A Conversation with Alex Orbison – HuffPost 5.22.14

Mike Ragogna: There are so many releases oriented around your dad’s work and his catalog right now, and one of the major releases is the deluxe edition of Mystery Girl. What was your participation in that and how do you like the end result?

Alex Orbison: Well, Mystery Girl Deluxe happens to fall on the 25th anniversary of the annual release. My brothers and I put this together, we all had our parts. I directed the documentary Mystery Girl Unraveled, which is the camera part to this. We started with archive footage that was very strong. A bunch of it we did not know that we actually had, there were recordings that we’d found in the last two years that really made the documentary appealing for us. We have behind the scenes footage of the guys recording all through Mike Hammel’s Garage and then in Rumbo studios with archive interviews from and Tom Petty and Mike Campbell and Steve Cropper among others. We’re really, really proud of that. On the audio side, we have nine bonus tracks which are studio demos and in studio jams more or less. Some of them are just the band and my dad running through the songs before they were doing the takes, and then we actually have very intimate demos that are blue box recordings from my dad. Out of those, one of them has never been heard before. One of those songs had such a beautiful sound, but the tape was unlistenable, so we used new technology to go and scoop out just the vocal and be able to turn that up and put new instrumentation on it.

My brothers and I are all musicians, so my brothers and John Carter Cash and I played on it and then my brothers and I sang backup and John Carter coproduced it with us at the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee. There’s so much to this deluxe package and the forty page booklet that has a five thousand word essay and never before seen photos and all the original artwork. We tried to only add and not take away, keep things in that original format from the late eighties. It’s been very exciting. We’re really, really pleased with what we came back with. The expression is, “Everything but the kitchen sink,” we’ve been calling this “The kitchen sink.” We just wanted to see how much we could put on a CD and with the documentary we just started where we started and did it primarily for the fans. It’s a real nice little piece.

MR: Can you tell me the story of Mystery Girl? Were there any surprises about your father when you went through the archives?

AO: The footage is very, very candid at the Mike Campbell studio. It was just a camera that they set up because the control room was in a guest bedroom and my dad was recording in the garage. The footage is very candid and the personal details we all remember very, very clearly but the actual technique that they used to recordMystery Girl and specifically “You Got It” and the Mike Campbell songs, this stuff came out sounding so amazing and they were literally in the garage and they liked the sound underneath the light that goes on the motor that pulls the garage door up. So they would literally pull the cars out and set up everything from my dad’s vocal to the drums and they would just go for it right there in that garage. I knew that they did some stuff there but I didn’t know that they did everything there, and that was very, very surprising to me. Also “She’s A Mystery To Me” with Bono and the Edge, we remember Bono coming by the house and seeing him and discussion was a big deal, but I did not know that Bono had gotten my dad into the big drum room at Rumbo studios. He had his guitar amp in that big room with the drums going and my dad singing the vocal and I had no idea that they had such an unorthodox approach. They had the chance to go to the big studio that was all polished and they huddled in one room like it was the garage.

So the intimacy and the actual technique they used was so much different than anything that I’d imagined while listening to the end results of “You Got It” and “She’s A Mystery” and the actual polish on the record. There’s also TV footage from the Netherlands, a guy who came and interviewed my dad and there’s footage of the song “In The Real World,” it had aired in the Netherlands but I had never seen it. I ended up seeing it on YouTube some time in the last year and contacted them and got that footage. To have a live performance of my dad singing one of these special songs was really incredible. I’ll go on about the record: Mystery Girl was started in 1985, in late ’84 Jeff Lynne came to Hendersonville, Tennessee, where we lived at the time, where Johnny Cash fell in the lake. He wanted to get together with my dad and talk about doing some recording and writing some songs and putting a record together. We had moved to Malibu, California within a year and when we got to Malibu my dad started to put together a team with a publicist and start recording other stuff that was not the new record. He did Class Of ’55 with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis and then he went and re-recorded his greatest hits because Monument, the label that put them out originally went bankrupt and the fans were unable to get those recordings of the classics.

