The early years of rock and roll are often mythologised as a quasi-biblical narrative of near-death and resurrection. In the estimation of writers such as Rogan Taylor (Reference Taylor1985), Peter Guralnick (Reference Guralnick1999) and Reebee Garofalo (Reference Garofalo2005) the music was dealt a series of devastating blows in 1958 and 1959 with the conscription of Elvis Presley, followed shortly thereafter by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper in the 1959 plane crash – ‘the day the music died’. Rock and roll's demise was officially announced to the world by the anodyne strains of Elvis's 1960 record, ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’, produced under the increasingly pernicious influence of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. According to Garofalo, Elvis's early 1960s recordings, together with his mainstream television appearances and Hollywood films, rendered him ‘family entertainment, if not worse’ (Garofalo Reference Garofalo2005, p. 144). With rock and roll's social and sexual revolutionary potential quelled by this combination of tragedy and military regimen, US music was supposedly reduced to a wasteland of blandness and conformity. It was not until the arrival of the Beatles and the 1964 British Invasion that the rock and roll revolution was revivified.

In the intervening years between rock and roll's supposed death and resurrection, it was a different musician – Roy Orbison – who stood on top of the world of US popular music. In our own day, however, Orbison figures very minimally in rock and roll history. Apart from Peter Lehman's Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity (2003), most of the extant writing on Orbison was published during a brief flurry of activity following his sudden death on 6 December 1988: two biographies – Alan Clayson's Only the Lonely (1989) and Ellis Amburn's Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story (1990) – and a handful of magazine and newspaper eulogies. Otherwise, Orbison has been largely ignored, ‘dismissed as just another cog in the pop music industry teen-machine’ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 2). To a certain extent, this neglect can be attributed to the timeline of his career: according to the mythology, Orbison would have been a kind of Fisher King of the US cultural wasteland of 1959–1964, overseeing a moribund nation thirsting for the heroic arrival of the Beatles.

Of course, Orbison's obscurity is no more the result of mere historical coincidence than the death and resurrection rock and roll myth is a matter of irrefutable historical fact. In recent years, many scholars of popular music have critiqued the phallocentrism that characterises many histories of rock and roll.Footnote ¹ Hence, as Peter Lehman has convincingly shown, Orbison's outsider status in the rock and roll meta-narrative can be attributed in large part to the radical ways in which he departed from both the musical and sexual aspects of the rock and roll revolutionary discourse. Whereas Orbison's Sun cohorts – Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis in particular – asserted their youthful vigour and phallic potency in sexually dynamic performances of songs like ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’ and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin' On', Orbison's songs most often represented masculine narrators paralysed by heartbreak (or the fear of heartbreak), and masochistically fixated on their own misery and loneliness – a paralysis that was mirrored in his famously staid performances. Indeed, since the early 1980s, notwithstanding the general critical neglect, there have been a small collection of writers and musicians who have celebrated Orbison's ‘alternative rock masculinity’ as an antidote to the phallocentrism that so often undergirds the rock and roll revolutionary mythos.

In this article, I focus on one of the key texts of Orbison's 1980s redemption: the 1988 concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, a document that is intriguingly complex and strikingly ambivalent. The article is organised into four sections: in the first, I offer a very brief overview of Orbison's biography, with a view to demonstrating the film's importance by situating it in the context of the overall trajectory of Orbison's career. In the second section, I theorise the role of concert films in general in the process of identity construction in popular music, and broadly examine how A Black and White Night performed this role for Orbison. In the third section – building chiefly on Lehman's work – I discuss the specific characteristics that mark Orbison's masculine persona as an alternative to normative, phallocentric rock and roll masculinity, and explore how A Black and White Night deliberately amplifies these characteristics. In the fourth section, however, I propose that even as normative masculinity appears to be destabilised, a close reading of the film reveals that the performance situates Orbison within a different masculinist discourse: the 19th-century Romantic discourse of masculine genius that continues to inflect 21st-century notions about artists and art music. Thus, in Black and White Night, normative and non-normative masculinities are thoroughly imbricated, each simultaneously destabilising and reaffirming the other.

Biographical overview

In the first half of the 1960s, Roy Orbison dominated US popular music. Following marginal success with ‘Ooby Dooby’ (written by Dick Penner and Wade Moore, colleagues of Orbison's from his days at North Texas State University in 1956 [de Heer, ‘Dick Penner’, n.d.]) on Sam Phillips's Sun Records and ‘Claudette’ (written for the Everly Brothers) in 1958, Orbison signed on with Fred Foster's Monument record label in 1959. He skyrocketed to number one on the Billboard pop charts in 1960 with ‘Only the Lonely’, a song which Orbison decided to record himself only after it was rejected by friend and former Sun label-mate Elvis Presley, as well as by the Everlys (‘Orbison, Roy’, n.d.). This song was the first in a string of hits for Monument, including ‘Blue Angel’, ‘Running Scared’, ‘Crying’, ‘Blue Bayou’ and ‘In Dreams’, culminating in 1964 with ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’. After the enormous success of ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’, Orbison signed with MGM in 1964 for $1 million – at that time one of the largest contracts in industry history. Following the move to MGM, however, Orbison's career – and life – took a profoundly negative turn. With MGM (and without long-time producer Foster), Orbison was unable to recreate the successes of his Monument years. His output rapidly diminished both in terms of critical and popular reception. Then in 1966 his first wife Claudette (subject of the song), was killed in a motorcycle accident. In 1968, two of his three sons died in a fire in Orbison's home in Nashville while he was away on tour. By the end of the decade, having lost much his family and most of his fame, Orbison was consigned to obscurity, a strange and tragic footnote in rock music history.

Orbison's influence persisted among musicians and musical cognoscenti. Though he seldom performed in North America through the 1970s (he was more active in Australia and the UK), a widely varied group of musicians – from John Lennon to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen – cited him as a significant musical inspiration. Through the influence of these and other prominent cultural icons, Orbison's North American career was slowly resuscitated. In 1980 Orbison reappeared on the North American scene, winning a Grammy for his duet with Emmylou Harris (another professed Orbison admirer), ‘That Lovin’ You Feeling', recorded for the movie Roadie. In 1986, acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch used Orbison's 1963 song ‘In Dreams’ in a memorably chilling scene in Blue Velvet. During the same year, Orbison reunited with erstwhile Sun Records companions Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins to record Class of ‘55. In May of 1987, Orbison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – a ceremony that included a reverential speech by Bruce Springsteen, followed by a duet performance of ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ with Springsteen. Orbison's resurgence arguably peaked in 1988 when he joined rock legends Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne for the first of their two recordings as the Traveling Wilburys.

