The Story Of Heartbreak Hotel—Elvis Presley
It was a cold, breezy day in January 1956 as Steve Sholes, Artist and Repertory Manager for RCA Victor, sat in his New York office listening to tapes of Elvis Presley. The week before, Sholes had been in Nashville, overseeing the first RCA recording session for the young singer. Over two days, Elvis cut five songs, and it was Sholes’ job to decide which one would be the A-side of the singer’s first official single for the label.
Two of the songs were covers of R&B hits, cut in the hot hybrid style of R&B and country pop that first catapulted Elvis into the public eye. Another two were romantic ballads, similar in style to Elvis’ last single released on the Sun record label, I Forgot To Remember To Forget. After RCA bought Elvis’ contract near the end of November 1955 for an unprecedented amount of money, the single had been reissued on RCA and was now riding high on the country charts. The fifth track from the session was a strange, mid-tempo song that pushed country music’s obsession with heartbreak to new levels. It focused on loneliness, despair and death, and was performed in a bluesy style that mashed together musical genres without any thought for conventional marketing categories. While it was certainly unique, almost no one thought it would be a hit. Sholes’ superiors, already nervous about the investment they had made, saw no hope in the song, but they also thought the rest of the session was a failure and suggested he take the boy back into the studio for another try.
Sholes’ experience as a record company executive told him the song was a loser, but there was something about it that he couldn’t quite shake. Elvis Presley was a dramatically new and different type of artist, and his first new record from RCA needed to be a bold statement of that fact. Plus, Elvis himself was 100 percent convinced that the record was a hit, and even though Sholes had only known him for a short time, he was impressed with Elvis’ musical instincts. Going with gut over intellect, Sholes made the decision. Heartbreak Hotel would be the single. Pop music would never be the same.
The story of Heartbreak Hotel began a few months earlier. Inspired by a newspaper story of a man who had committed suicide and left a note that read simply, “I walk a lonely street,” the song was officially a collaboration of Jacksonville, Florida high school teacher and songwriter Mae Boren Axton and country singer-songwriter Tommy Durden. Accounts of exactly how the song was written vary, with Durden later claiming he wrote the song and performed it with his band before bringing it to Axton for help with pitching it to a publisher. Axton’s own account was that Durden came to her with only a few lines, and that they worked together on the finished version.
However the song came to be written, Axton met Presley in Jacksonville at a concert in July 1955 and was impressed with his talent. She made arrangements with Colonel Tom Parker to pitch the songs to Elvis at the Country Music Disc Jockey Convention in Nashville in November 1955. Meeting Elvis in his hotel room in Nashville, Axton played a demo recording for him. He immediately loved the song, saying, “Hot dog, Mae, play that again!” He listened to it 10 more times, committing the song to memory before Axton left.
After Elvis signed with RCA on 21 November 1955, Axton offered him a third of the royalties if he would record the song as his first single on his new label. A little over two weeks later, he debuted it at a concert in Swifton, Arkansas and told the crowd it would be his next hit.
But convincing Steve Sholes of the song’s hit potential wasn’t as easy. When Elvis arrived at the RCA Studio in Nashville on 10 January 1956 for his first session, he was greeted by a nervous and contentious atmosphere. The week before. Sun Records released Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins and the song was taking off like a rocket. Could it be that Sam Phillips had hoodwinked RCA? Had Steve Sholes signed the wrong artist?
As for the band, Scotty Moore and Bill Black were both tense to be working in new and unfamiliar surroundings. Although Nashville’s recording studios were far more casual than those in New York or Los Angeles, it was more structured than the ‘anything goes’ atmosphere they were used to at Sun Records. Drummer D. J. Fontana had recently joined Presley’s band, and this was his first recording session with his new boss. Pianist Floyd Cramer had worked with Elvis and the band on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, but he had just moved to Nashville to pursue session work and was nervous about making a good impression on Steve Sholes. Back-up singer Gordon Stoker was slightly annoyed that Sholes had not chosen to hire Stoker’s quartet. The Jordanaires, for the session, against Presley’s specific request. Instead, Sholes had assembled an ad hoc trio of Gordon along with Ben and Brock speer from the RCA gospel group the Speer Family.
