Vital Viewing (Through the Glasses Darkly Edition)

Pop singer Roy Orbison was born on this day in 1936. For someone whose public persona was that of a man of mystery, he was very open to giving interviews, and I had close to a dozen to choose from on YouTube. Here's the one I finally settled on, conducted amidst a 1972 tour of Australia: 

 The dark glasses. The black hair. The usually black wardrobe. The mournful singing. So much a part of the Orbison mystique. And it's tempting to say that...

 

...the tragedies to which the Aussie interviewer alluded was the key to the Orbison mystique. Until you find out it all came together before the bad stuff happened. Take the most famous part of the persona, the ebony spectacles. Orbison wasn't blind, but neither was his vision 20/20. According to the performer himself, he had left his regular glasses behind on a plane, and so had to go out onstage with a pair of prescription Wayfarer sunglasses. Afterwards, he decided to make it a regular thing. It hid his stage fright, and, well, it also hid the fact that he wasn't the handsomest man in the world. Orbison's hair, like Elvis Presley's, was brownish-blondish, and, again like Elvis, he died it jet-black so the top of his head wouldn't seem to disappear under the bright lights. The black clothes went with the black hair and black lenses. As for his choice of singing material, much of which he wrote or co-wrote himself, Orbison had grown up in Texas listening to country and western music, much of which was of the somebody-done-somebody-wrong variety. And he heard the blues, which in its rawest form is about experiencing, well, the blues. There's no evidence that he was ever exposed to opera, though his ethereal vocal style earned him the nickname The Caruso of Rock. Whatever the exposure, the voice itself he was born with, and it wasn't tragedy but another word that begins with a T that is the key to Orbison's mystique: talent.  

OK, enough with the achy, breaky heart. How about something a little more upbeat? 

Listening to the lyrics and watching the grainy images, it occurs to me that by today's standards, this could be a song about a stalker.

Of course, when it comes to stalking, Orbison has nothing on this guy.

The 1980s saw a revival of interest in Roy Orbison. He was even in a supergroup.

Orbison and Bruce Springsteen. Two generations of rockers. Looking at this picture it's tempting to say a torch is being passed. But not so fast...

December 1988. Just 52 years old. That's 11 years younger than Sammy Davis Jr (died 1990), 17 years younger than Tennessee Ernie Ford (died 1991), 17 years younger than Burl Ives (died 1995), 17 years younger than Howard Keel (died 2004), 17 years younger than Pete Seeger (died 2014), 18 years younger than Leonard Bernstein (died 1992), 19 years younger than Dean Martin (died 1995), 19 years younger than Robert Merrill (died 2004), 21 years younger than Frank Sinatra (died 1998), 28 years younger than Lionel Hampton (died 2002), 29 years younger than Cab Calloway (died 1994), 29 years younger than Gene Autry (died 1998), 33 years younger than Roy Acuff (died 1992), 33 years younger than Lawrence Welk (died 1992), and 48 years younger than Irving Berlin (died 1989.) That's NOT how you pass a torch!

However, as another rock star or cartoon bear or baseball player or somebody once said, it ain't over 'til it's over. Orbison had just completed a new album, Mystery Girl, a few weeks before his death. A song from that album, "You Got It", co-written with fellow Traveling Wilburys Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, rose to No. 9 in the US and No.3 in the UK. Here's the video:

Roy Orbison's personal losses were enormous. In the public sphere at least, he was able to give more freely. And he did

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1931-2020

It's probably in bad taste to refer to a death as a scheduling conflict, but it so happens that actor Robert Morse died right when I was putting the finishing touches on this post. I always liked him in whatever I saw him in, and even if his fame was at best relative, I wasn't about to pass up his passing. His career was mostly on Broadway, but one of those Broadway productions, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, was also a 1967 Hollywood movie, and the character of window washer-turned-chairman of the board J. Pierrepont Finch was for many years Morse's best-known role. As for Hollywood movies based on something other than Broadway productions, Morse had large parts in two minor classics of the 1960s, The Loved One, a satire of the cemetery business (both two-legged and four-legged), and the cameo-laden A Guide for the Married Man, in which he schools Walter Matthau on the fine art of adultery. In recent years, Morse became well-known all over again for playing senior advertising executive Bertrum Cooper in the highly regarded cable series Mad Men. Those of you who think I've seen every TV show ever made may be surprised to learn that I've never watched a single episode of Mad Men, but I have no problem believing Robert Morse was very good in it.