Tracks: 1) This Kind Of Love; 2) Devil Doll; 3) You’re My Baby; 4) Tryin’ To Get To You; 5) It’s Too Late; 6) Rock House; 7) You’re Gonna Cry; 8) I Never Knew; 9) Sweet And Easy To Love; 10) Mean Little Mama; 11) Ooby Dooby; 12) Problem Child; 13*) Go! Go! Go!; 14*) Chicken Hearted; 15*) I Like Love.
REVIEW
I suppose that prior to December 1961, only the most knowledgeable and musically hungry teens in America knew that Roy Orbison’s original occupation was to make certified rockabilly records for the Sun label. Between 1956 and 1957, as lead singer and guitar player for his own little band (formerly The Wink Westerners, later renamed to The Teen Kings once Elvis became a thing), he cut four singles for Sam Phillips, only the first one of which made any visible impact on the charts (‘Ooby-Dooby’); the rest were pretty much ignored both by the public and Sam himself — actually, Sam’s attitude toward most of the artists he’d worked with after Elvis’ defection to RCA can be more or less summarized as going through three stages: [a] «could he be the next Elvis?», [b] «nah, he couldn’t be the next Elvis», [c] «what’s this guy still doing in my studio?». Some of those artists, after they’d left Sun and became big stars on their own, merited a Stage D: «oh, they made it big with somebody else, well, they have plenty of stuff left in our vaults, so let’s get it out now». Such was the fate of Johnny Cash, for instance, and the same happened to Roy Orbison, with a 12-song LP — more than half of which came from the archives — released in late 1961, by which time Roy had been a steady hitmaker for Monument Records for more than a year. Now all those new fans of America’s hip young modern artist could hear what he’d been up to five years earlier — except, of course, most of them weren’t really interested, and not even Roy himself could probably blame them.
Much like Cash, Roy would not completely renege on his rockabilly roots throughout his career — as late in his life as 1988, he would quite joyfully perform ‘Ooby-Dooby’ and ‘Go! Go! Go!’ live on stage (as captured on the excellent Black & White Night Live DVD), rather than wipe that stage out from his memory. Yet it probably goes without saying that, of all the young rockabilly artists trying to make their mark on the world in the wake of ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Roy Orbison must have been one of the oddest cases. Never a particularly great guitar player, never the kind of singer to be able to raise hell with his vocal chords, never a pelvis-thrustin’ sex symbol on the stage, the young Roy Orbison was a humble, bashful kid who could certainly love this kind of music — heck, I love AC/DC and I’m probably farther removed from the average stereotype of an AC/DC fan than from the Sun — but who was tremendously underequipped to perform it, and that’s putting it mildly. Blaming Sam Phillips for failing to promote those flops is pointless; there was not a chance in hell anyway that they’d be able to withstand competition with the likes of Gene Vincent or Sun’s own Jerry Lee Lewis. Even Bob Dylan, with his Golden Chords from his teen days at Hibbing, might have had a better stab with this while his primary idol was still Elvis rather than Woody Guthrie.
Even so, Roy’s short and commercially disastrous rockabilly period was not completely pointless. It did leave us with ‘Ooby Dooby’, a song originally written by aspiring Texan songwriters Dick Penner and Wade Moore that somehow fell into the hands of Roy Orbison and his «Wink Westerners» as early as 1955. The song itself is nothing special — it clearly models itself after ‘Tutti Frutti’, toning down the sex aspect of the latter and making it a little safer for general consumption — but Roy’s merit here is the brilliantly constructed lead guitar break, showing how much, perhaps on a subconscious level, he was already craving for Apollonian harmonic perfection even while playing supposedly «wild» rock’n’roll. He probably took Carl Perkins as his role model, but the guitar breaks on ‘Ooby Dooby’ are cleaner, more precise and thought-out than just about anything I’ve heard from Carl, even if it does not make them automatically superior. Years later, John Fogerty would recognize Roy’s goals and, with the aid of more modern production and a slightly better technique, take them even further on his tributary cover of the song — but do take note that John essentially just copied Orbison’s solos almost note-for-note, something he’d be rarely interested in doing when taking on other artists’ songs.
