Roy Orbison could really sing

[Greg Torso]

Roy Orbison could really sing.

I know, yeah, and Miles knew his way around a set of valves, and punk rock died in 1975, and when Hendrix threw his amplifier into the crowd at Woodstock he invented the hot sick mod fuck.

But Roy Orbison could sing.

And he was such a weird dude who gets weirder as the years slither passt. He doesn't accrue coolness or sexyness, it's no surprise that David Lynch chose him to soundtrack Frank Booth's gas huffing smack down sex rodeo.

Christ, listen this.

Sorry look I know no one wants a Roy Orbison thread but a bloke has come round to clean my oven and to get out of making small talk with him I have gone into the other room to write about Roy Orbison.

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Roy had the sad sack market sewn up. Quivering proto-grandpas in the late 50s who never touched a girl's "sweater swells" could relate. Elvis was singing about fucking and sucking, but Roy was there in the corner in permanent sunglasses touching his shaky pale hands to his face and wondering if he would ever get to the batter's mound with Betty from the munitions factory.

Larval teenage dads with big voluminous hair-dos exploding like ripe toadstools at Roy's keening notes, and the girls all swooning into their human ash shakes in the falsetto amaretto pink armadillo assault of his voice.

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Roy lived his life inside a sarcophagus of stage fright and personal tragedy. He wore black-out shades and dressed in black to hide the map of sweat that would creep across his back during a performance. His voice would yo-yo up his diaphragm with the nerves.

He honed his singular outsider style working brutal full-fat day shifts spreading tar pitch on the roads and then wandering the barren Texas plains between Vernon and Wink at night, listening to the mountains whistle.

Who is here now to take this desert ghost with the grieving voice of god and own the world without compromise?

[Greg Torso]

He goes on tour in 1963 when In Dreams is a hit, on tour with The Beatles, and he's like "who the fuck are the Beatles" and then John Lennon steps out of the shadows and goes "Ye best start believin' in the Beatles, lad, yer in them" and Roy goes "you cheeky fucker, when I'm in town, I'm the king" and so he's supporting the Beatles and going out first on stage. They're laughing like who's this weird nervous waxwork pale undertaker with the pomade, and Roy goes out and he does 19 encores every night. Girls screaming their faces off, wigs surfing on a tide of sweat down the aisles, Roy's just standing there like Kim Jong-il in a crepe paper suit, not even fucking singing, just standing like a giant blind owl, it's insane. He's huge, towering, heroic. Lennons going fuck in the wings, maybe we should drop that song about the octopus, lads.

[Greg Torso]

Crying. excuse me sir but FUCK OFF

John Sullivan might have laughed in the faces of Roy Orb and sufferers of rhotacism but he's dead now. So is Roy. The universe will have its equilibrium.

The utimate I am dead, I have fucked it, she is never coming back and I have fucked it into Hell song.

Every night on stage, the crew are putting up microphone stands and setting the monitors out and Roy is there, immaculately lacquered, his hair like a patch of spilled printer ink. He's shaking with nerves, chain smoking, eating handfuls of fruit pastilles and then he steps up the mike and he sings a fucking clear high C that kills everyone in the orchestra pit stone dead.

[Greg Torso]

Some of his songs have been bludgeoned over the years by discount supermarket soft power jingles and montages where a guy sees a hot babe on the street and then falls down a man hole, but Pretty Woman actually has a bit of snarl to it and Roy is having fun shouting FUCK IT LORD KILL ME DEAD RIGHT NOW all over the choruses and doing a cheeky little warble on the tonsil orbs

[Greg Torso]

ROY ORBISON is a handy mnemonic for remembering the colour sequence of an insane rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Orange, Rubella, Blue, Indigo, Shit, Orange, Nothing.

[Greg Torso]

The man is still in my kitchen.

Here is a song about Roy Orbison by the band Animals That Swim.

[shagatha crustie]

In that Travelling Wilburys video they show each band members' childhood photo and in his he looks like a little sad baby elephant.

[shagatha crustie]

[shagatha crustie]

On a kinder note, 'Running Scared' fucks.

MY HEART WAS BREAKING, WHICH ONE WOULD IT BE

YOU TURNED AROUND, AND WALKED, AWAY, WIIIITH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Greg Torso]

Running Scared is amazing. Raw bison.

[Greg Torso]

Apparently when he hit that last note in the studio the entire band stopped playing just looking at him going Jesus!

[The Mollusk]

I grew up with my grandpa taking me for weekend drives to neighbouring towns and we'd listen to Big O along with other slammers of the era like Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Neil Sedaka and Del Shannon, so this stuff's in my blood and I love it dearly. Shannon I think is noteworthy in this example since his album "Runaway with..." is soaked in tragedy, where all but one of the songs - even the uptempo bangers like "Runaway" and the cheerily titled "Misery" - mention being alone or crying. I find it odd that popular music in the age of peak masculinity would be so open hearted, blokes swinging their hips on stage going "I FUCKING CRY LADS, WHAT OF IT", but there it is.

