Chart position: #1 Country (for 17 weeks), #3 R&B, #1 Pop (for
8 weeks)
Category: Rockabilly
Writers: Mae Axton, Tommy Durden, Elvis Presley
Label and number: RCA 47-6420, New York
Flipside: "I Was the One" (#19 Pop)
When and where recorded: January 10, 1956, in Nashville
When released: January 27, 1956
Why Important: It was Elvis's first real RCA single and his first #1
hit, transforming him from a Southern country novelty to a national rock 'n'
roll sensation.
Influenced by: A newspaper article
Influenced: Almost everything
Important cover versions: Stan Freberg (#79 Pop), Hank Smith and the
Nashville Playboys (a.k.a. George Jones)
Important remakes: Roger Miller (#84 Pop, 1966), Frigid Pink (#72 Pop,
1971)
The story behind the record: Incredible as it may seem, RCA Victor Records
didn't quite know what to do with Elvis Presley after they signed him on November
22, 1955. The best idea they could come up with at the time was to reissue Elvis's
last Sun Records single, "Mystery Train," which the corporation had acquired
from Sun along with the singer himself. RCA conducted the release of this record
in December with less than halfhearted enthusiasm, and it didn't sell. The company's
$25,000 investment seemed to being going south.
Likewise, Hill and Range Music, the major New York publisher that had bought into the Presley deal for $15,000, didn't know how to handle this new act.
Meanwhile, in Gainesville, Florida, a local musician named Tommy Durden was scanning the front page of the Miami Herald when a photo of a corpse caught his eye. The headline asked, "Do You Know This Man?" The accompanying story explained that this suicide victim had been found with no identification. His pockets had been empty except for a note that said, "I walk a lonely street."
For the rest of the day Durden couldn't get that note out of his head. He drove over to his friend Mae Axton's house. Axton was a local songwriter, TV personality and publicist who worked occasionally for Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager. (Mae's son, Hoyt, would grow up to write songs too, and sing 'em.) When Durden told her about the story in the paper, she suggested that they write a song about it for Elvis, because he needed some material for an upcoming recording session in Nashville. Reportedly she had already told the young singer, "You need a million seller, and I'm going to write it for you. "As Tommy Durden improvised on Axton's piano, the "lonely street" began to wind through their imaginations until it ended up at a "heartbreak hotel." Within an hour they'd written the song.
When a local friend and musician, Glen Reeves, stopped by the house, they got him to sing the song as a demo on Axton's tape recorder, giving his imitation of how he thought Elvis would sing the song. Axton offered him a piece of the song as payment, but he turned them down. "That's the silliest song I ever heard," Reeves told them, and he'd be damned if he'd attach his name to it.
According to Mae Axton, "The moment I played that song for Elvis, he was hooked. He went back and played it ten times."
Elvis's first session for his new label took place in an old converted Nashville church. It lasted two days, January 10 to 11, 1956, less than a week after his twenty-first birthday. Producer Steve Sholes, the man responsible for signing Elvis to RCA, had decided to keep the "Sun sound," with its emphasis on heavy echo simulating a performance in an auditorium. But Sun producer Sam Phillips had also used slapback echo as a way to fatten up the sound of Elvis's small group: Winfield Scott Moore on guitar, Bill Black on bass and, later on, drummers Jimmy Lott and Johnny Bernero, who had since been replaced by D. J. Fontana from "The Louisiana Hayride." Sholes decided to fatten up Presley's sound by adding a rhythm guitarist (veteran Chet Atkins) and pianist (Floyd Cramer) to his band, as well as a gospel trio comprised of tenor Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires and brothers Ben and Brock Speer of the Speer Family.
Sholes recalled that Presley warmed up for the session by sitting down at the piano with his background vocalists and singing several hymns, including "I'm Bound for the Kingdom" and "I'll Tell It Wherever I Go." When it came time to start recording, Elvis said he wanted to sing Ray Charles's "I've Got a Woman." (It eventually came out as "I've Got a Sweetie," so as not to offend his fans.)
Sholes immediately had to work with the problem of Elvis straying off-mike because he jumped around, propelled by ex-burlesque drummer D. J. Fontana's "stripper" beats. (This was Fontana's first of many recording sessions with Elvis.) Sholes surrounded Elvis with three mikes-one in front and one on each sideand to solve the problem of him banging on his guitar strings Sholes gave him a felt ukulele pick. Since the studio had no headphones, Elvis gathered his musicians close to him. By the time they'd laid down the take they were satisfied with, Elvis had taken off his white bucks, worked himself into a sweat and ripped his pants. His fingers bled from hitting the strings.
