The TRAVELING WILBURYS Collection

Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. That's quite a lineup. The kind of lineup you might expect something truly epic from. Not at all what you would get, thankfully. The Traveling Wilburys was all about its band members having a really great time. It was a mythic jam session that got well out of control and went platinum. Why perform under a bunch of fake names and make up some elaborate silly backstory about a nomadic tribe of musicians when everybody is well aware of who you are and you make absolutely zero attempt to hide it? Well, because it's fun to make stuff up. That is the entire ethos of this group - a bunch of extremely talented people, legends in their own time, just kicking back without any ego and having a great time with their friends. I can get behind that. It really comes through in the songs, it really does sound like they're having a great time. Dylan's crazy improvisation of "Tweeter and the Monkey Man" is still hilarious. Likewise George Harrison's concept of random words picked out of magazines for the closing section of "Dirty World". "Handle With Care" and "End of the Line" are still oddly touching.

TRAVELING WILBURYS VOL.1

Original released on LP Wilbury Records 25796-1

(US 1988, October 25)

TRAVELING WILBURYS VOL.3

Original released on LP Wilbury Records 26324-1

(US 1990, October 23)

The second album (Vol. 3, another instance of them just playing around) is hurt a bit by the loss of Orbison. I can't say exactly what it is, but there just seems some spark missing. It's still sounds like good times with friends though, if rather than a mixture of their styles, it comes off more like a series of songs that could be outtakes from the albums each of the members were working on at the time. The stabs at political consciousness don't really help (like "Inside Out"), although it still sounds like they're just messing around, and there is still much to enjoy here (I especially like "Cool Dry Place"). The DVD included in the set contains a bunch of footage from the original recording sessions, which is pretty illuminating, showcasing just how much of a 'hanging out with friends' project the whole thing was. Also all the original videos which are all pretty basic and charming if wonky, with "The Wilbury Twist" featuring John Candy dancing, and "End of the Line" (having been made shortly after Orbison's death) genuinely affecting with an empty chair with a guitar on it standing in for Orbison. No, it isn't genius, and lord help us if that's what they'd been going for, because it would have been a disaster. This is old-timey rock and roll and that's all it needed to be. With a group of great songwriters just having a fun time writing songs to entertain themselves and each other, the result is pure entertainment, a great party album. The collection adds an interesting DVD, four pretty good bonus tracks (three of them previously unreleased plus non-album track "Nobody's Child") including a cover version of Dion's "Runaway", a bunch of postcards and photos from the sessions, and a book detailing the real history of the band, a fake history of the nomadic Wilbury family, and a guide on how to do "The Wilbury Twist". Class act. (in RateYourMusic)

ROY ORBISON: "Black & White Night"

Recorded Live in 30 September 1987 at the Ambassador Hotel's Coconut Grove Nightclub, in Los Angeles, approximately fourteen months before Orbison's death.

"Oh Pretty Woman" By ROY ORBISON & FRIENDS

ROY ORBISON: "Crying" (+ bonus tracks)

Original released on LP Monument SM 14007

(US 1962, January 19)

Roy Orbison's second album was above-average considering the slight standards of the time, but was a fairly slight effort nonetheless. In its favor, the album features nearly all original material by Orbison and some of the writers who frequently tailored songs for him, such as Boudleaux and Felice Bryant and Joe Melson. The trademark early Orbison production flourishes, with swooping strings and full vocal choruses, are also present. What's missing is truly first-rate songwriting. With the exception of "Love Hurts," the title track, and the epic hit "Running Scared," most of the cuts lean toward the Big O's more sentimental side, and are pleasantly forgettable. Of the obscure cuts here, the best are the uptempo "Nite Life" and "Let's Make a Memory," with its bouncing string arrangement, but neither could be classified among his best early work. (Richie Unterberger in AllMusic)

A Lost and Found ROY ORBISON Album

Original released on CD Universal B0023169-02

(US 2015, December 4)

“One of the Lonely Ones” - recorded in 1969, this 12-track Roy Orbison album has never before been available to the public. This a completely unreleased ‘new’ Roy Orbison studio album, recently discovered by his sons. Rock critic Ken Emerson once wrote about the crescendo of Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” «his love, his life, and indeed the whole world seemed to be coming to an end – not with a whimper, but with an agonized, beautiful bang». The sound of Roy Orbison’s voice is one of the most singularly beautiful things in rock and pop music. It is not just his famed vocal range, his voice had a tone like no one else’s, and he was equally comfortable hitting the high and the low notes and invigorating those in between. He specialized in ballads, dramatic ones, sweeping as well and quiet ones, and his reading and understanding of them was carefully in unison with what he knew he could do with them with that unique instrument that his voice was, and still is when you listen to it today. There is ample proof of this on this new album that was not released at the time. Though there are no crescendos of the magnitude of the finale of “It’s Over”, there are certainly examples of perfect matches of singer, voice and song. One is “Sweet Memories”, a Mickey Newbury song.

