SMIP #10: She’s A Mystery To Me by Roy Orbison
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
[4:05-4:15]
For Ministers of a certain age, Roy Orbison was one of many childhood musical figures of fun.
Through the mid to late Seventies, the same old faces would do the rounds of awful light entertainment shows, miming to one of two or three prehistoric hits to pay the mortgage.
If it was Gene Pitney, it meant we were about to hear Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa or Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart. Lonnie Donegan’s dad was a dustman or had something to do with a gap in Cumberland. Tom Jones didn’t exist outside the narrow confines of What’s New, Pussycat?, It’s Not Unusual or The Green, Green Grass Of Home. And Shirley Bassey would send me running from the room before she could bellow the second syllable of Goldfinger or Big Spender.
The final column around which British variety TV shows were built in 1970s Britain was Roy Orbison. Every few months he’d turn up, standing motionless, dressed head to toe in black, eyes and any emotion hidden behind sunglasses, miming the bizarre and alien cadences of Only The Lonely, Crying or Oh, Pretty Woman (“Mercy!”) before silently sloping away once more. For some reason, there did not seem to be a more disconsolate human being on the planet.
Contrary to the Minister’s recollection,
Roy Orbison did sometimes wear
something other than black in the Seventies
I’m sure I even recall Orbison turning up on more than one edition of The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which might as well have been filmed at the Working Men’s Club at the top of my street (a glass of shandy and a packet of salt and vinegar on a Saturday afternoon while my grandfather watched the ITV Seven) and was mainly noted for Bernard Manning crooning pre-war ballads most weeks. (Yes, really.)
Like Diana Dors’ predictable chat show innuendo these singers seemed principally to exist, without discernible contemporary achievement, to remind adults of a bygone time when they had to make their own entertainment by candlelight. Nothing more, nothing less – the routine never changed and these people had nothing original or relevant to offer me. The BBC strike in late 1978 and the four-month-long ITV strike of 1979 at least meant we had to find something else to watch for a while…
WIth the benefit of hindsight and maturity – though I still have nothing good to say about Shirley Bassey – I’ve come to realise that Pitney and Orbison were great songwriters, that Donegan is the bridge between rock’n'roll and The Beatles, that Jones was a brilliant entertainer and – above everything else – that Roy Orbison possessed one of the two best white male voices in pop music.
Roy Orbison, smiling
(almost certainly pre-1966)
If you look up the adjective ‘tragic’ in a dictionary of popular culture, the definition is replaced by a picture of Roy Orbison: if he looked disconsolate and sounded desolate, it was because he had every right to be. When Orbison sang that he was crying or that it was over, he knew what every word of it meant: his wife died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and less than two years later his house burnt to the ground, killing two of his three sons.
Writing in the wonderful The Heart Of Rock And Soul, Dave Marsh says of Orbison:
If Phil Spector is pop music’s truest romantic and John Fogarty its greatest fatalist, Roy Orbison stands as its ultimate stoic. Maybe he wore those shades all the time to disguise the fact that he never blinked no matter what you threw at him… Orbison was different than any other rock star of his period. He was relatively middle-class, college-educated and on easier terms with more kinds of music – opera and Mexican ballad singing, for instance – than any of his peers. His songs possess a psychological complexity that is commonly believed not to have existed in pop music until Dylan and the Beatles… No other singer with this much range displays anything like Orbison’s complete emotional commitment – when Roy sings ‘from this moment I’ll be crying,’ there’s no reason to believe that the tears will ever stop.
According to Dylan, writing in the sleeve notes to the posthumous compilation The Very Best Of Roy Orbison:
Orbison… transcended all the genres. With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes… [He sang] his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal… 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. Orbison was deadly serious – no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him.
Bolero, chanson, opera, mariachi, symphony – not words ordinarily associated with rock and roll, but all of which can be applied to Orbison’s oeuvre. No wonder it confused the young Minister.
Orbison placed nine singles within the Billboard Top Ten in the five years from 1960, with even greater chart success in Europe and Australia, but for twenty years after that Orbison floundered, consigned to the clubs and variety shows.
One of the unlikeliest musical career revivals ever began in 1986 when In Dreams featured in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; a year later, another movie song – a re-recording of Crying with k.d. lang – would earn Orbison a Grammy Award; in 1988 Orbison would join Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in The Travelling Wilburys and record Mystery Girl, his first album of new solo material in over a decade.
Orbison in 1988
After performing this new material in concert just a handful of times, Roy Orbison would die – literally of a broken heart – on 6 December 1988, at the age of just 52.
Mystery Girl was released two months later to levels of critical acclaim and commercial success that had eluded Orbison for two decades: The Travelling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Mystery Girl would simultaneously reside in the top five of the Billboard album chart in early 1989. A few months later, filming began on a Richard Gere-Julia Roberts movie that would introduce Orbison to a whole new generation, with Oh, Pretty Woman earning him the 1991 Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
In 1989, Orbison was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame and in 1998 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A year later, Only The Lonely and Oh, Pretty Woman were inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame; Crying joined them in 2002. In 2004, those three songs and In Dreams made Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.
Mystery Girl is a splendidly fulfilling album, recalling Orbison’s heyday without sounding like self-pastiche. His voice soars as high and strong as ever within well constructed and sympathetically arranged songs. The most successful single from the album – You Got It – revives the timpani of It’s Over and the twanging guitar of Oh, Pretty Woman – and its co-author and producer Jeff Lynne for once resists the temptation to make his subject sound like the Electric Fucking Light Orchestra.
She’s A Mystery To Me (CD single)
The album’s crown jewel, though, is She’s A Mystery To Me, penned for Orbison by U2’s Messrs. Hewson and Evans. At the end of the Eighties, Bono and Edge had a penchant for penning persistent ballads, initially driven by gentle percussion and noodling guitars that build inexorably to a dramatic and climactic crescendo: She’s A Mystery To Me comes from the same place as The Joshua Tree’s With Or Without You (1987) and Rattle And Hum’s All I Want Is You (1988). It stands apart from its siblings, though, in that it swoops and soars across a wider span of octaves than Bono could ever manage himself, taking full advantage of Orbison’s magnificent range.
Like most of Bono’s output, the lyrics deserve barely a moment’s consideration; like a lot of Evans’ music of that period, it would drone tediously without a hearty vocal performance to propel it upwards.
It’s not until after the first verse that Orbison first begins to cut loose [1:00-1:10], but that’s only a tease. There is no chorus as such – merely the repetition of the line “She’s a mystery girl,” in a higher range – and first time around Orbison rocks even more gently than Val Doonican. Producer Bono allows the song to fall back to the verse and Orbison’s voice falls two full octaves for the next 40 seconds. From 1:55 to 2:15, we’re back at the ‘chorus’: his voice of necessity emboldened to rise above the rising waves of cymbals, guitar and piano, Orbison now takes the line out for four walks around the block and his power up to 50%.
Still we’re not where we need to be. We need to summon all our strength for the final push over the top, and a gently tinkling piano line atop Edge’s guitar motif gives us time to draw breath [2:17-2:22]. During the final verse, Bono introduces a string section [from 2:25] to swell the ranks further for the last battle; from 2:44 a snare drum signals the final stage of an introduction that takes three minutes and six seconds to take the listener to the Promised Land, the place where Roy draws in a lungful of air and lets rip. One final crash of cymbals [3:06] and our boy’s away.
Power, passion, vibrato and falsetto – from 3:07 Orbison gives it the ghostly, full-throated works for almost a minute. There is no question about this girl’s mystery when Roy seemingly lets the matter rest at 3:59.
But after a few seconds of the band playing on, the musicians almost audibly astonished by the singer’s efforts [3:59-4:05], The Big O hits the very highest note one last time – for two bars, across five full seconds [from 4:05] – and the hairs on the back of the neck stand up to applaud.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
Singer and band spiritually and physically spent, that last word – extended to five distinct syllables [4:12-4:14] – masks their exhaustion. In those two seconds the percussion, guitar, piano and bass all fall silent. When Roy lets go the last sound he has, just a solitary violin string fading into the background [4:15-4:16] brings matters to a conclusion.
Neither Roy Orbison nor U2’s best song, She’s A Mystery To Me nevertheless archives two talents at the height of their games.
Immense, beautiful and haunting – there has been no other sound in pop music like Roy Orbison.
Conscious that I keep banging on about wanting to write about music more than I do here, this is my entry in Upstart Blogger’s Inner Circle competition in the popular music culture section.