Just before the Wilburys recordings, however, there was a performance with another group of major figures in American music. On 30 September 1987 at Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, Orbison filmed the Cinemax television special, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night. Directed by Tony Mitchell and produced by Orbison's wife Barbara, the concert featured a star-studded band, including T Bone Burnett, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther and, most prominently, Orbison, Springsteen, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. The audience too was filled with famous faces: Billy Idol, Patrick Swayze, Kris Kristofferson and Leonard Cohen were all in attendance. In his somewhat hyperbolic notes accompanying the VHS release in 1988, Orbison's son Roy Kelton Jr. wrote, ‘Mystical, captivating, enthralling – these words describe what Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night will mean to millions of Orbison fans and to the concept of modern music.’ With its A-list band and star-studded audience, the film served as an affirmation of Orbison's exalted position in the canon of American popular music.

Identity construction and the concert film

Like biographers, documentary filmmakers frame their subjects according to their own ideas and agendas. The key point that distinguishes documentary film from written biography (at least from a critical perspective) lies in the transparency of the medium. While the framing voice of the biographer is made literally visible by the written word, the filmmaker is typically invisible. Because the filmmaker presents real images rather than secondary, written descriptions of them, it is easy for a viewer to forget that the images are mediated by the lens of the camera and by the editing process. As film scholar Bill Nichols suggests, ‘The minimally represented body of an investigating agent strengthens a film's claims of access to the real, the historical, without insisting on highly individualised, subjectivist, or self-reflexive interpretations of it’ (Nichols Reference Nichols1987, p. 11). Krin Gabbard points out that recent trends in documentary films focusing on music are specifically intended to minimise (or eliminate) the filmmaker's visible presence in the mise en scène, thereby further disguising his or her control of the frame: ‘When the documentary subject is a living person, filmmakers will train the camera on the subject and hope for moments of self-revelation. Even if there is no self-revelation, the mere presence of a camera and film crew ensures that the subject will at least seem to be transparent’ (Gabbard Reference Gabbard1999, p. 209).

Concert film, then, is the closest a musical documentary filmmaker can come to achieving a sense (albeit a fallacious one) of total transparency. In a conventional documentary, the filmmaker's presence is at least somewhat tangible in the narrative construction of the documentary, the questions (audible or not) put to the subject and other interviewees, or perhaps extra-visual elements such as captions, voiceovers or non-diegetic music; in a concert film, on the other hand, the filmmaker's presence is latent only in the camera work, giving the viewer the illusory impression of wholly unmediated access to the subject – as if the viewer her/himself were actually in attendance at the concert. This impression is all the more potent in the case of DVD releases of concert films: these often include supplementary interviews with the subject or outtakes from the concert or rehearsal, offering the viewer a virtual unrestricted backstage pass to the performance.

The filmmakers behind Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night – namely, director Tony Mitchell and executive producer Barbara Orbison (Roy Orbison's widow) – go to considerable lengths to disguise their own editorial control. Not only are the filmmakers' voices entirely absent from the film, but neither Orbison nor the other musicians ever utter a spoken word over the course of the concert. While there are very brief interviews with most of the key musicians while the closing credits roll (each paying tribute to Orbison in a few sentences), there is no commentary interspersed between the songs (as there is in The Last Waltz, for instance – the Martin Scorsese-directed concert film featuring The Band, along with numerous special guests), or even a word of stage patter between songs. The 2004 DVD re-release of the film uses the capabilities of this newer medium to enhance the sense of unmediated, transparent representation, working to make viewers feel that they have actually attended a live performance. The bonus material consists of brief written biographies of all the participating musicians, the aforementioned note from Orbison's son (collectively constituting what one might find in a concert programme), and a collection of still photographs from the concert and the September 29 rehearsal, including images of both an ‘all access’ concert ticket and a pass to the ‘after party’. Additionally, the names of the director, producers and film crew never appear in the opening credits, and not until the middle part of the closing credits – after every musician has been listed. It is as though the music speaks entirely for itself.

But of course, in actuality the music does no such thing – at least not by itself. The decision to severely delimit speech (and to keep Orbison himself entirely silent) was made by Barbara Orbison, in conjunction with the director, Tony Mitchell, as were the decisions to use certain camera angles and techniques, sequence particular shots and use black and white film.Footnote ² Hence, A Black and White Night is not at all an unmediated presentation of Roy Orbison in concert; it is a thoroughly mediated, carefully managed representation of Roy Orbison, overseen by Roy and Barbara themselves. Simon Frith has suggested that ‘[written] biographies are an aspect of [the] star-making process, whether they are “authorised” or simply rushed out by rival publishers to cash in on the latest aura’ (Frith Reference Frith1983, p. 272). A Black and White Night is very much like a star-building, identity-constructing biography, but with virtually all markers of the frame (and concomitantly the markers of constructedness) carefully elided.

Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies of his frustration with the ‘sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality’ which is not ‘natural’ at all, but rather profoundly socio-culturally contingent: ‘I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there’ (Barthes Reference Barthes and Lavers1972, p. 11). In A Black and White Night, nearly everything ‘goes without saying’; hence, while I certainly do not mean to accuse the Orbisons of any intentional ‘ideological abuse’, the film's carefully polished patina of naturalness, of unconstructedness, demands scrutiny.