(Somewhat off-topic, if you want to hear a somewhat different take on ‘Ooby Dooby’, it’s a good pretext to get acquainted with a little bit of Janis Martin, who was, for a short while, promoted by RCA as the «Female Elvis» — before she eloped with her boyfriend, got pregnant, and forever ruined her prospects of a successful American career, leaving Wanda Jackson and Brenda Lee to reap the seeds she’d sown. I think that might be Grady Martin backing her on lead guitar on this recording, and he devises his own solos rather than copying Orbison’s — pretty sweet, but mainly just going to show how perfect the original ones were in the first place. Unfortunately, Janis never made it big because most of her songs were straightforward rewrites of popular rockabilly hits with new sets of lyrics — but she does deserve some recognition due to her pioneering effort).
Anyway, ‘Oooby Dooby’ was cutesy-cool, and, arguably, its B-side, ‘Go! Go! Go!’, may have been even better, with the Teen Kings really putting on the speed and Roy making the first triumphant demonstration of his vocal range, moving up an octave in the chorus to raise the level of rock’n’roll hysteria as high as possible. It was also his first proper songwriting credit, though, honestly, the song is more or less just a variation on Hank Snow’s ‘I’m Movin’ On’ — it’s not the compositional genius that matters here but the level of stomping energy, unusually impressive for a timid guy like Roy. (The song would later be covered by Jerry Lee Lewis as ‘Down The Line’, but the Killer would just convert it to his usual Killer style like he did with everything else).
And that was it. ‘Ooby Dooby’ charted — a little bit — and sold — enough to let Roy keep his contract with Sun and continue cutting records with the label — but nothing that followed made any impact. ‘Rockhouse’, from September 1956, feels less like an attempt to repeat the alluring primitivism of ‘Ooby Dooby’ and more like a conscious mimicking of Elvis’ last singles for Sun, such as ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, which does not work for Roy because his voice simply refuses to provide the same effects that Elvis’ does — as energetic and danceable as the song is, Orbison sounds like a struggling imitator here, and even the guitar breaks feel like a poor man’s replacements of Scotty Moore’s talents. The B-side, ‘You’re My Baby’, was even speedier, and I really dig the fast chuggin’ interplay between rhythm and lead guitars, but the vocals just don’t work.
With the ‘Rockhouse’ single flopping, Roy tried to go for something different on his next release and came up with ‘Sweet And Easy To Love’, a comparatively gentle pop-rock song more reminiscent of Buddy Holly than Elvis — although, to be accurate, the single came out in March 1957, by which time ‘That’ll Be The Day’ had not yet been released and nobody really knew of Buddy Holly... well, come to think of it, ‘Sweet And Easy To Love’ sounds more like a Carl Perkins country number with comparatively croonier, Buddy Holly-esque vocals. The old-fashioned doo-wop harmonies surrounding Roy’s lead vocal sound positively moronic, though. The B-side, ‘Devil Doll’, slows things even further, for the first time ever placing 100% emphasis on vocals, both backing and lead — and perhaps it could have really been something with better production, but the usual Sun limitations apply here rather painfully, so that the song ultimately becomes a muffled mess, sounding like Roy was singing it from down in the cellar, separated from the mikes by a thick layer of concrete. (Somehow this approach sometimes worked in the case of Elvis, but Roy Orbison’s voice is just not powerful enough to get such rough treatment).
