Review: Roy Orbison - Sings Lonely And Blue (1961)

Tracks: 1) Only The Lonely (Know The Way I Feel); 2) Bye-Bye Love; 3) Cry; 4) Blue Avenue; 5) I Can’t Stop Loving You; 6) Come Back To Me (My Love); 7) Blue Angel; 8) Raindrops; 9) (I’d Be) A Legend In My Time; 10) I’m Hurtin’; 11) Twenty-Two Days; 12) I’ll Say It’s My Fault; 13*) Uptown; 14*) Pretty One; 15*) Here Comes That Song Again; 16*) Today’s Teardrops.

REVIEW

Although Roy Orbison’s professional career properly begins as early as 1956, with the recording of ‘Ooby Dooby’ for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, it would not be until late 1961 — already after Roy had become a rising star at Monument Records — that Sun would bother putting some of those early, rockabilly-era recordings onto an actual LP. Thus, technically, Roy Orbison Sings Lonely And Blue became the singer’s first album, even if stylistically it already represents the second stage of Roy’s career, in which, after his only semi-successful stint as a rockabilly artist, he reinvented himself as a pop troubadour — and never ever went back. Roy’s rockabilly-era Sun output will be covered later, in the review of At The Rock House; for now, we shall skip it, as well as Roy’s two formative singles during his even shorter stay at RCA, and proceed straight to the beginning of a new life.  

That new life, for all purposes, begins with ‘Paper Boy’, released as a single on September 28, 1959 — from a certain point of view, the single most important song in Roy Orbison’s history. RCA did not let Roy issue it, for reasons that seem rather unclear to me: it would have been one thing if the label truly wanted their new acquisition to go on putting out «rocking» material, but they did not — by late 1959, the emphasis on rock’n’roll was already fading away, and solid, catchy pop songs were all the rage, so I am not exactly sure what it was that they found so wrong about ‘Paper Boy’. In the end, Roy took it with him to the Monument label, and although the song did not chart (so maybe RCA were right about it all along?), it still heralded the arrival of «Troubadour Roy», with typically symptomatic lyrics: "I walk down to the blue side of town / Where there’s no happiness, no joy". Prepare yourself for some tight bonding with the word ‘blue’, which, judging by the frequency of its appearance in Roy’s lyrics, must have been his favorite color (I can almost picture the man dressing in it from head to toe one day and dubbing himself "The Man In Blue", then going on a joint tour with his former Sun Records partner as The Man In Blue And The Man In Black).

Although ‘Paper Boy’ already featured the basics of Roy’s musical aesthetics and was recorded with the Nashville A-Team that would become his standard vehicle for everything, it is not yet fully typical of the early Roy Orbison sound. For one thing, there are no strings, which would soon become an essential component. For another, The Voice is not quite there yet; Roy still sounds like a human being rather than a supernatural force, not having quite found those registers and frequencies that Mother Nature granted him at birth, but with the stipulation that he’d have to eventually discover them by himself. (Ironically, Jack Clement at Sun Records allegedly told Roy that he would never succeed as a ballad singer — and given his data at the time, he was probably correct about it). But the direction indicated by ‘Paper Boy’ is already quite promising: write a song that merges together the pop styles of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, give it a relatively tasteful guitar and brass arrangement, soak it in romantic melancholy, and there you have it — a pop music Schubert is born for the upcoming decade of teenage entertainment. (Curiously, the B-side ‘With The Bug’ still remains an umbilical cord tying Roy down to his rockabilly roots — it’s a fun enough dance number, but neither too original melodically nor bringing out the best in Orbison’s voice).

After ‘Paper Boy’ failed to make the grade, Roy decided to try out a slightly more optimistic vibe with ‘Uptown’, his first significant collaboration with future long-time partner Joe Melson. The song is usually quoted as more or less inventing the classic Roy Orbison sound — with its heavily prominent emphasis on both lead and backing vocals (due to engineer Bill Porter’s strategy of building the song up starting with voices rather than instruments) and its clever use of orchestration; by «clever» I mean not having the strings carry the entire melody, as Snuff Garrett did with Johnny Burnette, but rather engaging in occasional dialog with the singer, playing short, hook-like phrases with a bit of a «shocking» effect. The only problem was that for an upbeat, positive-energy-loaded song like ‘Uptown’, whose lowly-boy-dreams-big lyrics sounded as if they were tailor-made for Eddie Cochran ("It won’t be long, just wait and see / I’ll have a big car, fine clothes / And then I’ll be / Uptown, in penthouse number three"), Roy’s vocals were hardly the best fit, even if he did live in a tiny apartment with his wife and son at the time and "one of these days, I’m gonna have money" was far from a meaningless line for the man. Still, the vibe properly requires a stinging, aggressive, hungry vocal delivery, and Roy... well, Roy was just too much of a gentleman in a suit to provide.

