Is there any point in listening to people who don't think Roy Orbison was the greatest singer of the rock era?

Is there any point in listening to people who don't think Roy Orbison was the greatest singer of the rock era?

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>Roy Orbison
>rock
Unless you mean his Sun era stuff...no, just no.

cry-eye-eye-eye-iiiiing
over youuu

Apparently those high notes he hit were actually full voice and not falsetto, he was a hell of a tenor

Even Elvis said he was the greatest singer in the world

In Dreams: The Greatest Hits [Virgin, 1987]

From Chuck Berry on Mercury to the reunited Everlys, rerecorded best-ofs like this one rarely deliver magic or chops. The youthful buoyancy that kept the melodrama from getting soggy is in short supply, and without much trade-off in the standard interpretive nuance. A quarter-century later, his voice still socks and soars, and if on some songs--"Pretty Woman" of course, "Blue Bayou," "Candy Man"--it's clear that only the original artyfact will do, nobody who wasn't there would swear to the general inferiority of this marginally more tasteful recreation. After all, just exactly how great were his hits? Crowning him rock's first neurotic is as overwrought as damning Donald Duck for a protofascist--pop-rock (cum countrypolitan) self-pity has its own conventions just like slapstick did, and he is their slave. So as a heretic who isn't positive Phil Spector was good for rock and roll, and also as a heretic who was there, I'll stick with the artyfacts after all. They're certainly no worse. And versions you don't need. B

16 Biggest Hits [Monument/Legacy, 1999]

Not counting imports, there are now 13 best-ofs on 10 labels by this opera singer from the wrong side of the oil rig. Unless you worship Scott Walker, rockabilly, or both (a big unless), you need precisely one of them. There's no Sun ooby-doobie-booby here, just 16 of the 20 tracks on All-Time Greatest Hits of You-Know-Who, where you pay a buck apiece for four expendables, including Roy's third hit, which peaked at 27 while the other four went 2-9-1-2, wonder why. Here you get what you want: amazing vocal range, a beat that would give Scott Walker lumbago, the mystic miracles "Blue Bayou," "Only the Lonely," and "In Dreams," lesser product slow and fast, and one of the greatest records ever made: "Oh, Pretty Woman." A-

I think he only went up to like B4 or something at the highest. That's enough to make it pretty hard for karaoke, but not the best range ever or anything. The exceptional thing is how relaxed he sounds hitting those notes; most people will sound much more strained and uncomfortable.

He used falsetto sometimes too.

Yeah that was basically what I was trying to say, I guess Dion was touring with him at some point and said his high notes were actually sung very gently.

McCartney had a hell of a vocal range too, but you could tell on songs like Maybe I'm Amazed and Band on the Run that he had to start putting effort into it when he got around B4

Makes me wonder how high Roy could really go

Shame he died so soon, I could see the Traveling WIlburys sending him on a Brian Wilson like resurgence in music.

The Wilburys basically already started his resurgence, he probably died from overwork

The hippie era threw him for a loop. He went down the shitter in the late 60s, but for some reason kept releasing albums and more albums despite selling about 10 records total for an entire decade. By the mid-70s, he was reduced to playing at county fairs. He'd handled his money well and never had to worry about that, but still...

Oh, and this cover looks like it belongs on a Robin Trower album or something.

The thing about Orbison is that he wrote the song entirely around the high notes, like that's the climax. Most other stuff that goes into that range hits it only briefly.

>I guess Dion was touring with him at some point and said his high notes were actually sung very gently.
With good technique you shouldn't be straining (if you sound like David Byrne you're doing it wrong) but it's still hard to sound that good.

I think Billy Mackenzie could go higher than Orbison, he fucking nails C#5 at 4:15
youtube.com/watch?v=th2NM67bEw0

Poor guy.

>wife cucks him
>then she dies in a motorcycle crash
>house burns down and one of his sons dies
>becomes totally irrelevant by 1970
>finally when he's managing a career comeback...drops dead

He sings like a man with a paper butthole.

You would know

how he'll be remembered

I seriously dislike Cgau's style.

He sounds like a pretentious English major whose high school band never topped the charts so he made a career out of shitting on actual artists

He's best understood as a satire of people like Adorno. The idea of rock music criticism, at the time he was first writing, was ludicrous. It was akin to that TheReportOfTheWeek guy who puts on suits to review store-brand soda pop.

Part of the point, not the whole point, but part of it, is to kind of reveal how silly art criticism inherently is. Also he's making stupid puns and cracking silly jokes. If you read it in-context in early Rolling Stone issues, it makes more sense. Rolling Stone once had an early Vice kinda' vibe, and they were looking for snarky assholes to kind of take the piss on the idea of objectivity and journalistic norms.

