In Dreams: 35 Years Without Roy Orbison
Reflections on the moment we lost a crucial voice in rock ‘n’ roll
I know what I was doing mid-morning on the seventh day of December, 1988. Sleeping. And at some subconscious level, readying to battle a hangover.
I was a pop music writer, on staff at the Boston Globe, and it was a scheduled day off. Hence, the night before had been, well, the night before and my plan for this day was gradual recovery + whatever.
And then the phone rang. My editor. On my day off. Way earlier than I normally got up. Couldn’t be good news. It wasn’t.
Roy Orbison, one of the greatest, most operatic rock ‘n’ roll singers ever, had died at 52. This was incomprehensible. I’d talked to him a few weeks earlier on the phone from Paris and just seen him play three days prior at a Boston club, the Channel.
I’d penned a rave review. “Most prominently,” I wrote, “the vocal crescendos are unmatched, especially during the mountain-climbing ballads. Situations that induced awestruck smiles among the crowd …Whatever pain he’s gone through in the song is cathartic. The fact that he can still bring that out and bring shivers to the spine is awe-inspiring.”
The only downside? He did nothing from the upcoming album, Mystery Girl. He’d only finished it the month before and was really proud of that album. He had every right to be. I’d had an advance tape so I knew the music was terrific and was hoping to hear a few songs in concert. But, he explained to me, he felt it wouldn’t be fair to his audience to spring something new and unheard on them. Next time, next tour.
“I’m not sure that I want to subject the audience to a tryout,” he said. He never did unreleased material in concert. “The reason I haven’t done it in the past was because it was a personal thing with me. [When I’m] in an audience, I didn’t altogether want to see a performance. I expected to hear all the big hit records, and then the performer said, ‘Here’s my new album.’ So, you sit for 30 minutes through things you aren’t familiar with. That was just personal taste. But I’m going to, certainly in the new year, have a big rehearsal before I come out again and include ‘most all of the things on the album.”
Which, of course, never happened.
So, I’m still dumbstruck, sitting there numb on the bed while on the telephone with my editor. He asked me to come in and write the appreciation. I wanted to, I didn’t want to, I needed to. I told my editor about my prior night – honesty being the best policy – and present condition, both foggy and grief-stricken, and said, “Please edit carefully. It’s gonna be a rough day.” He got it, he did.
Orbison died 35 years ago on December 6th. He played what turned out to be his last concert, December 4, 1988 at the Front Row Theatre in Highland Heights, not far from Cleveland. A fatal heart attack struck him two days later, while in Tennessee visiting his mother.
I’d met him a couple of times previously after his shows. I was still stunned by the voice and charmed with his humble warmth when we talked. This was back in the day when guys didn’t routinely hug when they met or parted. But we did.
As it turned out, that interview I did was the last of substance before his death, and his two shows in Boston. (I think he did a TV quickie in Cleveland after the Boston shows.)
There was a perception people had of Orbison – because of all the sad, emotional songs and because of his personal history – more than a few tragedies – that he carried this undercurrent sadness with him all the time. Did he?
“It’s just the kind of guy that comes out sometimes when I write,” he said. “Probably one side of my personality coming through. I read a lot into what I write, and it’s mostly feelings – ‘Running Scared’ and ‘It’s Over,’ ‘Pretty Woman.’ And on the new album it’s the same, [but] there are a couple of occasions where I’m in good shape.”
VIDEO: Roy Orbison performs “Oh, Pretty Woman” in Australia 1972
I’d have to say in those months that led up to his death Orbison was a very happy man, humble as ever. “My voice is a gift,” he told me. “My talent is a gift; the life process is a gift; the opportunity for the journey is a gift.”
Four years after his death, I was in New York talking with k.d. lang in her hotel room. They were friends and collaborators, having done a stunning duet of “Crying.”
“His strength and his calmness and his unworldly faith will affect me forever,” lang sand. “He was so beyond the surface and the frivolous part of human nature. I mean, people always thought he was so lonely and sad and everything, but au contraire, he was very strong and very peaceful. He was a legend, and yet, he was really humble.”
Orbison’s older music never felt old. So long after its genesis, it resonated with me and, I had to think, still did for him. Did he still feel it?