He’s far more indispensable on the largely — and totally unjustly — forgotten B-side, ‘Pretty One’, a slow ballad that sort of fell through the cracks but is actually the very first proper showcase of Roy’s vocal range and his classic technique of emotional build-up from the lower to the higher octaves. It’s a smooth, but tremendously dynamic journey from the bottom grim a cappella accusation of "Hey there, pretty one / Take a look at what you’ve done" to the crowning broken-hearted falsetto of "Remember I still love you", and even if similar and technically more stunning journeys would be waiting in the future, I am a little puzzled about why nobody ever talks about ‘Pretty One’ as the starting point of Roy’s impeccably Apollonic «multi-storied vocal towers». Give the lowly B-side a break!

It is, in fact, the very same strategy that he employs for ‘Pretty One’ which would soon be followed on the far more success­ful ‘Only The Lonely’ — there, too, Roy makes you wait for the final verse to unleash his full potential. "Maybe tomorrow — a new romance — no more sorrow — but that’s the chance — YOU GOTTA TAKE": these are the twenty seconds of singing that finally sold Mr. Orbison to audiences across both sides of the Atlantic. It’s funny, but I seem to detect just a tiny bit of vocal cracking at the beginning of the cha-a-a-a-nce bit, as if Roy was overstretching his natural range (or simply not yet having it fully trained); but even if it’s my brain playing tricks on me, there’s no denying that the quasi-operatic style that Roy demonstrates on ‘Only The Lonely’ has a much rawer, «homebrewn» feel to it than, for instance, the glossy polish of Elvis on ‘It’s Now Or Never’. Ironically, ‘Only The Lonely’ is said to have been initially offered to the King and rejected; I’m sure that it is only a matter of time now, in our advancing age of artificial pseudo-intelligence, before we hear how the song could have sounded in Elvis’ version, but, you know, Elvis doesn’t really do the broken-hearted vibe too well.

Actually, even more ironic are the obvious musical similarities between ‘It’s Now Or Never’ and ‘Only The Lonely’, set to pretty much the same rhythm; in fact, once the melody stops for the first time you almost expect Roy to pick up "it’s now or never...". Inevitably, there’s a bit of that Neapolitan romantic corniness attached, and I am also not a big fan of the dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah oh-yay-yay-yay backing vocals which sound as if they are uninvited guests from some Jan & Dean baby-talk universe rather than natural shadows of Roy’s broken-hearted delivery; on the other hand, it is hard to suggest any proper alternatives, because the song’s mood sort of requires Roy to have a conversation with a bunch of shadows on the wall, and if the Anita Kerr Singers could not find any more, uhm, respectable syllables to vocalize, then so be it. But maybe they should have gotten The Jordanaires instead. In any case, it’s ‘Only The Fuckin’ Lonely’, right? One of those songs where critique is useless even if you hate it, which I certainly don’t.

Predictably, the sequel to ‘Only The Lonely’ followed the same formula and, consequently, was quite a bit inferior. The most notable thing about ‘Blue Angel’ is that it marks the first appearance of the word blue in the title. Other than that, it has the same cha-cha-boom rhythm as ‘Only The Lonely’ (and, by extension, ‘It’s Now Or Never’), the same interplay between Roy’s lead and corny-and-even-cornier backing vocals (instead of dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah, we now have sha-la-la-dooby-wah, dum-dum-dum-yeh-yeh-um, which is definitely more sophisticated but not necessarily «transcendentally progressive», if you get my meaning), and the same «sit-tight-until-the-end!» trick where Roy unleashes his full power on you in the final bars. The most important shift is that the mood here changes from broken-hearted to courteously suave (Roy is now playing the outsider consoling the broken-hearted partner), and this puts the song into a slightly sleasy mode, playing up the smooth operator angle rather than the tragedy. In a strange display of adequate taste, the buyers were less enthusiastic about ‘Blue Angel’ than its predecessor, though it still made the Top 10.

Even less successful was ‘I’m Hurtin’, Roy’s third and last single from the same year — it corrected the potential mistake of ‘Blue Angel’, returning the man to pure broken-hearted mode, but it was simply way too close to the original formula of ‘Only The Lonely’. All they did was slightly speed up the tempo and make the arrangement a little fussier, with the big bass drum pounding out Roy’s heart rhythm and the swirling strings tickling our emotional centers right off the bat and all through the song. It was really one of those «if you loved ‘Only The Lonely’, you’ll also love...» moments, but sequels are just sequels, and even lyrically, the song does not pretend to be anything but a sequel: "Time goes by / Right on by / And I’m still hurtin’". Yep, and Peggy Sue got married not long ago. #27 on the US charts and no chart position at all in the UK — and I couldn’t really protest.

Even so, the smash success of ‘Only The Lonely’ and the slightly less smashing success of ‘Blue Angel’ earned Roy the right to finally put out an entire LP of material — an LP which would, almost algorithmically so, entitled Roy Orbison Sings Lonely And Blue, although, admittedly, it’s not really a bad title because Roy does mostly sing lonely and blue, no doubts about it. All of the three singles would be included, but it would also give the man a chance to branch out and try something riskier (well, faintly riskier) and not straightforwardly directed at generating sales. Since the Melson-Orbison songwriting plant still claimed to put quality over quantity, this would also mean having to rely on outside songwriters and covers, but with their brand new individual sound, that would not necessarily be a problem.