‘Running Scared’: denaturalising rock masculinity

Peter Lehman writes clearly and emphatically of Orbison's positionality vis à vis normative rock and roll masculinity: ‘Everything about Orbison's music, performance style, and persona is unusual with respect to gender stereotypes and defies generalisations about the rock music of his era’ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 25). In his 2007 study of masculine rivalry, ‘Men, Masculinity, and Competition: Whither the New Man?’, Steven Van Wagoner lists the conventional traits associated with what he refers to as ‘traditional masculine ideology’:

These traits seem particularly applicable to normative rock and roll masculinity. Indeed, Michael Bertrand has characterised the mode of masculinity typified by Elvis, Jerry Lee and other southern US rock and roll performers in terms that are highly reminiscent of Van Wagoner's list: for Bertrand, rock and roll masculinity is characterised by a ‘patriarchal ethos (independence, honor, dominance, and violence) [that] typically manifested itself in the form of a physical presence that exuded self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, and competitiveness’ (Bertrand Reference Bertrand2004, p. 66). Roy Orbison's music and performance persona run counter to virtually every item on both the Van Wagoner and Bertrand lists.Footnote ³

Orbison's anti-masculinity comes clearly into view when considered in terms of four subject areas: Orbison's body, his voice, his songs and his relationship to African American music and sexuality. In the first place, unlike his rockabilly contemporaries Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Orbison's body is far from the macho ideal. By contrast, Orbison's biographer, Ellis Amburn refers to the singer's ‘pale skin’ and ‘double chin’ (Amburn Reference Amburn1990, p. 1), while a reviewer of A Black and White Night writing for the Boston Globe described Orbison's face as ‘boyish’ and ‘roly poly’. Even his ubiquitous dark sunglasses, one of his only gestures towards a rebellious pose, were adopted in 1964 (towards the end of the period of his greatest productivity and popularity) to hide an unsightly astigmatism (Amburn Reference Amburn1990, p. 3). After meeting Orbison for the first time, Springsteen said that he ‘felt like he could put his hand through him’ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 23). In his almost spectral frailty, Orbison's body is anathema to the phallic vigour and virility of the rock and roll ideal.

Orbison's voice, on the other hand, is anything but frail. As Lehman writes, ‘Orbison's voice was always on a trajectory of being severed from the body and soaring away on its own. If his body seemed troubled, unattractive, sickly, and frail, “The Voice” was strong and vital beyond compare in the world of rock’ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 21). However strong and vital Orbison's voice may have been, though, it departed significantly from the norms of rock and roll singing. Orbison's voice has regularly been described by both music critics and fellow musicians as ‘operatic’. Bob Dylan described Orbison succinctly as ‘an opera singer’, while Tom Waits compared him to ‘Caruso in sunglasses and a leather jacket’ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 21). In the series of brief comments during the closing credits to Black and White Night, J.D. Souther echoes, ‘He's the world's only operatic rockabilly singer.’ k.d. lang summarises the sentiment: ‘I don't think Roy Orbison sings songs, I think he sings epics.’ Orbison himself, Lehman notes, distinguished his vocal style from his rockabilly contemporaries in similar terms in acknowledging light operatic tenor Mario Lanza as an influence, for instance (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 58). Towards the end of his career, he was still more explicit, saying, ‘I always felt each instrumental and vocal inflection had to be special. … I'd spend almost as much time on those as I'd spend on the song itself. Looking back on it now, I felt that I was blessed much like the masters, I guess – the guys that wrote the concertos’ (quoted in Amburn Reference Amburn1990, p. 129). This discourse positions Orbison in direct opposition to grittier-voiced rock singers like Presley (or Springsteen, Costello or Waits, for that matter). His vocal range, in particular, puts him into still deeper gender trouble: Orbison's falsetto was a hallmark of his performances, especially at climactic moments in his songs. As Edward D. Miller explains, ‘[Male falsetto] is a form of drag: a vocal masquerade. In this way, the falsetto voice challenges the authenticity of gender-assigned voices. When voices are so strictly assigned to particular bodies, the falsetto becomes transgendered—it moves between binaries of male and female’ (Miller Reference Miller2003). Orbison's magnificently controlled falsetto is particularly striking in an idiom so strongly associated with the deliberately uncontrolled, orgiastic ululations of Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis – soundmarks of tremendous phallic potency.

Orbison's songwriting puts him into still deeper gender trouble. Orbison's songs are often characterised by what Freud and Jacques Lacan would characterise as emotional excess. In Freudian/Lacanian terms, excessive emotion is a feminine-coded trait (in binary opposition to masculine rationality) that is suggestive of emotional hysteria and sexual abnormality (Middleton Reference Middleton and Jarman-Ivens2007, p. 104). Furthermore, unlike the numerous songs detailing the sexual conquests of the masculine rock and roll hero,Footnote ⁴ many of Orbison's songs (‘Running Scared’, ‘I'm Hurtin’,' ‘Love Hurts’, ‘Crying’, ‘Leah’, etc.) tend to dwell on emotional pain, relentlessly drawing out the singer's heartbreak and torment over the course of three- or four-minute narratives – what Lehman identifies as Orbison's aesthetic of masochism (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 89). In stark contradistinction to the ‘physical presence that exuded self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, and competitiveness’ that Bertrand describes, Orbison's male protagonists are rendered virtually torpid by their introverted obsession with their own fear and misery. Far from being aggressive and competitive, Orbison's men have removed themselves from the game.

Finally, in an era where white rock and roll consisted almost exclusively of appropriations of songs by black musicians, and where white performances were often grotesquely exaggerated significations of black masculine sexuality, Orbison insisted on recording his own material and standing perfectly still behind the microphone during his performances. Indeed, his departure from Sun Records was due at least in part to Sam Phillips's discouraging attitude towards original compositions: Phillips famously pressed his artists to cover songs taken from so-called race records rather than their own material (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 154). Moreover, Orbison's compositions (especially after he left Sun) bore little obvious resemblance to the African American styles in vogue with Presley, Lewis, Carl Perkins and the other rock and roll performers. Of course, African American musicians undoubtedly influenced Orbison: he identifies the Platters and Jackie Wilson as particularly profound influences on his ballad writing (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 156). Nevertheless, because he eschewed the direct musical appropriations and exaggeratedly sexualised performance style typical of rockabilly, his music and performances in no way signified the caricatured black masculinity – ‘blackface's unconscious return’ (Lott Reference Lott1993, p. 5) – that Eric Lott and others have argued is a core element of ‘authentic’ rock and roll masculine performativity.

In A Black and White Night, Orbison's anti-normative masculinity is amplified by the presence of the other front-line musicians. While Orbison is unquestionably the primary focus of the film, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits are also featured prominently: these three share the front section of the stage with Orbison throughout the concert, and each performs one or more improvised solos. Significantly, Springsteen, Costello and Waits all resemble Orbison in their uncommon performative masculine identities. Like Orbison, they have all actively positioned themselves in opposition to the conventional conception of heteronormative, hegemonic rock and roll masculinity, albeit to varying degrees and in starkly distinct ways.Footnote ⁵ By bringing four radically different male personae to one stage, A Black and White Night clearly presents male sexuality as a continuum of performatives, rather than a binary distinction between mainstream and periphery. As such, the film deliberately emphasises and valorises Orbison's own alternative model of masculinity.

