Two Sides of Roy Orbison

Looking at Orbison's recordings on Monument Records

Welcome music lovers once again!

This time, I’ve written some thoughts about Roy Orbison’s recordings on Monument Records from the early sixties. These are the sides that launched Orbison’s career and upon which much of his legacy rests. They exemplify his two sides: one, the profoundly emotional performer and the other, an intriguing and forceful rock singer. For both, the musicians of the Nashville A Team played a big role in making Orbison a transcendent performer.

As always, it’s been fun revisiting the music and trying to find new things in it. I hope you enjoy my essay and will share your thoughts on Roy Orbison too!

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Any day spent, in part, crate digging for records is a good day. But some days are, as days are in general, better than most. There was, for example, the Sunday in March 2011 where I dropped in on the now long-gone Sunrise Records location on Yonge Street in Toronto just north of Dundas. You’d walk in and there would be just to the left of the front door two elongated racks of used records. Filled without regard for alphabetization or any other measure of organization, there could literally be anything there and all for a decent price. On that Sunday in March 2011, there was treasure.

There was early Beach Boys—I nabbed Surfin’ U.S.A. and Surfer Girl. There was sixties-era Everly Brothers—I nabbed Both Sides of an Evening and Beat ‘n’ Soul—and sixties-era Elvis Presley—I nabbed Something for Everybody, Frankie and Johnny and Spinout. And then there was the best of all, all three of Roy Orbison’s albums on Monument. Needless to say, I nabbed them too.

Recorded between 1960 and 1963, they are an important part of pop music’s interregnum, a period of time that can be defined as starting with a departure and ending with an arrival.

The departure was of Presley from Brooklyn by ship on September 22, 1958 heading to Germany. The arrival was of the Beatles by plane on February 7, 1964 in New York.

The roughly five-and-a-half years between these two trips was interesting. Without a dominant artist against whom most were trying to reach or supplant, the music aimed for record-buying teenagers splintered off in many directions. Some of it was surely antiseptic, although there was a certain charm enlivening something like Bobby Vinton’s Nashville sound-drenched version of ‘Blue Velvet.’ It was still, for the most part, the time of the individual singer: Brenda Lee, Dion, Rick Nelson, Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, Ray Charles, Del Shannon and, yes, Presley too. Groups were gaining a foothold with the rise of the Four Seasons the most prominent example.

A lot of the music was really good and exciting too. What it didn’t do was arguably evolve the artform. Others outside of the pop-music realm were doing that; Bob Dylan especially. Some of the sounds out of California were prescient in that they predicted that the eventual great leap forward would be centered on, in part, a sophistication and ambition in production. Think of something like Phil Spector’s layered arrangement of the Ronette’s ‘Baby, I Love You’ and of how Brian Wilson treated it as a launching pad.

Where then in the grant scheme of things did Roy Orbison fit? He was, in a sense, both an exemplar of the best that pop music had to offer during the early-sixties pause and like Spector, a harbinger of what was to come.

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After desultory experiences at Sun—Orbison was the only one of the major artists Sam Phillips produced in the wake of Presley with whom he failed to gel—and RCA Victor, the only bright spot was getting the Everly Brothers to cut his ‘Claudette’ after he signed with Acuff-Rose Music as a songwriter. The turning point was in 1959 when Wesley Rose, the president of Acuff-Rose, put Orbison in touch with Fred Foster of the fledging Monument Records. His third single for the label was the game changer.

‘Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel),’ written by Orbison with his songwriting partner at the time, Joe Melson, was recorded when he was 23 and released just after he turned 24. That may seem a tad old for a singer to strike success in the early sixties but what impresses, more than arguably anything else about the single, is how Orbison sounds much older than that. It’s not only in the richness of his voice or the impression that he has had more than his fair share of loneliness and heartbreak, it’s that Orbison sounds fully formed as an artist. In other words, he already had a firm grasp of how best to present his music. By comparison, just six months earlier, he had recorded a song called ‘Raindrops’ and sounded years younger. Both appear on Orbison’s first LP for Monument, Lonely and Blue.

What may be less noticeable is how unorthodox ‘Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)’’s structure is. It was only after listening to the episode of Andrew Hickey’s indispensable podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs dedicated to it that I even realized how it subverts (and subtly so) Western music’s almost universal convention of diving passages of music into even numbers of bars, traditionally four. I’ll leave it to Hickey to provide his hypothesis of the mechanics of ‘Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel).’ But, with that in mind, what to make of Orbison’s next big hit, ‘Blue Angel’?

