by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution KPBS showed something called A Black &
White Night 30, which I briefly thought was
going to be an entirely new program paying tribute to Roy Orbison by reuniting
some of the guest stars that joined him for the original A Black
& White Night program in 1987 — Bruce
Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, k. d. lang, T Bone
Burnett and others — in new performances of his songs. Surprise: it was
actually simply a rerun of the original A Black & White Night, with Orbison in surprisingly good vocal form in
songs he’d first recorded nearly three decades earlier (though, alas, he did not still have the vocal chops to sing that awesomely
beautiful falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” — Linda Ronstadt
duplicated that on her 1970’s cover but it’s nowhere nearly as much a surprise
to hear a woman go that high than a man) and with the other stars placed well
back of the mix because the business of the evening was to allow Roy Orbison to
present his songs directly instead of to shoehorn him into a series of slapdash
“duets” with later artists. Roy Orbison had one of the weirdest career
trajectories of just about anyone with a reputation as a rock ’n’ roll artist.
It looked like he was going to begin where so much white rock of the 1950’s
began — at the legendary Sun record label of Memphis, Tennessee, owned by Sam
C. Phillips, which had broken the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl
Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis (and Black artists like B. B. King, Bobby “Blue”
Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and Ike Turner before that!). He and his
first band, the Teen-Kings, landed a Sun audition after recording a song called
“Ooby Dooby” on a tiny label called Je-Wel (notice the hyphen). Sam Phillips
heard both the song and the Teen Kings, liked them, thought he could do better
re-recording the song in his own studio, and Orbison had a minor Southern hit.
But he didn’t get along with Phillips, he didn’t really fit into the rockabilly
mold of most of Sun’s white artists, and after his contract ran out he signed
with RCA Victor and made seven records with them, of which only two were
considered releasable. The one single RCA put out on Orbison flopped and his
attempts to place his songs with other RCA Victor artists also failed (though
he did get a song called
“Claudette,” named after the 17-year-old girlfriend he eventually married,
placed with the Everly Brothers, who recorded it as the B-side of their
mega-hit “All I Have to Do Is Dream”).
In desperation Orbison signed with a
producer named Fred Foster who owned a tiny record label called Monument — and
Foster’s idea of how to break Orbison and have hits with him was to steer him away from rock ’n’ roll and make him over into a ballad
singer, using soft-rock backbeats on his songs but backing him with strings and
“whisper” backing vocalists in the style of mainstream country crooners of the
period like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. While Orbison kept up his rock chops on
songs like “Mean Woman Blues,” “Mean Little Mama” and his last Monument hit,
“Oh, Pretty Woman” (a big seller in both the U.S. and Britain in 1964 despite
the rivalry of the Beatles and the other groups of the so-called “British
Invasion”), most of his Monument successes were slow or mid-tempo songs in
ballad tempo that took advantage of Orbison’s unique voice, perched on the edge
between tenor and baritone and with a far stronger legato than most rock singers. Coming in during the early
1960’s, generally a wretched time for rock ’n’ roll — Buddy Holly, Ritchie
Valens, the Big Bopper and Eddie Cochran had died; Elvis Presley had been drafted
for two years (and had come home to a new strategy by his manager, Col. Tom
Parker, to steer him away from
rock and rebrand him as a mainstream crooner); Little Richard left music for
four years to become a minister; and sexual scandals wrecked the careers of
Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry — and these overpowering greats had been
replaced on the charts by the bland likes of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Besides
Orbison’s Monument hits, about the only enduring rock being made in the early
1960’s was coming from the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys (I’ve often joked that
if you lived, or wanted to live, on the East Coast in the early 1960’s you
thought the Four Seasons were the future of rock and if you lived, or wanted to
live, on the West Coast you thought the Beach Boys were the future), and solo
artists Del Shannon and Ricky Nelson (who was often lumped in with the fakers
like Avalon and Fabian but who actually had a flair for rock and went out of
his way to record with the best musicians, including session guitarist James
Burton who later toured with Elvis).
As Orbison’s Wikipedia page sums him up, “While
most male rock and roll
performers in the 1950’s and 1960’s projected a defiant masculinity, many of
Orbison’s songs instead conveyed a quiet, almost desperate, vulnerability. His
voice ranged from baritone
to tenor, and music scholars
have suggested that he had a three- or four-octave range. During performances,
he was known for standing still and solitary, and for wearing black clothes, to
match his jet-black hair and dark sunglasses, which lent an air of mystery to
his persona.” He achieved
superstardom with the ballad-rock hit “Only the Lonely,” an extraordinary song
that was a major influence on the Beatles — John Lennon tried to write a rock
ballad like it called “Please Please Me,” and when the Beatles’ record
producer, George Martin, rejected it John sped it up as an all-out rock song
and it became the Beatles’ first Number One hit in the U.K. and the real start
of their career — and throughout the rest of the early 1960’s the hits just
kept on coming: “Blue Angel,” “Dream Baby,” “Blue Bayou,” “I’m Hurtin,” “Leah”
(a bizarre song about a Southern Pacific pearl diver who drowns while
attempting to pull up the biggest pearl of all for his girlfriend Leah —
Orbison was known as an inveterate movie-goer who when he wasn’t working would see
as many as three movies in one day, and this song suggests his film viewing
extended to the 1931 F. W. Murnau-Robert Flaherty Tabu), “Crying” (later remade by Don McLean in 1980 into
a comeback hit for him), “Pretty
Paper” (a Christmas-themed song by the young Willie Nelson at a time when
Nelson was trying to get his
career established by placing songs with other, more established artists: he
placed “Hello Walls” with Faron Young and really scored big when he placed
“Crazy” with Patsy Cline). “It’s Over” and occasionally a midtempo rocker like
“Uptown” for a musical and commercial change of pace. After releasing “Oh,
Pretty Woman” in 1964, Orbison went into a slide; he made the mistake of
leaving Monument Records and signing with MGM Records because MGM also owned a
film studio and promised him five movie roles as well as a record deal. (He
made only one film, a 1967 comedy Western called The Fastest Guitar
Alive in which he played a Confederate spy
who carried a guitar that could convert into a rifle, of which he says in the
film, “I could kill you with this and play your funeral march at the same
time.” The film was such a flop MGM canceled his other movie commitments.)