Bruce Springsteen is the least obviously anti-masculine of the four musicians: with his muscular build and working-class roots, he is often held up as a paragon of authentic American masculinity, a far cry from Orbison's frail physique and high art persuasion. The subject of numerous biographical encomia, Springsteen's oeuvre has been characterised by Larry David Smith as ‘The Worker's Elegy’ and ‘The American Chronicles’ (Smith and Rutter Reference Smith and Rutter2008, p. 111). By the same token, Robert Coles quotes the US physicist and author Walker Percy at some length in his evocatively titled biography, Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing:

Coles's evident disdain for cultivated artistry – ‘an artist going up and down the musical scales’ – throws Orbison's carefully rehearsed vocal performances and quasi-operatic technique into sharp relief. Nevertheless, there is an emotional intimacy that characterises many of his songs that can be understood as conventionally feminine. Springsteen has described his songs as ‘emotionally autobiographical’ (Smith and Rutter Reference Smith and Rutter2008, p. 125) as opposed to literally autobiographical, in that rather than writing directly about his own quotidian experiences, he plumbs the emotional depths of his subconscious, a musical source that he argues is more authentic and more meaningful:

Springsteen thus balances his normatively masculine traits with a feminine-coded ‘excess of emotion’.

According to David Brackett, Elvis Costello's masculine identity falls somewhere in between Orbison and Springsteen: ‘Costello himself has described how he struck a stance in his lyrics that was neither the hard-rock macho image nor the ‘sensitive’ image of the singer-songwriter' (Brackett Reference Brackett1995, p. 162). Like Orbison, Costello has been criticised for writing songs about ‘wimps and losers’ (Brackett Reference Brackett1995, p. 162). His physical appearance is also similarly far removed from the macho ideal, even sharing Orbison's proclivity for boldly nerdy eyewear. Writes David Gouldstone, ‘His physical ungainliness, deliberately exaggerated by [album and promotional] photographs, marks him out as a misfit, a man out of time and place. He's not the cool man of the world many rock singers present themselves as; he's the outsider, observing sardonically from a distance’ (Gouldstone Reference Gouldstone1989, p. 10). Costello differs from Orbison, though, in that his outsider status vis à vis the pop mainstream has been reinforced by comparatively meagre record sales throughout his career. Brackett characterises Costello as a ‘cult figure despite flirtations with mass popularity’ (Brackett Reference Brackett2005), while the Oxford Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes his music as ‘brave yet commercially ignored’ (‘Costello, Elvis’ n.d.). Costello's musical ‘bravery’ is a further Orbison parallel, in that he has been described in both popular biographies and academic writing as pursuing an anti-rock and roll high art aesthetic, manifest in his preference for ‘formal sophistication’ and ‘complexity’ (Brackett Reference Brackett1995, p. 198), or more simply his insatiable ‘appetite for musical discovery’ (Thomson Reference Thomson2004, p. 313). This aesthetic is more evident in Costello's work in the years following A Black and White Night: his 1993 recording, The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky String Quartet, as well as his more recent recordings on the classical music label Deutsche Grammophon – For the Stars (with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter in 2001) and My Flame Burns Blue (with the Metropole Orkest in 2006) – all speak to his interest in experimenting with the conventions of European art music.

Tom Waits, too, can be regarded as a cult figure. Waits has said of his popular reception,

Waits's popular marginality is in part due to his wildly variegated recorded output, with each different record seemingly sung by a different series of characters, albeit always channelled by Waits' voice. Gabriel Solis understands Waits' fluid performative identity as ‘a kind of “gender trouble” …, not in that it suggests that gender is ambiguous or vague, but in that it clearly presents masculinity as a set of performances, masks that can, at least to some extent, be exchanged at will’ (Solis Reference Solis2007, p. 27). We might push Solis' premise still further by considering Waits' ‘set of masculine performances’ in terms of what Biddle and Jarman-Ivens call ‘multi-vocality’ (Biddle and Jarman-Ivens Reference Biddle, Jarman-Ivens and Jarman-Ivens2007, p. 7). They understand multi-vocality not as just alternatively masculine, but as precisely anti-masculine, at least in terms of heteronormative conventions.Footnote ⁶

In this way, Waits serves as a metonym for the entire Black and White Night encounter. Given their divergent approaches to performing non-normative masculinity, the performance by Orbison, Springsteen, Costello and Waits is itself multi-vocal. This comes to the fore in the performance of ‘Ooby Dooby’.Footnote ⁷ Originally recorded in 1958 on Sun Records, ‘Ooby Dooby’ is by far the most typically phallocentric rock and roll song played at the concert. With its thinly veiled sexual innuendo poorly disguised by nonsense lyrics (consider lines such as ‘Hey baby, jump over here/When you do the ooby dooby I just gotta be near’, and ‘Well you wriggle and you shake like a big rattle snake/You do the ooby dooby’til you think your heart will break'), ‘Ooby Dooby’ falls into a lineage including other Sun Records hits ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin' On' and ‘Sixty Minute Man’. Furthermore, the performance on Black and White Night is one of only two to feature multiple improvised solos,Footnote ⁸ thereby invoking both what Steve Waksman and others have identified as the phallic potential of the guitar solo (Waksman Reference Waksman1996, Reference Waksman1999) and what Eric Porter has called the exclusive homosocial male space of the jam session (Porter Reference Porter2002).Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, through the musical and performative operations of Orbison, Springsteen, Waits and Costello, the normative masculinity that undergirds ‘authentic’ rock and roll performance is at least partially destabilised.