“Yeah, I sure do,” he said. “It was a thing back in the early days. I might have one hit record and I’d go out and sing 20 or 30 minutes of other people’s songs and my one hit record. I always thought it’d be nice if I had five or six hits. When I got five or six, I was really pleased. Then, it worked out to an hour, an hour-and-a-half. I’ve always been really pleased to be proud of that. If I hadn’t cared so much for that material, the shows might not have been what they were. We would’ve gotten tired of performing those things and the shows probably wouldn’t have had the sparkle that they’ve had.”
Orbison’s journey certainly had its highs and lows. The 50s breakthrough of “Ooby Dooby” and then that string in the early 60s: “Only the Lonely,” “Blue Angel,” “Running Scared,” “Crying,” “Dream Baby,” “Blue Bayou,” “Oh, Prety Woman,” “It’s Over.” In an era where most singers depended almost entirely on songwriters, Orbison wrote his own. It added another layer of depth; he wasn’t just amplifying someone else’s words; they were his to own.
Orbison’s career took a dive with the British invasion, and although he remained a steady concert draw, he never regained his hit-making capacity (until posthumously). Personal tragedy also struck: his first wife, Claudette, died in a motorcycle accident in 1966; two of his sons died when his house caught fire in 1968.
“You set out to whip the world,” Orbison told me, “and then when you get beat up a little bit, in my case, you say, ‘Father, I’m gonna let you have it. I’ve done what I can do.’ You turn your will over to God.”
That was a key turning point. In 1984, he went through a born-again experience, though Orbison disliked the born-again term because he felt it was misused and overused.
“I’ve been developing a personal relationship with myself and with Jesus Christ and it just kind of smooths everything,” he said. “If you have faith, then your whole life is put in a new perspective. You get to work, but enjoy the work at the same time. If you grow spiritually, you do what’s in front of you and let the results speak for themselves.”
Orbison was on one hell of a roll when tragedy struck.
VIDEO: Roy Orbison performs “In Dreams” as a hologram
Postscript: I did see Roy Orbison again. Sorta. Four years ago, at a stop on a tour called Roy Orbison & Buddy Holly: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream Tour. Roy and Buddy were holograms, very high-tech holograms. (As of last year, at least, this tour was ongoing.)
As I approached the Boston theater, my main thoughts were: Is this going to be creepy? Would there be something vaguely ghoulish, or even weirdly comic, about this, a 21st-century reanimation of superstars from the 20th? Should one be politely outraged at this appropriation — even given the singers’ estates enthusiastic endorsement — at the idea of this as a real-time concert?
So, how’d it shake down?
“Creepy” certainly hovered at the onset, but dissipated and mutated into something else fairly soon. “Cool” is too much of a stretch, but “curiously entertaining” would be close. As the show progressed through its 90 minutes, and as I got used to the lay of the land, with the Holly and Orbison images popping up and then disappearing in a puff of pseudo mist — the music transported me back in time. The Holly image was, of course, about 20 years old. I’m guessing “Orbison” was in his mid-30s to 40. And, as the on-stage Orbison in life was pretty much a statue, it hardly mattered that his movements were limited as a hologram.
Still, you can only suspend disbelief so much. It felt semi-live, or live at arm’s length. I was never not aware that it wasn’t a hologram. Marty Tudor, CEO of BASE Hologram Productions, the company which staged this show, told me 2019’s “Orbison” was measurably better than last year’s.
“The technology has improved,” he said, “and we are constantly improving it and upgrading it. It’s a very big, complicated process and it takes a good nine months to a year from the moment we say go to when we deliver a show. Essentially, what we’re doing is using a digital laser projector to project light.”
BASE engineers worked with Holly and Orbison videos as reference points, but they created each hologram “from scratch” and a team of engineers put in hundreds of hours. Tudor said each hologram has over 200,000 frames “and each one of those frames has to get touched by hand.”
Even when enjoying the music — expertly played by a band of Broadway show veterans — there was a bit of a distance from it. When “Orbison” or “Holly” gestured toward the band or thanked the audience after some applause, I couldn’t help but giggle nervously. And, when a song I like ended, I wondered should I applaud a hologram?
I did applaud, partially because there was a five-piece band and two female backup singers and they were live, they could hear it. If I were another kind of person – maybe more like Roy, a believer – I’d say that perhaps Roy heard that applause in heaven. I can’t go that far. But maybe you can. And that’s all right.
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ROY ORBISON THE GREATEST HEART: THE GREATEST NATURAL VOICE ! ELVIS WAS CORRECT !!!!!