Before Roy Orbison became a music legend himself, he was just another young Texas musician trying to understand a strange new performer named Elvis Presley.
And his first impression was not exactly flattering.
Orbison remembered seeing Elvis perform in Texas in 1955, before Elvis had become a national television sensation.
Everything about him seemed strange.
The hair.
The clothes.
The attitude.
Even the way he walked onto the stage.
Orbison recalled Elvis immediately spitting out a piece of chewing gum, something he found surprisingly rebellious for a country-music show.
Then he really started watching him.
Orbison later described the young Elvis as a “punk kid” and a “real raw cat singing like a bird.”
More than anything, he remembered how shocking Elvis seemed because there was almost nothing in popular culture to compare him with.
Roy Orbison Remembers Seeing Elvis Presley Before Fame
The music was only part of what caught Orbison’s attention.
He remembered Elvis breaking guitar strings, moving wildly across the stage and telling crude jokes between songs.
Orbison even compared Elvis’s rough way of speaking to a truck driver.
But then the audience began reacting.
Girls screamed.
Young men became jealous.
And the room descended into what Orbison remembered as pandemonium.
Suddenly, the weird-looking kid made sense.
Orbison could see that Elvis possessed something completely different from the polished country performers surrounding him.
His appearance might have looked strange.
His humor might have seemed rough.
But his energy was impossible to ignore.
Orbison later summed it up another way:
“His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing.”
He said there simply was no cultural reference point for what he was watching.
That encounter mattered.
Orbison was still trying to establish himself as a performer with his group, which would become the Teen Kings.
Seeing Elvis’s explosive rise helped push him toward the same Memphis label that had launched Presley.
By 1956, Roy Orbison was recording for Sun Records, releasing “Ooby Dooby” and beginning the career that would eventually produce songs like “Only the Lonely,” “Crying” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.”
Years later, the relationship between their names had completely changed.
Elvis reportedly admired Orbison enormously and publicly praised his voice, while Orbison continued speaking with fascination about the effect Elvis had made on him before either man became an international icon.
That is what makes Orbison’s first impression so fascinating.
He did not look at young Elvis and immediately see the King of Rock and Roll.
He saw an oddly dressed, gum-spitting, rough-talking kid who seemed almost too strange to understand.
Then Elvis started performing.
And Roy Orbison realized he was watching something music had never seen before.