Musically, Orbison's solo immediately defuses the electric guitar's metaphorical function as prosthetic phallus through the simple fact that (at least on this occasion) his performance is rather weak. While he executes the solo with a degree of technical competence, its musical content is lifted almost verbatim from the version he recorded for Sun Records 30 years earlier (see

).Footnote ¹⁰ It is true that a particular improvised solo can become as inextricable a part of a song as the composed melody, especially after it has been repeated countless times in live performance and disseminated widely through recordings (consider Luther Perkins's solo on Johnny Cash's ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, or Chuck Berry's opening solo phrase on ‘Johnny B. Goode’). Orbison's original recording of ‘Ooby Dooby’ had only moderate popular success, however, and hence his original solo hardly achieved iconic status. Following a virtuosic solo by session guitarist James Burton,Footnote ¹¹ Bruce Springsteen takes his turn. Orbison clearly cues him to take one chorus, after which he sings a verse of the melody. When Orbison cues Springsteen to play a couple more choruses, Springsteen misses the cue, leaving four measures of empty space – hardly a moment of thrusting musicophallic potency. Waits plays next, unleashing a Cecil Taylor-esque barrage of dissonance. While this could be construed as a violent gesture, given Waits's sense of postmodern play (as documented by Solis and others) it does not seem at all untoward to read his solo as ironic, a self-conscious parody of the rock solo paradigm.

Example 1

The musicians destabilise rock and roll masculine norms through their actions in performance as well. Orbison, for instance, stands very still at the microphone throughout, while Elvis Costello sits, reading music from his stand. Clearly, these are not terribly dynamic rock and rollers. Springsteen has also seemingly traded his famously exhilarating, exuberant and physically exhausting stage presence for the role of sideman. He stands in one place and waits for his cues, casting reverential glances towards Orbison. Such behaviour is especially unusual for an all-star band of this calibre. In Orbison's previous all-star collaboration with the Traveling Wilburys, for instance, there was a clear emphasis on equality and collectivity: each artist contributed songs to the band's repertoire, and each artist was given relatively equal attention in the band's music videos and promotional materials. The video for ‘Handle with Care’, an Orbison composition from Traveling Wilburys Volume 1 features the band members clustered in a circle around a hanging boom microphone. The members form a circle once again for their later video for ‘End of the Line’, recorded shortly after Orbison's death; in this case, however, a guitar perched on a rocking chair acts as a surrogate for the absent Orbison in the circle. In both cases, the emphasis is clearly on collectivity and community. In A Black and White Night, however, the musical and cinematographic focus remains on Orbison from start to finish; the star power and phallic ‘self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, and competitiveness’ of the other musicians is almost entirely mitigated by Orbison's presence.

The destabilisation of conventional rock and roll masculinity is even clearer in the performance of ‘Running Scared’. Originally written and recorded in 1961, this tune is far more typical of Orbison's compositional and lyrical approach, clearly demonstrating his ‘masochist aesthetic’. Like many of his songs, ‘Running Scared’ features a male protagonist who is in a desperate situation, but is so paralysed by his own passivity that he is unable to do anything to resolve it. Here, the protagonist is consumed by fear that his girlfriend will leave him for a former lover. During the first four verses of the song, the protagonist makes it very clear that he hopes to solve his problem by entirely avoiding a confrontation with the other man. Should such a decisive moment occur, the protagonist has no idea ‘what [he] would do’ or ‘which one [she would] choose’. His obsessive fear is palpable, however – he repeats the phrase ‘running scared’ at the beginning of each of the first four verses, and twice in the third – suggesting that the protagonist in his petrified state would likely do nothing at all. Indeed, he seems resigned to the fact he would lose the woman if her old flame ‘came back/And wanted [her]’. Of course, his desperate evasion of conflict is no resolution at all, instead leaving him in a constant state of fear: ‘Just running scared, each place we go/So afraid that he might show’. Moreover, in his obsessive state he appears to lose his grip on external reality. He dwells exclusively on himself, his own thoughts and fears, never naming his lover, describing her in any way or even mentioning a word about their relationship (except his fear that it will end). While his lover has ostensibly been the catalyst for his fears, those fears are directed entirely inward, leaving him in a spiral of solipsistic torpor – a veritable anti-Narcissus. In turn, this leaves us as listeners to wonder whether he actually cares about the woman at all, or if she merely exists for him as a mirror to reflect his own self-obsessed fears, feelings of inferiority and tremulous fantasies. In fact, even the protagonist's sole claim to action – that he is ‘running scared’ – is specious. He is not running, except perhaps in his mind. In actuality, he is not moving much at all.

Musically, Orbison amplifies the protagonist's paralytic fear and obsession in the melody and form of the song. Unlike the dynamically expressive melodies of songs like ‘Only the Lonely’ or ‘Crying’ that demand the fullest extent of Orbison's vocal virtuosity, the melodic resources in ‘Running Scared’ are drastically delimited, evoking the speaker's emotional palsy. Orbison relies on a repeated short, plodding three-note motive over a simple, repeating ‘A – Bm – C#m – E7’ harmonic progression (quasi-modal in its stepwise, diatonic motion) for the first two verses. In the second two verses, the ambitus changes, spanning the sixth between the third degree and the fifth instead of the sixth between the tonic and the third; nevertheless, the harmony and melodic rhythm remain the same, reaffirming the sense of musical stasis. Moreover, the endlessly repetitive melodic rhythm is echoed and reinforced by a relentless bolero pattern in the accompanying guitars, percussion and (eventually) strings that persists throughout the first four verses.

Combined, the melody and rhythmic accompaniment serve two roles: on the one hand, they evoke the protagonist's paralytic fear and obsession; on the other, they mirror his growing anxiety as he is driven inexorably towards the inevitable confrontation with his nemesis. This increasing tension is further underscored by the building dynamic, as a new set of instruments or voices appears in each verse. Following Orbison's solo guitar accompaniment in the first verse, the second verse features the addition of a second guitar, piano and the kick drum on beats one and three of every measure. The third and fourth verses are especially important in the lyrical and musical narrative of the song, including both the introduction of the string section in verse three followed by the choir in verse four, as well as the aforementioned change in ambitus in the principal melody. Significantly, these verses mark a turn in the lyrics, where the protagonist moves from his own feelings of anxiety and helplessness (‘So afraid’; ‘What would I do’) to a more specific and evidently more troubling fear of his lover's feelings and potential actions (‘You loved him so’; ‘Which one would you choose’). Clearly, he doesn't like his chances. This steadily building musical tension echoes the protagonist's crippling mental anguish and self-doubt, dragging it on right until the final moments of the song – something Lehman would identity as a hallmark of Orbison's anti-masculine ‘aesthetic of masochism’.

