Roy Orbison

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Roy Kelton Orbison left a room feeling different after he sang. Where other male performers of his era projected confidence and ease, Orbison sang about fear, grief, and longing with a voice that one conductor described as causing the hair on the back of his neck to stand up. He died on the 6th of December 1988, at age 52, just weeks after completing what would become the highest-selling album of his career. He never heard it released.

  Orbison grew up in the oil-field towns of West Texas, a landscape he described as "football, oil fields, oil, grease, and sand." He wore thick glasses from age four, dyed his nearly white hair jet black as a teenager, and spent school recesses playing guitar alone while other kids ran outside. He was quiet, self-effacing, and certain of one thing: music was the only life that made sense to him. By age seven, he later recalled, he already felt he was "finished" for anything else.

  He would go on to place at number 37 on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest artists of all time and number 13 on its list of the greatest singers. Bob Dylan compared his voice to an opera singer singing from "an Olympian mountaintop." Elvis Presley called it the greatest and most distinctive he had ever heard. What made Orbison's story strange, and worth examining, is that he nearly vanished entirely before any of those tributes were paid.

• 2. West Texas Roots

  ›

  Orbison was born on the 23rd of April 1936, in Vernon, Texas, the second of three sons. His father, Orbie Lee Orbison, was an oil-field driller who struggled after the Great Depression. The family moved several times in search of work, settling in Wink, Texas, in 1946, a desolate oil town that Orbison was relieved to eventually leave.

  His father gave him a guitar on his sixth birthday, and his father and older brother taught him how to play. He was drawn first to country and western swing, and particularly to Lefty Frizzell's singing style, with its slurred syllables. He also listened to Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Moon Mullican, and Jimmie Rodgers. One of the first musicians he saw perform in person was Ernest Tubb, playing on the back of a truck in Fort Worth.

  Another formative experience came at regular singing sessions in Fort Worth, where soldiers on their way to the front lines of World War II sang with an emotional intensity that stayed with him. Living in West Texas also exposed him to rhythm and blues, Tex-Mex, the orchestral arrangements of Mantovani, and Cajun music. One of the first songs he sang in public was the Cajun favorite "Jole Blon."

  A polio scare in 1944 sent the eight-year-old Orbison and his brother Grady Lee to live with their grandmother in Vernon. There, he began singing on a local radio show and by his late preteens had become the show's host. At nine, he won a contest on radio station KVWC that earned him his own show. He sang the same songs every week. The habit of performing, not just practicing, was already fixed in him.

• 3. First Bands and Sun Records

  ›

  In 1949, the thirteen-year-old Orbison formed the Wink Westerners with four school friends: Billy Pat Ellis on drums, Slob Evans on bass fiddle, Richard West on piano, and James Morrow on electric mandolin. They played country and western swing standards and Glenn Miller jazz swing at local honky-tonk bars and held a weekly morning radio show on KERB in Kermit, Texas.

  A 1953 talent contest on KMID-TV in Midland led to a 30-minute television spot and eventually to weekly Friday-night shows there and Saturday-night shows on Odessa station KOSA-TV. Orbison had already decided by age fifteen that the guitar would serve his voice, not the other way around. When he enrolled at North Texas State College in Denton after graduating in 1954, he planned to study geology as insurance, but switched to history and English after growing bored. At a New Year's Eve dance in 1954, the Wink Westerners ended the night playing Bill Haley's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" on repeat, which pushed the band toward rock and roll. Orbison had also seen Elvis Presley perform that year and been struck by his stage presence.

  The band was disbanded in the fall of 1955, replaced by a new group called the Teen Kings. The Teen Kings recorded "Ooby Dooby" at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, in March 1956 and released it on the small Odessa label Je-Wel as a B-side. Orbison broke free of that contract and pursued a larger label. Columbia turned down his demo and then had a contract artist release the song before Orbison could pitch it elsewhere.

  What happened next is disputed. Johnny Cash later said he met Orbison in Texas in late 1955 or early 1956 and urged him to contact Sun Records, and Orbison recalled Sam Phillips responding sharply that Cash didn't run his record company. Both Phillips and the band's drummer dispute Cash's involvement, saying instead that a record-store owner named Poppa Holifield played the tape over the telephone to Phillips in April 1956. Whatever the route, Sun Records signed the Teen Kings and re-recorded "Ooby Dooby," releasing it as Sun Single 242 in May 1956. It peaked at number 59 on the Billboard charts and sold 200,000 copies.

