Talk:Roy Orbison

Well done and comprehensive

This is a great article! I learned a lot from reading it, even as a big fan. It should be nominated for one of Wikipedia's good article categories.

Beautiful nonsense, very ugly guy

When compared to the Everly Brothers, who often used the same session musicians, Orbison is credited with "a passionate intensity" that, according to The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, made "his love, his life, and, indeed, the whole world [seem] to be coming to an end—not with a whimper, but an agonized, beautiful bang".

This is the kind of thing a very advanced algorithm produces these days. Apparently, you can't earn yourself an agonized bang recycling the tried and true. Or something to that effect—inscrutable to mere human comprehension. — MaxEnt 00:27, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, he was extremely ugly. 86.135.26.77 (talk) 18:01, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

Not sure if you are celebrating or demeaning the quality of the writing you quoted. Just in case, it's from the 3rd edition, published in the pre-algorithmic 1992. MxBuster (talk) 08:03, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Nobbled?

It looks like this page and other Orbison-related pages have been nobbled by or on behalf of someone called Marcel Riesco. He has inserted his name as an official biographer into the text of the articles, and also alongside authors' names in the references. According to the Library Of Congress catalogue data, the official biography was written by three of Orbison's sons and Jeff Slate, with Riesco credited as a researcher or contributor (but not on the front cover). Credit where credit's due, but his name shouldn't be more prominent than the authors'. DavidFarmbrough (talk) 17:42, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Update - I have made about forty edits on various Orbison pages and pages relating to individual songs and albums, some containing multiple instances of this name. It's possible someone might try to revert them. DavidFarmbrough (talk) 21:26, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Associated acts

There's no way Orbison is associated (according to the guideline) with all those acts. - FlightTime (open channel) 02:06, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Timeline issue?

The timeline details regarding Orbison's death are a bit screwy. Apparently in his last two days (4-6 Dec) he rested for several days then travelled to Britain to record videos with the Travelling Wilburys? It doesn't make sense. ~2026-34878-69 (talk) 21:28, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Problematic Content Heavily Reliant on One Source

The article appears to have degraded in the past few years.

Content has been pulled from the Ellis Amburn bio, Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story, (available on archive.org), which is a somewhat sloppily written celebrity bio from the Carol Publishing Group's Lyle Stuart imprint.

It's not a book (or company) with interest in ideas, meaning, or even whether self-interest or the passage of time may have influenced an interview subject's recollections of decades-old events— even when they contradict someone else's recollection.

Doubts notwithstanding, if taken as a reliable source some of the referenced information is distorted in the form it takes in the article, i.e. Orbison is quoted on page 53:

"It was Elvis who, without knowing it, made me a motorcycle fan." "I saw a motorcycle outside Sun Records Studio and somebody told me it belonged to Elvis Presley. I finally managed to get to take a motorcycle ride with the guy who bought that machine from Elvis and that was the start of it."

Which in the article becomes:

"[...] Roy had been introduced to them [motorcycles] by Elvis Presley."

I intend to re-read the article and then read versions prior to the introduction of the Ellis Amburn Dark Star content, and hopefully propose some edits here. MxBuster (talk) 07:54, 20 July 2026 (UTC)