999,917: Buck Owens — Under the Influence of Love

A lot of male country musicians made their bread lamenting their difficulties with women, but maybe none looked the part of a spurnable man so much as Buck Owens. With a generous nose, tiny eyes, and a large, wide grin, Owens' goober-esque face was the model of doofiness. If he'd had to make it in the music business today, he'd probably have to go the Marilyn Manson route.

Luckily, all he needed in the late '50s was to put on a nudie suit and invent a new style of country music. Dubbed the Bakersfield Sound for Owens' home town, it was an offshoot of the Honky Tonk genre, with electric bass and guitars, a fiddle, and steady back beat that was deemed by some to be far too aggressive for the chaste ears of country fans. Owens, who would later star on Hee-Haw and adorn the lobby of his Crystal Palace venue with a statue of himself clutching the "Holy Bible", was nonetheless considered a dangerous quantity by the string-soaked countrypolitan establishment. Owens' musical direction was so feared that he was forced to record a rockabilly song under an assumed name, Corky Jones—"that's the fearsome Corky Jones, rockabilly defiler!"

"Under the Influence of Love", then, must have caused apoplexy on a Pope photo-destroying scale. Not only did this catchy number sport the hard-driving jungle drums (the "freight train sound") loathed by demure gentility, it equated the affections of the fairer sex with illegal and degenerate narcotics. It was said that playing this record backwards caused the devil's erect penis to appear in tea parlors throughout the land. Nice fiddle work by Don Rich, though!

Under the Influence of Love - ...