• 4. Monument Records and Stardom

  ›

  Phillips had signed the Teen Kings hoping to find a successor to Elvis Presley, and his attention had already shifted toward Carl Perkins before the band even settled in. The Teen Kings broke up in December 1956, partly over money and partly because Orbison, as bandmate Jack Kennelly put it, "became egomaniacal" once his ego was inflated by early success. Orbison spent time working for the songwriting firm Acuff-Rose Music in Nashville, making demonstration tapes and sending them to the publisher Wesley Rose. Songwriter Boudleaux Bryant described the young Orbison at this time as "a timid, shy kid who seemed to be rather befuddled by the whole music scene," singing "softly, prettily, but almost bashfully."

  A major shift came when Orbison and a fellow songwriter named Joe Melson began collaborating. In 1960, the two wrote "Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)," using strings and the Anita Kerr doo-wop backing singers. Orbison had tried to sell the song to Elvis Presley early one morning in Memphis, but Presley wasn't interested. Instead, it was recorded at RCA Victor's Nashville studio, with engineer Bill Porter building the mix from the top down, starting with close-microphoned backing vocals and ending with the rhythm section soft in the background. That approach became Orbison's signature sound. The song reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and went to number one in both the UK and Australia.

  From 1960 to 1966, twenty-two of Orbison's singles reached the Billboard top forty. He wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them himself. The recording of "Running Scared" required Orbison to sing louder than a full orchestra, so producer Fred Foster put him in the corner of the studio and surrounded him with coat racks as an improvised isolation booth. On the third take, Orbison abandoned falsetto and hit the final high A naturally. The accompanying musicians stopped playing in astonishment. Foster later recalled, "He did it, and everybody looked around in amazement. Nobody had heard anything like it before." Weeks after that session, "Running Scared" became Orbison's first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

  By 1963, a touring DJ in Australia had begun calling him "The Big O," a name that stuck. From 1959 to 1963, Orbison was the top-selling American artist and one of the biggest names in music worldwide.

• 5. The Beatles and "Oh, Pretty Woman"

  ›

  In April 1963, Orbison was asked to replace Duane Eddy on a UK tour that had the Beatles in the supporting slot. The tour sold out in one afternoon. When Orbison arrived in Britain, he discovered he was no longer the main draw. He had never heard of the Beatles, and he asked, annoyed, "What's a Beatle, anyway?" John Lennon replied by tapping his shoulder: "I am."

  Orbison volunteered to go onstage first on opening night, though he was the more established act. The Beatles stood backstage and watched him play through fourteen encores. When the audience began chanting for Orbison again, Lennon and Paul McCartney physically held him back to keep him from going out again. Ringo Starr later said, "In Glasgow, we were all backstage listening to the tremendous applause he was getting. He was just standing there, not moving or anything." Orbison felt a particular kinship with Lennon, but it was George Harrison with whom he would eventually form a lasting friendship.

  The following year, Orbison began collaborating with another Texas songwriter, Bill Dees. One day, Claudette Orbison walked into the room where the two were working to say she was going to Nashville. Orbison asked if she had any money. Dees said, "A pretty woman never needs any money." Forty minutes later, they had completed "Oh, Pretty Woman." The song rose to number one in the United States in the autumn of 1964 and stayed on the charts for fourteen weeks, then went to number one in the UK for a total of eighteen weeks. The single sold over seven million copies.

  Billboard magazine later noted that in a sixty-eight-week period beginning the 8th of August 1963, Orbison was the only American artist to reach number one in Britain. He did it twice: with "It's Over" on the 25th of June 1964, and "Oh, Pretty Woman" on the 8th of October 1964.

• 6. Tragedy and Disappearance

  ›

  On the 6th of June 1966, while Orbison and his wife Claudette were riding their motorcycles home from Bristol, Tennessee, she was struck by a pickup truck in Gallatin, Tennessee, and thrown into the air. She was rushed to hospital, but her liver was seriously injured and she died at age 25. Orbison threw himself into work, writing music for and starring in an MGM film called The Fastest Guitar Alive.

  Two years later, on Saturday, the 14th of September 1968, while Orbison was on tour in Britain and playing Birmingham, he received word that his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, had burned down and that his two eldest sons had died in the fire. Fire officials said the cause may have been an aerosol can possibly containing lacquer. Orbison's grief made it impossible to write. The property was sold to Johnny Cash, whose house at the same location also burned down later.