Roy’s vocals turn what could have been self-pity into strength and beauty. He must have seen a kindred spirit in Mickey Newbury, for he successfully bent a number of his songs into expressions of his own style: there is “Leaving Makes the Rain Come Down”, also on this album, and one of Roy’s best 70s recordings “I Remember the Good”, “Here Comes the Rain Baby”, which was used as B-side, and a couple of songs on the album “Many Moods”. Two other examples of perfect matches are the title track, written by Orbison-Dees, and “I Will Always”, a Don Gibson song. “Say No More” and “After Tonight” are examples of the sweeping ballads that Roy sings with ease and full use of his range. The two songs are interestingly by Sammy King, the person who wrote a very different kind of song for Roy, “Penny Arcade”. “Laurie” and “Give Up”, two mid-tempo songs, are almost playful, virtuoso demonstrations of his lithe vocals. “The Defector” and “Little Girl (in the Big City)”, both good, strong songs, are social commentaries, not a genre much developed by Roy, though “Southbound Jericho Parkway” from the same period was somewhat in that vein too. The two remaining songs are a beautiful rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and an effective up-tempo song “Child Woman, Woman Child”, which could have been picked as a single at the time. On the whole an inspired album that bears comparison with the best of his albums. (in Amazon)

ROY ORBISON: The First 2 Albums

 Original released on LP Monument SM-14002

(US, 1960)

Time and familiarity - through multiple reissues - may have muted the seeming significance of some of what's here, but in 1960 "Sings Lonely and Blue" was not only a breakthrough for Roy Orbison as his debut LP, but also for rock & roll. Up to that point, apart from Elvis Presley - who was in a class by himself - few white rock & rollers had even tried to make as bold a use of the LP as what we hear on this record. Orbison, his collaborator Joe Melson, and producer Fred Foster turned the singer's debut long-player into a huge canvas for a sound that combined rock & roll's beat, Nashville's countrypolitan sound, and the singer's unique multi-octave range and operatic intensity into something unique in music. The single "Only the Lonely" may have been the most accessible and commercial side of this new sound, but the whole album was packed with great moments and different permutations of that sound: the powerful lead vocal and the Boots Randolph sax break on "I'll Say It's My Fault"; the haunting Orbison-Melson "Come Back to Me (My Love)," which was like a mini-movie script, a vest-pocket romantic melodrama sung with operatic depth and played to a light rock & roll beat; Don Gibson's "I'd Be a Legend in My Time," and "I Can't Stop Loving You," both filled with larger-than-life musical attributes and emotions behind Orbison's extraordinary singing, Orbison treating the former almost like a Verdi aria while a sax solo, the Anita Kerr Singers, and a dense string section hold it in the realm of pop music; and "Bye Bye Love" given the new Orbison treatment and sounding like a country-pop symphony. The material was uniformly strong and consistent, probably due, in part, to the fact that Fred Foster was able to draw from nearly a year's worth of recording activity to assemble the contents of the album, and he also took advantage of the album's stereo release to devise a crisp, discreet, two-channel mix that brought out all of the details of this sound in notably sharp relief, creating one of the earliest stereo rock & roll albums that was actually superior to its mono equivalent. Indeed, "Sings Lonely and Blue" was among the first rock & roll LPs to attract the interest of serious audiophile enthusiasts. (Bruce Eder in AllMusic)

 Original released on LP Sun 1260

(US, 1961)

Although it was technically Roy Orbison's first album, "At the Rock House" wasn't really an LP effort on his part so much as a cash-in effort by Sun Records in the wake of Orbison's later success on Monument Records with "Uptown," "Only the Lonely," etc. And understandably, the sound is very retro for 1960-1961, comprised as the record is primarily of the rock & roll and hardcore rockabilly numbers that he cut for Sun in 1956 (with his original group the Teen Kings) and 1957, including the Johnny Cash-authored "You're My Baby," the Orbison/Harold Jenkins collaboration "Rock House," and Sam Phillips' "Mean Little Mama" and "Problem Child." Not everything is quite as briskly paced as those two numbers, but even the ballads, such as "Sweet and Easy to Love" and "Devil Doll," and the melodic "This Kind of Love" and "It's Too Late," have an edge to them - they stand midway between the rock & roll that was happening in 1956 and the more lush and dramatic sound that Orbison would perfect at Monument Records from 1959 onward. All of the material is fascinating as a sort of alternate-universe version of where Orbison might've headed musically, and most of it is downright bracing and exciting, though it's easy to see why it never succeeded at the time - numbers like "You're Gonna Cry" and "Problem Child" were a little too intense and ambitious as rock & roll, with too many changes and involved lyrics, to hold that audience en masse. It was some of the best and most intense rock & roll you could buy in 1961 this side of Elvis Presley, however, and heard today the album is a fascinating curio from what's usually thought of as a fallow period in rock & roll history. (Bruce Eder in AllMusic)

SOMEONE ASKED FOR A ROY?

Original Released on LP MGM SE 4379 (1966/09)

The Classic Roy Orbison is an erratic collection that perhaps reflects the crisis in Orbison's career. By 1966, the signs of commercial decline were apparent, particularly in the United States. Whilst managing a top ten hit in Britain with "Too Soon To Know", Orbison's MGM recordings had failed to reach the popularity of the Monument hits with which he is primarily identied. The quality of the MGM recordings are generally very good, and it was perhaps the changing nature of the music scene, rather than anything intrinsic to Orbison's performances, that ensured his declining sales. The Classic Orbison does not break new ground, following the standard Orbison template of beat ballads, mixed with uptemo rock and roll. (in Amazon)

A TRIBUTE TO ALL THE (PRETTY) WOMEN

Pretty woman, walking down the street
Pretty woman, the kind I like to meet
Pretty woman
I don't believe you, you're not the truth
No one could look as good as you
Mercy !

Pretty woman, won't you pardon me
Pretty woman, I couldn't help to see
Pretty woman
That you look lovely as can be
Are you lonely just like me

Pretty woman, stop a while
Pretty woman, talk a while
Pretty woman, gave your smile to me
Pretty woman, yeah yeah yeah
Pretty woman, look my way
Pretty woman, say you'll stay with me
'Cause I need you, I'll treat you right
Come with me baby, be mine tonight

Pretty woman, don't walk on by
Pretty woman, don't make me cry
Pretty woman, don't walk away, hey...okay
If that's the way it must be, okay
I guess I'll go on home, it's late
There'll be tomorrow nigh, but wait
What do I see
Is she walking back to me
Yeah, she's walking back to me
Oh, oh, Pretty woman