Authorized Roy Orbison Book

This episode is The Authorized Roy Orbison. The Authorized Roy Orbison is the book that my brothers Alex, Wesley and I, and a great author named Jess Slate have written on my dad Roy Orbison. I’ve been calling it the first book on Roy Orbison because it’s the only one that real and true. It’s the best one and we’re proud it. This rock bio and Elvis-By the Presley’s are my two favorites and there are a lot of good bios out there.

What I like about this book is that it has pictures. One of my goals for this book was that you could sit and listen to music and read it at the same time. I just wanted to be able to hit Roy Orbison repeat and then start flipping through the pages. That’s the way I read most books, I listen to music or I listen to the book on tape while I’m reading it. While I’m on that topic, there’s also an audiobook that corresponds with the book (I’ll get back to that a little bit later at the end and tell you about how we did that). Don’t forget the audiobook is available on iTunes, or in CD form. I’m holding a copy of it right now, this is the first one. It’s about the size of a CD and it has a beautiful picture of Roy Orbison on the front with the guitar neck. Roy Orbison Unabridged read by Roy Orbison Jr., Wesley Orbison, and Alex Orbison. This includes PDFs of photos. Alex read the introduction and then I read the book on tape. Which is a lot of reason why I am doing these podcasts now, I did so much reading on this book that I started to like it and so I’m just continuing on my own with this. I’ve been telling the press I had to hold my breath for three days to read this book. I would have to keep the lines consistent, so I would take a deep breath and then read all the way to the end of the sentence and they would edit out the breaths in between. It’s beautiful, my brother Alex read the introduction, I read the bulk of the material and Wesley read the quotations. 

My brother Wesley (who sounds like most my dad and has the Orbison accent), never really moved from Tennessee and Texas. Alex and I went to California, so we got a little bit more California. I grew up in the back of a tour bus and in London, England and I also spent decades in Sweden, so I have a little bit of a European kind of marbled English accent. Wesley was raised by our grandparents Orbi Lee and Nadine who we call Mawmaw and Pawpaw. He has an accent that even people in Texas don’t have today. He has a kind of the Roy Orbison type accent. When he reads those lines, he read all the quotations of my dad. It makes the book more three dimensional and much more interesting. I listen to a lot of books on tape and I kind of don’t like it when it’s just one person and they act all the voices. There’s not so much acting in this, it’s us three brothers reading it. We have the rights to the music so the company that we worked with, Hashet, they did a great job putting the music underneath the text. They played it before the text or after the text, in between the text or underneath while I was talking. Those were really the only options you have but they were creative and clever in the way they did that. With the music there, it gives it breadth and dimension, it’s like a three-dimensional audiobook. We even got the new album Roy Orbison with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the title of the album is The Love So Beautiful. We were fortunate to be able to use that music on this project, so it all lined up well. It’s about seven hours long so if you aren’t getting enough with these podcasts and want to listen to me all the way to Florida, New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. It’s about perfect for a drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. If you’re out there driving around, you can get this on CD like the box that I’m holding or on iTunes. I have it on my iPhone so I’m taking it around everywhere I go. I also have the book on my iPhone and I have a physical copy