Nothing of Consequence, Mostly: The Big O

The end of 2020 saw the anniversary of the death in 1988 of Roy Orbison, at which point he had been dead just as long as he had been a recording musician, 32 years. Yet despite his absence these past three decades, he's never truly gone away, has he?

With that gorgeous near-operatic voice, Roy sang of love and heartache like no one else. And he knew both in vast measure. For years, he could seemingly do no wrong, putting hit after hit on the charts, starting a family with the girl of his dreams, Claudette, and building a magnificent home next door to his best friend, Johnny Cash. But then it all seemed to come tumbling down in quick succession; the hits stopped, due to changing musical tastes in the second half of the 1960s (and a switch to a new record label that seemed to have little understanding of how to properly promoter their superstar artist) ...Claudette died tragically in an accident...and then two of his three young sons were killed when that mansion Roy had built caught fire and burned to the ground. Johnny Cash bought the land and put a grove of trees there to commemorate the lost lives.

To keep his sanity as these ill winds blew, Roy threw himself deeper into his music, continuing to write and record, even if the audience was no longer what it once was. He spent twenty years in this musical wilderness, but not alone...he found new love and a second wife with Barbara, and fathered two more sons. He continued to be a popular live act, playing to packed houses all over the world. And even if he couldn't score a hit himself, cover versions of his earlier smashes ("Blue Bayou" by Linda Ronstadt, "Crying" by Don McLean, "Oh Pretty Woman" by Van Halen) sold in the millions, and earned Roy fortunes as a songwriter.

The mid-Eighties saw the fates smile upon him again at last. It was a slow but steady climb back into the public eye: Director David Lynch used Roy's performance of "In Dreams" to powerful effect in his 1986 hit film, Blue Velvet, and produced a new music video of the song with Roy that found itself in heavy rotation on MTV. The following year, Roy was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an occasion which allowed younger superstar artists to wax rhapsodic about his place in music history. Then came A Black and White Night, a concert film (in black & white, of course) in which Roy is backed by an all-star band, including Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and k.d. lang. The film was an instant hit when it aired on Cinemax, introducing an entirely new generation of fans to Orbison's canon of classics (and to this day, PBS continues to air it each year during their pledge drives, and it consistently proves to be their biggest donation generator!).

But those were baby steps compared to the One-Two punch that came next. First was the recording of Roy's first full album in nearly ten years. He called upon some of his superstar friends...Costello, Tom Petty, Bono and the Edge from U2...to pen new tunes for him, to go along with some new original numbers he himself had written. And he brought in Jeff Lynne, late of ELO, as his producer; Lynne had just produced the great comeback album of 1987, George Harrison's CLOUD 9, and he was anxious to repeat that success with Orbison (for good luck, he brought along the former Beatle to play on the album). The result was MYSTERY GIRL, and it would prove to be every bit as much the smash hit anyone could hope for, both with critics and the public.

But first, there was a wholly unexpected triumph that no one had anticipated: The Traveling Wilburys. It was entirely unintentional...Harrison, visiting in LA, needed to record a new song as the b-side of his next single, and asked Lynne for help. Wanting to use a specific guitar, which he had loaned to Tom Petty, George swung by the rocker's house to pick it up. Upon hearing that the pair were going to record, and with nothing else to do that evening, Petty asked if he could join in. Needing a recording studio, Harrison called up Bob Dylan, who had a demo studio set up at his home; no one had expected the reclusive Dylan to actually participate, but he surprised them all by saying it sounded like fun, and he joined in. It was then that Lynne made the suggestion of asking Roy to take part. Everybody froze...here was a Beatle, Dylan, and two other million-selling rock stars, and just the idea of asking an icon like ROY ORBISON to perform with them left them stunned. "Do you really think he'd do it?" the other three asked, and Jeff said, "Well, let's ask." And in no time at all, wearing his trademark sunglasses, there was Roy Orbison in Dylan's makeshift studio, and the quintet came up with "Handle With Care".

Harrison's record label, Warner Bros., promptly rejected it...not because it was bad, but because it was too good. "This isn't a b-side," the label head told George, "It needs to be the first track of a whole album!" Having enjoyed the one-night experience so much, the five stars cleared their schedule for two weeks and wrote all of the songs from scratch. The album was released later that year with no advance fanfare, and it took the world by storm.

Suddenly Roy Orbison found himself a part of the biggest thing in rock and roll, on the eve of the release of his comeback album.

And then fate, as it so often did in the Roy Orbison story, took as much as it gave. Now it took everything, because it took Roy.

On December 6 of 1988, Roy was back home in Tennessee, having just finished another successful tour. He was leaving in a few days for London, where the Wilburys were assembling to shoot a music video, so Orbison spent the day relaxing...he visited with old friend Johnny Cash, took his boys out to indulge in one of their favorite hobbies, flying model planes, and had dinner with his mom. And later that night, that great heart, which had carried such joy and ache in equal measure, ceased beating.

MYSTERY GIRL was released the following month. Both the album and the first single, "You Got It", where Top Ten hits around the world. He won his fourth and fifth Grammys posthumously. By any measure, his comeback was an absolute triumph, but for the fact that destiny had decreed he would not be here to savor it.

The one thing that strikes me the most about Roy Orbison is that when anyone who knew him speaks of him, it's never about his fame. Rather, they speak of how, despite all of his success, he never allowed his ego to run rampant. Indeed, he was perhaps the humblest star in rock history. One example: In 1963 Roy did a tour of the United Kingdom, where if anything he was an even bigger star than he was in the U.S. His opening act was a new group called the Beatles, with whom Roy instantly made friends with. After several performances, Roy...the headline star, remember...decided that the Beatles' high energy rock set was better suited than his ballad-heavy act to close the show, so he switched places with them! What other star of his magnitude would ever do that? But for Roy Orbison, it wasn't important who finished the show...all that mattered was the show itself, and he believed trading places with the Liverpudlians made for a better show for the fans.