Episode eighty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and how Orbison finally found success by ignoring conventional pop song structure. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have two bonus podcasts — part one of a two-part Q&A and a ten-minute bonus on “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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Resources

Apologies for the delay this week — I’m still trying to catch up after last week. 

 

As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast.

I have relied for biographical information mostly on two books — The Authorised Roy Orbison written by Jeff Slate and three of Orbison’s children, and Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth. 

For the musicological analysis, I referred a lot to the essay “Only the Lonely: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style,” by Albin Zak, in Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music. 

 There are many Orbison collections available, but many have rerecordings rather than the original versions of his hits. The Monument Singles Collection is the originals. 

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Transcript

It’s been nearly a year since we last looked at Roy Orbison, so it’s probably a good idea to quickly catch up with where we were up to. Roy Orbison had started out as a rockabilly singer, with a group called the Wink Westerners who changed their name to the Teen Kings and were signed to Sun Records. Orbison had thought that he would like to be a ballad singer, but everyone at Sun was convinced that he would never make it as anything other than a rocker. He had one minor hit on Sun, “Ooby Dooby”, but eventually got dissatisfied with the label and asked to be allowed to go to another label — Sam Phillips agreed to free him from his contract, in return for all the songwriting royalties and credits for everything he’d recorded for Sun.

Newly free, Orbison signed to a major publisher and a major record label, recording for RCA with the same Nashville A-Team that were recording with Elvis and Brenda Lee. He had some success as a songwriter, writing “Claudette”, which became a hit for the Everly Brothers, but he did no better recording for RCA than he had recording for Sun, and soon he was dropped by his new label, and the money from “Claudette” ran out. By the middle of 1959, Roy Orbison was an absolute failure.

But this episode, we’re going to talk about what happened next, and the startling way in which someone who had been a failure when produced by both Sam Phillips and Chet Atkins managed to become one of the most important artists in the world on a tiny label with no track record. Today, we’re going to look at “Only the Lonely”, and the records that turned Roy Orbison into a star:

[Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely”]

It seems odd that Roy Orbison could thank Wesley Rose for introducing him to Monument Records. Rose was the co-owner of Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest country music publishing company in the world, and the company to which Orbison had signed as a songwriter. Fred Foster, the owner of Monument, describes being called to a meeting of various Nashville music industry professionals, at which Rose asked him in front of everyone “Why are you trying to destroy Nashville by making these…” and then used an expletive I can’t use here and a racial slur I *won’t* use here, to describe the slightly R&B-infused music Foster was maki