The moment came early in every concert Roy Orbison gave for the last two decades of his life; in a way, it was as electric a moment as the instant Elvis Presley stepped onto a concert stage and found himself blinded by the glare of a thousand Instamatic flashbulbs.

     On Orbison's case, though, that instant of recognition, the tremor that came when audience members were reminded why they'd come, happened not when he ambled on-stage, and not when his backup singers sang, "Dum dum dum dum-bedoo-wah" - the nonsense syllables that began the opening song, "Only the Lonely."

     At a Roy Orbison show, the moment of epiphany came when Orbison stepped up to the microphone and sang, "Only the lonely/Know the way I feel tonight." Every night, in clubs and concerts and auditoriums and state fairs, you'd hear an audible gasp, a wave of applause.  Every night, the audience would be full of people thinking exactly the same thing: "My God, he sounds just like he did in 1960."

    And from the early to middle Sixties, when he recorded twenty two Top Forty hits, to his death of a heart attack on December 6th, 1988, he always sounded just like the Roy Orbison of our memories and dreams: The pure, aching melancholy, the bursts of passion that were invariably called "operatic," the overwhelming power of a lonely man in black singing about lost loves and midnight fears.  Night after night, he'd take the stage, stand dead still in the spotlight, speak barely a word to the audience and spin out one teenage passion play after another: "Crying," "Running Scared," "Oh, Pretty Woman," "In Dreams."  The lyrics told you that love was at stake; the voice could convince you that lives were at stake.

     And then he'd walk offstage, and the singer who'd unleashed such tremulous passion became shy, soft-spoken, gentle: if Elvis Presley once called him the best singer in the world, just about everyone else who knew Roy Orbison
 would add that he was also the sweetest man in rock & roll.

     When he had his hits, he toured steadily.  When his career faltered after personal tragedies and professional malaise, he kept on touring.  And even in 1988, as he worked on one record that would be his first Top Ten LP in
 decades (Traveling Wilburys: Volume One) and another that seemed certain to seal his full-scale comeback (Mystery Girl), he still toured, playing the old songs on weekends and working on new ones during the week.

     In late October he was a featured attraction at the Arizona State Fair, in Phoenix.  While outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum families rode the Ferris wheel and gambled along the midway, inside Roy Orbison sang his hits.
 "Cover for me on any notes I don't hit," He said to his bass player backstage before the show, and the line got a big laugh; everybody in the room knew he'd hit every note of every song, and he did.

     Afterward, he relaxed in the limousine carrying him back to his hotel, looking through the window at the bright neon and flashing lights of the fair.  The Phoenix show marked the beginning of a series of Rolling Stone interviews with Orbison, conversations intended not for an obituary but for a story on the celebrated past and promising future of a rock & roll legend. And as Orbison peered through his thick glasses at the fairground sights, he began to reminisce
.

     "Ever seen a real medicine show?"  He asked.  "I played at one when I was ten years old, in Vernon, Texas.  They just set up a bunch of benches in the dirt and strung up some lights.  And they told jokes and did skits and had a talent contest and sold this magic elixir.  I was co-winner in the talent contest.  Won $7.50, but my buddy went with
 me and carried my guitar and rooted for me, so he figured he ought to have half."  He chuckled softly.  "That was my first taste of a manager."

     Roy Kelton Orbison was born in Vernon, Texas, on April 23rd, 1936.  When he was six, his parents gave him a guitar; at eight, he showed up so often at auditions for a local radio show that they made him a regular.  Orbison
 loved Lefty Frizzell, Frankie Laine's pop hit "Jezebel," the odd instrumental and, after the family moved to Wink, in West Texas, mexican music and the rhythm & blues songs that would soon coalesce into rock & roll.  In high school, Orbison led a band called the Wink Westerners, later renamed the Teen Kings.  A few years later the group
 recorded "Ooby Dooby," a nonsense rockabilly track written by some of Orbison's college classmates, in a Dallas studio.  That version wasn't released, and neither was a version cut in Clovis, New Mexico, with future Buddy Holly producer Norman Petty.  But Sun Records head Sam Phillips heard the song and invited the Teen Kings to his history-making studio in Memphis.  They cut it one more time, and it became a minor hit.

     A handful of rockabilly-style tunes followed; none were hits.  All along, Orbison had wanted to sing ballads.  He also wanted a better deal on his songwriting royalties, and when Nashville publisher Wesley Rose said he could get the Everly Brothers to record a tune Orbison had written for his college sweetheart and wife-to-be, Claudette,
 Orbison left Sun and, like Elvis Presley, signed with RCA.  Unlike Elvis, he didn't sell many records, and in 1959, after a pair of singles, he moved to producer Fred Foster's label, Monument Records.