In any case, out of the three additional original numbers only one, ‘Come Back To Me (My Love)’, is a rather shameless and inferior (though still pretty-sounding) rewrite of ‘Only The Lonely’. ‘Blue Avenue’, on the other hand, while it could also be accused of being just a rewrite of ‘Uptown’, improves on that upbeat vibe in every respect — particularly in its inspired use of strings, which, in the bridge section ("oh, Blue Avenue, yeah I’m feeling so bad") play up a veritable «thundercloud» pursuing the singer. This is basically a downer version of ‘Uptown’, retaining the former’s toe-tappiness and catchiness but adding extra drama, and that is precisely the way you do formula if you think you have to do formula. In my own best-of collection, ‘Blue Avenue’ easily replaces ‘Blue Angel’, unless I screw up and mess up the two titles.

Also not to be overlooked is ‘Raindrops’, a song credited exclusively to Melson — it is utterly different from every other original on here, sort of a country-waltz turned art-pop with the addition of «raindrop-like» chimes (I’m not sure why, but somehow chimes and vibraphones always give an «ennobling» rather than «cornifying» aura to whatever song they’re in, unlike strings, who really have to work hard to prove their highbrow pedigree). No Olympic feats from Orbison’s voice on here, but the stylistical difference from everything else feels refreshing, and the song’s babylike cuteness is so fragile and vulnerable, you feel like you want to cuddle with the tune rather than brush it off.

The covers, as befits a pop artist recording in Nashville, are mainly pulled off from the country circuit, with Roy sometimes reaching over to decade-old hits like ‘Cry’ (well, any song with the line "and your blues keep getting bluer" is sure to tickle our hero’s fancy), but also showing a real affection for more recent country hitmakers such as Don Gibson. I’m not really sure if there is such a big need for Roy’s cover of ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, but I do have a soft spot for his take on the appropriately gloomy ‘(I’d Be) A Legend In My Time’, on which he really feels himself like a fish in water, giving it extra depth and power, particularly on the final line of the chorus, where he dips into an almost sardonic barytone (like an "oh yeah, you thought Don Gibson wrote a song for himself? well, you ain’t heard nothing yet, make way for me, the true king of feeling lonely and blue!").

Ultimately, there is just one big thing that is wrong with Sings Lonely And Blue, and it is already symbolized by its title: despite all of his innovative approaches to the essence and image of a pop artist, the one thing that Orbison still shares with the Fifties’ generation is his willingness to lock himself into and firmly confine himself to that one particular image. If we take up — you knew this was coming, didn’t you? — the inevitable comparison with the Beatles’ debut across the Atlantic two years later, there is no denying that Orbison already comes across as an accomplished professional on this record, while the Fab Four are just juvenile amateurs by his side (and I’m pretty sure that they correlated more or less in the same way on their famous joint tour of the UK in 1963). More than that, he’s got a strong, individual artistic identity, writing his own songs and recreating most of those covers in his own image — something the Beatles also tried to do from the beginning, but it’s much harder, really, to believe that Lennon and McCartney really lived out the emotions in songs like ‘P.S. I Love You’ or ‘Ask Me Why’ the same way Roy sounds fully sincere and convincing on ‘Only The Lonely’ or ‘Blue Avenue’.

And yet, the way I feel it, there is one big difference between Sings Lonely And Blue and Please Please Me that is responsible for the fact that Roy Orbison would remain Roy Orbison, and the Beatles would go on to become the most symbolic band of the new decade. Roughly speaking, Sings Lonely And Blue is a closed system. It gives you a self-sustained, accomplished artistic portrayal to which, in the future, many new details and depth-enhancing improvements would be added, but the essence of which would never truly evolve or expand. This is Roy Orbison, so much so that you shall always know what to expect of him in the future: moody, beautiful, sophisticated broken-hearted pop music with that wonderfully lilting Voice on top. Please Please Me, on the other hand, is the very epitome of an open system — a band that tries out a half-dozen different formulae at once, some of which naturally work better than others but all of which, taken together, send out an inspiring message that — to paraphrase and invert the line we all know — there’s nothing you CAN’T do that CAN be done. In other words, you could probably build an AI that would, more or less correctly, predict post-1960 Roy Orbison if you fed Sings Lonely And Blue into it, but you certainly couldn’t do the same for the Beatles if you only fed it Please Please Me and its surrounding singles.

Even so, there are formulae and formulae, and at least Roy’s included such parameters as «diligent songwriting» and «trying out new musical ideas» as one of its foundations. As we can already see, he was not completely above rewriting his own hits or occasionally falling into a rut, but (a) his guilt here is far less than that of many others and (b) his sense of taste and understanding of the concept of beauty is pretty much infallible, so that even the most obvious self-repeats still sound wonderful, at least on a purely formal level. And if you love The Voice — as in, really love love love it — do not limit yourself to best-of compilations; settle for nothing less than the entire catalog, starting with this perfectly fine sample.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Roy Orbison