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October 8, 2006
I flew back to Adelaide from Brisbane around dinner time and watched a DVD of Roy Orbison. Originally produced as a television special for Showtime, it shows that Orbison's music is not hackneyed as many have thought.
Black and White Night is a live show at Los Angeles' Coconut Grove and it features Roy Orbison making music with friends and colleagues including Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, James Burton and Tom Waits joined Orbison in order to collaborate with, and pay tribute to, a rock and roll talent. It's full of warm vibes.
The music is more than the big ballads of lost love and dark sunglasses--there is a lot of good rockabilly played that highlights Orbison's musical roots in 1950s rockabill and shows the forward links to Bruce Springsteen.
However, as the Poemhunter.com site says:
Orbison finally found his voice with Monument Records, scoring a number-two hit in 1960 with "Only the Lonely." This established the Roy Orbison persona for good: a brooding rockaballad of failed love with a sweet, haunting melody, enhanced by his Caruso-like vocal trills at the song's emotional climax. These and his subsequent Monument hits also boasted innovative, quasi-symphonic production, with Roy's voice and guitar backed by surging strings, ominous drum rolls, and heavenly choirs of backup vocalists.
The Black and White show discloses how that dark glasses persona is misleading.
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I have had this video for years great stuff.Who ever told Springstien he could sing?yea I know record sales yada yada yada.Saw Orbo live twenty years ago,the real deal just like the records perfect.Probably the best singer from this style period absolutely brillient what a tragic waste when he died.