Roy Orbison thought his son Wesley took after his mother, Claudette. She was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966, when the boy was a year old, and Roy found it hard to talk to Wesley about her, because he reminded him of her so much. Watching Roy Orbison: Love Hurts (BBC Four), though, you were struck more by his resemblance to his father, and by his sadness.
Wesley didn’t lose only his mum (and Roy his wife). In 1968, when Orbison was playing in Bournemouth, he received news that his Nashville home had exploded. His two eldest sons had been killed. Wesley and Roy’s parents survived. The following year, Orbison remarried, to a German teenager named Barbara Jakobs, with whom he had two more sons, Roy Jr and Alex. And while the latest BBC Four Friday-night music documentary – produced by the Orbison siblings – told the story of how he rebuilt his life, resulting in his triumphant return to stardom before his own death, Wesley’s pain was the emotional crux.
Orbison had enough tragedy to fill several lifetimes, so one could hardly blame him for wanting to rebuild his life carefully with his new family. But rebuilding can mean knocking over old foundations, and the foundations that were demolished were Wesley’s. As Roy and Barbara constructed their own showbiz home in Nashville, Wesley was left living over the hill with his grandparents. So he grew up listening to his dad’s records a lot, “maybe obsessively”. You all but grieved for him when he said: “That’s how I visited with him.”
The pattern continued, Wesley recounting each setback stoically. When Roy had a heart attack in 1978, Wesley realised his dream that he would be able to hang out with his dad in adulthood and “we would get to be closer” was unlikely to happen. When the Orbisons moved to California in the 1980s, Wesley stayed in Nashville, because his grandmother was housebound and couldn’t follow her son.
In December 1988, his career back on a high and a new album to play for his son, Roy paid a pre-Christmas visit to Wesley in Nashville. “And things are going great – for about an hour. Then he’s unresponsive in the bathroom.” Orbison had died, aged 52. Roy Jr and Alex fought back the tears as they remembered their dad, but Wesley was the one you wanted to reach through the screen to hug.