     This time, everything clicked.  Orbison's third Monument single, "Only the Lonely," began a string of lushly arranged, inventively structured pop ballads: "Running Scared," for instance, was a rock & roll bolero that slowly built to a pitch of lover's paranoia before its dramatic, happy ending.

     In the early Sixties, the anguished grandeur of those songs was rivalled only by the work of producer Phil Spector and his stable of girls groups. From the Beatles to Bruce Spingsteen, young rockers and young dreamers were listening to the sound of Roy Orbison, the heartbreaking balladeer - and, on tunes like, "Oh, Pretty Woman" and "Working for the Man," Roy Orbison, the rocker.

     But Orbison's momentum faded when he left Monument for a big-money deal with MGM Records in 1965. Subsequent producers, it seems, didn't have the Fred Foster touch.  The records were good but not great; a movie for MGM, a Civil War musical titled The Fastest Guitar Alive, didn't do well.

     In 1966 tragedy struck when Claudette Orbison was killed in a motorcycle accident, with Roy riding just ahead of her when it happened.  He found it difficult to write any more songs, but kept touring.  Two years later, a fire destroyed his house in Hendersonville, Tennessee, killing two of his three children.  From that point on, he refused to attend funerals.

     The albums came sporadically, but the tours were steady.  In 1969, Orbison married a young German woman, Barbara Wellhonen, and the couple later had two children.  But a 1977 reunion LP with Fred Foster was disappointing; so was a 1979 album on Elektra/Asylum Records, which he recorded shortly after he underwent triple bypass heart surgery.

     But pop music never forgot Roy Orbison: Linda Ronstadt, Van Halen and Don McCLean had hits with his songs in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and in 1980 Orbison released "That Loving You Feeling Again," a
 Grammy-winning duet with Emmylou Harris.  In 1985 there was Class of '55, a reunion LP with Sun Records veterans Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis that contains a standout Orbison performance in the elegant "Coming Home."  That song, like most of the songs he recorded in subsequent years,  is suffused with spiritual glow and full of intimations of mortality; the grandiose ballad "Wild Hearts," from the movie Insignificance, is similarly unsettling, while "Life Fades Away," from the Less Than Zero soundtrack, is simply a dying man's missive.

     At the same time, though, Orbison was preparing his comeback with the aid of fans like director David Lynch (who used "In Dreams" to great effect in his film Blue Velvet), Bruce Springsteen (who inducted Orbison into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987), T Bone Burnett (who handled the musical direction on the star-studded Cinemax concert Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black & White Night and produced the first two track for Mystery Girl) and Jeff Lynne (who wound up producing much of the album).  In the end, a whole crew of admirers lent their support to Mystery Girl, which includes songs and productions from the likes of Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Elvis Costello and Bono.

     But at the end of his life, Orbison's best-known collaboration was with Petty, Lynne, George Harrison and Bob Dylan, his partners in the Travelling Wilburys.  Recorded quickly and cheaply by musicians who happened to be
 friends and colleagues, the album was presented, tongues firmly in cheeks, as if it were the work of brothers who five different mothers but a single footloose father - and in an interview with the Wilburys, the other members were quite vocal about what a thrill it was to hear "Lefty Wilbury" sing.Lefty himself sat quietly as younger colleagues like Petty and Harrison spun outrageous tales of life as a Wilbury; then, just when it seemed the group's elder statesman might be uncomfortable with the elaborate put-on, he softly tossed out a choice remark.  "Some people
 said Daddy was a cad and a bounder," he said, deadpan.  "I remember him as a Baptist minister."

     On the evening of December 6th, Orbison complained of chest pains.  At about 11:00 p.m., he collapsed in the bathroom of his mother's Hendersonville home.  Paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, but by midnight Orbison had been declared dead of a massive heart attack.

    In the three months before his death, the usually private but unfailingly polite Orbison had been generous with his time, inviting Rolling Stone to his recording and mixing sessions, his concerts, his comfortable, unostentatious house high in the hills overlooking the beach at Malibu. The final session took place over breakfast at a restaurant just down the beach from the pier where he'd once spoken to actor Martin Sheen about playing the lead in the movie version of the autobiography Orbison wanted to write.  "I guess I'll give the book a try now," he said, finishing off his meal and smoking from a pack of Camels that he later left behind so that Barbara wouldn't get upset.

    And as he sat in the restaurant less than three weeks before his death, flushed with pride at the success of the Wilburys and the completion of what he knew was a strong new album, a happy and productive Roy Orbison said he didn't have a clear picture of where he'd like to be in a year. "That's like predicting the future of rock & roll in 1954 and '55," he said with a laugh.  "I have faith that everything will unfold properly."