We Finally Know What Actually Happened To Roy Orbison, Buckle Up

In 1978, surgeons opened Roy Orbison's chest and found arteries so blocked that one biographer said he was barely alive. He was forty-one. He walked out of that hospital saying he felt brand new. Ten years later, at the exact moment the world finally wanted him again, he was dead. Between those two dates is a story most fans have never heard. The smoking he refused to quit. The weight that rose and fell. The chest pains he mentioned to a friend and then ignored. And one last night in Hendersonville that was supposed to be about something completely different.