THE BEAT GOES ON: Roy Orbison

The early 1960s are widely considered to be a lost period in rock ’n’ roll. The music had burst on the scene in the mid-fifties with the arrival of Elvis Presley and a host of others who revolutionized the sounds of the airwaves, ushering in an era of teen-driven, rebellious pop culture.

But by mid-1960, Presley was in the army, Little Richard had found God, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were in disgrace over sex scandals, and Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly were already dead. The first wave of rock ’n’ rollers had been usurped by white-bread crooners such as Fabian, Pat Boone, and Frankie Avalon. Rock ’n’ roll, it seemed, was also dead.

There was one authentic voice, however, that kept the flame alive during this transitional period between the early rock ’n’ rollers and the Beatles—who were at first mere rock ’n’ roll revivalists—while paving a new creative path beyond the simple rockabilly-isms and balladry of the first-generation rockers.

For a few short years, from 1961 to 1963, Roy Orbison dominated the American pop charts with his singular style, patched together from a wide range of influences including classic pop, blues, R&B, Latin, Tex-Mex (he was a native of western Texas), country, opera, doo-wop, and rockabilly.

While first recording for Sam Phillips’s Memphis-based Sun Records label, the same launching pad that skyrocketed Presley into the musical stratosphere, and where Orbison was groomed as a successor to the King, his move to Monument Records in 1959, and the subsequent emergence of his own, unique songwriting style, made clear that Orbison was no mere Presley clone but a total original.

Part of it had to do with his vocals: Orbison is probably best remembered for his remarkable, unearthly falsetto. In fact a natural baritone, Orbison boasted a phenomenal range, from a deep bass growl to a natural, full-throated, operatic high-G. He also was the polar opposite of Presley onstage.

Whereas the latter shimmied and swiveled and practically seduced the girls in the audience with his charisma, Orbison stood stock still, dressed all in black, his eyes hidden behind dark prescription sunglasses (he was nearly blind), barely moving over the course of a dozen songs, simply delivering one song of heartbreak and loneliness after another.

And what songs they were. “Only the Lonely.” “Running Scared.” “Crying.” “Blue Bayou.” “Falling.” “In Dreams.” “It’s Over.” As heard on a terrific new, career-spanning retrospective, the four-CD Soul of Rock and Roll, Orbison’s body of work was a veritable catalog of night terrors, anxiety, and depression—not the typical subjects of your average pop song, which generally ranged from puppy-love to puppy-love, occasionally with a little s-e-x (that’s as close as it came to sex in those days) thrown in for good measure.

There was little to no sex in Roy Orbison’s songs; rather, there was fear of sex and anguish over the possibility of intimacy. Whatever romance Orbison sang about happened almost exclusively in his imagination or, as the song title indicated, in dreams:

I close my eyes, then I drift away
Into the magic night. I softly say
A silent prayer like dreamers do.
Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you.
In dreams I walk with you.
In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you’re mine, all of the time
We’re together in dreams, in dreams….
It’s too bad that all these things, can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.

Orbison was a master of such psychological narrative at a time when others were singing about their ding-a-lings or disguising their adolescent yearnings in euphemistic odes to hound dogs and great balls of fire.

In contrast, Orbison put distraught nightmares to cinematic musical set pieces like “Leah,” a tropical idyll replete with steel drums and Caribbean rhythms, in which the narrator goes swimming to get oysters in the hopes of finding pearls with which to make a necklace for his beloved. Other than the melodic hints that something is awry, hints we can really only hear in retrospect, we have no reason to doubt the credibility of the narrator until the tropical paradise turns into a tropical hell:

But something’s wrong I cannot move around
My leg is caught. It’s pulling me down.
But I’ll keep my hands shut tight for if they find me
They’ll find the pearls for Leah.
And now it’s over, I’m awake at last.
Oh, heartaches and memories from the past
It was just another dream about my lost love
About Leah.
Here I go, back to sleep and in my dreams
I’ll be with Leah.

As it turns out, the narrator is something of a night stalker; apparently Leah rejected him long ago.

Other than Orbison’s best-known hit, the oft-covered “Oh, Pretty Woman,” which went to number one in late 1964, the British Invasion of that year spelled the end of his chart success. It also marked the beginning of a painful decade in Orbison’s personal life. Much has been made of how tragedy fed Orbison’s muse. His ill-fated, on-again off-again marriage to his first wife, Claudette, was marred by her frequent infidelities and finally came to a horrific end in 1966, when she was hit by a tractor-trailer while the couple was out riding their motorbikes in Tennessee. Two years later, while touring England, Orbison received news that his house had burned down, with his two eldest sons trapped inside. (Johnny Cash bought the property and built a house on it; it burned to the ground in 2007.) Orbison also suffered from ulcers, substance addiction, and heart problems leading to triple-bypass surgery in the mid-1970s.

While these losses undoubtedly fueled his performances for the rest of his life, the fact is that by 1966 all his great songs of love and loneliness had already been written. And within a few years after Claudette died in his arms, Orbison married Barbara Jakobs, with whom he would have two children and to whom he remained happily married until the day he died.

Roy Orbison’s greatest fan may have been responsible for sparking his late-1980s comeback. When David Lynch first asked permission to use “In Dreams” in his breakthrough 1986 feature film, Blue Velvet, Orbison turned him down.

Fortunately, Lynch ignored him and used it anyway as a plot element in one of the film’s most terrifying scenes, featuring actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell inhaling oxygen and lip-syncing to the song. When the film became a cult hit, it brought renewed attention to Orbison and gained him instant, hip cachet.

His Jeff Lynne-produced comeback album, Mystery Girl, featuring the U2-composed title track and songs by Elvis Costello and Tom Petty, and his recording with the accidental rock supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, whose ranks included Petty, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison, soon followed, with both recordings climbing the pop charts in late 1988.

Orbison seemed on the verge of enjoying one of the few genuine second acts in American life, only to have it cut short by a fatal heart attack that December, at the frighteningly young age of fifty-two. It was a nightmare come true. [AUGUST 2009]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and music critic. He saw Roy Orbison perform in Boston two nights before he died in December 1988.

THE GOODS

Roy Orbison
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Legacy

Photos courtesy Legacy Recordings