Under sequins, a rebel

PORTER WAGONER strides calmly to the microphone set center stage on the wood plank floor of the Grand Ole Opry here, pretty much the same way he has most every week since he was invited into country music’s royal chamber 50 years ago.

As usual, he’s dressed to thrill on this recent Friday night, in a royal-blue western suit embroidered with wagon wheels and rose blooms, all sparkling with sequins. The tips of the collar on his pale lavender shirt look to have been dipped in gleaming gold, and a dazzling sapphire-colored, triangular cut-glass neckpiece hides the top button. At his waist, a gold and silver National Wild Turkey Federation belt buckle big enough to catch radio waves from Jupiter.

Best of all, his boots. If, as they say in Texas, God is a cowboy, surely Wagoner this night has his boots, a dazzling gold pair with turquoise-colored cactus figures carved in, the toes and bootheels caked in jewels as if he’d stomped through a stable full of rhinestone horses.

At 79, Wagoner is the star most closely identified with the Opry -- the living and, thanks to a little emergency surgery last summer, still breathing personification of Nashville country tradition.

“This is my second weekend back,” Wagoner says in his no-hurry-folks Missouri drawl backstage a few minutes before going on. He’s referring to his seven-month layoff from the Opry after suffering a near-fatal aortic aneurysm last July. “It’s so wonderful just to get out of the house. I didn’t realize what being cooped up does.... I was so ready to come back to work.”

Despite the old-time numbers he and mountain music patriarch Ralph Stanley sing for the Opry audience -- they form a duo that’s collectively older than the Civil War -- Wagoner’s sights these days are set resolutely forward. He’s got a new album coming in June, “Wagonmaster,” his first secular studio album in seven years, produced by longtime fan and fellow musician Marty Stuart. It’s reductive country and honky-tonk that’s likely to give Wagoner some late-in-the-game career-appreciation props the way Rick Rubin’s albums with Johnny Cash (Stuart’s onetime boss) did.

Wagoner’s album isn’t as consistently stark, it just shares the vision of classic country music sung the old-school way: staring straight into the heart of human darkness. It’s coming out on L.A.’s hip Anti- Records label, which in recent years has put out albums by Tom Waits, Merle Haggard, Elliott Smith and Nick Cave.

“When Marty came to me and said he wanted to do a Porter Wagoner record, I thought, ‘Wow -- is he still alive?’ ” says Anti- President Andy Kaulkin. “We put out a couple of Merle Haggard records and did one with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, so we’re not strangers to that type of music....

“When you dig a little deeper,” Kaulkin adds, “you’ll find that the first country song the Byrds recorded was Porter’s ‘A Satisfied Mind,’ and that when country rock was being incubated, it was Porter’s music that a lot of people were listening to. When Gram Parsons showed up with his marijuana-leaf Nudie suit, that was a tribute to Porter.”

“I think there’s definitely a whole audience out there that isn’t the traditional country audience that is going to totally get it,” Kaulkin says. That was the thinking behind putting Wagoner on a show last month at the Fonda in Hollywood with singer-songwriter Neko Case. He and Stuart will do a showcase of the new material on Friday at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and when he returns to Southern California for a June 10 headlining gig with Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives band behind him, it’ll be at quirky little Safari Sam’s in Hollywood rather than a more conventional country music venue.

Wagoner says he was touched by how attentive the hipster crowd at the Fonda was, and how much earnest interest greeted him when he visited Anti-’s offices.

“They were all real excited about [the new album],” Wagoner said. “I tell you, that got me keyed up. I left there feeling like when I first signed with RCA.”

That would have been in 1952, when celebrated RCA producer Steve Sholes (who signed Elvis three years later) gave Wagoner a contract on the recommendation of Chet Atkins. He struggled for a while looking for his first hit, but that came in 1955 with “A Satisfied Mind,” starting a string of more than 80 singles that made the country charts over the next 25 years.

Straight talk

FOR a while last year, however, it looked as if this comeback might not happen. Wagoner can now joke about the bedside manner of the emergency-room doctor who pointed out to him on the gurney that similar aneurysms killed both his fellow country star Conway Twitty in 1993 and actor John Ritter a decade later.

“He told me, ‘I’ve done this surgery and I’m good at it, and if there’s any way to save your life, I’ll do it,’ ” Wagoner said. “I liked the way he talked, straight out to me. He didn’t throw no bouquets on it that it was gonna be a cakewalk or anything. He said it’s gonna be tough.”

After the enforced break from the Opry, “I’m so happy to be back to work,” he says, relaxing in the overstuffed easy chair in front of a large lighted makeup mirror that reflects three walls filled with 8-by-10 photos.

His always-ready-to-work ethic has helped keep him as long and lean at 79 as when he was 29. The big difference, besides a fuller face and the usual wrinkles and creases of age, is the hair. The flattop he wore into the ‘50s, and which morphed in the ‘60s into his signature blond pompadour, has given way to a meticulously groomed silver cotton candy-like ‘do.

Despite his astonishing tenure at the Opry, which will celebrate his half-century there with a May 19 all-star show, Wagoner never made it into country’s top echelon of artists with the likes of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones or Dolly Parton.