The shift of approach did not help; the record became another flop, prompting Roy to briefly return back to the classic rockabilly format and outside songwriters. His last single for Sun (December 1957) was one of the oddest records in his «archaic» catalog: ‘Chicken Hearted’, driven forward by laconic, lashing-out electric guitar bursts and occasional patches of lead sax that take their cues from Little Richard’s ‘Keep-A-Knockin’ and ‘Slippin’ And Slidin’, is close to being a fully instrumental blues-rock groove — and the lead guitar break sounds like Roy Orbison inventing Neil Young lead guitar à la ‘Down By The River’ twelve years before the occasion. Most interesting is the fact that the original song, credited to Bill Justis (best known as the composer of ‘Raunchy’, the instrumental that famously got George Harrison accepted into the Beatles), apparently featured a complete set of «anti-hero» lyrics ("My girlfriend slipped and fell / Now she’s hanging from a cliff / I can’t come to her rescue / But these flowers I must sniff"), and there is even a rare outtake version of the song featuring Roy mumble them out incomprehensibly — but on the final cut, he decided to throw them out and just go with the absolute minimum. Possibly because the lyrics were quite biting for their time: "Mama’s in the workshop / Daddy’s in the jail / I seem to be afraid / To go to work and make their bail" — just a short step from here to something like ‘Tombstone Blues’, but young Mr. Roy Orbison was apparently too chicken-hearted to pioneer it.
In any case, the final result is quite quirky and, perhaps, the closest Orbison ever came — accidentally — to patenting his own brand of rockabilly; but this very oddness made the song ineligible for any potential chart success even if Sam Phillips were to heavily promote it, which, of course, he did not. The B-side, ‘I Like Love’, written by Jerry Lee Lewis’ main songwriter Jack Clement, was much more stereotypical and would have made decent fodder for the Killer, but sounds expectedly unconvincing when delivered by Roy; ‘Chicken Hearted’ would be much closer to his true heart than having to sleazily bark out "I LIKE IT!" when it’s simply not the man’s natural style.
And that was all she wrote, that is, until Roy’s career at Monument Records started picking up and Sam Phillips suddenly woke up from his slumber and remembered he still had a bunch of unreleased stuff from Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings lying around in Sun’s inexhaustible vaults. The resulting album, At The Rock House, included most of the aforelisted A- and B-sides (though, inexplainably, not ‘Chicken Hearted’), plus seven more songs, most of which are conspicuously softer and more melodic than the energetic rockabilly stuff Sam wanted Roy to release officially — except for ‘Mean Little Mama’, which sounds inspired by Elvis’ ‘Got A Lot O’ Living To Do’, and ‘Problem Child’, which tries to marry the guitar style of Chuck Berry to the vocal style of Elvis. Both songs are fun, if you are able to look past the usual dreadful standards of tinny production on Sun Records — vocals and instruments all sound as if they were wrapped in half a dozen blankets.
As for the softer material, direct competition with Elvis on a cover of ‘Trying To Get To You’ does not quite work in Roy’s favor (although he does give the song a predictably more subtle and nuanced reading); ‘It’s Too Late’ is sweet, but rather unnecessary in light of the already existing Chuck Willis and Buddy Holly versions; and the other three songs are early stabs at original pop-rock songwriting, marred by a little too much recycling of pre-existing ideas and the usual low production standards — perhaps an important step forward in Roy’s personal history, but too much of this stuff feels as if there was always this constant pressure on Roy to become the ersatz Elvis for the label, and it’s not highly likely that he ever felt comfortable about this. On the other hand, he did later remember that there was a considerable amount of freedom during his years with Sun — at least, freedom to write and record, if not freedom to publish.
