Well, alphabetically, we moved from one very personally connected album to another with at least a little bit of a personal connection.
I don’t think it’s this way anymore, not in an age when younger generations have embraced artists like Tony Bennett or Tom Jones – but when I was developing my musical tastes, there were artists and genres that were just not cool to listen to. Anything that might have been considered “square,” a completely arbitrary designation – that stuff was off limits. Some of it was social pressure – I had limited social capital to spend on openly liking things that weren’t considered “cool” by my peers, as ridiculous as that sounds now. Some of it was just the reality of the different genres, because I grew up when The Beatles and the British Invasion changed everything, musically, and almost anything that came before just sounded – unhip.
There were exceptions – Buddy Holly’s incredible energy, which of course inspired so many of the British acts, crossed the gap, and to a lesser degree so did Eddie Cochran. And so did Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman,” an absolute classic from 1963 that still thumps today.
Unfortunately, that number 1 single pretty much capped off Roy Orbison’s career until its revival with The Traveling Wilburys 25 years later. Some of the songs he wrote had real lasting impact – “Blue Bayou” as sung by Linda Ronstadt, for example, or “Crying” as done by Don McLean. But where “Oh Pretty Woman” has a clean, modern, driving sound, nearly every other song on this collection sounds, well, square. Everything’s got a lush string arrangement. Roy had an incredible, distinctive voice, and each of these songs plays to the strength of that voice, but they’re all kinda the same. Listen to Eddie, listen to Buddy – there’s some more variety and experimentation among their works, even though some of their songs sound exactly like this. But all these Roy songs are produced pretty identically. And if you’re not into that heavy strings sound, well, it’s not cool.
So, I didn’t think Roy Orbison was cool until The Traveling Wilburys. I had already gained an appreciation for another pretty square artist of the day, the legendary (and somewhat similarly voiced) Gene Pitney, whose songs I came to appreciate during some years when I was forced to listen to “oldies” AM radio every damn day when I was working at a printing plant. And then, just a few years later, Pitney was featured when he joined Marc Almond – my absolute favorite artist at the time – on Pitney’s “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart.” Those soaring vocals!
The Wilburys came along, Roy got to work out on some material other than slushy romantic ballads (although “Not Alone Any More” is pure Orbison, his contributions on “Handle With Care” and “Last Night” stand out), and younger audiences gained an appreciation for this relic of another era, who was all of 52 when these songs were recorded.
Still, this particular collection is a lot of the same thing, so it doesn’t get played all that often.
The personal connection, however, is that this is the first record album given to me by one of my children. They gave me various other CDs through the years, but sometime when they were in high school, my elder took it upon themself to buy me some records for my collection, and this was one they chose … because they knew Roy was in the Wilburys, and I loved the Wilburys. Isn’t that sweet? (The other was a reissue copy of Sticky Fingers without the working zipper – because I always had to keep my working zipper copy separate from the rest of the collection.) So yeah, this 1972 collection of Roy’s gets a spin from time to time just because it reminds me of that.
