and no mistake.While those who have been able to get through the recording say it seems like a pastiche which has no copyright infringement whatsoever guv according to internet lore,Torn is reported to have possibly said that he liked the song ( he referred to it as ‘Be My Goddam Wife’ )because sometimes he had felt so lonely, and that he had lived all over the world, but had left every place.He got over it in the end.How would the MIB have handled TJN, Zed ?
Torn might not have got on the bus, but is said to have recorded this track as well as country versions of V2 Schneider, Sense of Doubt, Chilly Down and Bus Stop,which Bowie hadn’t written yet.He was already five years older, and his brain hurt a lot.The session was recorded by a Texan with a broad but hard to pin down accent and a surprisingly English sounding name,one Phillip Jeffries, who was said to moonlight for the ATF and had infiltrated militia gangs and Apocalypse cults through his encyclopedic knowledge of juke joint bar blues and astral incantation.It is Jeffries who was pinned as the thief who stole the PayDay master tapes and the reason they have been lost to the world until now, or rather, then.The Mud Shack burned to the ground backwards.Now we won’t talk about Judy no we won’t talk about her at all.The recovered tapes,in Jeffries possession until 1983 when he goes off the map and chops the fabric of time with a machete,reappeared 10 years later exhibiting sonic damage from spectral trauma,and they got cropped on a zone jag, mislabeled as Larry Sander’s audition tapes,and stored in a fictitious storage area until the lewdies saw plenty dook deng and it wasn’t no Hen Korn and no mistake.While those who have been able to get through the recording say it seems like a pastiche which has no copyright infringement whatsoever guv according to internet lore,Torn is reported to have possibly said that he liked the song ( he referred to it as ‘Be My Goddam Wife’ )because sometimes he had felt so lonely, and that he had lived all over the world, but had left every place.He got over it in the end.How would the MIB have handled TJN, Zed ?
Irene Bryce in the 20th Century
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