Chet Atkins, Sholes’ assistant and the head of RCA’s Nashville office, wasn’t happy either. What he had heard of Elvis hadn’t impressed him, and with the session starting at 2pm, it was likely to be a long night. Moreover, the studio was brand new, and a number of problems had yet to be ironed out, including a troublesome bass frequency that so far had resisted all efforts to solve it. Despite the anxiety that filled the studio, however, Elvis was completely focused on the job at hand, and obviously excited about the session. Kicking off with a cover of Ray Charles’ I’ve Got A Woman, Elvis gave the song all the passion and excitement he had been pouring into it for the past year before live audiences, while also zeroing in on the right ‘feel’ for the record. Sholes seemed satisfied more than once, but Presley kept requesting another try, until he felt he had nailed it on the eighth take.
Atkins’ doubts about Elvis were quickly overcome when he saw him in action. Calling his wife from the control booth, Atkins later recalled that he told her to get to the studio right away. “I told her she’d never see anything like this again, it was just so damn exciting.”
With the first song completed, the group turned their attentions to the one song that Elvis had specifically planned to record at the session, Heartbreak Hotel. Although both Sholes and Atkins had doubts about the song, both for its subject matter and odd arrangement, they agreed to record it, probably with the hope of relegating it to a B-side.
It took seven takes to satisfy Elvis. The sparse arrangement that emphasised Bill Black’s bass along with wonderfully concise solos from Moore and Cramer, layered over Atkins’ rhythm guitar, was channelled through a strong overlay of echo—made possible from a makeshift echo chamber that was constructed by placing a microphone and amp in a hallway and then feeding the sound back into the studio. After finishing Heartbreak Hotel, the musicians broke for supper and reconvened two hours later to cut a cover of the Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters song. Money Honey, another staple of Presley’s live act. The next afternoon, the group returned to the studio to cut two ballads that Sholes selected. I’m Counting On You and I Was The One.
With the session completed, Elvis, Scotty, Bill and D. J. headed back to Memphis. Elvis was the only one who seemed completely satisfied with the session. Over the next few days he caught up with friends and visited Sun Records to tell Sam Phillips and Marion Keisker (Phillips’ assistant) how the session went. It was probably during that visit that Phillips first heard Heartbreak Hotel from an acetate dub. Although he was too polite to hurt Elvis’ feelings, Phillips later said that his first impression was that the recording was a “morbid mess”.
Meanwhile in New York, the pressure increased on Sholes in regards to Elvis’ first RCA single. Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins was picking up both jukebox spins and airplay on pop and even R&B radio stations. Sholes knew that his entire career was on the line with the decision to release Heartbreak Hotel.
The single began to hit stores, jukeboxes and radio stations on 23 January 1956. It took a few days for the sales reports to start coming in, but in the meantime Elvis travelled to New York for first of six nationwide TV appearances on The Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show. After a rehearsal of Heartbreak Hotel didn’t go well, the decision was made to substitute a medley of Shake, Rattle And Roll and Flip, Flop And Fly—both longtime staples of Elvis’ live sets.
A week later, Elvis returned to Stage Show, but Heartbreak Hotel was still conspicuous by its absence as he performed his fifth Sun single. Baby Let’s Play House along with a cover of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, which was still riding high on the charts. For his third appearance, on 11 February, with the single breaking in many regional markets, Elvis finally got the chance to perform Heartbreak Hotel, pairing it up with a cover of Blue Suede Shoes. It was a foreshadowing of the excitement that was about to break loose.
