Alex Orbison, a son of Roy Orbison, godson of Johnny and June Carter Cash and a longtime friend of the Allman and Betts families, had for some time been focused on managing his father’s legacy.
“I kind of had become disenchanted with the music business,” Orbison says. “I’d spent some time solely concentrating on working on my mom and dad’s stuff, and I got pulled into the Allman Betts Family Revival with Devon and Duane, and I have a long history with both of those guys. But to shorten it up, music started becoming fun again.”
So he contacted some buddies about starting a kick-around group to play cover tunes. And to a man, they all said no: Get back in touch when you have your own material.
At the same time, he says, “I had already gotten pressure” to write from longtime collaborator and former bandmate Damon Webb. So he came up with a song called “Pieces of my Heart,” and then more tunes started to come, culminating in the release last month of his debut album, “Love and Loss.”
The record includes a song born from previously unused words written by Johnny Cash called “Let’s Put It To Music,” on which his wife Erika sings as well. It came from a box of poems held by John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son and Alex’s friend since childhood when they were both growing up in Hendersonville, Tenn.
“I can’t pin down when they did it, but sometime in the mid ‘60s, when Johnny and June were married to other people, and June wrote ‘Ring of Fire.’ And probably before she wrote ‘Ring of Fire,’ Johnny had written, ‘Let’s Put It To Music,’” Orbison says. “He wanted this to be the announcement to the world that like, ‘Let’s move beyond this. This is the real thing.’ And wow, since it’s a song that features my wife and I sing it with her, none of my friends had any idea; they all thought that I wrote this for Erika, so it really fit my thing really well.”
“Love and Loss” also features the lead single “Fairweathered Friend,” a duet with Erika called “Wouldn’t Know Love” and “Gone Too Far,” which Orbison wrote for his daughter at the wedding of Devon Allman, a son of the late Gregg Allman and a leader of the Allman Betts Band alongside Duane Betts, a son of the late Allmans guitarist Dickey Betts.
“Devon’s like my best buddy, and me and Duane were the best men with some family members and assorted people,” Orbison says. “I wanted the best for Ashley and Devon. I don’t want like an 80% percent good day, you know? And it was kind of like humid, foggy, cloudy. Like it was just changing every 10 seconds. And so, ironically, me and my daughter are having a terrible day. Long story short, around this time it was like at the cocktail hour and everyone had their first drink in a day. Still going like this right around drink two. It’s like literally the clouds just parted and everyone that was in separate groups, all were just gelling.
“It was like the best wedding you’ve ever been to. And the hair on my arms and neck stood up, right now it’s doing it too, and I go, ‘Oh my God, Gregg just showed up’. Dude, you know what I mean? It was like Gregg was hanging there and he was like, ‘All right, we’ve had enough of this.’ So I looked at my daughter and I just thought, of course, like, where else would you be? You know what I mean? And so I pulled out my phone and I wrote the whole poem and I sent that poem to Tommy Lee James, who’s one of the best songwriters on the planet, and put the picture in there that I took and told him the story of that, because I’d had moments with my dad after he’d passed where like the lights would flash or you’d smell cigarettes and no one was there. And that was like a thing.
“So I’ve had these things that blur the lines of before and after. I just talked to my brother Wesley, I sent him the whole record a month ago. And he had said that my grandmother Nadine Orbison always said, ‘When I go, you’ll know when I come because I’ll be the wind. I’ll blow the wind on you.’”
The seemingly supernatural aspect of the story and the song doesn’t stop there.
“To thread that all the way through, my dad wrote a song called ‘Borne on the Wind,’ which had had that theme and an Indian wedding where [the couple] end up dying in a blizzard, but you can hear them calling the wind.
“I didn’t have a lot of ideas of all this stuff until [‘Gone Too Far’] got going. So I’ll tell you the truth, I wrote ‘Gone Too Far’ and I had it and I was I thinking of doing this artist thing because I was having much more fun in music, and then once I’d had that, I said if any of my best friends wrote that song and came to me, I’d say, ‘Screw it, just put eight more around it and make a record,’ you know what I mean? This one, you can hang your hat on, and I have like the artist side of me, but I also have the manager and chief salesman side of me too, but ‘Gone Too Far is near and dear to my heart.”
Leave a Reply