In these forlorn days of auto-tuned wonders (Rihanna) and voices so woebegone and bland that not even auto-tune on steroids can save them (Michael Buble) it is comforting to be able to look back at a time when pop stars could actually sing ( they pretty much had to, as the techonology that allows Lady Gaga to sound like an actual woman had not yet been invented, ) and no one person exemplifies this better than the Big O, the (other) Man in Black, The Dude With The Shades, the guy whose parents named Roy Kelton Orbison.
The second of three children in a family of gnomes, Orbison first came to the public’s attention at the age of sixteen when he sneaked into a Texas bar, got blind drunk, and proceeded to climb on to a table, drop his pants around his ankles, and sing what witnesses described as the most magnificent version of “Ave Maria” they have ever heard. Among the drunks that night was Colonel Harland Sanders, a former manufacturer of outdoor toilets who had by that time achieved wealth and fame with a chain of chicken restaurants called Chickens A’Hoppin’, later renamed Kentucky Fried Chicken after a legal challenge from competing chain Chickens A’Fryin’. A lifelong supporter of the arts, Colonel Sanders was the sponsor of a local TV variety show called “Whistle While You Work.” Sanders was so impressed by Orbison’s voice that he immediately signed him to be the show’s star. After signing the contract, Orbison pulled up his pants and went home to recount the night’s events to his parents, who tried unsuccessfully to have him committed. Orbison’s run on Whistle While You Work was a highly successful one and his newfound fame led him to sign with Monument Records, with whom he recorded most of the songs we will be taking a look at today…
Orbison’s first big hit was 1960’s “Only the Lonely,” a song he wrote while locked inside an airplane toilet. The door had jammed and Orbison was trapped for 10 hours before the plane landed in Dallas, where maintenance men had to take the door off its hinges and where big laughs were had by all, including a large media contingent. Orbison was so embarrassed by the entire episode that he slipped on his Raybans and pretended to be a blind man. In order to keep up the pretence, Orbison spent the rest of his career wearing dark glasses both on and off stage, a tactic that not only served to exonerate him from much suspect behavior, but which also had the added financial advantage of random strangers suddenly walking up to him and giving him all their spare change.
Orbison’s next hit was “Running Scared,” a number which was modeled on Beethoven’s “Bolero” and which set the pattern that was to become his trademark, namely that he would complain about his lousy love life in an ever louder and more high pitched manner as the song progressed. Legend has it that Orbison took three takes to hit the high note which finishes the song, but when he finally did hit it he did so with such power that it shattered not only several windows in downtown Nashville but also his manager’s glass eye.
Soon after came what is undoubtedly my favorite Orbison opus, “Crying,” a song during which Orbison often sounds as if there is a ferret running around loose in his underwear. As is usually the case, love has gone awry and Roy is singing about how distraught he is…
Next came “In Dreams.” In this one, Roy yet again seems to be suffering from a case of unrequited love – a condition which, if his oeuvre is anything to go by, was unrelenting. What really strikes me about this piece is the first verse in which Orbison tells us that…
“A candy colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep, everything is all right.”
The question that immediately springs to mind is “Who the hell wants some weirdo dressed like a clown creeping into their room in the middle of the night!?!?!” And how could anyone possibly go to sleep with such a maniacal figure looming over them? Still, the 1960s were more innocent times and perhaps homicidal clowns weren’t as common then as they are now…
Later the same year came Blue Bayou, a song in which Orbison seems to have misplaced one of his offspring just before migrating from some place in the South to some place not in the South. How he could have been so careless as to forget the baby is a mystery, but you know these artistic types, head always in the clouds. Perhaps even more disturbing is that he seems to miss the boats and the catfish at least as much as he misses the baby, which means either he wasn’t much of a dad or he had some sort of unnatural attraction to catfish…
Somewhere along the way Roy made the mistake of moving to a new record company and letting his manager produce his songs, something that bewildered everyone in the business as his manager was not only tone deaf but also just plain deaf, period! Not surprisingly, the flow of hits came to a screeching halt. Though no longer on the charts, Orbison wasn’t exactly reduced to living in a cardboard box as he had invested his earnings wisely – he was one of the first to invest in the manufacture of plastic coat hangers ( till then, coat hangers had been made of marzipan and as a result were prone to being eaten by moths.) Then the Eighties rolled round and “In Dreams” was featured in the movie Blue Velvet, in which it was performed by a speed-addicted herring. Bruce Springsteen and a bunch of other fans gave Orbison a lot of publicity, and soon Roy was back on the charts as part of the Traveling Wilburys with “Handle with Care.” A few months later, Orbison was once again back on the charts, this time as a solo artist with the hit “You Got It”, though by then he had better things to worry about, like having inconveniently dropped dead at the somewhat premature age of 52…
But it was this, his last hit single, released posthumously in 1991, that I find the most impressive piece from his comeback. In “I Drove All Night” we have what is probably Orbison’s randiest song. If the video is anything to go by, Jason Priestly gets a serious case of hormonal overflow and drives all night to get his hot little hands on Jennifer Connelly’s hot little body, and who can blame him? For some strange reason Connelly spends a lot of this video wearing semi-transparent tights, even though she’s just walking around outside. Is she a trapeze artist who fell out of the circus truck? A stripper who had to leave work halfway through her act? Yet, at other times she is wearing a rather stylish black dress, as if she were going to a cocktail party or something, so perhaps she’s one of those highly paid escort types, though why she seems to be lost in the desert is beyond me. As for Priestly, he seems to have chosen an unusual means of arriving at his destination, namely running a one man relay race in which he keeps switching from a car to a motorcycle and then back again!
When I first listened to this I could have sworn Orbison was singing “I drove all night, crapped in your room,” which doesn’t sound like a very romantic thing to do, at all! As it turns out what he is really saying is “I drove all night, crept in your room,” which seems much more sanitary, though a tad, well, creepy…