That week, the first review of Heartbreak Hotel appeared in Billboard magazine. Calling the song “a strong blues item wrapped up in his usual style and a great beat”, the anonymous reviewer predicted that the single might easily break in both the country and pop markets—he had no idea. On the same page, Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes was on Billboard’s regional country charts. The next week, the magazine featured both singles in their “This Week’s Best Buys” column, citing that they were both top sellers in Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans and other southern cities. By the middle of March both records were moving up the country and pop charts, and Blue Suede Shoes appeared on the R&B chart, an event that had never happened before for what was considered a ‘country’ record. Billboard spotlighted the achievement in a story that discussed the amazing success of ‘mongrel music’. The surprises weren’t over yet; three weeks later. Heartbreak Hotel joined its rockabilly cousin on the R&B chart.
By the end of March, Heartbreak Hotel was approaching the one million mark in sales. It, along with Blue Suede Shoes, continued to occupy the upper spots on all three Billboard charts for the next three months, with Heartbreak Hotel topping out at #1 Pop, #1 Country.
When the single was released in the UK in March 1956, it was not greeted with the same warmth it had encountered from the US music press. The NME said, “If you appreciate good singing, I don’t suppose you’ll manage to hear this disc all through.” Despite the snark, British rock ’n’ roll fans had a different opinion and the single entered the UK Official Singles Chart in May, rising to the #2 position.
For Steve Sholes, it was an amazing victory. Seemingly overnight he was the smartest man in the record business. Further proof of his wisdom in signing Elvis came in March when RCA released Elvis’ first album and a four-song EP that contained both Heartbreak Hotel and Elvis’ cover of Blue Suede Shoes that he recorded in New York City during his third session for RCA. Both releases shot up the charts with the LP becoming the first million-selling album for RCA Victor.
The twin success of both Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes caused other record labels, both major and independent, to scramble for their own ‘hillbilly cats’. It soon turned into a gold rush for the style that would eventually become known as rockabilly. The spring and summer months of 1956 produced classic records by an amazing number of hillbilly hoppers—Eddie Bond, Janis Martin, Buddy Holly, Sid King & the Five Strings, Warren Smith, the Collins Kids, Johnny Carroll, Joe Clay, Mac Curtis, Andy Starr, the Johnny Burnette Trio, Roy Orbison, Gene Vincent, Sanford Clark, Charlie Feathers, Ronnie Self, Eddie Cochran, Dale Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley and many others.
Beyond the sales of Heartbreak Hotel and its effect on the record industry was the proof that Elvis Presley’s talent and abilities extended far beyond his vocal abilities. In the year and half that Elvis spent working with Sam Phillips, he absorbed Phillips’ often-repeated mantra of the importance of ‘feel’ over musical perfection. Combined with his almost encyclopedic knowledge of pop, country, gospel and R&B, Elvis’ confidence in his musical instincts developed and sharpened. When Sholes signed him to RCA, the label wasn’t just securing a talented vocalist but also a brilliant record producer. Even though Sholes may not have consciously realised this, he was sharp enough to trust his own instincts when Elvis was the only advocate for the hit potential of Heartbreak Hotel.
The sound and feel of Heartbreak Hotel was completely in line with Elvis’ Sun recordings, while also pushing that sound to a new level by mashing together disparate elements of pop, country and R&B. As a testament to the distinctiveness of the recording, very few cover versions were attempted by competing labels. In 1956, the widespread view in the music industry was that songs always took precedence over individual singers. When Blue Suede Shoes showed signs of taking off, over nine different versions of the song were rush-released by various labels with different artists adapting the song for country, pop and R&B markets.
Yet the singular sound and vision of Elvis’ recording of Heartbreak Hotel meant that covers were not even attempted—other than a passable doo wop adaption by the Cadets on Modern Records, a popular parody version by Stan Freberg on Capitol, and various sound-alike attempts on fly-by-night budget labels (including a knock-off by future country mega-star George Jones, released under the aliases Thumper Jones’ and ‘Hank Davis’). With Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis had not just recorded a hit record, he had caused a bellwether change in American popular music. Heartbreak Hotel was a landmark in the rise of the rock ’n’ roll era, a signal of the ascendency of individual performers over songs and the arrival of one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century.
THE END
It is a quote. VINTAGE ROCK PRESENTS – ELVIS COLLECTORS EDITION 2015