The climactic moment arrives suddenly after the fourth verse (indeed, so suddenly that the expected fourth measure of the fourth verse is dropped) with the song's first cymbal crash, as the tension built mercilessly through the rigid, metric regularity and the ceaseless bolero finally erupts. In an ecstasy of fear and envy (and perhaps desire?), the melody is stretched to three-measure phrases, spilling out of the metrical framework, while the rhythmic accompaniment transitions from the plodding bolero to a 12/8 rock ballad groove. The melody is new too, a much more dynamic theme with a rising contour and twice as many syllables per beat. This energetic music introduces the lyrical image of the rival, which contrasts sharply with that of the protagonist: while the protagonist was rendered immobile and impotent by his obsessive dread, his rival stands tall and confident, the apotheosis of phallic masculine vitality: ‘Then all at once, he was standing there/So sure of himself, his head in the air’. A new sense of tension begins to build, however, and much more rapidly than in the first half of the song. The extended lyrical and musical phrases draw out and intensify the protagonist's terror to the point that it becomes nearly unbearable (reinforced by a nine-and-a-half-measure subdominant pedal), while at the same time the doubled syllabification and the off-kilter three-measure phrases make for a sense of frantic motion as the protagonist plunges toward the narrative's resolution in a state of near-hysterical desperation. The tension is extended mercilessly, even until the very last word of the song, as the melody begins to rise steadily by step, accompanied by a restless tremolo in the strings. As the melody continues to rise through the final lyric, the syllabification is cut in half once again, drawing the agony out still further. And when we reach the conclusion, when we discover that the woman chose to stay with the protagonist instead of leaving with her old lover, he seems even more astonished than we are: ‘My heart was breaking/which one would it be?/You turned around/and walked away with me!’ Exhilarated, he bursts through the tonic, hitting a B before resolving to the A. His triumph is rather a hollow one, though: through the entire climactic sequence, the protagonist remains utterly inactive, only observing the crisis as if it were happening to someone else. He watches his lover interact with his rival, but he himself contributes nothing whatsoever to the resolution.

The relationship between the protagonist and his rival is worth unpacking further, particularly in terms of the precise character of the envy that defines it. More than his female lover, the protagonist's male rival seems to be the focus of his uncontrollable obsession: following three ponderously repetitive verses, it is the rival's sudden appearance that triggers the new and dynamic music of the fourth verse. Indeed, the protagonist's entire relationship with his lover is dominated by his fear of the rival: his feelings of his own inferiority to the rival, his terror of the inevitable conflict between them, and his conviction that that conflict would have an unfavourable outcome. Moreover, the rival is the only figure in the song that is subject to any physical description: Orbison's protagonist describes him standing erect, confident and determined. Clearly, the protagonist is envious of his rival's imposing physical presence, of the rival's previous relationship with the woman, and of his presumed fearlessness: the rival appears eager to initiate the necessary conflict, instigating the climax with his sudden appearance, while the protagonist would prefer to avoid conflict at almost any cost (‘running scared’).

To a certain degree, this envy is in line with Van Wagoner's ‘traditional masculine ideology’; as scholars of envy such as Joseph Epstein (Reference Epstein2003), Leyla Navaro and Sharon L. Schwartzberg (Reference Navaro, Schwartzberg, Navaro and Schwartzberg2007) and Steven Van Wagoner (Reference Van Wagoner, Navaro and Schwartzberg2007) have all suggested, it is not at all uncommon for envy – particularly sexual envy – to occur along same-sex lines. In the case of Orbison's song, however, it is unusual that the protagonist would be envious at all. According to William Irvine's (2005) definition, within the framework of traditional masculine ideology, Orbison's protagonist should be jealous rather than envious. Irvine writes,

Since the protagonist already ‘possesses’ the woman, his normative masculine emotional response should be to jealously protect her from his rival. Rather than focusing his emotional energy on what he already has and fears losing (the woman), however, the protagonist's primary concern appears to be what he lacks and wishes he had (the rival's phallic masculinity).

This in turn begs the question as to who the object of the protagonist's desire actually is. The linkage between envy and admiration has been widely discussed in both psychology and philosophy.Footnote ¹² Soren Kierkegaard, for instance, defined envy as ‘failed admiration’ (quoted in Irvine Reference Irvine2005, p. 44), while William Irvine understands it as ‘admiration […] mixed with a sense of injustice’. Irvine explains, ‘If I envy someone's house, I will feel, deep down, that it is unfair that he owns such a house but I do not’ (Irvine Reference Irvine2005, p. 44). Orbison's protagonist, however, does not seem to evince any sense of injustice – only a sense of resignation to the (presumed) fact that he will inevitably be usurped by his rival. Without the critical element of injustice – coupled with the protagonist's unwillingness/inability to challenge the rival, along with his obsessive focus on the rival's masculine physicality and phallic potency – the protagonist's relationship with his rival begins to slip from homosocial envy towards homosexual desire. The listener is left to wonder whether the protagonist simply wishes to possess the rival's characteristic of phallic potency, or if he desires to possess the rival himself as a figure of that characteristic. To reframe the question in Lacanian terms, we as listeners ask whether the protagonist wishes to have the phallus (the dominant masculine symbolic role) or to be the phallus (the subservient feminine symbolic role) (Homer Reference Homer2005, p. 95). Taking all of these factors into consideration, the feeble, passive and potentially queer masculine persona represented by the ‘Running Scared’ protagonist is in diametrical opposition to the typical aggressive and assertive rock and roll man described by Van Wagoner and Bertrand.

As was the case with ‘Ooby Dooby’, the performance by the Black and White Night band of ‘Running Scared’ mirrors the anti-masculine protagonist of the song. Aside from a brief shout when they recognise the bolero rhythm, the audience sits in utter silence, motionless, through the song. Once again, Orbison barely moves behind the microphone, while Costello, Springsteen and guitarist James Burton stare intently at their music stands – a jarringly unusual pose for rock stars, especially for Springsteen.Footnote ¹³ In fact, Springsteen only takes his eyes of the stand towards the end of the song to cast another admiring glance at Orbison. It seems fitting that a performance of ‘Running Scared’, a song about the surprising victory of an anti-masculine protagonist over his hypermasculine rival, should end with Springsteen – the musician who most closely resembles the rival – gazing admiringly at Orbison, whose body he felt he could put his hand through.