He was doing that and David Lynch had put “In Dreams” into Blue Velvet. He went and recorded “In Dreams” with T-Bone Burnett and T-Bone was introduced and my dad signed with Virgin records at the same time. Then they recorded the first song from Mystery Girl sometime in 1987, I want to say. Right around then they had the “The Comedians” and the black and white special, and that was a good glimpse at what Mystery Girl would look like live as well. The first songs were done with T Bone Burnett and then at that point I think T Bone had another project and my dad sent out for Jeff Lynne again and Jeff did a little part on “You Got It” and “California Blue.” Then The Travelling Wilburys happened and that footage ended up in the documentary. In “California Blue,” George Harrison shows up…then The Travelling Wilburys happened right in the middle of my dad’s record. Jeff also did a song that they wrote together called “A Love So Beautiful,” they did that during the Travelling Willburys while normal people were sleeping Jeff had constructed that song and my dad sang it in one take, there’s a beautiful piece on that in the documentary. After the Travelling Wilburys my dad came back and grabbed Mike Campbell and they went into Rumbo studios and cut the song “Windsurfer” that my dad wrote with Bill [Dees], a song called “In The Real World,” the last song on the album “Careless Heart” was done there as well and then after that Bono had come up with his song and they went back to Rumbo and they had a magical tracking session there, Bono and my dad and Jim Keltner as the drummer, you can hear it on that tape, it’s magical. My brother Wesley actually wrote the last recorded song on the album, it’s called “The Only One.”

My dad had talked to Wes, who had started writing songs, and he submitted three songs and my dad picked “The Only One.” My dad had closed out that record with my brother’s recording, basically it was Roy Orbison and the Heartbreakers, he used Tom Petty’s band for a lot of this stuff but that one was from Memphis Hall so it ended up being a really special track for us. That was late in 1988, sometime around November, so my dad spent a couple of weeks out mixing and mastering all of the songs with the different producers. My mom and dad actually produced “In The Real World” and Mike Campbell did all the other songs and Jeff Lynne and T-Bone worked on it and even all the different engineers were different for that. To get everything into one sound my dad spent a long time doing the mixing and mastering himself. It’s interesting because over time people have imagined that my dad cut the record and went back to the Wilburys because they had become so successful and that he passed the record off to someone else, but my dad actually had the test pressings from Mystery Girl and played it for everyone that he saw by the end of November there. That was a really great page from the documentary, I wanted to show how much fun everyone was having and what a great experience it was in the making of the actual record. It really ended up being a nice timeline and I was surprised by how much footage we had of my dad through this time.

MR: At that point in time, Roy Orbison had almost never been more famous.

AO: It was wonderful that he had made a point to be more publicly visible. As contemporary as he tried to be, he ended up making a record that sounded totally classic. If you listen to this next to the other albums of the time there’s not a lot of that eighties funky electronic heavy synth keyboards and stuff. It really was magical, the genesis of it was very organic and I think the timing was just right. I think everyone knew it was going to be a big deal and they felt it was going to do well. It was amazing. Personally, I attribute a lot of this to the move to Malibu, California. There were always people who came by Hendersonville because Hendersonville was a little beacon of safety when you’re touring. Nashville is centrally located so if you end up in Kentucky or somewhere then why not drive the extra three or four hours on the bus? For someone like Bob Dylan to come to Hendersonville in the middle of a tour happened a lot, but when we lived in Malibu people started to realize, “Hey, Roy Orbison’s in town, why don’t we just call him and get him over here?” Everything from hearing Bruce Springsteen sing Happy Birthday to my dad and my dad during the national anthem and going to the Hard Rock for just random parties and stuff. He was getting out and being a public figure which hadn’t really happened for quite some time. It was part of his diligence to get out there and be seen and also put together the right team to get there.

MR: Was Roy aware of his contribution to culture? And how did you view your dad’s place in music history?

AO: You know, when I was very, very young I could tell that were just a different type of family, and we were, even outside of my dad. It just seemed like we were all different from other people. Then I started to realize around age four or five that my dad was really special and the nature of his performances were so incredible that I was a fan from that point on, I went to all of those shows from that point on just to go see him do his thing and hit those high notes. It was such a spectacle and an event, every time he would start off on “Running Scared” and get to those high notes, it was like watching a stunt. It almost seemed like it couldn’t be real. With the writing at home and the people coming by and the work that was being done, that was so steady through my life that all seemed very normal. It’s funny that you mentioned Chris Isaac, I remember Chris coming by the house and he was with us for a couple of days, literally he would come by mid morning and we would have lunch together and he would sit around the table with us at dinner time and he and my dad would walk across the street to the beach and talk and have guitars and they would go over stuff. There was definitely time spent with so many people in that manner that it all just seemed really normal. It’s amazing, the amount of people that my dad touched throughout his life all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, producing people through the sixties, I went through his schedule, he would be touring and then I’d see these albums that my dad produced and I would look back and say, “Wait a minute, that was when ‘Pretty Woman’ was out on the charts for four weeks,” because it hit the number one slot twice, once at the end of summer and then again in fall. In the interim my dad went back to Nashville and produced another band’s album and went back when “Pretty Woman” hit number one again. So seeing the scope of the work and the extent of it is really incredible. My dad’s opinion on it, he was a humble, gentle soul, and in the documentary we made I think we relayed that more than probably had ever been seen before.

