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Bard of the Lonely
Roy Orbison, rock original, dies at 52
By Jim Jerome
His was a voice like no other ever heard in rock-silky, soaring, tender,
gritty, haunted with
pain, and durable. Roy Orbison was present at the creation, a
skinny Texas kid who sang
rockabilly at sun Records with close buddies Elvis Presley and Jerry
Lee Lewis in the
mid-50's. Through the next three decades his brilliant lyrics
and melodies --- he wrote such
bedrock classics as "Only the Lonely," "Oh, Pretty Woman," "Crying,"
"Mean Woman
Blues," "Candy Man," "Dream Baby" and "Blue Bayou" --- were given new
life by
performers as diverse as the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt and Van
Halen. His own career
may have suffered years of eclipse; his music, never.
Recently, and suddenly, however, Roy Orbison himself had emerged to
take full possession of
the legend he long since had become. As one of the whimsically
named Traveling Wilburys,
alongside Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, Roy
had surged back onto
the charts, at the rockripe age of 52, with the group's single, "Handle
With Care," a video and
the Traveling Wilburys' Volume One LP. With his own album, Mystery
Girl, ready for release
in February, Orbison, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
subject of a
superstar-studded cable TV tribute that aired earlier this year, was
deservedly flying high. He
was working out and had shed 30lbs. He was remodeling his Malibu
home. And he was
enjoying his reborn popularity immensely.
Last week he played small clubs and gigs in Boston and Cleveland to
rapturous, awe-struck
fans aged 15 to 50. Then he traveled to Hendersonville, Tenn.,
to visit his mother, Nadine,
and his eldest son, Wesley, 23 who was trying to launch a music career
of his own. Barbara,
36, Roy's German-born second wife, who also worked as his manager,
was in Frankfurt
arranging a promotional tour for Roy; their two children, Roy Kelton,
18, and Alex, 12, were
home in California. After Tennessee, Orbison was planning to
fly to London to shoot the
Wilburys' next two videos, one of them for a tune called "The End of
the Line."
Then, on the night of Dec. 6, having spent the day shopping for parts
for model airplanes, his
hobby, he was rushed Hendersonville Hospital after collapsing at his
mother's house. A
gentle, abstemious man who drank nothing stronger than Coke, he was
also a heavy smoker
despite having undergone triple-bypass surgery a decade ago.
At 11:54 P.M. Orbison was
pronounced dead of a massive heart attack.
Tributes flowed in from stunned, reverent rockers whose vocal and lyrical
styles were, in no
small part, defined by Orbison's unique gift. Johnny Cash, a
Hendersonville neighbor until
Roy and Barbara moved to Malibu three years ago, said, "For 30 years
we were heart to
heart. It hurts too much to say a lot about Roy. I'm just
happy the world has come to
recognize his great talent. I will miss him so much." Said
Sun Records founder Sam Phillips:
"He was probably the tamest man I've known in rock. He was very
sensitive to people, to
tragedy, to hurt. He wouldn't hurt a piss ant if it was biting
him. Wesley had spoken to his dad
just a few hours before he died and said he hadn't sounded the happy
in a long time. What a
wonderful, sweet man."
But no rocker rhapsodized as polgnantly as Bruce Springsteen when he
introduced Roy at the
Hall of Fame ceremony in New York last year. Recalling that in
1970 he had traveled 15
hours in the back of a
U-Haul truck to open for Roy in Nashville, the Boss said: "His
arrangements were complex and operatic, they had rhythm and movement,
and they addressed
the underside of pop romance. They were scary. His voice
was unearthly. Roy had the
ability, like all great rock and rollers, to sound like he had dropped
in from another
planet..........In 1975, when I went in to make Born to Run.......I
wanted most of all to sing like
Roy Orbison. Now everybody knows that nobody sings like Roy Orbison."
That was clear from the beginning. The son of an oil field worker,
Roy grew up in Wink,
Texas, and went to North Texas State with Pat Boone before heading
to Memphis to play his
tapes for Sam Phillips. The founder of Sun Records recalls an
insecure, ill-at-ease kid with an
"unusual" voice and great rhythm guitar licks. " 'Do you think
my looks'll hurt me onstage?'
" Phillips remembers Roy asking. "He couldn't see real well,
and he was most self-conscious
about having small eyes."
Orbison's magnificent string of hits from 1960 to 1964 made him an international
rock hero
who received top billing over the Beatles during a 1963 U.K. tour.
The sunglasses that
became his trademark got their start on the same tour. Orbison
had lost his regular glasses,
forcing him to rely on his shades. He stuck with the look.
The era that tour presaged brought a sharp downward turn in his career.
Seemingly overnight,
his shivering emotive voice was drowned out by the British Invasion
and acid rock; successive
tides of pop-rock, disco and synth-pop gave him little chance to regain
his footing.
And as bad as things were going professionally, his personal life in
those years was scarred by
the darkest tragedies. In 1966 his wife, Claudette --- the namesake
inspiration for the Orbison
song that the Everly Brothers made a hit in 1958 --- was killed in
a motorcycle accident in
Nashville as Roy rode on another bike just ahead. Two years later
two of their children, Roy
Dwayne, 10, and Anthony, 6, perished in a fire that destroyed Roy's
Hendersonville home
while he was on tour. Only Wesley survived. Character-
istically, he talked little about his
sufferings, except to say that "work helped --- that and time and a
lot of good friends and
friends' advice."
Orbison began rebuilding his life in 1969, when he married Barbara,
a former medical student,
whom he met in London. Though he was set back by bypass surgery
in 1978 --- he had
collapsed while running up steps at a football stadium --- his legend
continued to grow. Linda
Ronstadt made his "Blue Bayou" a hit again in 1977, and in 1981 he
recorded a
Grammy-winning duet of "That Loving You Feeling Again" with Emmylou
Harris.
His music was used for movies (notably in 1986's Blue Velvet), and he
continued to play small
gigs. But it was his performance on Sun Records' priceless Class
of '55 LP in 1986 that
seemed to signal Roy's resurgence. Last spring he was dining
in L.A. with producer-musician
Jeff Lynne, ex-Beatle Harrison and Heartbreaker Petty when the Wilburys
project took
shape. Dylan joined soon after. Rolling Stone, citing Roy's
work on the cut "Not Alone
Anymore," said Orbison "hurts as good as he ever has. It proves
[he] has lost none of his
tremendous vocal prowess."
For his lyrics, Orbison drew on both his life and his dreams.
In one of his last interviews he
told reporter Bruce Dorminey how, 25 years ago, he dreamed that he
had heard a new Elvis
song on the radio. "The song was something about gold," Roy recalled
in his lilting, soothing
drawl. "It was just beautiful, and I said, 'well, ol' Elvis has
another smash.' Then I woke up
and realized Elvis couldn't have sung it; I was dreaming. One
night, days later, the lyrics came
back to me: 'The candy-colored clown they call the sandman/ Tiptoes
to my room every night/
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper/ Go to sleep, everything's
all right.' "
The song became "In Dreams," a standard. Its last line suggests
a longing for an elusive
peace that Orbison surely deserved: "Its too bad all these things could
only happen in my
dreams."
----- Additional reporting by Victoria Balfour, Steve Dougherty and Jane Sanderson
People Magazine December 19, 1988