‘Caruso in sunglasses’: renaturalising genius

The various anti-masculine performative poses in Black and White Night are ambivalent, however, in terms of their potential to de-centre normative, authentic rock and roll masculinity, and in turn they reveal a level of ambivalence in the entire Black and White Night project. While the staid performance style certainly rejects the phallic dynamism of 1960s rock and roll, it simultaneously invokes a different set of normative masculine conventions and codes: those of Western art music. Significantly, according to Lehman, the audience reception paradigm in Black and White Night is typical of Orbison concerts:

Lehman's crucial observation shifts the analytical frame to a different axis, a different set of bifurcated gender codes drawn from the world of classical music. We have already observed in some detail Orbison's discursive position-taking (to use Bourdieu's term) within the art music field. By being characterised again and again as an opera singer, by citing Lanza as an influence, by linking himself to ‘the guys that wrote the concertos’, and by demanding a high art concert paradigm at his performances, Orbison is not merely extracting himself from the norms and conventions of rock and roll; he is also placing himself within the lineage of art music performers and composers. David Brackett has suggested that this high art axis has come increasingly into play in rock music since the late 1960s: ‘No longer simply “product” for working-class and/or teen audiences, certain types of pop metamorphosed into music that could, under the right conditions, produce something of “timeless value”’ (Brackett Reference Brackett1995, p. 160).

Orbison is not merely positioning himself as an art music composer and musician, however. Partially through his own discourse, but especially through the discourse and actions of his musical collaborators, in A Black and White Night Orbison is reconfigured as a musical genius according to the paradigm of Romantic art music. According to several key scholars of genius in music,Footnote ¹⁴ qualification for the category (especially in the Romantic mould) seems to rests on four central interrelated qualities: exceptionality/originality, recognition/influence, commercial marginality and ‘strength of feeling’. With this in mind, the animus of A Black and White Night seems to be to represent Orbison's music as possessing Brackett's ‘timeless value’, and to represent Orbison himself as a genius according to these qualities.

The discourse of Orbison's exceptionality circles around his voice, in particular. The recurring theme of his ‘operatic’ quality, as we have observed, is said to distinguish him from all other pop singers. Several of the other musicians in A Black and White Night go a step further, rejecting the ‘operatic’ contingency in articulating Orbison's vocal distinction. At the end of the film, J.D. Souther says simply, ‘He has the best, most evocative voice that I've ever heard.’ Souther's sentiment has been echoed by other musicians: Emmylou Harris called him ‘one of the greatest singers who ever lived’ (quoted in Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 21), while Bono, from whom Orbison requested a song for what proved to be his final recording, Mystery Girl (Bono contributed ‘She's a Mystery to Me’), called him ‘the greatest white pop singer on the planet’ (quoted in Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 21).

Orbison's songwriting is a second crucial aspect of his exceptionality. As we have seen in ‘Running Scared’, Orbison's writing is certainly unorthodox in his approach to melody, and especially his approach to the integration of lyrical narrative and formal scheme. Writing of Elvis Costello, David Brackett suggests that ‘developmental, narrative, and teleological forms [are] characteristic of post-Enlightenment art music in which every event plays a singular structural role’ (Brackett Reference Brackett1995, p. 171). Doubtless, Orbison invested an unusual degree of time and effort in his compositionsFootnote ¹⁵; in the film, however, this unusual or unorthodox quality is reconfigured as timeless – literally in Jennifer Warnes's brief comments at the end of the film (‘it's timeless stuff’), and figuratively in k.d. lang's assertion that his songs are not merely songs but ‘epics’. The filmmakers further contribute to this sense of timelessness by using black and white film for the occasion. In this way, viewers are reminded that not only are Orbison's songs of an older vintage, they could easily belong to any era, anywhere from the earliest days of film right up to (thanks to the presence of Springsteen, Costello, Waits, et al.) the current period.

According to Marcia Citron (following Foucault), ‘the timeless persona of the author (here including composer) achieves a mythic status that is difficult to concretize’ (Citron Reference Citron1993, p. 113). Indeed, it is precisely through his (not to say her) perceived timelessness that an individual moves from unorthodoxy to transcendent genius. In the 18th and especially 19th centuries, this movement was marked by the conferring of virtual godhead upon the genius. Lydia Goehr refers to such hyperbolic descriptions of superhuman artists as the ‘romantic illusion’: ‘It captured the ability of an object, a person, or an experience, to exhibit simultaneously the character of the human and of the divine, of the concrete and of the transcendent’ (Goehr Reference Goehr1992, p. 158). It is worth noting that Orbison has regularly been described in both religious and supernatural terms: his voice is often either ‘otherworldly’, ‘from another planet’, ‘god-like’ or ‘angelic’Footnote ¹⁶ (Lehman Reference Lehman2003, p. 22). A Black and White Night has played a critical role in contributing to this discourse as well. After watching the concert, Patrick Swayze declared to People magazine, ‘I saw God and the Boss on the same night.’ During a particularly memorable cinematographic sequence in the early part of the performance of ‘Running Scared’, there is what appears initially to be a cross-fade from a panoramic shot of the stage to a close-up, full-screen shot of Orbison. The cross-fade is never completed, however, as the close-up shot never fully materialises. This results in a ghostly, translucent full-screen image of Orbison, superimposed over the more concrete image from the stage, creating an uncannily transcendental moment, as if (as Lehman earlier described) Orbison's voice has literally been ‘severed from his body’, and that his untethered spirit has expanded to fill the entire mise en scène. Elsewhere in ‘Running Scared’, and indeed throughout much of the film, Orbison is also shot partially enshrouded in shadow and partially bathed in a white (spot) light. Together these kinds of shots produce an image of Orbison that is seemingly half human, half spirit – an impression made all the more powerful by our retrospective knowledge of Orbison's death very shortly after the release of the film. Obviously, these quasi-religious comments and images are in no way intended as literally as they were in the 19th century; nonetheless, they do help clarify the conceptual and ideological basis of the Orbison exceptionalist discourse in the notion of the Romantic genius.

