Script
What do you think of when you hear the name Roy Orbison? Black glasses? A bad haircut? A soaring, operatic voice? A partially shaved bear in a Dracula costume? Pretty Woman? The Travelling Willburys? Maybe even David Lynch movies?
Perhaps nothing at all. Certainly not pimping or writing books about pimping or inventing rap music.
Of all of the founding fathers of Rock ‘N Roll – Elvis, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – Roy Orbison is the most anonymous – a figure that most know, but few know much about.
We know his music. He had 22 songs in the Billboard Top 40 between 1960 and 1964, many of which remain firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist. Only the Lonely. Crying. Blue Bayou. It’s Over. Pretty Woman. You Got It.
The music can be ethereal, enchanting. Other-worldly. Heartbreaking. Many other adjectives. The songs often defy the rules of the craft, ignore traditional structure. Typical early rock filtered through a unique mind, tweaked with strings and an emo sensibility – endearing innocence and vulnerability.
And that voice. Equal parts Pavarotti, Dean Martin, and hysterical grandmother, it soars above everything else, twists and turns and crescendos. It holds you in its grip.
There’s a suspense to it all. How does this work? Will it keep working? Every song seems like it’s on the verge falling apart, every note on the verge of breaking.
But it doesn’t. They don’t.
He’s no James Brown, though. Man, can you imagine that episode. Anyway . . .
We also know the look. Two looks really – the early years and the later years.
The early years, starting from the top: Thick, goth black hair, drowning in mousse and wrangled into a helmet tight pompadour perched above a pale, southern, weak chinned, nerd face; Small, close set, wonky eyes barely visible under thick lensed, black framed, prescription sunglasses, over a small-mouthed, dopey, slightly down-turned smile, all coming together and looking better than it had any right to – greater than the sum of its parts and sitting atop a thin, normal style body in a classic black and white suit.
In the later years, the pompadour had fallen, long and still stiff, outlining the contours of an increasingly doughy face, like a black candle melted over a peeled potato. He grew chubby and favored the least flattering outfit possible for this development – a polyester jumpsuit or, alternately, a more flattering suit, bolo tie combo.
Roy Orbison was a dark, homely, beardless wizard. A conjurer of sadness. A fascinating, important, weird figure in the birth of rock and in the decades after, and it’s time he got his due: the white guilt replacement topic of a solitary, three-fourths episode of a little loved, little listened to, brilliant podcast.
An anecdote, to begin, told by Tom Waits to Charlie Rose. For reference, the concert referred to is the Black And White Night, a kind of victory lap show, where Roy Orbison was backed by some of the artists that count him as an influence, including Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, KD Lang, Elvis Costello, Jackson Brown, T-Bone Burnett, and Waits:
“This is an odd story. It was after the concert, The Black and White Thing, it was a few hours after that and some of us were still hanging out back at Roy’s hotel room, drinking and, you know, um, imbibing in some other, uh, potent potables, if you will – only a few men left standing. Me, Roy, and Jackson, but I think Jackson was kind of teetering on the edge of the abyss at that point, so I suppose he probably doesn’t remember. Anyway, Roy’s perched on his bed and I’m there and Jackson’s slumped in a chair and Roy says in that quiet voice of his, he says, uh, kind of out of nowhere, “If you play all of the songs I’ve written backwards and at half speed, in the order I wrote them in, it’s an incantion from the Egyptian book of the dead in the original Egyptian.” And I laughed, you know, because I thought it was a joke, but Roy wasn’t laughing and, he’s got those glasses, right, so it’s hard to see his eyes, but from what I could see he was staring right at me and I just, uh, you know, I stopped. Stopped laughing. And then he started singing, kind of, intoning lower and slower than his usual thing, and it sounds like language but it’s not any language I know, right, but it sure as hell could have been Egyptian, and he goes on for, must have been an hour. I swear it, an hour. Jackson fell asleep but Roy was staring into my eyes, man, the whole time and I didn’t dare blink. And then he finished and he said time for bed, and he nodded to the door, and I, uh, I hit the bricks,man, and that’s the last time I ever saw Roy Orbison. He died about a year later.”
Roy Orbison, aka The Big O, aka The Caruso of Rock, aka The Spookiest Man In Showbiz, was born on April 23rd, 1936 to Orbie Lee Orbison, a disgraced magician, known professionally as The Black Orb and ousted from the magic union for dabbling too deeply into the black arts and his refusal to grow a moustache, a requirement for the magic union at the time, and Nadine Vesta Shults, Orbie’s gloomy assistant, who he had lured from a band of American Gypsies when she was but 12 years old.