His
personal life also unraveled at the same time, reaching its lowest point when
in 1968, while on a tour in England, he got word that his home in Tennessee had
burned to the ground and killed two of his sons. Later his health declined; he
was diagnosed with heart disease in 1977 and had triple bypass surgery, though
as soon as he was well enough to record Scott Mathews, Ron Nagle’s songwriting
partner in the Dúrocs, got him a gig recording a new version of “Oh, Pretty
Woman” for the woman’s beauty product Tone Soap, and he made a lot of money
both in song royalties and his performance. Orbison drifted around to several
record companies when his deal with MGM ended, including a one-album return to
Monument and an attempt to cut a new album for Asylum (home of Linda Ronstadt,
who had covered “Blue Bayou,” and the Eagles, who had once opened for Orbison),
Laminar Flow, which was such a
big flop cut-out copies turned up in record close-out bins for years after its
release in 1976. Orbison finally got his crack at a comeback in 1987 when Jeff
Lynne, co-founder of the Electric Light Orchestra and a major record producer
in his own right, recruited him for an all-star band called “The Traveling
Wilburys” that also included George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. He
parlayed that into the deal to do the Black & White Night video, which was shot at the Cocoanut Grove
nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel where Bing Crosby had first achieved
stardom with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931, and a new solo album called Mystery
Girl which sold well. But Orbison responded
to his comeback by scheduling a back-breaking tour that caused a return of his
heart disease, which killed him in 1988 at age 52. I hadn’t seen A
Black & White Night since pretty close
to its original release (though it’s been a mainstay of PBS pledge-break
periods ever since) and this time around I was surprised at how deliberately
retro the production was. Not only was it shot in black-and-white, it was lit
very much like a band performance from a 1940’s musical and there were even
shots of cigarette smoke drifting past the stage lights and becoming visible.
(In fact there’s a brief shot of a cigarette girl working the audience exactly
as would have happened in a 1940’s club — and the whole thing is a wrenching
reminder that in my lifetime it was still not only permissible but even
encouraged to smoke inside a night-life venue.)
The other thing that sets this
apart from most tribute shows to veteran acts today is that the focus remains
exclusively on Orbison: there are no duet performances (though Bruce
Springsteen contributes virtually inaudible second vocals to “Uptown” and
“Dream Baby,” and these songs — among the few uptempo hits Orbison had at his
peak — might actually have been more exciting as Orbison-Springsteen duets) and
none of the guest artists are introduced: they’re just there, and one goes, “Was that — ?” as
you see Costello playing harmonica on “Uptown” or Browne or Raitt or lang at a
backing-vocal mike. It also helped that Orbison’s voice was surprisingly intact
(he had to duck the big falsetto high note at the end of “Blue Bayou” but that
was pretty much the only time he
had to compromise), and unlike a lot of singers in his later years that killer legato was still intact. (It’s the legato — his ability to sustain a long, heavily ornamented
vocal line and enunciate each note clearly but also bind it to its neighbors —
and his command of melisma, the
“sliding” from one note to the next that rock ’n’ roll inherited not only from
Black gospel and R&B singing but also traditional Irish folk music — which
is where Irish-descended singers like Bing Crosby and John Lennon learned it —
that make Orbison’s voice so unique in the history of pop music in general and
rock in particular.) A Black & White Night seems astonishing today not only for how well
Orbison’s voice had held up from its heyday in the early 1960’s in this 1987
performance but for how the production strove for a “class” image throughout,
with the musicians (the male ones, anyway) in suits and ties, the
cinematography recalling classic Hollywood rather than the quick cutting and disconnected
imagery of music videos that was already being established as the standard way
to present rock on film, and the visible evidence of the entire orchestra, including the string players, being
present and performing their parts in real time instead of Orbison singing to
pre-recorded backing tracks the way Elvis did on most of his later TV specials. Orbison’s legacy is one of the
quirkiest in rock ’n’ roll, and though he could rock he was always most effective on ballads, and
his unique performing style (he stood stock-still through his songs and didn’t
move around to the music, which he said was because so few of his songs
contained the instrumental breaks during which other rockers did move, but may have also been part of his big-time
stage fright) was well showcased in A Black & White Night.