Parton, in fact, launched her career after Wagoner hired her in 1967 and featured her every week on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” the first nationally syndicated country music TV series, one that ran for two decades and is reruns today on the RFD cable channel.

The team of Wagoner and Parton is second in the annals of country duet partners only to George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Their relationship rose to similar musical heights and sank to personal lows after her career skyrocketed in the ‘70s, taking her right past him and into the top rank of country stardom, at the same time his was falling back to Earth.

It was the stuff of a great country song, especially when the mentor sued his former protege in 1979, feeling slighted and underappreciated once she got a taste of fame and fortune. Parton, meanwhile, felt stifled and exploited by the man who also served as her manager and shared in royalties of the songs she wrote, including “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” a send-off that some have suggested was written with Wagoner in mind.

They settled the suit -- he got to record with her again at the peak of her pop-crossover success in the early-’80s; she regained ownership of her song catalog, one of the strongest in country music. And despite a period of bitterness, they returned to cordial relations as the years rolled by.

In recent years, Wagoner, who always held the respect of mainstream fans, has won over a lot of today’s country cognoscenti for the plain-spoken credibility he typically brought to tightly crafted narratives full of melodramatic, hyper-emotional plot twists.

He’s also won points for his maverick sensibility, no more evident than when he funked up the Opry in 1979 after persuading James Brown to play there.

Like the films of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, his songs explore the extremes to which characters are often pushed, challenging those who take them in to ponder how far from reality they really are. Yet there’s no question how many light years separate Wagoner’s brand of country from today’s soccer-mom music by the likes of Rascal Flatts.

In “The Cold Hard Facts of Life,” a Bill Anderson song that Wagoner took to No. 2 in 1967, a hapless fellow returns a day early from a business trip to find his wife with another man. After confronting the two with a knife -- the tragic denouement is assumed rather than detailed -- he dispassionately sings, “I guess I’ll go to hell or I’ll rot here in this cell/But who taught who the cold hard facts of life?”

In 1971 he sang of life in “The Rubber Room,” a song he wrote about losing one’s grasp on sanity, a theme that also crops up on the new album with “Committed to Parkview,” a sobering look at life in a mental institution that Johnny Cash wrote in the ‘70s, at least in part with Wagoner in mind because both singers had spent time in the Nashville hospital by that name. Wagoner was admitted in 1965 for exhaustion because of his extensive touring schedule.

Bringing the past full circle

FOR Stuart, who played in Cash’s band in the 1980s before mapping out a successful career of his own, working with Wagoner is a chance to repay a childhood hero he watched on TV with his father every Saturday afternoon, the show’s homespun charm lending a measure of stability during the turbulent ‘60s.

Nearly four decades later, “The day that President Bush declared war on Iraq, I was on the road somewhere, and I walked to the front of the bus and somebody had ‘The Porter Wagoner Show’ on the TV,” Stuart said. “I felt like I was 5 years old again. I’d been watching CNN all day, war had been declared and the world felt upside down. But at the end of the show ... I felt like everything was going to be OK. It really made me fall back in love with Porter’s music.”

Early last year he approached Wagoner about putting a new album together, and Wagoner jumped at the chance. The aneurysm hit as they were planning to start recording, and it put the album on hold for about four months.

While recuperating, Wagoner continued to meet with Stuart until Wagoner got strong enough to step back in front of a recording studio microphone. Stuart had played on the Rubin-produced albums that rejuvenated Cash’s career, but Stuart knew Wagoner to be a very different kind of country singer.

“Johnny Cash was more of a pop star than Porter,” he says. “Porter has always been a master showman, but he has no pop leanings. Like Waylon Jennings used to say, ‘He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers’.... And therein lies the difference. I did not even think of trying to stick a Nine Inch Nails song in Porter’s mouth.”

Instead, Wagoner sings a mix of his own songs -- including one, “Eleven Cent Cotton,” that he and Stuart wrote for the album -- and other numbers that address the desperation of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. It includes one of the recitations Wagoner’s told over the years, “Brother Harold Dee”; an instrumental, and a conversation between Stuart and Wagoner about Hank Williams.

“I don’t try to show off a so-called beautiful voice, because I don’t feel my voice is beautiful,” Wagoner said in the liner notes for a 1992 box set of his work. “I believe there is a different kind of beauty, the beauty of being honest, of being yourself, of singing it like you feel it.”

That idea was cultivated on his family’s farm in West Plains, Mo. As a child he spent hours perched on the stump of a felled oak tree, pretending it was the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and that he was introducing one stellar guest after another. A neighbor once came upon him in the middle of his act, asked what he was doing, and when young Porter told him, the farmer said, “You’re as close to the Grand Ole Opry as you’ll ever get. You’ll be looking these mules in the rear end when you’re 65.”

Reminded of the incident as he reclined on his upholstered throne backstage at the Opry, he lets loose a gentle laugh. “I wish I could see him now,” he says with a quiet smile, and not an ounce of vindictiveness, “now that I’m celebrating my 50th anniversary.”

randy.lewis@latimes.com