When You're Only Lonely

John David Souther was a jazz man, playing sax and drums in Texas.  But he had his ears open to other Texans, especially the sounds of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison.  When he wound up in Los Angeles, he literally picked up a guitar left at his house by a musician friend, and found a new musical expression.  He began hanging out at the fabled Troubadour club (and the Sad Cafe next door) and made some interesting friends among young and aspiring musicians, including Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Don Henley and the other eventual members of the Eagles, and especially Linda Ronstadt, with whom he had a romantic and musical relationship.  Together they all created the dominant LA sound of the 70s.

Souther became a songwriter for them all, sometimes singing on their records.  He made his own albums for a smaller public, which included me.  I practically memorized his Black Rose album in particular.  But it wasn't until 1979 that he had a breakout hit with this song, "You're Only Lonely."  With obvious and admitted inspiration from Roy Orbison, there's some Buddy Holly in it as well, especially live.  Souther's voice is different from Orbison's but also remarkable, and he seems to sing with such ease.

This is about the only piece of video of Souther singing this song I could find--a live performance outdoors at the Farm Aid concert in 1986.  There's some sound problems, a few microphone squeals, but the song gains in performance what it loses in sound quality.  (There's another YouTube video of the same performance that replaces the audio with the 1979 studio recording, but it doesn't really work.  The tempo is slightly different, and it comes off a bit lifeless.)  This to me is a fitting companion to the song that inspired it, Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely."