...
Roy keeps singing to me. I am remembering being a very young girl and seeing him come on TV. I remember thinking he was such a geek... except as the song went along his voice hooked me hard, and by the end of the song I was offworld in contemplation of a new extent to beauty. I had a way of coming untrained like that fairly often... most of my life... all of it.... Anyway, he suddenly meant stratospheric things to me, whenever that TV appearance came my way. I was eight when I got him situated in my aether.
I just came across this Dylan quote:
Orbison, though, transcended all the genres — folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious — no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.Which shows Dylan knows, too, but just couldn't be very sweet about it in public.
I've been dreamin' like mad and determined while I'm doing it not to lose it, but I keep losing it and hearing Roy singing instead.
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