Also central to the Romantic genius archetype is the issue of influence. Citron writes,

In other words, in order for an individual to be considered a genius, he must be recognisably influential; conversely, if a chain of influence can be traced (or constructed, as the case may be) back to an individual, he is presumed to be a ground-breaking genius. A Black and White Night's role in this regard is clear: the film represents a panoply of artists and intellectuals – both in the band and the audience – all coming together to venerate a great master. The reverential gaze Springsteen directs at Orbison throughout both ‘Ooby Dooby’ and ‘Running Scared’ thus does not only suggest the decentring of Springsteen's phallic masculine authenticity; it is also a clear homage to a transcendent artist. The various comments during the closing credits serve a similar function in the genius construction. In his post-concert remarks, Elvis Costello reminds us that Orbison was a major influence on the Beatles (themselves recognised pop music geniuses), as evinced by John Lennon's suggestion that ‘Please, Please Me’ was inspired directly by Orbison's music (specifically ‘Only the Lonely’). T-Bone Burnett expands on Costello's point, arguing, ‘all that British music that's come out, all of that European music, you know, for the last twenty years, starting with Paul McCartney on and all the things he spawned comes from Orbison.’Footnote ¹⁷

Paradoxically, just as it is vital for the genius to be the nexus of a web of influence, so it is equally vital that he nevertheless remain on the commercial margins. At the very least, it is crucial that his symbolic capital as a genius is predicated on the appreciation of a small pool of intellectuals and connoisseurs of ‘discriminating’ taste – not on broad, mainstream appeal. Writing in 1835 in his journal, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Robert Schumann reflects on this idea following a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony – a performance which elicited a gushingly enthusiastic response from the numerous listeners, much to Schumann's displeasure:

For Schumann, it is as though the supposedly mindless applause of the ‘shallow men of the world’ somehow threatens the aesthetic integrity of the genius. J.S. Forkel articulates this idea more directly in his 1802 biography of J.S. Bach: ‘The public merely asks for what it can understand, whereas the true artist ought to aim at an achievement which cannot be measured by popular standards’ (quoted in Goehr Reference Goehr1992, p. 210). By the same token, in Orbison's biographies, we are constantly reminded that he toiled in relative ignominy for nearly 20 years – a forgotten legend of American music – until his resurgence in the 1980s. That resurgence is often depicted as a ‘re-discovery’ of Orbison's exceptional talent by a handful of similarly gifted artists who never lost track of him during those dark years, among them Emmylou Harris, k.d. lang, Bob Dylan, David Lynch and Bruce Springsteen. In a sense, A Black and White Night enacts this re-discovery, placing Orbison in a band with some of the key players in his resurrection – apostles who never stopped spreading the Gospel of Roy – along with some other, newly converted disciples. The audience is also visibly small and intimate: members are shown seated café-style at a small collection of tables. At the same time, the number of famous faces in the crowd makes it clear to the viewer of the film that this is an elite group, comprised almost entirely of musicians, celebrities and other cultural figures of various stripes. The performance thus takes on the character of a salon concert, a rock and roll Schubertiad. Here, in accordance with the genius archetype, Orbison can be himself, playing for an audience that is equal parts admiring and discerning – appreciative of his exceptional art (as evinced by their enthusiastic but decorous reception, befitting an evening of high art).

Even Orbison's feminised, gender-troubling lyrics contribute to his elevation. Christine Battersby's remarks on the androgynous character of the Romantic genius are instructive:

As Susan McClary reminds us, however, ‘the appropriation by males of “the feminine” did not have the result of exalting actual women or granting them a role in cultural production’ (McClary Reference McClary1991, p. 102). The shots at the end of the performance of ‘Running Scared’ are once again revealing: when Orbison comes to the climactic final notes of the song (‘walked away with me’), the film cuts from a shot of the three female backup singers to a close-up of Orbison. The camera zooms in on Orbison's face from a position somewhere below him, angled sharply upwards. In her discussion of the opera films of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Marcia Citron observes, ‘In film, sharply angled shots from above or below place emphasis on a character, and Ponnelle uses them to highlight power or social status’ (Citron Reference Citron2005, p. 213). Director Tony Mitchell and producer Barbara Orbison seem to be using this technique to similar effect in A Black and White Night. Curiously, however, as we have already seen, the anti-masculine protagonist in ‘Running Scared’ is anything but powerful. I would suggest, then, that the sharp camera angle is not meant to affirm the dubious achievement of the song's fictitious protagonist; rather, in tandem with the contiguous shots of the backup singers and Bruce Springsteen (gazing reverently, as usual), the angled close-up is meant to focus on Orbison himself in his role as singer and composer, emphasising his powerful status as creative genius. In so doing, the angled shot undercuts the performance's destabilising of normative masculinity, transforming it from an anti-rock and roll, anti-masculine gesture to precisely the kind of ‘appropriation of the feminine’ that concerns Battersby.

At this point, we are reminded that, like the phallic rock and roll model of masculinity, the genius model rests equally on a gendered hierarchy. As Citron explains,

The timelessness of genius also subtends a masculinist gender hierarchy, for the simple reason that the vast majority of artists who have been elevated to the canon of temporally transcendent genius have been men. Tautologically, the sheer number of male geniuses serves to reinforce the idea that artistic genius was always already a masculine trait. As Battersby explains, ‘Tradition […] presses heavily on the shoulders of the woman artist […] as a discouragement to all artistic efforts’ (Battersby Reference Battersby1989, p. 46).

True to form, the only women who appear in Black and White Night do so on the margins of the performance, either nameless members of the string orchestra or, in the case of k.d. lang, Jennifer Warnes and Bonnie Raitt, backup singers. Interestingly, they also literally embody the subjugated femininity that Norma Coates argues is crucial to rock and roll masculine authenticity: ‘[R]ock masculinity is discursively constructed as to bolster as well as reiterate itself; at the same, rock masculinity requires the existence, illusory or real, of a subordinate femininity to support it and give it the appearance of “truth”’ (Coates Reference Coates2003, p. 79). The irony, of course, is that women such as lang and Raitt, along with Emmylou Harris and (above all) Barbara Orbison were utterly essential (along with the Traveling Wilburys, Springsteen, Lynch and the many others mentioned previously) to reviving Orbison's flagging career.Footnote ¹⁸ And yet, in order for Orbison to stand ‘sure of himself, his head in the air’ among the immortals in the Western pantheon of timeless genius in accordance with persistent Romantic ideology, these women are shunted to the side.