In the end, though, Roy’s rockabilly years are still bound to remain a charming footnote in his personal history. Roy was never a genuine rocker by his true nature, even if he undeniably loved rock’n’roll («loving» something and «being a part of it» are two completely different things, though), and it is only through his overall talent and professionalism that ‘Ooby Dooby’, ‘Problem Child’, ‘Chicken Hearted’ and the other highlights on here remain listenable and enjoyable after all these years, provided you can look past the production muck. Admittedly, At The Rock House is still a pretty good place to assess Roy’s talents as a team player in a rock’n’roll band: The Teen Kings at their best put up a hell of a tight groove, and, ironically, there are few spots in Roy’s discography where you can hear him play a meaner, leaner, speedier guitar than he does on some of these cuts (that’s one advantage he sure holds over both Elvis and Johnny Cash, his chief rockabilly competitors on the label). But heroes of early rock’n’roll are rarely judged by the amount of discipline and practice in their guitar playing — more often than not, they’re judged by the intensity of the fire in their spirit, and although Roy had plenty of intensity, it just wasn’t the kind of intensity that made you want to smash your chair over your neighbor’s head, which is the kind of noble goal that every noble rock’n’roller typically aspires to reach.
For the sake of completionism, it is also necessary to mention Roy’s very brief stint with RCA Records, which signed him up after he’d left Sun — perhaps somewhat mechanistically, hoping that they were making the same kind of right move when they lured Elvis away from his original makers. Roy only put out two singles for the label, both of which flopped and got him quickly canned, but both represent an important chunk of progress for the man: ‘Seems To Me’ and ‘Sweet And Innocent’ are smooth pop songs with heavy emphasis on Roy’s soothing vocals, and although the hooks are weak, the style is already much more close to his Monument era than to the Sun rockabilly one. ‘Almost Eighteen’, released in January 1959, has a bit more rock’n’roll energy, and the Felix & Boudleaux Bryant-penned ‘Jolie’ is a cutesy French-tinged pop ditty that is hard to take seriously but even harder to get offended about. Most importantly, though, all four of these sides were personally produced by Chet Atkins, and this means that they sound awesome next to the muddy waters of Sun’s production — crystal clear guitars, perfectly audible vocals with every overtone registering ideally in your mind. Nothing against Monument’s Fred Foster, who did a fine job helping people properly discern the uniqueness of Roy’s voice, but I sure wish that partnership with Chet could have gone on for at least a little longer.
It’s still a bit of a scholarly question — just exactly how much had the «Sam Phillips School For Beginning Artists» helped shape and nurture Roy’s artistic persona for the big things to come in the future. I do suspect that, career-wise, had Roy stuck from the very beginning to writing melodic pop songs, he might have ended up as Carole King — peddling his services to other artists for a decade or so before gathering the courage and grabbing the opportunity to launch his own artistic career. The rockabilly market, being far more of a D.I.Y. sort of thing back in the Fifties, gave artists a better chance to speak up for themselves than the already far more corporate-controlled pop business, so that, by the time Roy decided to make a decisive shift to pop, he had already established a sort of reputation as a singer and player, not just a composer. In other words, it may be so that without ‘Ooby Dooby’ we would not have ourselves an ‘Oh! Pretty Woman’ — at least, not as it was recorded in 1964 by Roy Orbison, rather than somebody else at some other time. Then again, (a) this is just educated speculation on my part, and (b) this has nothing to do with the far more important question of whether there is still a reason to listen to, or a possibility of enjoying an album like this in the 21st century... and ultimately, it probably all depends on just exactly how chicken-hearted you feel in this day and age, dear reader.
Only Solitaire reviews: Roy Orbison
"But heroes of early rock’n’roll are rarely judged by the amount of discipline and practice in their guitar playing — more often than not, they’re judged by the intensity of the fire in their spirit..."
And what fire it was. I love reading anything I can about Sun records and George, you bring it home so well. I was barely alive but alive during this period. A little child laying in the backseat soaking in these tunes in a Studebaker rumbling along route 66 in Oklahoma.
About 1964 I remember staying the night at my grandmothers with my cousin. She was melting records on the stove making candy dishes. Can you imagine eating Circus Peanuts from a now invaluable Elvis Sun record made into a bowl? Meanwhile I was reading my Marvel Spider-Man #1 comic having little value at the time. Both items worth fortunes now.