Roy Orbison Remembered
In the beginning, Rock & Roll was about sex.
The very phrase was a black euphemism for a good roll in the hay. Chuck Berry wrote three-minute odes to teenage mating rituals, and what Elvis Presley did with his hips onstage most people dared not do even behind bedroom doors. Then a quiet, thoughtful Texan named Roy Orbison came along and proved to the world that rock & roll could also be about love – the cryin’, achin’, heart-breakin’ kind, the once-in-a-lifetime, through-trouble-and-strife variety. Blessed with a rich, mellifluous voice that shivered with operatic vibrato and soared to extraordinary heights, Orbison could sing like a man on the edge of orgasmic ecstasy or on the verge of tears, sometimes in the same song. He brought to rock & roll a spectrum of emotion as wide as his octave range, and he showed not only that it was okay for a grown man to cry but also that one could find strength through sorrow. When Roy Orbison sang “Only the Lonely,” you could hear in his trembling, bittersweet tenor that he was singing for all the lonely. Suddenly, you didn’t feel so alone anymore.
That Orbison touched a highly sensitive nerve among rock & roll fans is evident from his career statistics: twenty-two singles on the Billboard charts, including eight in the Top Ten, between 1960 and 1966; more than 30 million records sold, according to Orbison’s own estimate. But numbers are hardly an adequate measure of his real achievements. Roy Orbison was a pioneering stylist, marrying lush orchestration and propulsive rock & roll arrangements. He created a sumptuous yet eerily introspective sound ideally suited to his minioperas of love and pain – “Crying,” “Running Scared,” “Blue Bayou,” “Leah,” “In Dreams,” “Only the Lonely.” He was fearlessly eclectic, heightening the melodrama with sophisticated rhythmic devices, like the martial bolero beat of “Running Scared,” and elaborate choral flourishes in which a mere “dum dum dum dum-bedoo-wah” (“Only the Lonely”) could speak volumes.
Like his closest contemporary rival, Phil Spector, another would-be Wagner, Orbison brought a splendor to rock & roll that equaled its native energy and liberating spirit. Orbison’s songs expanded rock’s emotional palette and broadened its musical vocabulary. He could also rip it up with the best of them. His biggest hit was 1964’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” a masterpiece of horny prowl ‘n’ growl, and the flip sides of his ballads were often lowdown, swaggering rockers like “Candy Man” and “Mean Woman Blues.” His specialty, however, was the heart in rock & roll. And when he took aim, he rarely missed. To see Orbison in one of the vintage publicity photos from his early-Sixties heyday, it was hard to imagine he was capable of expressing so much emotion, and with such dramatic immediacy. Dressed in black from the tips of his shoes to the imposing crest of his high pompadour, gazing out from behind dark sunglasses with an enigmatic smile, the soft-spoken balladeer looked more like an inscrutably hip mortician than a rock & roll singer.
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