fange
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Post by fange on Mar 8, 2024 0:46:53 GMT
Roy fecking Orbison. If anyone needs his own thread, it's this bloke. Tell us about your musical relationship with Roy. What did you love - or not love - about him and his music?
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Sneelock
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Post by Sneelock on Mar 8, 2024 4:42:21 GMT
His "third act" did my heart a lot of good. he was everywhere and he was singing as good as ever,
then he was gone.
i vote Legend. I'm pretty sure I saw him on a commemorative postage stamp so that shouldn't be a problem.
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davey
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Post by davey on Mar 8, 2024 7:32:21 GMT
Too bad that all the BCB 130 threads disappeared. I know I wrote a pretty involved one on Orbison. He’s a guy I could probably write a book about. But I’m not quite at liberty right this moment to give the topic the focus it deserves.
Suffice to say, I think he’s among the handful of greatest recording artists ever. As deep as music goes.
Since I don’t have time right now, I’ll simply point out that if you asked anyone who knew their shit the day before The Beatles broke in America, “whose records are THE most cinematic in the world today,” Orbison would win that one in a walk.
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Post by DarknessFish on Mar 8, 2024 7:51:15 GMT
The man had a great voice, but generally, I find his songs pretty unengaging. It's just not the kind of thing I'd choose to listen to.
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fange
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Listening to long jazz tracks
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Post by fange on Mar 8, 2024 8:13:47 GMT
I take your point, Dave. Popular music from the early '60s usually has a certain sound and feel and not everyone, especially from later generations like ours, is going to connect with it.
But there is something musically universal about a song and sound like 'Running Scared', which seems to tap into an earth-spanning and outside-of-time rightness. The build, the drama, the delivery - it's beautiful. It's simply extraordinary to me.
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Post by fearlessfreap on Mar 8, 2024 13:36:33 GMT
I'm in the "he's ok" camp. I'm not a fan of melodrama in music, Orbison, Shangri Las - They're ok in small doses, but a 40 minute comp is too rich for my blood. It's sort of like a Sirk film set to music.
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Post by DarknessFish on Mar 8, 2024 13:36:45 GMT
At the risk of being given a selection of individual Roy songs and backtracking my opinion on each one, I think "Running Scared" is quite different to the kind of smooth country-tinged rock I associate with Roy. That is my kind of song, it's a construction with a bit of drama, a dynamic building with it, and it's quite stripped back for the most part. It's that dynamic, the use of space, that kinda appeals. It does have the benefit of being familiar, but not over-familiar, too. I never need to hear Crying or Pretty Woman ever again. I have this thing about hearing music in my own time, in a context of my choosing. These songs just violate my personal space
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Post by Stacy Heydon on Mar 8, 2024 14:33:06 GMT
I sort of lean towards Freap's view, although I'd be more positive than 'he's ok', he did have a great voice. 'In Dreams' is my favourite track, which I've loved since Blue Velvet
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The Big O
Mar 8, 2024 16:05:25 GMT
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Post by osgood on Mar 8, 2024 16:05:25 GMT
I voted "legend" but I agree that a comp of his music is something that I'm not likely to play in full. In Dreams and It's Over are tracks I don't think I'll ever get tired to hear, though.
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davey
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Post by davey on Mar 8, 2024 16:17:35 GMT
Here are five lesser-known tracks that might be eye-opening for non-enthusiasts:
Crawling’ Back
Pantomime
Shadaroba
The Loner
Southbound Jericho Parkway
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Post by riggers on Mar 8, 2024 16:44:10 GMT
He's a giant, but not an artist I have any great knowledge of. I used to have a double LP best of, which ticked all the boxes. There's probably tons of stuff I haven't heard, but I love his Sun era stuff, the big dramatic epics obvs, and have a soft spot for his 80's comeback.
Like DF, I too never need to hear 'Pretty Woman' again, but stuff like 'Only The Lonely', 'Uptown', 'In Dreams' and 'Running Scared' are absolute gold.
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The Big O
Mar 8, 2024 17:08:43 GMT
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Post by osgood on Mar 8, 2024 17:08:43 GMT
I don't think I've heard Pantomime before. It's fabulous.
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Mar 8, 2024 18:26:46 GMT
Well, this has kind of pre-empted what I was going to say in the 1961 thread, so let's get expansive...
