A 3-D Roy Orbison? Not only for the lonely

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Of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan once said that his voice was so startling that it could “jar a corpse.” Preach, Bob Dylan, preach, for the late singer and songwriter Orbison was the star attraction at Toronto’s Sony Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday, thanks to the miracles of modern technology and age-old chutzpah.

The show is called In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert. Orbison, a near-operatic tenor who died of a massive heart attack at age 52 in 1988, appeared in 3-D hologram form with a live orchestra. His prerecorded voice was synchronized with a laser-image form that strummed an electric guitar and did all the things a real Orbison would have done. He tiger-growled at the beginning of Oh, Pretty Woman, acknowledged the crowd at the end of Only the Lonely and never once took off his dark sunglasses. The spectre was a spectacle – can personal jet packs be far behind?

The show – I would call it sci-fi theatre rather than a concert per se – is the work of the Las Vegas company BASE Hologram. Ticket prices to the high-tech freak show ranged from $49.50 to $79.50.

Unlike the stunt projection of Tupac Shakur at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in 2012 and the ghostly appearance of Michael Jackson at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, this is no one-off thing – not for portable Orbison, and not for the hologram music industry. Following the current In Dreams North American tour, in 2019 the chart-topping crooner and orchestra will settle in for a residency in Branson, Mo., the country music town that good taste forgot but Dolly Parton did not.

BASE Hologram is also behind a current show featuring the holographic 20th-century opera-star soprano Maria Callas, with the late jazz-pop legend Amy Winehouse also set to do digital duty. Other companies are reportedly ready to put holograms of everyone from Ronnie James Dio to Glenn Gould to Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson to Frank Zappa on the road. The wave of the future is a wave of the past, apparently authorized by the estates of the long-left-the-building artists.

In Dreams is an entertaining technical marvel, but I am unconvinced the estates of deceased have the best interests of their respective meal tickets in mind. These hologram shows could be seen as an undignified and non-consensual cashing in on a legacy.

Remember that it was the demands of stardom that took their toll on Presley, Winehouse and Jackson, and which ultimately contributed to their tragic downfalls. Now their talents are being exhumed for posthumous paydays.

Orbison’s resurrection in particular is ironic. U2’s Bono said of the Blue Bayou singer that his octave-climbing tenor seemed supernatural – that it was “not his,” perhaps belonging to an angel instead. Indeed, Orbison was an oddball, with a persona as an unearthly, mysterious loner. Bruce Springsteen once said that he got the impression after meeting him that if Orbison reached out to touch you, his hand would go “right through you.”

And now we are to clap for the lifelike reboot of an artist who was never lifelike in the first place?

A couple of hours before Orbison’s “performance” on Sunday, the gifted alt-country troubadour Doug Paisley celebrated the release of his new album Starter Home a few blocks away at the Cameron House bar on Queen Street West. He sang about loneliness and dreams in a way that Orbison would understand. If the message was not clear enough, he closed the show with a cover of 1962 by the late Newfoundland songster Ron Hynes: “That’s all gone, it won’t come back again.”

Like Orbison and Hynes, Paisley made a compelling case for the humanity of the songwriter and a flesh-and-blood performer. “It’s too bad that all these things can only happen in my dreams,” Orbison sang. He knew that dreams were not for the lonely, but for the living.