Music “It was terrible”: The one artist The Beatles were scared to follow
Any modest rock and roller is normally shaking in their boots the moment they hit their first major tour. It’s easy to do things that seem like it’s taking place in your backyard, but the minute that the touring cycle goes outside the realms of home, it can be easy for someone to either choke up onstage or have to rely on some liquid courage to get themselves through a set. While it’s strange to think that any member of The Beatles would be nervous in front of a crowd after a while, it was actually far more common than everyone thought.
Despite looking like they were at home playing on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s, the band were always going one rung up the ladder into superstardom like every artist before them. It was never going to be easy seeing themselves in bright lights, but the minute that they started getting to another level of famous, they started to make all their idols look tame, especially when they graduated to the stadiums of the world rather than the small clubs.
But even if they were too big for those venues, that had always been where they thrived. They might have been crammed into places like The Cavern when they were starting out, but that left a lot of room for them to joke around and actually be able to hear what they were playing instead of having to fight with the relentless volume of the crowd.
And looking at the artists they opened for, it reads like a breeding ground for any great rock and roll. John Lennon may have called his shot when he told his touring mate Johnny Gentle that he would eventually be bigger than he would, but seeing them open for Little Richard may as well have been their way of repaying him, since most of Paul McCartney’s screeching voice came from him trying to emulate the pianist’s signature rasp.
Compared to the throat-shredding brand of singing, though, there was something far more nuanced about the way that Roy Orbison sang during their first tours with him. He was every bit as strong as any other rock and roll star at the time, but his voice was far more soulful, usually bringing a sense of melodrama back into music, even giving tunes like ‘Crying’ and ‘Only the Lonely’ the kind of operatic feeling that the lyrics demanded.
For a band that was still learning the ropes, it didn’t take long before The Beatles thought they were going to get shown up when they went out, with Ringo Starr recalling, “It was terrible following him. He’d slay them, and they’d scream for more. In Glasgow, we were all backstage listening to the tremendous applause he was getting. He was just standing there singing, not moving or anything. As it got near our turn, we would hide behind the curtain.”
It might have been scary, but it was the price for the Fab Four getting a lot of their cues from Orbison. Outside of his fantastic taste in ballads, Orbison was the one that pushed Lennon to make something worthy of his voice on ‘Please Please Me’, until Martin told him that the band needed to play it faster if they wanted to have a hit.
Then again, Orbison never looked at himself as in competition with the Fab Four. It was always about delivering great music, but the minute that he got behind the microphone and sang ‘Oh Pretty Woman’, there wasn’t a soul in the venue that cared about anything else other than that voice.