CRITICAL MASS : Mercy! It’s not over for Roy Orbison’s music
Posted on Tuesday, March 14, 2006
He didn’t die young enough to be forever preserved in our memory as a beautiful boy, but Roy Orbison never was that good-looking anyway. He had bad hair and weak eyes; his skin was sallow. He looked pretty much like someone you’d see stocking shelves in a grocery store or shuffling papers in a cubicle.
To see him onstage was to feel embarrassed for him. He looked a little chunky and painfully sincere and worst of all like he didn’t quite get it. In his stage gear, Orbison appeared to be some rube Elvis impersonator. Black leather and prescription Wayfarers failed to camouflage the heavy shyness that rooted him to the stage, locked him up and bent him forward at the hips, his guitar jammed up under his chin. Roy was never a dancer, no Jumpin’ Jack Flash, no dervish spinning in Spandex tights. He was just a lumbering boy from Texas.
But what’s beautiful about rock ’n’ roll is that it acknowledges that even geeks have got something to say. And Roy wasn’t much good at movin’ around. But the boy could flat-out sing.
His voice was an uncanny, utterly redeeming instrument — maybe the best to ever mine that curious vein of popular music we call rock ’n’ roll. It was seamless and true and invited comparisons to guys with Italian names like Caruso. Roy easily reached notes in his natural voice that other singers would strain for in falsetto; he could glide through one-two-three-four-five octaves just like that.
It was a voice sad and sweet; Orbison’s bel canto tenor lent bitter resonance to the often scary words he sang. He was rock’s first public neurotic. Songs like “It’s Over,” “ Only the Lonely, ” “Running Scared” and “Crying” ached with unrequited desire.
Orbison’s life imitated his art — his first wife died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and two years later two of his three children died when his house in Nashville burned down. His career faded in the late 1960 s, but he never stopped touring, he never went gently into oblivion. Like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, he hung on too long, a lumpy figure giving concerts that took on the pathetic patina of kitsch. That’s how I got to see him.
He died in December 1988, a couple of years into a late career renaissance that provided evidence he’d found his artistic compass. Director David Lynch did him a huge favor in 1986 when he inserted Orbison’s appropriately haunting “In Dreams” into the soundtrack of Blue Velvet. In 1987 he contributed a shivery ballad about suicide to Rick Rubin’s landmark Less Than Zero soundtrack. The last year of his life found him goofing around with the great as a member of the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys.
The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 was the biggest-selling album Orbison ever sang on; the posthumously released “You Got It” was his first hit single in 23 years. You could close the book on Roy right there and it would be sufficient — put him in a Hall of Fame or two. Maybe a couple of times a year the opening riff to “Pretty Woman” would jump out from behind some speakers and you’d remember how the music used to make you smile.
He would have been 70 years old this year, which isn’t as old as we used to think it was, but it’s still up there.
And it could be his best year ever.
Sony BMG’s Legacy Recordings label has started re-releasing pretty much the entire Orbison catalog; last month they kicked the barrage off with the all-star 1987 HBO concert Black and White Night which featured Orbison performing with Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt and k. d. lang, among others. On March 28, The Essential Roy Orbison, the first-ever double CD collection to survey his entire career, will hit stores. It will feature some of Orbison’s early Sun Records rockabilly cuts including his first chart hit, 1956 ’s “Ooby Dooby” and “Go ! Go ! Go !” through cuts from the posthumously released Mystery Girl.
Later this spring will be the Monument albums of Orbison’s commercial heyday — Roy Orbison Sings Lonely And Blue, Crying and In Dreams. In the fall, Legacy will begin re-issuing virtually every recording — the Sun Records, Monument, Jewel, MGM and Virgin catalogs — Orbison ever cut, including a DualDisc edition of 1992 ’s King of Hearts, comprising Orbison’s final vocal track and featuring his Grammywinning collaboration with k. d. lang on “Crying.”
Barbara Orbison, Roy’s second wife and his widow, is leading a drive to have the U. S. Postal Service issue a commemorative stamp honoring him. (You can sign an online petition at www. petitiononline. com / royvote / petition. html. ) I’M A BALLAD SINGER, SAM
Born in Vernon, Texas, in 1936, Orbison was reared in the west Texas boom town of Wink. His father, a peripatetic laborer who strummed Jimmie Rodgers songs, gave him his first guitar when he was 6 years old.
Within a couple of years Orbison was performing regularly on the radio; at 10, he played a medicine show. He sang ballads during high school assemblies and formed his first band — the Wink Westerners — when he was 13.
The Westerners featured an amplified accordion and played dances and jamborees throughout west Texas with an eclectic repertoire that included Webb Pierce songs as well as “Moonlight in Vermont” and “In the Mood.” They were clean-cut kids, regulars on local television — exactly the sort of band the high school principal would recruit to play at his rally when he campaigned for the presidency of the local Lions Club.
While Orbison was only a year younger than Elvis, he belongs more to the second generation of rock ’n’ rollers. For him, it was a career choice — something of a commercial decision. Orbison would later confess that his own tastes ran more to country-flavored material along the lines of Lefty Frizzell. He saw opportunity in the greasy kid stuff. At the urging of fellow North Texas State University student Pat Boone, he changed the name of the Westerners to the Teen Kings and recorded — at the band’s expense — some tracks at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, N. M.
“Ooby Dooby” caught the attention of Johnny Cash, who suggested that Orbison send a tape to Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis. Phillips — with Presley, Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis already in his stable — recut “Ooby Dooby” and gave Orbison his first hit.
But Orbison bristled at what he considered Phillips’ lack of professionalism, and the Teen Kings disbanded after a followup hit failed to materialize.
“Sam brought me out a set of thick 78 records and said, ‘Now this is how I want you to sing, ’” Orbison remembered years later. “He played Arthur Crudup’s ‘ That’s Alright (Mama ).’ He said, ‘Sing like that... and like this.’ And he put on a song called ‘Mystery Train’ by Junior Parker. I couldn’t believe it... I said, ‘Sam, I’m a ballad singer. I want to sing ballads.’ He said, ‘No, you’re gonna sing how I want you to sing. Elvis wanted to sing like the Ink Spots or Bing Crosby.’”
For a couple of years, Orbison worked as a staff writer for Acuff-Rose in Nashville — he wrote “Claudette” for the Everly Brothers, “Down the Line” for Jerry Lee Lewis and some album filler for Buddy Holly — before deciding to try again as a solo artist.
He came back with “Only the Lonely” in 1960, the first of a remarkable run of singles. In four years, he had nine Top 10 singles and a number of nearmisses. These were good records, marked by a haunting, operatic lushness that rivaled — from a production standpoint — Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound creations. Orbison incorporated everything from weepy steel guitars and swirling strings to syncopated Latin rhythms and traces of classical fanfares. They soared and swooned, with Orbison’s voice building from a low conversational tone to the inevitable keening crescendo — a wired, nervous edge cutting into the high-end quaver.
There was something odd and beautiful about that voice. Mercy. This column is based on one originally published in 1989. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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