You'd never guess from the songs I've been waxing nostalgic over in my Friday Evening Video segments, but sometime around my junior or senior year of high school, I developed a serious affection for the music of the 1950s and '60s, better known as the oldies. I don't remember what, precisely, triggered my interest in the stuff my parents used to listen to, but I suppose you could probably blame my car, my '63 Ford Galaxie, as much as anything. You see, my old Cruising Vessel had only a stock AM radio, and there wasn't much music on the AM band by the late '80s. When I was bombing around the valley with the top down, pondering the unfathomable mysteries of growing up -- i.e., girls -- I had a choice of either the oldies station or the country station, and at that point in my life, there wasn't any question of which I was going to prefer. I ended up building a lot of my identity as a young adult around that car, and by extension, around that music.
One of my favorites artists from that period was Roy Orbison, a strange-looking man who had an even stranger voice. Everyone knows him for "Oh, Pretty Woman," of course, but the larger percentage of his work tended to comprise haunting, melancholy tunes about loneliness, heartbreak, insecurity, and longing -- in other words, the perfect soundtrack for your teens and early twenties, when nobody understands you and every perceived slight is a tragic thing that hits you like a baseball bat in the gut. I recall many evenings when I was driving along the dark roads on the south end of the valley -- there wasn't much traffic then, and not a lot of street lights either, so it often felt like my big old car was gliding through deep space -- with the air temperature turning brisk against my face and arms as I passed irrigated fields then warming again as I left them behind. The dashboard lights bathed the car's interior in a greenish light, and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" or "Only the Lonely" was fading in and out of the static-y background noise like messages from another dimension. Eerie... and, as I noted, perfect.
As fate would have it, Roy was experiencing something of a comeback right around then. In 1987, he recorded, along with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, and Bob Dylan, the astounding Traveling Wilburys, Volume I -- there's not a bad cut on that album -- and his older music was starting to turn up in movies. In November of 1988, he releasedrecorded a solo album called Mystery Girl, which spawned his first all-new hit in years, "You Got It." His star was definitely rising again. And then, right at the end of 1988, when I was a sophomore in college, Roy Orbison died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I remember being really depressed that I'd lost him just as I'd discovered him. It didn't seem fair, somehow.
I also remember thinking that he was quite old.
Well, I've just been reading a retrospective on Roy -- NPR has named him one of its 50 Great Voices -- and it turns out that his age upon his death was all of 53 years old. Fifty-three. I don't mind telling you, I'm a little freaked out by this realization, both because 53 no longer seems old to me, and also because I was such a dunce back in '88 as to think that it was. I'm going to have to ponder this whole thing for a while, I think.
In the meantime, go check out that article. It's an interesting read, especially if all you know about Roy is that he did the theme song for some Julia Roberts movie...
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