Sunday, April 23, 2006

Tribute to Roy Orbison

Um, as one can see clearly, I again failed to update this blog on a regular basis. Shame over me! But thanks to my two kinda frequent commenters Don and Rayson, this place didn't go silent. Thank you, guys, for keeping the blog alive and being constant reminders to end the hiatus!

As you can see from my last comment, one of the reasons which keeping me from blogging in English recently is, that I got addicted to Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter. But before I start to write about those, I want to mention, that today marks the 70th birthday of Roy Orbison (d. 1988). I found out about that only yesterday, after having checked out the Wikipedia entry about him. And why I came across the Wikipedia entry? Because I've seen his appearance of September 27, 1969 on "The Johnny Cash Show", during my journey trough all videos hosted by youtube tagged with "cash".

Judging from the search engine results, Roy Orbison seems to be almost forgotten. C'mon, people, that's not fair! He was one of the founding fathers of Rock'n Roll and doesn't deserve to be only remembered by contributing the title song to a Julia Roberts movie.

I have to admit, that I couldn't get warm with him, though. Aside from my sympathy with his remarkable fate. (To lose a wife in a motorcycle crash and a year later two of three sons in a fire, isn't something I can imagine to get over.)

Apparently, I'm not the first one to post the youtube-Link for that video, but anyway, here it is. Enjoy! [Link]



Btw, on Wednesday, a Roy Orbison exhibition opened up. In Cleveland. It will be open till late October. Since I most certainly won't make it to Cleveland till then (will I ever make it to Cleveland?), if someone out there is going to see the exhibition, please come back and report!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

There was also a really good VH1 Storytellers CD (basically VH1 version of MTV Unplugged) w/ Willie Nelson & Johnny Cash.
I'd recommend checking that out asap

Marian said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Marian said...

don,

you're right.

Maybe the post title "Tribute to..." was just too much. It was more like a reminder for true fans of Roy Orbison.

But, c'mon, do you really watch youtube-videos for the sake of the sound quality. For me, they're more like an appetizer.

Thank you for the pointer to Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Oddly enough, I've known Kristofferson long before Johnny Cash. But I'm not through with Cash. Not yet.

anonymous,

thank you, too, for your pointer. I'll certainly check it out.

Marian said...

don,

Fixed. Thanks again for telling me. I'm such a dork.

Edna Sweetlove said...

Five or six of Roy's best are simply masterpieces never to be forgotten or bettered, some of the greatest pop songs ever. So he didn't make all the high notes in those early recordings - sue him. Edna regards him as VASTLY superior to all the other singer-songwriters mentioned by other posters here. No Dylan or Cash song can touch Falling, dears. Not even close, imho. However, despite his many hits (Pretty Woman is rather overrated and isn't reflective of his best work and yet it's his best-remembered), Roy was always a bit too... weird to be 100% mainstream.
Kisses from London.