Orbison is almost literally on another plane, though; Shannon and Sedaka are tangible and human, you could grab them and go "that's flesh, it's a guy". You'd be forgiven for thinking that behind Roy's thick black veneer there's a ghost or an entity assuming the shape of a man, trembling and barely holding the spell together like something out of a Ghibli film, beginning to melt down into his shoes before he's even fully left the stage. The energy of his magic probing a little too hard into the depth of the human condition to extract the golden nectar for his songs which are haunting and otherworldly. Lynch doesn't always get it right but he was bang on the money with Roy Orbison, and Chris Isaak as well, to a lesser extent.

[Astronaut Omens]

I grew up with my grandpa taking me for weekend drives to neighbouring towns and we'd listen to Big O along with other slammers of the era like Gene Pitney, Elvis Presley, Neil Sedaka and Del Shannon, so this stuff's in my blood and I love it dearly.

Late 80s-early 90s stuff like Roy's 'Anything You Want' and Pitney's remake of "Somethings Gotten Hold of My heart" with Marc Almond had this really weird 'is this old or new'? feeling to them when I was a kid.

[SteveDave]

My parents saw him in the mid-80s and after one long note at the end of a song, he asked "Who here thinks I'm miming?" and then he resang the end of the song acapella and everyone lost their minds.

[Greg Torso]

It would have been mad to have seen him live. The footage from the Black and White Night concert with Springsteen, Costello etc, recorded a few months before he died, he's still got the same pipes, still hits the same notes from 20 plus years before.

[Satchmo Distel]

And he had to cope with these events:

"June 6, 1966, when Orbison and Claudette were riding home from Bristol, Tennessee, she struck the door of a pickup truck which had pulled out in front of her on South Water Avenue in Gallatin, Tennessee, and died instantly"

"During a tour of Britain and playing Birmingham on Saturday, September 14, 1968, he received the news that his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, had burned down, and his two eldest sons had died"

Yet he kept going for another 20 years, always on top of his game, with one of the best singing voices in the world.

[Magnum Valentino]

ROY ORBISON is a handy mnemonic for remembering the colour sequence of an insane rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Orange, Rubella, Blue, Indigo, Shit, Orange, Nothing.

Astounding thread, and a spectacular post.

[Twit 2]

Top notch Torso. Love it. You're my hero, GT.

[kalowski]

Fucking Godhead. What a voice.
Maybe the greatest voice ever??

[bgmnts]

I like his surname in terms of the patronym.

Yeah i'm John, Orbi's son.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Had that voice even then. Deeper somehow

[The Culture Bunker]

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay to Orbison's singing is that he even made a song Bono wrote sound great.

He was a pretty handy, to say the least, songwriter himself too.

[SpiderChrist]

One of my earliest musical memories is playing my mum's 7" of Only The Lonely over and over again. Orbison rules.

[SpiderChrist]

And also this:

[SpiderChrist]

a

[cosmic-hearse]

This song is COLOSSAL

[convulsivespace]

Maybe the greatest voice ever??

According to no less an authority than Elvis Presley.

[badaids]

Not the best song he was involved in but when he starts singing his bit in the Wilbury's Handle With Car it totally raises the song from a thing of mundanity to great beauty. He retained his wonderful voice to the very end.

It's true that he looked like a sad baby elephant to as a lad.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Worth remembering that "the very end" for Orbison was only 52, at the (second) peak of his popularity. Another 10-20 years of his voice holding up wouldn't have been out of the question.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

For Orbison, you basically need the three Monument albums (Lonely and Blue, Crying, and In Dreams), plus the singles compilation from that era (along with the B-sides, which are often killers), Mystery Girl, maybe an anthology from the pre-Monument years, Traveling Wilburys vol. 1, and the latest edition of Black & White Night, the one that has the full show, reedited, on Blu-ray and CD.
The amount of respect he would inspire to everybody was amazing. On B&W Night, Springsteen or Costello play a couple of solos, but nobody in the band tries to take the spotlight or looks unprepared (it also helps that they took most of the noodling by Tom Waits on the organ out of the mix).

The video for End of the Line was shot after his death, and when his parts come, they show instead an empty rocking chair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMVjToYOjbM

Worth remembering that "the very end" for Orbison was only 52, at the (second) peak of his popularity. Another 10-20 years of his voice holding up wouldn't have been out of the question.

He smoked a lot and had a very unhealthy diet, as he would eat junk food for months then would switch to diet pills before a tour. That's how he had triple bypass surgery at 42. He made an extra effort for losing weight because of his comeback, he even tried to exercise, and that's how he had his fatal heart attack.