Roy Orbison was the king of the juke box 45. He knew how to put raw teenage emotion onto two and a half minutes-worth of vinyl – whether that emotion was elation or despair. Steven Myatt tunes in …

 

Along with being known as one of the most gentlemanly guys in the pop business, Roy Orbison had a voice like no other - both in expression and octaval range - and, admittedly with some high highs and some very low lows, had a career thirty five years long.

He was born in Vernon in Texas, which really is Nowheresville and isn’t even on my Collins Road Atlas Of The USA, and started recording in 1955 with a band called The Teen Kings, when he was just 19. His first single was Trying To Get To You, produced by Buddy Holly’s mentor, Norman Petty. The following year Ooby Dooby (with Go!Go!Go! on the B-side) was a minor hit - peaking at number 59. The big differencewas that Roy was now with the Sun label in Nashville (having ‘escaped’ from his first recording contract on the basis that he was underage when he signed it), which was a move that brought Roy greater experience and new contacts.

The Teen Kings played a good number of gigs through ‘56, but at the end of that year he went solo and moved to Nashville full-time, but continued to see only modest success. Roy didn’t see eye to eye with Sun’s Sam Phillips, and he left the label the next year - partly because he saw his own future as a songwriter rather than a performer.

Although his country roots were very strong, Roy was very important part of the rock ‘n roll scene, and at the end of the decade he wrote the song that was to take him to the top - and fortunately for all of us, recorded it himself.

Only The Lonely (which was turned down by Elvis Presley) was an excellent showcase for Roy’s wonderful vocal range and emotive vibrato. In the summer of 1960 it made number one in Britain (staying in the charts for nearly six months in all) and number two in the USA - denied the number one slot by Elvis, ironically.

Only The Lonely also showed that Roy had become an absolute master of the rock ‘n roll single at its finest. Along with Chuck Berry, Roy knew instinctively how to take a slice of time just two and a half minutes long, and not just tell a story that would connect instantly with what were only now being called teenagers, but also craft it in such a way that it had a distinctive structure. Roy’s songs were hand-carved masterpieces, with an attention-grabbing beginning, a narrative middle, and a definitive end. Again, as with Chuck Berry’s songs, each was a pop short story (something very rare nowadays) and it was a form that they virtually invented.

Both men also knew how their audience was going to hear their work - either on a tiny, tinny radio - probably hidden under a pillow after lights-out, in a car with a cut-off exhaust, or on a juke box in a steamy cafe or drive-in. None of this was high-fidelity, and the medium dictated the style of the production. Orbison and Berry wrote for valves, not transistors, and got it spot on every time. Whereas Chuck captured the detail and minutia of his generation though, Roy caught the emotion and the passion. Neither really sang of love; both sang of frustration - Chuck of unrequited lust, Roy of loss and yearning. They were the first truly great singer/songwriters of pop.

The black-framed shades and the too-black-to-be-real hair established Roy Orbison’s image visually (though, by the standards of the time he was an unlikely looking pop star), but his real trademark was his voice.

While it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Roy having made a good career just as a songwriter and not performing his own material, in fact none of his clients would ever have been able to match his vocal wizardry. His songs weren’t much covered because no-one could sing them like Roy could. The only person who has come close to his range and vibrato - though not his passion - is Raul Malo of The Mavericks.

Only The Lonely went straight to number one in the charts in Britain and stayed in the Top 40 for 24 weeks in total. It was the first of three UK number ones that Roy was to see - the others being It’s Over in April 1964 and Oh Pretty Woman that September. In total Roy had 34 records in the Top 50 in Britain. World-wide, Oh Pretty Woman sold seven million copies in 1964, and was number one in the USA for three weeks.

It’s Over is one of the greatest anguished-teenager songs of all time. The lyrics are utterly kitsch but so perfect. It’s superbly produced too - the big strings, the ethereal backing vocals, and that heart-wrenching, defining last wail of ‘it’s over’ from Roy - and then the massive diddy-diddy-did---duddy-duddy-dud ending. It must have led to a hundred thousand spurned adolescents sobbing against Rockolas. It certainly proved that no-one ever sang a sad song quite like the Big O did.