He started recording with Sun in 1956 as a writer and performer of rockabilly, although I didn't hear any of that until much later (and I've now heard Ooby Dooby all I need to in this lifetime), but I wasn't aware of him at all until 1960, when he had a huge worldwide hit with Only the Lonely. It was number one for weeks (he had more and bigger hits in the UK than in the USA). I wasn't buying records, then, though. Looking back, the song was pretty routine fare, no better as a song or arrangement than mid-tempo hits by long-forgotten contemporaries such as Bobby Vee or Johnny Tillotson, and with a distinct whiff of the Fleetwoods in the backing vocals, but it introduced what would become a trademark of his self-penned singles: an orchestral arrangement that started out simple and gradually added instruments, ending in a dramatic crescendo that showcased his extraordinary soaring range, hitting pure (i.e. not falsetto) high notes in way beyond anything the various Bobbys and Johnnys ever managed. It was a refinement and intensification of the format that he would employ again on Running Scared and in a less stark form in other hits.
But I completely missed or was only dimly aware of any of his releases in the next couple of years: I only really started listening to American pop (the only sort that mattered) on Radio Luxemburg and US chart rundowns on the American Forces Network broadcasting from Germany in 1962, when I first bought my own records (I was 14). And so it was that my real introduction to Roy was In Dreams c/w Shadarobah. The self-penned a-side, the first record I learned the words to, is another 'builder', as I remember the style being called in the music press, while the B-side enthralled with it's 'exotic' arrangement and lyric (there's a thesis to be written about the extraordinary variety of arrangements and instrumentation in both black and white pop records in the early 1960s, before the Bea*les swept it all away and made it all about guitars again).
I was sold, and hoovered up any of his earlier sounds I could find in the various junk shops around Tottenham. A feature of his golden period was that he made genuine double-sided singles, often in countrasting styles (one ballad, one more up-tempo usually, although Running Scared was an exception to that rule, with his peerless version of the Everlys' Love Hurts on the B-side). There was a reason for this: as the US charts were to some extent dependent on airplay, both sides of a single could chart, increasing sales. The follow-up to Only the Lonely, Blue Angel, used the shoo-doo-be-wah backing again in a more complex, but less catchy song featuring some more stratospheric warbling - always hit high and pure - while the B-side, Today's Teardrops (written by Gene Pitney, whose career, right down to being more popular and for longer in the UK than in his own country, ran parallel to Orbison's) was a breezy up-tempo number complete with yeah yeah yeahs and a stripped-down backing.
After Running Scared, a US number one, came Crying, which made number two, and was coupled with the folky/bluesy Candy Man, written by Fred Neil and featuring some great work by Charlie McCoy on harmonica. And following that came the uptempo Dream Baby (number four), coupled with an other melodrama fest, 'The Actress'.
After In Dreams, the next big hit was the lilting, melancholy Blue Bayou c/w the nearest thing to a rocker he had made since the Sun days, a version of Elvis's Mean Woman Blues. Blue Bayou was a top three hit in the UK, while MWB was top five in the US. In 1964, he had two UK number ones, with the over-wrought (in my opinion) It's Over and the rifftastic Pretty Woman, featuring that lewd growl that was the only vocal mis-step I ever heard him make. And then it was over.
Of course he kept on issuing things through the 1960s, but I didn't buy any, have heard very little and he kind of fell out of my consciousness until his re-emergence/reinvention with Wild Hearts, You Got It and She's a Mystery to Me, all of which I snapped up and was glad to have. To this day, I've never heard an album other than a singles comp, or anything ast all by the Travelling Wilburys.
So, short version: great voice, no question: fine songwriter, too. But the magic was in that cinematic run on Monument (London American in the UK) from 1960 to 1963, which defined him for me. I don't like the term 'legend' particularly, but several thumbs-up defintely.
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davey
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Post by davey on Mar 8, 2024 21:56:11 GMT
Certainly those Monument tracks are…well…monumental. But I think (like The Everly Brothers) his mid-to-late 60s work has some real treasures to be unearthed.
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Mar 8, 2024 23:48:27 GMT
Certainly those Monument tracks are…well…monumental. But I think (like The Everly Brothers) his mid-to-late 60s work has some real treasures to be unearthed. Oh I'm sure. It's just that the OP was asking about my personal relationship with his work.
I'm also kind of obsessed by the post rock&roll years in the US. Producers, arrangers, session musicians, writers, artists, all developing in their own ways out of the upheaval of the mid-50s, and producing some great records with imaginative, complex soundscapes, but many of them were swept aside by the beat boom.
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