15th
blog comments powered by Disqus
Running Scared: Roy Orbison (1961)
I’ve been reading Chronicles, Volume One and was especially delighted to read Dylan’s musings on Roy Orbison:
He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, “Man, I don’t believe it. (33)
Well said, Bob. But while his voice is crucial to the effect, I’ve always felt that it was the structure of Orbison’s ballads that made one feel so self-destructive. They are pop operas that drive themselves off of cliffs. They are short stories with no denouement. A slow and steady climb to nowhere.
“Running Scared” begins as a march, the anxiety of being left for a former lover a mere seed. One man and his guitar. But as the thought develops, so does the march, reigning in along the way pianos and drums and brass and strings and singers that sing like angels. An army! It is not until the final section (“Then all at once, he was standing there.”) that the spark finally ignites – private anxieties become a nightmarish reality, and the march becomes a full-on trot as if imbued with fight or flight adrenaline. But what of it? The girl chooses him. The hero wins. All that worrying for naught. The final pulses of the march are rich with brass and strings, matrimonial perhaps. We stand on the sidelines, not sure if what we witnessed was love or war, shaking our heads in disbelief and (yes, Bob) muttering, “Man, I don’t believe it.”