Here, he and Melson throw in interesting modulations on lines such as, “you thought love was a game and it’s a, oh, such a shame” (note here also the extra syllables added to the second part of the line) and “I’ll tell you why / I’ll never say goodbye, blue angel.” As well, there doesn’t appear to be the typical kind of signpost that the song has moved to the bridge and once it moves to what may be called the bridge, it seems to linger longer than expected. Smeared against the song’s peculiarities are background vocals by the Anita Kerr Singers and Melson that accentuate their syrupiness, the kind of startling collision that, to my ears, make it even more inventive than ‘Only the Lonely (Know The Way I Feel).’

It also points to, as does Lonely and Blue as a whole, how Orbison was operating in the same territory as Presley, using the principles and musicians behind the Nashville Sound to create music that defied easy categorization and also had singer and backing band in deep accord. Like Presley, Orbison recorded in RCA’s Studio B with Bill Porter engineering and with the best of the A Team: guitarist Hank Garland, pianist Floyd Cramer, bassist Bob Moore, drummer Buddy Harman and tenor saxophonist Boots Randolph. Both also had a way of personalizing whatever material they chose to record. While Orbison’s version of Don Gibson’s ‘I Can’t Loving You,’ for example, doesn’t exactly reach the heights of Presley taking on Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’ or ‘Fever,’ he smooths out whatever song he is covering on Lonely and Blue to employ a gait that could be called rock and country that is underlined by strings arranged by Anita Kerr.

Initially, Orbison thought ‘Only the Lonely (Know The Way I Feel)’ was a song for Presley to cover. It’s said that when Orbison’s recordings was riding up the charts, Presley brought multiple copies to give to friends, a sign of how he impressed he was by it. Indeed, they were kindred spirits but only met a few times. Both excelled within the world of Nashville record making and, with Gibson, the Everlys and Brenda Lee too, illustrated how the malleability, experience and simpatico of the musicians that powered the studios of Music City could produce sounds that reflected an impressibly wide view of American music.

The emotions underpinning an Orbison recording quickly heightened with his second release, Crying, which came out at the beginning of 1962. The first side is a roller-coaster ride among the depths of despair. ‘Wedding Day,’ one of nine songs Orbison penned with Melson for the album, is about the lack of one on a fateful day and ‘Summer Song’ is about a love that blossoms during the summer yet tumbles down like the leaves as autumn’s chill breaks the heat.

Covers of ‘The Great Pretender’ and ‘Love Hurts’ each crest on a crescendo in the bridge and ‘She Wears My Ring,’ by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, is sung by Orbison almost as a warming against anyone with designs on his beloved. In a way, all three performances affect the state of a poseur against the title track which moves from just-the-facts reportage (“I was alright for a while, I could smile for a while”) to existential despair with Orbison almost wailing repeating the word crying six times. The music charts a similar path. The opening is soft with a funereal tom pattern by Harman and closes with all the musicians, including a string section, playing a staccato phrase over and over that accompanies Orbison’s crying in song.

Equally remarkable is the dramatic parallels of Orbison and Melson’s lyrics, the second chorus commenting on the fateful meeting in the first between the protagonist and the ex-lover for whom the torch he carries remains bright. We move from “you wished me well, you couldn’t tell / that I’d been crying over you” to “for you don’t love me and I’ll always be / crying over you.”

‘Crying’ can be considered a template for one of two sides of Orbison. On his third album for Monument, In Dreams, released in 1963, there is the same kind of sweep, albeit a tad muted, for much of it like the smoldering Orbison-Melson ‘(They Call You) Gigolette’ and covers of ‘My Prayer,’ ‘House Without Mirrors’ and ‘No One Will Ever Know.’ There’s the title track too, exquisite in how it moves from an opening just like the starting verse of a pop standard to the final line on which Orbison and background singers sing in unison.

The crowing achievement of the operatic Orbison is the song that started it all: ‘Running Scared.’ Its trajectory, starting with just Orbison and Garland with an additional guitarist, Harold Bradley, as well as Cramer, Moore and Harman entering as the second stanza begins and then the strings beginning as the third starts and then the Anita Kerr Singers added as of the fourth, is both methodical and enrapturing.

