AAA Vinyl

This is the first Roy Orbison collection that includes material from all of Roy's excellent recorded adventures. There are twenty six tunes in all, culled from Sun, Monument, MGM, Virgin and The Traveling Wilburys.

The gatefold packaging is well done, with each track getting a "mini-single" color picture, annotation for each song that's pleasingly complete, and the tracking is imaginative. Rather than ordering the songs chronologically, the compilation producers (Alex Orbison Chuck Fleckenstein and John Jackson) "mixed and matched" to produce a broad, exciting overview of Orbison's work.

So it opens with "Pretty Woman", then lurches forward from '64 Monument to the Jeff Lynne produced "I Drove All Night" from 1987/1992, then to the Lynne produced "You Got It" and then back to "Crying", "Only the Lonely", "In Dreams" and "Love Hurts." Quite a first side!

Side two opens with "Claudette" but live from "Black & White Night", then back to "Blue Bayou", "Dream Baby", "Walk On" (MGM), "Falling", "Running Scared" and then "California Blue" (Virgin).

It includes the Bono produced "She's a Mystery to Me", "Heartbreak Radio" from King of Hearts and finishes with "Not Alone Any More" and "Handle With Care" from The Traveling Wilburys.

So you have good packaging, imaginative tracking and for many tracks for the first time musician credits! There are also some great Roy photos. How's the sound? Obviously digitally sourced and mastered by Vic Anesini at Battery Studios. Vic cares, Roy's kids care but the sound is compressed, the high frequencies squelched and especially on the monumental Bill Porter engineered Monument tracks, what should be vibrant and three dimensional just lays there lonely and blue. The CD overall sounds at least as squashed and dulled but for some reason "Love Hurts" sounded good. Sad.

Still, for casual Roy listeners, this is a great musical compilation and if it leads to an appreciation, there are always better sounding versions to be had of the tunes but not as complete and well ordered as they are here. There's always The All Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison, which offers far better sound but a less imaginative and wide-ranging song selection.