Roy Orbison – Go! Go! Go! (Down the Line)

Roy Orbison called it “Down the Line.” Sam Phillips renamed it and bought it outright.

Thirty-one years separate the two versions of this song that matter. The first is two minutes and eleven seconds long, cut in Memphis on March 27, 1956 by a twenty-year-old from Texas and a band called the Teen Kings, and it went out in May on the back of a Sun 45 that nobody expected much from. The second was filmed on September 30, 1987 in a Los Angeles ballroom, with Elvis Presley’s band behind him and half of American songwriting standing in a line at the back waiting for their turn.

Keep watching: Roy Orbison – Oh, Pretty Woman

It was the first song Roy Orbison ever wrote — with Billy Pat Ellis, the Teen Kings’ drummer, according to the account on Orbison’s own official site. He called it Down the Line. Sam Phillips heard it, decided the title was not urgent enough for what the record was doing, and renamed it Go! Go! Go!. It was a habit of his. Carl Perkins got Gone! Gone! Gone! the same way and Johnny Cash got Cry! Cry! Cry!, and Phillips was right every time about what a title should sound like on a jukebox.

He was less generous about the rest of it. Phillips bought out Orbison’s Sun songs and put his own name on the songwriting credits, and for a long stretch the first thing Orbison ever wrote did not carry his name. It is worth sitting with that for a moment. The record is a young man discovering he can do something nobody had told him he could do — the Teen Kings pushing the tempo past comfortable, Orbison jumping an octave in the chorus for no reason except that he had just worked out he was able to — and the credit went elsewhere.

Everyone else’s hit

The A-side, Ooby Dooby, charted a little and sold enough to keep Orbison at Sun. The B-side did better in other people’s hands. Jerry Lee Lewis cut it at 706 Union in January 1958, restored Orbison’s original title, and Sun put it on the back of Breathless, where it reached No. 51 on the Hot 100 in its own right. Ricky Nelson recorded it too. Orbison finally re-recorded it himself in 1969, with a band called the Art Movement, and called it Down the Line — which had been the point all along.

By the mid-eighties he had been out of view for most of a decade. Then David Lynch put In Dreams into Blue Velvet in 1986, in a scene disturbing enough that people who had never thought about Roy Orbison suddenly had to, and a generation of musicians who had grown up on him found there was an audience willing to hear from him again.

September 30, 1987

What plays on this page is that night, not the 1956 record. He was fifty-one. The band behind him was the TCB Band — James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, Jerry Scheff and Ron Tutt, the men who had spent the seventies backing Elvis Presley. T Bone Burnett put it together and produced it. Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, J.D. Souther and Jennifer Warnes all turned up to play behind him, mostly on rhythm guitar, mostly out of the spotlight.

The whole thing was shot in black and white on seven cameras and broadcast on Cinemax on January 3, 1988. Orbison died on December 6 that year, about fourteen months after the night was filmed, having in the meantime joined the Traveling Wilburys and recorded most of the best-selling album of his career.

What you are watching is not the 1988 broadcast. In 2017, Alex Orbison — Roy’s youngest son — and Luke Chalk went back to the hundreds of hours of footage those seven cameras had shot and which nobody had ever used, re-cut the entire performance, and restored the running order to what actually happened in the room that night. Most of the shots in Black & White Night 30 had never been seen by anyone outside the edit suite. It is the same evening, assembled by a man who was three years old when it happened.

And the song he opens up on is the one somebody else’s name was on.