John Kruth - Rhapsody in Black: The Life and Music of Roy Orbison

Copyright 2013 by John Kruth

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Backbeat Books
An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation
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Illustrations by Glenn Wolff

Book Design by UB Communications

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

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For Louie Cannonball Dupree

True Believer

The Papago [Indians] of southern Arizona said that a man who was humble and brave and persistent, would some night hear a song in his dream, brought by the birds that fly in from the Gulf of California; or a hawk, a cloud, the wind, or the red rain spider; and that song would be hiswould add to his knowledge and power.

Gary Snyder, The Old Ways

Contents

I stopped by to see my old friend Joel Dorn, a producer at Atlantic Records who had some hits years ago with Roberta Flack and Bette Midler, when I heard the news that Carl Perkins had passed away. It was a cold January day in 1998 and Joel sat slouched, deep in his chair, as his blue eyes gazed out the window at the gray winter sky, watching for signs of snow.

Mac [Rebennack, better known as the New Orleans pianist Doctor John] once told me a story about how Carl drove from Nashville to Memphis to see this guy called Elvis Presley, Dorn recalled. When he walked in, they were really tearing the joint apart, Elvis, Scotty [Moore], and Bill [Black]. When Carl finally got a good look at Presley, he went running to the bathroom, where he stood in front of the mirror like a teenage girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, where he allegedly spoke these words: There stands Adonis and I have the face of a mule. After just one look at Elvis, he knew it was a whole new ball game.

Other than Presley, nobody at Sun Records vaguely resembled a Greek god. Not the scrawny Perkins, or the rooster-coiffed, piano-pounding lunatic, Jerry Lee Lewis, or that square-jawed grinning hulk of the people, Johnny Cash, and, least of all, Roy Orbison, the skinny kid from Wink, Texas, with no chin and math-geek glasses. Suns visionary producer Sam Phillips, whose unabashed truthfulness was as legendary as his razor-sharp musical instinct, was far from generous in his assessment of Roys appearance: I knew his voice was pure gold, Sam said, but then bluntly added, I also knew if anyone got a look at him, hed be dead inside a week.

Although Orbisons manager Wesley Rose appreciated Roys voice, he, too, had serious doubts about the singers star power. Rose, hoping to save some bread on a string section during a recording session with Orbison, confided to his producer Fred Foster, Hes not all that good-looking, especially when you compare him to guys like Fabian. I dont think he can compete.

Time has been less kind to the fleeting youth and talents of all the Fabians and Frankies weve known along the way than it has to Roy Orbison. Roys singular voice and stylea campy vampire aesthetic comprised of jet-black hair (originally slicked back in a pompadour, then combed down into an unshakable Beatle-bowl helmet), pasty white complexion (thanks to a bout of childhood jaundice), and his trademark Ray-Ban Wayfarerswould be aped by future generations of punks and goth rockers.

Orbison was a true iconoclast. There was no mold. Its like Duke Ellington used to say: There aint but the one. Or as Roys half brother Charlie T. Wilbury (better known as Tom Petty) put it: No one could ever make a sound like that.

1

The August afternoon sun had begun to sink, stretching the gangly kids shadow into an elongated, abstract figure across the dry, parched earth. Grasping an empty pop bottle tightly in his hand, the boy began to sing into his make-believe microphone, warbling, uncertain at first, until something inside of him suddenly erupted, something strange, volcanic, burbling up from down below, something unearthly, startling, unknown even to himself, something Dwight Yoakam would describe years later as the cry of an angel falling backward through an open window.

As the boy tilted his head back, facing the sky with his pale eyes shut tight, his voice began to soar with all the soul an eight-year-old could muster. In the distance oil rigs pinged and clanked in a steady four-four rhythm as the warm prairie wind sighed like violins behind his lonely songone part opera, one part blue yodel. Excited, he barely slept that night, like a comic book superhero dying to tell someone about his newfound secret power.

A couple of days later, his father, Orbie Lee, asked Roy what he wanted to be when he grew up. Any other kid in town would have probably answered sheriff, roustabout, or maybe taxidermist. But Roy Kelton Orbison replied without hesitation. He seemed to know what his earthly mission was destined to be pretty much from the get-go. A singer, he told his father earnestly.

Well, all the same, much as you love music, son, youd better learn something about geology if you dont want to be stuck working in the oil fields for the rest your life, Orbie Lee advised knowingly.

Country music wasnt merely played on the radio around the Orbison household; it was an integral part of family life. Asked what he wanted for his sixth birthday, Roy replied, A harmonica. Instead, Orbie Lee presented him with his first guitar, a Sears & Roebuck Gene Autry Singing Cowboy model, and showed him how to tune it, and how to strum and form his chords. His dad loved Jimmie Rodgers blue yodels and hard-knock country ballads; and a couple of Roys uncles, Orbie Lees brother Charlie and Uncle Kenneth, on his mother Nadines side, who sang from time to time on the local radio station in Vernon, would come around to pick and sing on the weekends. A pal of Orbie Lees from work named Clois Russell stopped by the house to play old country favorites with him at Sunday afternoon fish fries.

Orbie Lee and Clois sounded pretty good together and performed occasionally around town at local dances. Roy was not only blessed with his fathers voice, as he recalled in an interview years later, but Orbie Lee fueled his ten-year-old sons love of country music by taking him to see Lefty Frizzell, whose Number One hit If Youve Got the Money, Ive Got the Time was one of Roys favorites.

Orbisonnow thats a name you dont hear every day. Irish in origin, from the north, about twenty miles outside of Belfast, in county Armagh, in the town of Lurgan, known as The Long Ridge, a typical village lined with rows of small thatch-roofed cottages and a parish with a Protestant spire that looms over the town, tall and dark as a witchs hat. Lurgan was peopled, for the most part, by the British, who raised corn and manufactured and sold linen, both of which had begun to decline in profitability by the start of the 1700s.

Lurgan and neighboring villages of Portadown and Craigavon comprised what eventually became known as the dreaded Murder Triangle, a region so named for the constant violent clashes between the Protestants and Catholics that continued all the way into the 1990s. Roys earliest known ancestor, Thomas Orbison, born in 1715, hailed from the land where the Troubles raged.