|
In his heyday, Roy Orbison's great rock music reverberated from the tiny speakers of teens' car radios, the impassioned growl of "Oh, Pretty Woman" fueling lustful gropings in the back seats of Chevys everywhere. But his ballads ... ah, his ballads! This was music of a different kind, a music of nighttime mystery, a music that hung its hat on Lonely Street, lingered beneath dingy streetcorner lights, and frequented the back parlors of David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Yet, aside from his sad, soaring tenor — an instrument that appeared to have its origins in the netherworld, not the unlikely flat hamlet of Wink, Texas — in real life Orbison, one of rock's true shining originals, dispelled any notion of mystery with a kind of startling insouciance. Years ago, when the late Don Gant went to pick him up for his first BMI award ceremony, the publisher looked down to see the nerdiest of white socks reaching for the cuffs of Orbison's rented tuxedo.
In 1983, when Orbison was between record deals and his glory days were seemingly behind him, I traveled to one of his dates to talk with him about a magazine interview. Four years after his open-heart surgery, he was jowly and out of shape, and when he walked on stage in his costume, his physique sagged into something resembling a black-leather pear. None of that mattered when he started to sing, of course. The years had diminished none of his majestic range and power, and he still sang for "lonelies" everywhere, his glorious voice throbbing with emotional pain and abandonment, his shuddering crescendo weeping for anyone who ever sought solitude and self-pity in the dark.
Afterward, in his hotel room, his eyes still hidden behind sunglasses, his pasty skin framed by crow -black, fright-wig hair, he talked about exercising, getting in shape for a comeback. He was sweet and gentle, polite to a fault, eternally self-effacing, and, in a way, almost beatific. He struck me as someone who spent too much time in dreams.
But dreams were, of course, the stuff of Roy Orbison's art. He often said that certain songs came to him in dreams, although songs such as "Running Scared" and "It's Over" sounded more like dreams themselves, dreams that teetered on the edge of nightmare. The irony is that after years of tragedy and career disappointments, dreams were starting to come true again for Orbison at the time of his death last December at the age of fifty-two. George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty were thrilled when he agreed to climb aboard the Traveling Wilburys caravan. Cable TV gave him his own stylish special. And Virgin Records asked for his first album of all-new material in a decade.
Mystery Girl, as the album was eventually titled, is as dignified a sendoff as anyone could want. Written and produced by Orbison, his wife Barbara, and an all-star group of acolytes — including fellow Traveling Wilbury Jeff Lynne, T Bone Burnett, and U2's Bono — the album weds the dramatic immediacy and grand flourishes of the old Monument hits with the good-natured simplicity of the Wilburys.
Although Mystery Girl is destined to become a classic, it's fair to say that the album also has its share of filler, most notably "California Blue" and "Windsurfer," both of which Orbison had a hand in writing. But this is not a showcase for Orbison the writer, but for Orbison "The Voice." The most affecting material comes from the supporting cast, which grew up playing his music over and over in the safety of their bedrooms at midnight-Bono, Lynne, Elvis Costello, Billy Burnette, and Will Jennings. Not surprisingly, they too found the passageway to Lonely Street, and most of their offerings here are dignified expressions of pain and longing, shrouded in ethereal dreams, shaped around the Orbison aura.
At times, however, the dreamer finds himself in dangerous company. In Burnette's "(All I Can Do Is) Dream You," he drifts away on growly, romantic fantasy. But Costello's bizarre "The Comedians," about a man left stranded at the top of a Ferris wheel by his lover, tops even Orbison's bleakest songs for paranoia. And Bono's "She's a Mystery to Me" presents the dream lover as murdering seductress-and the pop song as both complex psychological study and dark concerto.
There are beguiling pop anthems here — the bouncy "You Got It" and "A Love So Beautiful," a rhapsodic ballad that characterizes what Sun Records founder Sam Phillips saw as Orbison's baroque, classical contribution to the genre. (Sun was Orbison's first label.) But it is the murky fantasy underworld to which Orbison always returns, sometimes with eerie results. In the album's most plaintive cry, "In the Real World," he asks with weary anguish why we can't always live in dreams, where everything will always be all right. "In the real world," he laments, "We must say real goodbyes / ... And endings come to us / In ways that we can't rearrange."
Sweet dreams to you, Roy.
|