His expressions about people’s admiration, he’d say a lot of these things, but I know he was deeply touched by all that. It is really amazing because these people that my dad touched ended up resurfacing and joining around him and being the creative base that my dad was able to use to have his resurgence and really creatively have the most freedom that he had ever had and be the most effective with that absolute freedom of creativity. He was in admiration of them and the thing that I find interesting is that everyone was on equal footing and my dad just saw eye to eye. It’s Jeff Lynne, my dad and Mike Campbell and everyone had an equal vote and it was just really democratic and easygoing. I saw Bono and my dad writing together and they were just like two guys. There was no before or after, everyone was just right in that moment and working as a team. It’s a great thing to be able to see a little bit of that.

MR: You talked about Chris Isaac, I wish we had gotten to see a duet between them.

AO: Yeah, yeah. And when my dad and Chris actually toured together with Dizzy Gilespie, Chris opened up in Saratoga, California. I’d say that was 1987, so things were really cracking. My dad had started recording and the k.d. lang duet was the last thing of that nature before my dad was a hundred percent concentrated on making the new stuff. The duet with Chris would not have come until probably the end of ’90 or even ’91, it would have taken another year for my dad to slow down from putting together Mystery Girl and the next new album that he was really excited about. So yeah, it does seem like a missed opportunity, but when you look back through the career–I saw a picture of my dad and Otis Redding on the same plane and they were talking about doing “The Big O’s” because that was both of their nicknames. They laughed about that, they became friends so fast on that plane ride that they had planned to do a “Big O’s” record. If you start following that “lost opportunity” thing you can really go down a wormhole. [laughs]

MR: I just mean to say that it’s like the James Taylor and Carly Simon album that never happened, moments in history that would have been terrific.

AO: Oh, of course. I completely understand. There’s several of his friends that I wonder, “Why didn’t that happen?” but we do have more of those things that are relatively unknown, Roy Orbison penned songs that Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly cut, and the connection with the Johnny Cash songs and stuff that’s not far back, when it comes to light it’s really cool to piece together these pictures. Part of what we’ve done with the Mystery Girl Unraveled is get a good visual representation of what was going on and chronicle it in the liner notes. It’s really the first time that this part of the career has ever been in order from 1985 until my dad passed away, because everything did happen so fast. It’s really cool to see the way everything unfolded.

MR: Alex, what advice do you have for new artists? And what do you think your dad might have had as advice for new artists?

AO: I think being a new artist is almost tougher now than it was before. I would say that being able to change with the game is very important, but you have to maintain integrity through that, so that’s a real fine line to be able to do. I know my dad started as a lead guitar player in the middle of the fifties and did that exclusively and then was singing a little bit and then quit and became a songwriter and not a performer until he pitched a song to Elvis Presley and that song was called “Only The Lonely.” Elvis asked my dad if he could come by the next day. It was very late at night so my dad drove all the way to Nashville and cut “Only The Lonely” himself and ended up having the smash hit with that that changed his career forever. That kind of thing is good, to stay malleable but also have integrity and know if your position changes or whatever your creative outlet is or even your instrument or anything, I was a drummer for years and years and I had tried to learn as much as I could about the music industry and it’s really paying off now that I’m taking care of my dad’s stuff. It’s very helpful to know both sides of the coin. My dad’s thing was “Practice, practice, practice.” He told it to me, he told it to Roy Junior and he told it to Wesley. I said, “I’m practicing three or four hours a day,” I was practicing much more than that usually but he would say, “I would do eight hours a day of singing and we would have rehearsals before that,” so my dad was singing as much as twelve hours a day through the fifties and early sixties.