"Why didn't you stop?" Sholes asked him.
"Well, sir," Elvis humbly replied, "I didn't want to break it up, it was goin' so good."
Next up was "Heartbreak Hotel." Using Glen Reeves's demo, Elvis established what would become a pattern from then on: he copied the vocal intonations of the demo singer. This would later reach the absurdity of Elvis mimicking demo singers who were trying to sound like parodies of Elvis. According to Tommy Durden, "Elvis was even breathing in the same places as Glen Reeves did on the dub."
"Well since my baby left me, I've got a tale to tell, it's down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel." Elvis gave the song, in biographer Albert Goldman's words, a "grotesquely exaggerated and histrionic quality." Sholes, unfamiliar with using Sam Phillips's "slapback" technique, had drenched the recording in so much echo that it sounded ghostly. There was nothing else like "Heartbreak Hotel" in the history of recording. (Stan Freberg quickly spoofed its excesses in a novelty cover record: "Elvis" rips his jeans, the band wanders off into another song on the solo and the echo chamber malfunctions, trapping Elvis in an electronic reverberation.)
In accordance with the $15,000 deal that Hill and Range Music had struck with Colonel Parker and RCA, "Heartbreak Hotel" went into the publishing firm, and Elvis's name went on the song as its third writer. RCA slapped "I Was the One," a Hill and Range country song, on the B-side and released the single late in the month. At first, not much happened.
Sun Records owner Sam Phillips later reported that Steve Sholes called him on the phone to say, "Man, I don't know whether I bought the wrong person or not. That damn 'Blue Suede Shoes' [by Carl Perkins, on Sun] is breakin' all over New York and everywhere else I go." Sholes then asked permission to release Elvis's version of "Blue Suede Shoes," which had been recorded a day after "Heartbreak Hotel," as a follow-up single because he "couldn't get 'Heartbreak Hotel' to do a damn thing."
On January 28, the day after RCA released "Heartbreak Hotel," Elvis made his first of six national television appearances on the Dorsey Brothers' CBS variety program, "Stage Show." His selection of songs suggests that there might have been some confusion among Elvis, his manager and his record label. Instead of hyping his new single on the show, he sang Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" and "I've Got a Woman," both of which were included subsequently on his first album. A week later, he returned to the show and sang one of his old Sun songs, "Baby, Let's Play House," and "Blue Suede Shoes." Curiously, Hill and Range didn't own the publishing on any of them. Either Colonel Parker was playing games with the music publishers or else Elvis still didn't feel comfortable singing "Heartbreak Hotel."
Finally, on his third "Stage Show" appearance, on February 11, Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel," along with "Blue Suede Shoes." In March, as more and more people tuned in to see what all the fuss was about, he performed "Heartbreak Hotel" two more times, and the record broke wide open. He gave the song its final TV performance on April 3 as a guest on Milton Berle's NBC show.
Two and a half weeks later his debut RCA single reached number one and stayed there till mid-June. To get an idea of what kind of musical climate greeted Elvis Presley, you only have to look at the two orchestral numbers it displaced at the top: the Les Baxter Orchestra's "Poor People of Paris" and Prez Prado's "Lisbon Antiqua."
When Hill and Range received its first royalty check from RCA for about $250,000, they refused to cash it. They thought the accounting department had mistakenly added an extra zero.
"Heartbreak Hotel" went on to become 1956's biggest single, and Elvis Presley became the biggest single entertainer of the twentieth century. Rock 'n' roll had unequivocally arrived for good.
"Elvis could do anything."-Mike Stoller
"He could do anything that James Brown could do, anything that Little Richard could do or anything that Bing Crosby could do."-Jerry Leiber
"My Elvis Presley record collection included the 78s of 'Heartbreak Hotel,' 'Blue Suede Shoes' and 'Hound Dog.' I bought them the day they came out!"-Leslie West, guitarist
"'Hound Dog,' 'Heartbreak Hotel' and 'You're Right, I'm Left, She's Gone' were all favorites of mine."-Roy Buchanan, guitarist