Roy Orbison: The Soul Of Rock And Roll

Roy Orbison got it all wrong. As part of rock 'n'

roll's founding class, he was supposed to burn brightest early on. But apart

from a few classic tracks, the first disc of the long-overdue, superb-sounding,

career-spanning box set The Soul Of Rock And Roll finds Orbison struggling

to fit into the pumped-up rhythms of rock's '50s explosion. He was supposed to

grow soft and irrelevant as the '50s turned into the '60s and rock brought in

strings and lost its way before giving way to the British Invasion. But the

set's almost ridiculously hit-packed second disc features Orbison in his

element. His hitless years—which coincided with a pair of tragedies that

took his wife and two of his three sons—were supposed to be unlistenable,

but the admittedly selective third disc tells a different story. Finally, he

was supposed to get a chance to savor a hard-earned comeback, not die as it

began.

Nothing about Orbison fit a pattern, least of all

his voice. He could growl with the best, but his soaring range and emotional

edge distinguished him. Where his contemporaries got lost in the pop

orchestrations that early-'60s radio seemed to demand, Orbison always sounded

comfortable, floating above the strings and building operatic, suite-like songs

like "In Dreams" and "Leah." He knew how to break hearts using the same

materials others used to sweeten sentiments. "It's Over" features the sound of

a world collapsing. Where other singers couldn't sell a line like "You won't be

seeing rainbows anymore," Orbison dispatches it with the sad confidence of a

man who knows how things work.

Heartbreak is never far away in an Orbison song.

Even when he gets the girl—as in "Pretty Woman" and "Running

Scared"—it's usually an unexpected development in the final moments. He

sang like someone who had been kicked around by life, but with a comforting

kind of pain, the kind that suggests that others out there are hurting too.

"Only the lonely know the heartaches I've been through," goes one of his most

famous lines. Surely he knew how many people thought he was singing to them.