Roy Orbison’s Son Details Sprawling ‘MGM Years’ Package
In the fall of 1964 Roy Orbison was at the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with “Pretty Woman,” a gem of a hit punctuated by a seductive growl that rivaled Tony the Tiger and the MGM lion. In addition to that multi-million-seller, Orbison recorded a series of smashes for Monument Records (his first major deal was with Sun Records), from “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)” and “Running Scared” to the oft-covered “Crying” and many others. After the success of “Pretty Woman,” he secured a lucrative deal with (perhaps a bit ironically) MGM Records. Rather than the roaring success they should have been, however, Orbison’s MGM years were fraught with disappointment and tragedy.
In 1966, his first wife Claudette was killed in a motorcycle accident. Two years later, Orbison was touring in England when he learned that his two eldest sons had died in a fire that also destroyed his home north of Nashville (a third son with Claudette survived). In 1969, 32-year-old Orbison married German-born teenager Barbara Wellhoener-Jakobs, whom he had met while on tour in England. The couple would have two sons, Roy Kelton Orbison Jr. and Alexander Lee Orbison.
The LPs Orbison recorded for MGM have now been collected in a spectacularly entertaining package titled The MGM Years 1965-1973. Released on December 4th, the 13-disc set represents an era of Orbison’s music in which he experimented with everything from country standards to psychedelia. In spite of a dearth of hit singles, the albums contain some of Orbison’s most passionately delivered vocals — even more impressive when one considers the hardships he faced while continuing to tour the world.
“If the moniker of the ‘Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ wasn’t already taken, I would definitely hand it to him,” the singer’s youngest son Alex Orbison tells Rolling Stone Country. “If you took the recording logs and… the touring logs and overlaid them, he would sometimes record up to Christmas Eve, take Christmas Day off and then the 27th to the 30th would be more sessions then he’d play the New Year’s show. It was really amazing to me to see how hard he was working. I already have a lot of respect for my dad, obviously, but seeing it in those terms was astounding to me.”
Orbison’s familiar voice on the MGM material remains commanding and at turns is bathed in an electrically charged darkness and melancholy, which is understandable considering his personal trials at the time. Even when the material seems otherwise mundane, it’s impossible to deny the thrill that still exists in hearing his otherworldly vocals nearly two decades after his passing.