Every now and then, a song comes along that seems to change everything. For musicians or young music fans who would later become history-shaping artists, there are countless stories of how one song, heard at a specific moment, transformed it all. Perhaps it was the moment they realised they wanted to make music or saw the immense power of sound. Maybe it was a song so groundbreaking that it felt like a whole new world opening up. Paul McCartney, meanwhile, remembers his life-changing moment well.
At the time, McCartney was just 14 years old. He’d become fast friends with a local lad called George Harrison. He was learning the guitar amidst Liverpool’s skiffle craze, and he was getting more and more into music as he realised that maybe that’s what he wanted to do. Then, a certain song was released, and suddenly, everything seemed different.
“You hear on the radio Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what is that?’” McCartney remembered.
After his breakout with ‘That’s All Right’, Presley’s incredible upward trajectory was set to rocket speed with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, his first single for RCA. “You heard people saying, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before, man.’ And it was that,” McCartney said, attempting to get across what it was like to be a young music fan, witnessing this breakthrough in real time.
“Now that we know it so well, you think, ‘Oh, it’s Elvis singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ There will be listeners who can remember that moment when you heard that,” McCartney explained. At the time, there genuinely had been nothing like Presley. The radio was all sanitised pop or doo-wop, so when suddenly this seductive, crooning voice came through, bringing with him the sounds of blues and black American music, ears were pricked. It was a revelation like no one had heard before and one that no one would hear again until a few years later when McCartney’s own band emerged.
“It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music,“ McCartney said, crediting his own rock and roll career to this song and this moment. He said, “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, I thought, this is it.”
In a lot of ways, the release of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ can be drawn as a line in the sand of McCartney’s life, separating it between what came before and what came after. In the year that followed the single’s release, he met John Lennon, joined the Quarrymen and then the rest was history as they marched on down their path to world domination with the impact of this Presley number spurring him on.
It sounds melodramatic, but to the Beatles songwriter, Presley’s power was genuinely that supreme. In his whole incredible career where not only has McCartney met all his idols but has become an idol himself, it was meeting Elvis Presley that remains a peak.
“Often I think, ‘Oh my God, I really met Elvis Presley. I was really in his house, and it was a moment in time that really happened’,” he recalled, still starstruck, “Sometimes I pinch myself and think, ‘Was I really on the same couch as Elvis, talking about this stuff?’”.
