These 16 songs, taped from television broadcasts in 1956 for KOSA-TV in Odessa, TX, were originally issued on the 1995 U.K. Rollercoaster release Are You Ready?. This 2001 CD on Fuel 2000/Varese Sarabande made the material available for the U.S. market. Yes, this is pretty much for major Roy Orbison fans only, as the sound quality is unavoidably dull and rough, due to the inferiority of the sources. Yet for those fans who want a deeper glimpse into Orbison's early rockabilly career than even the most comprehensive collection of his Sun recordings provides, this is an invaluable document of his band the Teen Kings live, and pretty dang enjoyable if you can put up with the subpar-but-listenable fidelity. This pretty well lays any suspicion to rest that Orbison was just expediently riding the rockabilly trend until he found his own voice, as it's a real rough-and-tumble, exuberant set. It's not as polished as his early Sun recordings from the same era, but perhaps a little less inhibited. "Ooby Dooby" and a few of the other songs he also recorded at Sun ("Go! Go! Go!," "Rock House") are here, but there are also a bunch of items that didn't make it into his recorded repertoire of the time, like covers of "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "Blue Suede Shoes," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "Rip It Up," "Singing the Blues," "Bo Diddley," and even "St. Louis Blues." It's missing his pre-Sun Je-Wel single, but otherwise it's a useful document of his non-Sun rockabilly output. As a nice if rambling bonus, there's a 38-minute retrospective telephone interview with all three of the Teen Kings except Orbison, and the liner notes thoroughly go over Orbison's Teen Kings years. ~ Richie Unterberger

Rovi