Roy Orbison, Taylor Swift, and A Radio

Only the Lonely Meets The Alcott

A couple of days ago I was in the car, going to a thrift shop in the neighborhood. Heard a song on the radio, "The Alcott" by the National featuring Taylor Swift, written with the Nationals' Aaron Dessner. It gripped me powerfully. It was so well-written: The chorus, with Swift's voice entwined with that of the Nationals' Matt Berninger. "And the last thing you wanted/is the first thing I do." The love is so pure, but it's also untenable.

"I'll ruin it all over," they sing.

As I was about to let this resonate and get out of the car, the DJ on Fordham University's WFUV-FM/90.7 played "Only the Lonely" by Roy Orbison. It was one of those "pull off the road" moments, except I had already pulled off the road, a side street near the thrift shop, to listen to the Swift/National song.

You wouldn't consider this a great segue by the standards of the greats of early freeform FM rock radio in terms of sound. But the emotional link is there. Endless love, way past 'til death do us part. That's because I think the idea of 'The Alcott' is true love, mutual love, but right place, wrong time, or right time, wrong place. It's civilized and sad, and yet uplifting in its magisterial beauty. As earworms go, it makes me sort of happy: perhaps because age and experience have liberated me from needing the buzz of those obsessive feelings.

"Only the Lonely" came out in 1960. Written by Orbison and Joe Melson, it was Orbison's first hit, and what a hit it was: Number one for two weeks in the early summer of 1960. My friend Alan Grossinger, with whom I was beginning to play disc jockey with the 45 rpm records we chose for our class' sock hops and spin-the-bottle parties, remembers the first time he heard "Only the Lonely" that summer between fifth and sixth grade: On the way back from the beach with his family in Bayville, on the Long Island Sound, to our cloistered, mysterious magic town, Franklin Square.

"During the 50’s and early 60’s, I heard many songs for the first time while being in the family car," Alan said. [The Del-Vikings] "'Whispering Bells," [Everly Brothers] "Bye Bye Love," and "Only the Lonely" are three that I specifically remember. They just jumped out of the radio and I was immediately in love with them."

It's always fascinated me that kids that young: I was not yet 11, Alan not quite 12, representing the youngest and oldest in our tight-knit class (many of us are still in touch even though I moved away after eighth grade), were so attracted to songs such as Orbison's, with such tragic emotions. Maybe that's part of the reason middle school kids have such difficulties: Parents, teachers, adults, don't understand, have never understood, the oversize emotions of those tender years. We contained multitudes. But we couldn't express them, we didn't have the language for it. So we “acted out” and let the music tell the truth for us. There was no pocket of the young adolescent psyche resistant to the Orbison message: "Only the lonely/know I cry, and cry for you." We didn't have to connect it to a specific person. It was part of the landscape we inhabited. Maybe we didn't have anything specific to cry about, so we let Roy Orbison cry for us.

There were enough rock and roll elements to keep the toe-tapping: the background voices soothing "dum-dum-dum-dumbee-doo-wah...ooh-yeah-yeah-yeah," offered reassurance. The gentle but pronounced swing of the beat. But it was the voice, that operatic atomic bomb Orbison unleashed with full power, at the highest registers. We might as well have been a few years older and hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" for the first time. Because every time he maintained that powerful pitch at climax, he may have been asking: "How does it feel?" And the answer was: "Lonely." It felt lonely, the feared but inescapable preteen primal state.

Orbison had a number of other hits, all distinctive, almost all drenched in pain, from that moment in 1960, before the rise of the Beatles: "Blue Angel," "Blue Bayou," "I'm Hurtin'," "Running Scared," "Dream Baby." His "In Dreams," enhanced one of the most famous set pieces in David Lynch's movie Blue Velvet. (The title song was from the smoother crooner from that era, Bobby Vinton.)

Then Orbison pulled off his greatest trick of the 1960s. Five months after the Beatles held the top five spots on the Billboard singles chart of April 4, 1964, and the British Invasion took over the radio, making it difficult for American acts to be heard, Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" stayed at No. 1 for three weeks. At the untimely end of Orbison's life (heart attack, Dec. 6, 1988), he was a member of the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, the All-American Tom Petty, and man-of-all-nations Bob Dylan. A posthumous Virgin Records single, "You Got It," made the top 10 in 1989.

Though Orbison was the master of expressing heartache, it was hard to imagine anyone suffering the real life pain Orbison himself experienced after “Oh, Pretty Woman.” His wife Claudette died in a motorcycle accident on June 7, 1966. (It was a bad season for motorcycle accidents; Bob Dylan's was on July 29.) In 1968, two of Orbison's sons perished in a fire. Throughout the 1970s, his career disappeared into sorrow.

