Roy Orbison Live at Austin City Limits presents a truly great singer midway through his career - conscious that his glory years are behind him, and unaware that just five years later his career would be reborn in a startling and brilliant way.
This Austin City concert was filmed in 1982. The back-up band is fairly perfunctory. The word 'inspired' doesn't really come to mind. And Roy is finding the whole affair just a bit heavy-going. There are some great moments, notably when he tackles his song Leah, but the voice just isn't rock-steady on this night. The famous high-notes are still there, but it's an effort to reach and hold them. The concert is just a bit tired.
But the Texan audience loves it, and the repertoire of his most famous songs - Blue Bayou, Oh Pretty Woman, Only the Lonely, Dream Baby, Crying and so many more, ensure a great reception. Roy, however, just can't seem to totally warm up. This concert would have been not too many years after the two great tragedies in his life - the first when his wife died in a motor-bike crash; the second when his two children died in a house fire. We can forgive him for seeming somewhat uninvolved.
If we didn't know what came afterwards in Roy's career, then this Austin gig might have served to remember a great singer by. But THE concert to remember the great Roy Orbison by was recorded some five years later, in 1987. Roy seemed reborn for that concert. He looked younger and happier. The voice had come back in all its glory. And the DVD of that concert, A Black and White Night, stands as one of the great rock movies of all time. And if you are thinking of buying Austin, you must get the 1987 gig first.
Instead of performing with relatively uninvolved backing musicians, A Black and White Night saw Roy performing with the staging done by producer T-Bone Burnett, with a band which included J.D. souther, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Burnett himself, and Bruce Springsteen, along with a rhythm section which had cut its teeth touriing in the late 1960s with another Golden Age singer, a Mr Elvis Presley.
So while Roy Orbison fans, including myself, will welcome this Austin disc as another part of the Orbison legacy, those less familiar with his work should head straight for A Black and White Night and catch the greatest rock 'n roller of them all at his absolute peak.
Yes, I'm happy to have this souvenir of the Austin City Limits gig. But only because I already have A Black and White Night. Austin City is for completists. A Black and White Night is for everyone.
The liner states this is an anamorphic widescreen transfer.
It's in fact standard full-screen. The quality is OK for what seems a fairly ordinary standard video film, except for a few intermittent passages where the colour registration slips.
The effect is of those old-fashioned 3D movies with shimmering red and green bands - fortunately these out-of-registration scenes last pnly a few seconds.
The regular stereo recording has been remastered into Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 sound with noticeable extra warmth and presence.
The two special features are a photo gallery and a short video documentary about Roy's life at Wink High School in Texas and the band he formed there with school friends. Pleasant nostalgic stuff, which sounds exactly like the background of every country boy who wanted to grow up to be a full-time musician.
The photo gallery is very much a grab-bag of pictures from Roy's life, from childhood snaps to the days just before his untimely death. Here's Roy with Bob Dylan and George Harrison, with Tom Cruise, with... well, there's some I recognised. The frustrating thing with photo galleries of this sort is that they don't have captions. It would be good if a bit more effort could be put into their presentation, just to let us know who is who, where and when!
The sleeve states there are subitles in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese. There are none...