The small family lived in relative isolation in Vernon, Texas, hunkered down through the Great Depression doing god-knows-what, but moved to Wink, Texas when Roy was seven after Orbie inherited his great uncle’s estate – a grim, dark, supposedly haunted mansion, looming over desolate oil fields.
It has since been razed and the hill it sat upon leveled to make way for a strip mall housing a Papa John’s Pizza, J. Appleseed’s Family Restaurant and Cider Brewery that used to be a Benigan’s, and the lonely remains of an abandoned Blockbuster Video, still unoccupied due to purported paranormal activity. A mute, albino boy strumming an invisible guitar has been spotted on multiple occasions, wandering the video racks, hopelessly searching, perhaps, for a VHS copy of The Fastest Guitar In the World, the ill-fated 1967 comedic western starring none other than Roy Orbison.
This is most of what we know of Orbison’s childhood, as he refused to speak of those days or much of anything really – he was renowned for his mute gloominess – but there is one additional item of interest. Until his seventeenth year Roy’s hair was bone white, not the deep black that would later become such a prominent aspect of his signature, unsettling style. The black hue came from hot tar, which he would run through his mane each morning with a steal comb and also accounted for the acrid, eye watering smell which filled any room he entered.
And we know that a young Roy Orbison played music, of course. From the day he was born he was singing. Legend has it that instead of crying, an infant Roy would wail a soul rending Bolero melody in perfect pitch. His father gave him his first guitar at six years old – conjured the instrument from another realm, if you believe the rumors, but it’s also possible he just bought it from a store. Either way, Roy took to it immediately, with no training, and would wander the oil fields below his family’s estate, strumming Spanish rhythms and crooning – always crooning – a tiny, pale boy leaving a swath of weeping roughnecks in his wake.
Which begs the question – is the ghost of a young Roy Orbison haunting an abandoned Blockbuster Video on the grounds of his family’s former estate? I’m not sure that’s how ghosts work, but it can’t just be a coincidence.
By the time he was a teenager, Roy Orbison was known and feared across West Texas, as a powerful musician and maybe more. His solo performances, mostly held in dirty, rowdy honky-tonks, were more séance than concert. The gloomy, nearly translucent kid would get on the stage with his guitar and the whole place would go quiet. Where there had been western swing and fights and whooping and hollering just a moment before, there was now only silence, occasionally interrupted by weeping, while he played his haunting tunes, songs which haven’t survived to this day, but were, according to the few accounts we have, closer to funeral dirges than country songs.
There was plenty of work for a while – there are innumerable dives in West Texas and at the time they’d let just about anybody play – but eventually Roy’s reputation for hypnotizing an audience became a detriment. The owners of the establishments couldn’t sell booze if their customers were in a weepy trance. They stopped hiring him.
So he retreated back to his family’s mansion.
And then he saw Elvis perform on Ed Sullivan and everything clicked into place. If he was going to be a musician, he’d have to channel whatever it was inside him into something more commercial.
So he changed his look – used the tar in his hair because it was close at hand and he liked the way it burned – put a band together, The Wink Westerners (later changed to the Teen Kings) names so ambiguous as to rouse no possible feelings of discomfort in potential booking agents or audience members, a plan of deceptive ambiguity that he would stick to his entire career.
They played covers, mostly – country tunes by Lefty Frizell and Bob Wills as well as rock stuff from Elvis and Johnny Cash. They were a sensation, packing them in from to _______ with their unique blend of standard youth music as filtered through the other-worldly voice of their front man.
And then Roy wrote the first song of his career. What, if Tom Waits is to be trusted, and he is, would, when played backwards, make up the final lines of the Egyptian incantation. The song was ominously titled, “Ooby Dooby”.
And, shockingly, it took off.
Everybody in America was doing the Ooby Dooby, wiggling to both the left and the right, shaking like a big rattle snack, unaware that they had fallen under the spell of devious mesmerist, whose ultimate goal we can only guess at, but was probably the legalization of . . . something, and, thus, uh, the ushering in of the end times.
Stop the podcast. This is going nowhere. Roy Orbison wasn’t a dark wizard. That was all lies. I admit it. He was a pretty nice, kind of boring guy with a killer voice and some great tunes.
Let me try this again. A show about bees, maybe? Okay, let’s try a show about bees.