  His contract had moved him from Monument Records to MGM Records before these losses, and the transition had proved damaging. His first MGM album sold fewer than 200,000 copies. With the British Invasion reshaping popular music, most performers of Orbison's generation were pushed from the charts. His single "Cry Softly Lonely One" from March 1967 was his last to enter the top one hundred until the 1980s.

  By the mid-1970s, his concerts were playing to mostly empty venues. A concert at Cincinnati Gardens on his fortieth birthday in April 1976 exemplified how far his fortunes had fallen. Critics described him as a "fading rock star." Biographer Peter Lehman observed that Orbison's absence was part of the mystery of his persona: "Since it was never clear where he had come from, no one seemed to pay much mind to where he had gone; he was just gone."

  In late 1977, Orbison was not feeling well and checked into a hospital in Hawaii, where doctors discovered severely obstructed coronary arteries. He underwent open-heart surgery on the 18th of January 1978. He had suffered from duodenal ulcers since 1960 and had been a heavy smoker since adolescence. He said the surgery made him feel rejuvenated, though he continued to smoke despite medical advice.

• 7. The Traveling Wilburys and Final Comeback

  ›

  Don McLean's 1980 cover of "Crying" reached number one in the Netherlands, number five in the United States, and spent three weeks at number one in the UK. Linda Ronstadt's 1977 cover of "Blue Bayou" reached number three on the Billboard charts and stayed there for twenty-four weeks. Orbison credited that cover in particular for keeping him in the public memory. By 1982, he was popular enough in Bulgaria that he had to stay in his hotel room in Sofia to avoid being mobbed on the streets.

  The defining event of his comeback was a 1987 concert at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, where he was joined by Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, k.d. lang, and others. The concert was filmed in a single take and aired on Cinemax as Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, later released on video and selling 50,000 copies. Lang recalled that Orbison looked at everyone assembled and said quietly, "If there is anything I can ever do for you, please call on me." He was very serious, she said. It was his way of thanking them.

  Also in 1987, Bruce Springsteen inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and ended his speech: "I wanted a record with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector, but most of all I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison. Now, everyone knows that no one sings like Roy Orbison." Orbison told Springsteen he felt "validated" by the honor and asked him for a copy of the speech.

  The Traveling Wilburys formed in 1987 when Orbison joined Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne after an informal writing session produced "Handle with Care." Orbison chose the stage name Lefty Wilbury, honoring his childhood hero Lefty Frizzell. Lynne later described the recording sessions: "Everybody just sat there going, 'Wow, it's Roy Orbison!'... As soon as he gets behind that mic and he's doing his business, suddenly it's shudder time." The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 was released on the 25th of October 1988.

  Orbison completed his solo album Mystery Girl in November 1988, produced by Lynne, whom Orbison considered the best producer he had ever worked with. In the final months of his life, he gave Rolling Stone extensive access to his daily activities. He intended to write an autobiography and wanted Martin Sheen to play him in a biopic. Around November 1988, he confided in Johnny Cash that he was having chest pains.

• 8. The Voice That Remained

  ›

  On the 6th of December 1988, after spending the day buying parts for model airplanes with his friend and bus driver Benny Birchfield and eating supper at Birchfield's home in Hendersonville, Orbison went to visit his mother. He chatted with his son Wesley, went to the bathroom, and did not return for thirty minutes. He was found collapsed on the floor and died of a heart attack at the hospital at age 52.

  Mystery Girl was released on the 31st of January 1989, and became the highest-selling album of his career. Its biggest hit, "You Got It," written with Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, reached number nine in the US and number three in the UK. On the 8th of April 1989, Orbison became the first deceased musician since Elvis Presley to have two albums in the US top five simultaneously, with Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 at number four and Mystery Girl at number five.

  In the UK, he briefly held two solo albums in the top three at the same time. The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 spent fifty-three weeks on the US charts, peaked at number three, reached number one in Australia, and won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group.

  What those numbers do not capture is the quality described by everyone who heard him. Dwight Yoakam said his voice sounded like "the cry of an angel falling backward through an open window." Barry Gibb, hearing "Crying" for the first time, said, "That was it. To me that was the voice of God." Bob Dylan described it as sounding like someone "singing from an Olympian mountaintop" who "could jar a corpse." Orbison himself, looking back on the arc from "Ooby Dooby" to "Only the Lonely," said something simpler in 1988: "I think that somewhere between the time of 'Ooby Dooby' and 'Only the Lonely,' it kind of turned into a good voice." A posthumous hologram tour announced in 2018, titled In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert, was built around that voice, suggesting it had not finished traveling.