Roy Orbison got it all wrong. As part of rock 'n'
roll's founding class, he was supposed to burn brightest early on. But apart
from a few classic tracks, the first disc of the long-overdue, superb-sounding,
career-spanning box set The Soul Of Rock And Roll finds Orbison struggling
to fit into the pumped-up rhythms of rock's '50s explosion. He was supposed to
grow soft and irrelevant as the '50s turned into the '60s and rock brought in
strings and lost its way before giving way to the British Invasion. But the
set's almost ridiculously hit-packed second disc features Orbison in his
element. His hitless years—which coincided with a pair of tragedies that
took his wife and two of his three sons—were supposed to be unlistenable,
but the admittedly selective third disc tells a different story. Finally, he
was supposed to get a chance to savor a hard-earned comeback, not die as it
began.
Nothing about Orbison fit a pattern, least of all
his voice. He could growl with the best, but his soaring range and emotional
edge distinguished him. Where his contemporaries got lost in the pop
orchestrations that early-'60s radio seemed to demand, Orbison always sounded
comfortable, floating above the strings and building operatic, suite-like songs
like "In Dreams" and "Leah." He knew how to break hearts using the same
materials others used to sweeten sentiments. "It's Over" features the sound of
a world collapsing. Where other singers couldn't sell a line like "You won't be
seeing rainbows anymore," Orbison dispatches it with the sad confidence of a
man who knows how things work.
Heartbreak is never far away in an Orbison song.
Even when he gets the girl—as in "Pretty Woman" and "Running
Scared"—it's usually an unexpected development in the final moments. He
sang like someone who had been kicked around by life, but with a comforting
kind of pain, the kind that suggests that others out there are hurting too.
"Only the lonely know the heartaches I've been through," goes one of his most
famous lines. Surely he knew how many people thought he was singing to them.