“Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.” “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. “A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment. There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?” He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge. Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.” “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. “You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio. “I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic." They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. I guess you could say they weren't commercial. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. “I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.” Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. “As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless" it "force-feeds us music. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.” Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile.
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They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics.
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He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. With him, it was all about fat and blood. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next.
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His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. “I was always fishing for something on the radio.