This is Christgau doing that. He's extremely inconsistent, partly because he thinks that consistency, like objectivity is an impossible bullshit thing to pretend you can achieve.

It helps if you understand that Christgau's writing style developed out of gonzo journalism and postmodernism which was popular back when he started.

That's certainly how I found out about him. It wasn't recent or anything though.

>If you read it in-context in early Rolling Stone issues, it makes more sense. Rolling Stone once had an early Vice kinda' vibe, and they were looking for snarky assholes to kind of take the piss on the idea of objectivity and journalistic norms.

That was until that sellout rag just became a record industry mouthpiece designed to be as inoffensive and supermarket checkout line friendly as possible.

Yeah, Rolling Stone used to be pretty cool, I was reading their "100 greatest songwriters list" for the hell of it and naturally I got pissed off.

>On the list: Jay Z, Kanye, Eminem, Billie Joe Armstrong, Taylor Swift
>Not on the list: Freddie Mercury, any of Led Zeppelin, Roger Waters, Warren Zevon, Roy Orbison
>Bob Marley is ahead of Brian fucking Wilson

Was glad to see they included Randy Newman at least

Check out the top 100 guitarist list
>Dick Dale behind Kunt Cobain
>Dimebag Darrell at 92
>SRV behind George Harrison and Keith Richards

I was also confused to find Lou Reed on the top guitarists list at all

Would be interested to see a top 100 (if they can find 100) keyboardists list though

I'm thinking top ten would including Garth Hudson, Elton John, Billy Joel, Keith Emerson, Roy Bittan, Al Kooper maybe?

So should I listen to his entire discography or just the hits?

Add Jerry Lee Lewis.

Ray Manzarek is also top ten, maybe top five even

It's hard to think of a keyboardist who defined his band's sound like he did

It's basically /r/music--the magazine.

That compilation Christgau recommended (16 Biggest Hits) should be all the Orbison you need. I don't think anyone needs the vapor albums he recorded in the 70s.

If all you listen to is the radio, you'd be excused in thinking that Roy Orbison broke the Beatles' rop 10 stranglehold in 1964 with "Pretty Woman" and did nothing else until he resurfaced as a Wilbury.

Orbison was butthurt at MGM, so he decided against ever agreeing to a long-term contract with a label again. The result was that he kept releasing one-offs for different labels, most of which were 100% forgettable albums and you can count on your fingers the number of copies they sold.

The first sign that his career fortunes might be turning around were in 1980 when he won a Grammy for "That Lovin' You Feel Again" with Emmylou Harris. Then he didn't record anything again until Wild Hearts half a decade later. In 1986 his career started to pick with his participation in the Class of '55 project, the critically recognized inclusion of "In Dreams" in David Lynch’s 1987 movie "Blue Velvet", his duet with KD Lang ("Crying:), the successful "Black and White Nigt" concert film, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and finally in 1988’s Traveling Wilburys and his last album produced in his lifetime, "Mystery Girl".

And then at the end of '88, he dropped dead. The end.

This cover looks like it should be on a Cheap Trick album.

Considering that Orbison's relevance was almost zero at this time, it's a wonder why they even bothered with the time and expense of releasing these albums.

Well Roy had commented that he felt Laminar Flow was not a "finished" product and released prematurely. The production on this record is pretty hard to sit through now, but I am not overwhelmed by the quality of the songs either. I will say that "Hound Dog Man" sounds far better live on Austin City Limits.

I love Roy.

But I have steered clear of the three 70s albums, because I heard they were very slick.

Are there any great songs on any of them?

I'm Still in Love With You sounds decent and has some alright songs on it. Regeneration and Laminar Flow suffer from overly slick 70s adult contemporary production along the lines of Jefferson Starship. Some of the songs are ok but the production kills them.

Having never heard them before I gotta say I really liked "Still." "Belinda" and "Hound Dog Man" are also enjoyable if you can listen through the over-production and concentrate on just Roy's voice.

A lot of his early 70s MGM stuff can be spotty. I've gone though it all and made my own compilations.

Yeh the problem is that awful production. There are live versions of Hound Dog Man and That Loving You Feel Again which sound vastly better than the studio ones. His MGM stuff is top-notch up to at least Cry Softly, Lonely One. Many Moods isn't bad but has some bung tracks on it and Roy also largely relinquishes the songwriting chores to hired hands at this point. His 1969-70 singles are all pretty great.

I don't get all the hate for Laminar Flow, I own that LP and CD, and fully expecting it to sound like a Bee Gees album, I enjoy it.