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Oddly, I was the Roy Orbison specialist for Billboard's Special Sections editor Thom Duffy when I was a copy editor at that magazine 2004-2009. A Billboard special section was one of those paid "advertorial" inserts: "Congratulations on 50 years in show business," or whatever, with ads from labels, managers, agents, distributors. Duffy's gift has been to make those sections read like a real magazine section, going easy on the fluff. Billboard had enough fluff in its pages, anyway.

Barbara Orbison, Roy's widow, controlled his publishing and burnished his legacy, and so during those five years I wrote much of the content for two such Orbison celebration sections; I don't even recall the topics. Maybe Monument Records was one, the publishing company another.

But I interviewed Barbara, both in person and on the phone, one of Roy's sons, and everyone involved in Orbison’s continuing operations.

One of them, Johnny Rose, was a sales and marketing consultant for Orbison Music Productions. Johnny is the dad of one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Caitlin Rose, who I wrote about here. Caitlin's folks are divorced. Her mom is a songwriter named Liz Rose. You may recognize her name as the co-writer of many tunes on the first three albums of Taylor Swift. One of them was "All Too Well," which Swift re-recorded as a ten-minute version that recently went to No. 1.

I went pretty deep down the Orbison rabbit hole. There is a Roy Orbison Museum in his hometown of Wink, Texas, population 940. Although he lived there for only a short time, it is the kind of place in which loneliness would seem to be the most natural state. It is remote, in west central Texas desert near the New Mexico border.

That’s it, folks: the Roy Orbison Museum in Wink, Texas

It was one of those fantasies I had when I was still drinking . . . to go to Wink, Texas, see the museum, it sounded so exotic. I started emailing with a woman who lived in Wink who was the English teacher at the school. We must have connected through mid-late 2000s social media app MySpace.

She told me about mysterious sinkholes that started appearing in the area. I decided I did not want to be swallowed in a sinkhole near Wink, Texas, so I never made the trip.

Meanwhile, my songwriter friend Billy Steinberg and I can never talk enough about Roy Orbison. When I heard "Only the Lonely" on the radio last week seguing from "The Alcott," I immediately thought of both Grossinger and Steinberg, and we shared notes this week. Then Billy, who was interviewed in these pages when we had a chat about the late Cynthia Weil, reminded me that a song he wrote with partner Tom Kelly, "I Drove All Night," was a top ten single in 1989 for Cyndi Lauper. (Steinberg and Kelly had also written Lauper's "True Colors.")

But their model for "I Drove All Night" was Roy Orbison. They started out trying to write a Roy Orbison song. Oddly enough, it became one. There was even a music video, with Jason Priestley and Jennifer Connelly.

Billy, who was also interviewed this week on the Can't Get Much Higher Substack, emailed me about how Orbison came to sing "I Drove All Nigh":

Tom Kelly and I saw Roy perform at The Hop, a supper club in Orange County, owned by Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield of The Righteous Brothers. It was mid-1980's and at that time Roy was a forgotten man, no record label, nothing. Tom and I met Roy's tour manager in the parking lot after the show. We told him that we idolized Roy and had written a song for him. That song was "I Drove All Night" which has a section that was inspired by Roy's hit, "Running Scared." We got "I Drove All Night" to Roy and he agreed to come to our studio at Tom's house in Woodland Hills to record it. Roy arrived in a red Ferrari convertible. He was soft-spoken, humble and cooperative. We went in the studio and recorded 2 complete takes of Roy singing our song. It was an unforgettable experience.  It was great, but there was nothing that we could do with it. By that time, we had had a big hit with "True Colors" by Cyndi Lauper. She invited us to NY to work with her. When we got there, we played her "I Drove All Night" sung by Tom Kelly (we didn't mention the Roy Orbison version). Cyndi cut it and it became a Top Ten hit for her. Meanwhile, Roy's career was resurrected by his fanboys Harrison, Dylan, Petty & Lynne. Sadly, Roy died shortly thereafter. We contacted Jordan Harris, A & R at Virgin Records, Roy's label, and told him about Roy's version of "I Drove All Night." He was keenly interested. Harris gave our 16-track reels to Jeff Lynne who built a new musical track around the 2 vocals that Tom and I had recorded. Roy's version became a hit in Europe. As far as I'm concerned, "Oh Pretty Woman" "Crying" "Only The Lonely" "In Dreams" and "Running Scared" are as good as any 5 songs by an individual artist. And his vocals are unparalleled. I'm proud to be a small part of his story.