Orbison’s final phrase is often cited as the crowning touch that insured not only that ‘Running Scared’ would be a massive hit but also endurable enough to be a crowning achievement for the Nashville Sound. But, to me, it’s what happens before that moment, beginning at around the 90-second mark, that propels the song into immortality.

After Orbison sings the song’s ultimate question, the protagonist wondering of the woman possibly torn between him and her former boyfriend, “which one would you choose?,” there’s then a rush of sound, the briefest of interludes as the end of the repeating bolero beat is extended. Randolph enters playing a two-note phrase, adding a further layer to an already dense sound. This moment climaxes as Harman moves to the ride cymbal and Randolph doubles his beat. The Anita Kerr Singers open their voices for a slow climb up the musical staff. Orbison tells us that, “then all at once, he was standing there;” he being, of course, the ex-boyfriend. The strings answer, underlining that the protagonist’s greatest fear is now all too real. This sequence repeats as Orbison adds that his rival was “so sure of himself, his head in the air.” And then the final exuberant sweep into ecstasy starts. “My heart was breaking, which one would it be?” The Anita Kerr Singers and the strings cushion Orbison all the way to the final, victorious payoff: “you turned around and walked away with meeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

It’s the choice to significantly open up the soundscape of ‘Running Scared’ that makes the experience of listening to it a visceral experience, piercing straight into our insecurities and fears. The listener is swept up in the drama of the moment—and haven’t we all had something similar happen to us—experiencing it as Orbison is singing—or make that—living it. It is a maximalist song. To call it operatic is, to be an honest, a way to avoid digging into exactly why it is so powerful (there are times I hear it that I am so caught up in it that it moves me to tears. For this essay, I listened to it at least 15 times). Paradoxically, it is also a minimalist song. Two minutes, 10 seconds. Twelve lines of lyrics. Eighty-seven words. Orbison once said it took all of 10 minutes to get it down on paper.

As good as ‘Running Scared’ is—I would call it, without hesitation, a masterpiece—it does obscure the corollary of Orbison in how he could marshal the power of his voice to create forceful rock and roll. That was another Nashville specialty. Think again of Presley in the early sixties and the shuddering impact of recordings both well-known (‘Little Sister’) and those that should be better known (‘I Want You With Me’ and ‘Gonna Get Back Home Somehow’).

‘Nite Life’ from Crying has a swagger that comes from a cha-cha-cha rhythm that paraphrases part of Duke Ellington’s ‘Harlem Go Lucky Local’ by way of Jimmy Forrest’s ‘Night Train,’ and Orbison’s in-the-pocket lead, especially as it lands on the hooky release. ‘Sunset’ from In Dreams is also danceable, shuffling between two rhythms as well as a stop-and-start device that signifies the shift between the two.

There were also top 40 hits like ‘Working for the Man,’ the low-down ‘Candy Man’ and the freight-train beat of ‘Dream Baby.’ The most fascinating of these two for me is the B side of ‘Blue Bayou’ which has a top five smash.

‘Mean Woman Blues’ was first recorded by Presley in 1957 for his second movie, Loving You. It’s in the top echelon of the singer’s fifties recordings if forgotten today. It may have seem an unlikely vehicle for Orbison with lines like “she loves so hard, she bruise my lip / hurts so good, my heart just flips.” No surprise then that he does away with them—while retaining the chorus—and instead, sings lines like, “well, now I ain’t braggin', it’s understood / everything I do, well I sure do it good yeah.”

The dynamism of the arrangement is conventional. Halfway through, there is a break where Harman plus second drummer John Greubel opt for the toms punctuated by Randolph’s tenor. At the end, there’s a teasing lowering of the volume before a raucous crescendo that was a trademark of Jerry Lee Lewis. The performance is propelled by a polished groove, a formidable bottom doubled by Moore and Randolph (and perhaps even tripled with one of the four guitarists on the session adding a tic-tac part although it’s hard to tell on the recording). Jerry Kennedy rips off a scorching guitar solo. Orbison fills in whatever space remains with his voice and isn’t that what one always returns to when listening to him. On ‘Mean Woman Blues,’ for example, he lets out a long well before Kennedy’s spot.

It’s a performance like ‘Running Scared’ that I keep returning to over and over again. It’s a great rock record and that’s all. But it’s Orbison so I guess it means a little more. Everything is heightened when you listen to Roy Orbison.