Practice does make perfect and for us that was the only way to get there. So I know that’s what my dad would say because that’s what he told me. I got to the point where I played the drums so much it affected my school performance. So that’s the clear-cut path to doing it: Start with that and get that strong base of really going over stuff. But it’s almost like the stock market; you need to diversify your practice, there’s practice at home where you’re practicing your instrument and your craft and then there’s practice with a band which is rehearsal and preproduction for a record is super, super important. I could hear that through my dad’s stuff, we would work on it before he would record it and really try to figure it out and then practicing the final product and going on the road with it. There’s a lot of practice involved, I think.

MR: Van Halen had a hit with “Pretty Woman” and others have covered your dad’s material. What did Roy and your family think of some of the covers that have been recorded over the years? What were his thoughts on the finished results?

AO: We had the Van Halen “Pretty Woman” single. My dad listened to that a lot because the big stereo was in the living room. When he came home I don’t even know if he was aware of it yet because we had caught onto it very quickly. He thought it was great. He was always quoted as saying, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” so when people would recreate his music it was a way that the music was living on and having younger fans hear it and it was just the highest form of compliment. With all the people have cut his songs, it’s a pretty wide swath from Ronstadt and MacLean in the seventies all the way to newer bands and people you would never imagine to cut Roy Orbison songs. I think the number of covers is in the thousands, twenty-five hundred or thirty-five hundred different versions of different songs in different languages that we’ve collected over the years. It’s really amazing. He was very, very flattered by that and I think that’s another nice part of his nature as a person.

MR: What do you think might have been or was his favorite song that he’d ever written or recorded? And what did your family like the most?

AO: We were all so goo-goo over Mystery Girl, probably because I know that he enjoyed all of the songs immensely. The fun thing to me was the actual parts of the songs. There’s a song called “California Blue” and Jeff Lynne has this light effect in the back, the name of it is actually “Bubbles” but it doesn’t sound like bubbles. My dad was singing the vocal part and then when they finished the song it wasn’t really in there. You can actually hear him humming it in the documentary. When Jeff mixed the albums he put this little ascending keyboard part that goes up and my dad was just tickled pink with the bubbles, that was all he talked about for days. He would play it and just listen to it. I think he was missing the forest for the trees, he focused on the little things that were making these songs that he was comfortable with and enjoyed. The little things made it for him. I think that’s a little different than looking back in retrospect and saying, “This song was my favorite.” I know that the earlier works were such masterpieces, my dad wasn’t really like that, though, he didn’t really look back. He wasn’t ever thinking about “The glory days,” he was always focused on moving forward, especially with recording. It’s great that the newer songs had such similarities, the essence of “California Blue” is somewhat “Blue Bayou”-ish, and that kind of matches with the up tempo-ness of “Pretty Woman” and “In The Real World” is what happens in the real world and “In Dreams” is the other side of that. There is a kinship to the earlier stuff. They’re little tips of the hat to each other, but now that 25 years has gone by, looking back in retrospect and seeing how this mystery girl album has stood up over time, I was just in Europe last week and I met several people that knew “You Got It” but didn’t know the name Roy Orbison or the song “Pretty Woman,” but I said, “You Got It,” and they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah!” and I said, “That’s Roy Orbison.” That’s really amazing to me.

MR: What do you think is the Roy Orbison legacy?

AO: The Roy Orbison legacy moving on from here?

MR: Yeah, how do you think he will be remembered decades from now?

AO: I hope that in a decade from now more people know who Roy Orbison is than ever before. I believe it’s possible, and all joking aside it’s pretty remarkable, he’s got very good days ahead, and we three brothers have been having good days. It’s very important to us.

MR: Is there anything else that we should know about Roy Orbison? Something that didn’t even go in your documentary?

AO: He was absolutely the funniest guys in my entire life. Having the dark glasses and the dark hair, that wouldn’t be the first thing that you thought, but it’s true. Aside from being one of the most special and overall really nice across the board people, you never find someone of that stature, where one hundred percent of the stories we got back were about how nice he was, even people who had casual encounters with him in airport halls all the way up to Jeff Lynne it was consistent and that is really amazing. That’s something that normal people wouldn’t know because these are all stories that have come back to me one by one, but it’s amazing to go through everything he went through and do the things he did and still be a good guy.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne