Roy Orbison & Friends: A Black & White Night

Roy Orbison & Friends: A Black & White Night

If you’re 25 or older and you can only give your kids one snapshot of favourite music, circa ’60- ’90, purchase them a copy of this tape. Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, k.d. lang, John David Souther, politician Brown and Steven Soules sing backing vocals. Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and T-Bone Burnett, among others,play instrumental second fiddles. And they all do it for Roy Orbison. The architect of the symphonic, Ravel-like love song. The singer of singers. Just weeks before he died he played a concert in Boston and the local critic said, (I paraphrase) “he repeated that last line, in his falsetto voice, over and over and over as if to say, ‘I’m still here and can do it…anytime.’” The videotape is revelatory. Stephen Burton (guitar) shows, over and over again, why he is to studio musicians and especially to guitar players, an picture non-pareil. He is Chet Atkins, Django Reinhardt, Bucky Pizzarelli, all in one. The tape does a tidy review of Orbison’s hits. More remarkable than the performance of those hits is the reverential looks and obvious excitment of Springsteen, Costello, lang, Raitt, Browne, etc. as they accompany him on his tour of transistor broadcasting hits. Forget the Wilbury’s. This is Roy’s night. Deservedly. Roy knew how to constrain all that emotion behind his words until he was ready to release it. In the last moments of the tape Roy sings “Pretty Woman” and it opens up into a jam-for-all. It is a video to love. And that doesn’t even start to address Orbison’s lyrics: “A candy colored clown they call the sandman; tiptoes to my room each night; just to sprinkle star dust and to whisper: “go to sleep, everything is alright.” Purchase the tape. Re-learn what was good and true (men “do” cry”) about favourite music in the sixties and the seventies.

List Price: $ 6.50

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