Heartbreak Hotel Still Has It

From around the mid-nineteen fifties to his death in 1977, there can be little doubt the one name which was on every ones’ lips when Rock and Roll was mentioned was Elvis Presley. Even I, when in my youth, heard Presley songs with surprising frequency on the radio sometime after his star had faded; yet he still commanded a dedicated and loyal fanbase.

Presley had emerged from a melting pot of young, fresh talent; but this man had something else about him. There was the indefinable presence all the legends have. Something which puts them above all others; their territory is the stage but it is so much more than that. It’s a part of them; so few performers then or now have the same relationship, the same implied intimacy, as artistes like Presley.

It’s difficult often to exclude hindsight from an artist and their career and eventual demise; to claim you can see in those formative pictures, before the adoring crowds became his trademark, that this boy was different. But perhaps, Presley is a rare exception.

I’m not going to go through his Mississipi roots or his big break in 1954. I am going to pass on the sexually charged moves which gave him the name ‘Elvis The Pelvis’, or the series of really quite poor movie vehicles he appeared in. I am not even going to mention, that even now, with record sales approaching three quarters of a billion and so many more streams on playlist platforms which have made more money now than he ever did when he was alive. I can only write what I know.

It was 1972, and I am in the kitchen of our small semi-detached in the small town which, with its’ easy access to London, was appropriate as a starter home for my parents. Even now I can see the kitchen; formica table, two stools and my seat at the table, my Mother busily doing something that I cannot recall finding the slightest interest in. And on the radio they played ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. I was transfixed.

The original pressing of Heartbreak Hotel

If ever there was a song which absolutely defined a style and era, Heartbreak Hotel was it. The song was written after the composer read of a goodbye note by a teenager who had suffered a bad break up. “I walk a lonely street, and the only thing open is the Heartbreak Hotel” said the author. Or words to that effect. These had been absorbed into the song, the concept of every room on every floor contained a jilted, forgotten, abandoned and broken person.

But it was more than the poetry of the prose which to be honest I didn’t understand. It was the sound; more accurately, it was the whole lack of sound. Today, if that song was to be made and I suspect it would not get passed certain focus groups, but if it was it would be deemed too simplistic. In more clumsy hands, the song would likely become maudlin, a ballad for what might have been and will never be. A yearning and soulful wail into the eternal emptiness of being suddenly alone. But with Presley’s voice, it was defiant, resolute. His vocals on that track, the softly spoken stanzas followed by the shouting “Although it’s always crowded, you still can find some room” and the quieter, more melancholic “for broken hearted lovers, to cry there in the gloom”. The variants of energy in the singer in a song which grabs you. Because of who is singing it.

For me, nothing matched Heartbreak Hotel for the intensity and the insight it had. Even now, it sounds fresh, alive, part of the human experience. It marked a change in music, it was the true start of Rock and Roll. It was the battering ram at the gates which forced them open and brought so much to so many young minds, bored with dance and swing and jazz. It was their music.

It was their story. It was their time.

And now the kicker. This year, Heartbreak Hotel will be seventy. Most of those who savoured it when it came out are gone; Elvis himself will have been gone fifty years next year. But the song is still as fresh as it was in January 1956. And that’s what made Presley, Presley.