Although his hits weren’t massive at the end of the Sixties, unlike many rock ‘n roll stars from the Fifties he seemed to have more staying power come the onslaught of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and so on. Roy was different; his lyrics were intelligent, he was a singer/songwriter rather than a band, and the emotions he laid bare rarely failed to connect - especially with his female fans. Roy toured the UK with The Beatles and they were somewhat in awe of him - and were also surprised by him gentlemanly nature and his generosity; it wasn’t how they though rock ‘n roll stars behaved.       

Tragedy struck in the mid-Sixties: In mid-summer 1966 his first wife, Claudette, was killed in a motorcycle accident. In 1968 the two eldest of his three sons died in a fire at their home. With the world - and pop music in particular - changing fast, Roy’s fortunes were about to start falling, and would stay that way for the next decade or so.

Exactly two years after the death of Claudette, Roy met the 17-year old Barbara Wellnoener-Jacobs (a well-born American national living in Germany and visiting England) at a Jimmy Savile-run disco in Leeds. Roy was nearly twice her age but they were married by the end of the year. His personal life took a massive turn for the better (they had a son together in 1971) as his career was continuing in the opposite direction. Roy was reduced to playing small clubs, but with Barbara’s support he was phlegmatic about the fact.

Psychedelic, glam rock, punk, the new romantics - all a long way from Roy Orbison’s personal and musical style, and it wasn’t until the mid-Eighties that things turned around. And in that, he was lucky. Roy could have died a half-forgotten dinosaur, but several things slipped effortlessly into place, one after another.

David Lynch used In Dreams in his well-weird film Blue Velvet, and memories began to be jogged. He joined an almost incredible line-up of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in the formation of The Travelling Wilburys - a tongue-in-cheek super group which recorded some nice and unimportant but radio-friendly songs, and sold albums in huge numbers - crediting themselves as Otis, Nelson, Charlie T Jnr, Lefty and Lucky Wilbury. The music was nice, but heck, the combination of those vocalists verged on the weird. And who expected Bob Dylan to have a lighter side?

By now Barbara Orbison was his manager, and that was an important move. She was very bright, very focussed and absolutely devoted to her one and only client. One of the first things they did in business together was sue the man who had managed Roy since 1960 for $30,000,000 ...

Roy died of a heart attack in 1988, aged just 52, but high on the list of all-time ‘Man, you should have been there’ gigs was the Roy Orbison And Friends’ Black And White Night recorded on video and audio just a few months before he died. The Friends were a magical line-up which included Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, T-Bone Burnett, Jackson Browne, k d lang, and Bonnie Raitt - and the result was heaven on earth. It was all old songs, but performed with world-class musicians - and with such obvious delight and affection. If that had been Roy’s epitaph, it would have been enough - but there was more.
The album Mystery Girl was also completed just before his death, and he never saw the huge success it was to achieve. As well as being a work of straight forward rock ‘n roll genius, with songs like Dream You and The Comedians gloriously updated, it was a triumph of collaboration; You Got It was co-written with Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, Rick Vito and Billy Burnette of Fleetwod Mac contributed stunning guitar work to Dream You, and Roy wrote She’s A Mystery To Me with Bono and The Edge of U2 (and the musicians on that song included Howie Epstein and Benmont Tench of The Heartbreakers). Mystery Girl was one of his greatest ever works, and it showed that while he now allowed himself four and a half minutes rather than two and a half, he still understood how to construct a pop song as well as anyone else around.

 

There was still unreleased work though, and the King Of Hearts album was put out three years after his death and, unlike most posthumous records, was a masterpiece - made up of all-new material (except, being pedantic, the 1961 song Crying - which was a new recording; a duet with k d lang which had won them a Grammy). Some tracks, such as We’ll Take The Night - with its hefty percussion and its moody saxophone, and the funky, upbeat and Springsteen-esque I Drove All Night (ironically, not written by Roy) were real triumphs, and stand up alongside his classic songs from the early Sixties. These were daring recordings - completely modern in their arrangements and production styles; hardly the safe ground you would expect an old rocker to defend.