Elton John Revealed the Elvis Presley Song That ‘Changed Everything’
Elvis Presley significantly impacted rock music, and the Memphis singer influenced many artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles considered him an idol who made them fall in love with rock n’ roll. Elton John had similar admiration for Elvis Presley, and one song “changed everything” for him.
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ dominated the charts in 1956
“Heartbreak Hotel” was released in 1956. It dominated the U.S. Billboard charts, peaking at No. 1 and remaining there for seven weeks. It also reached No. 2 on the U.K. charts. While it didn’t reach No. 1, the track impacted many young rock stars in the U.K. In the book Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Legend, John Lennon recalled listening to the song for the first time and thinking how fresh it sounded.
“When I first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ I could hardly make out what was being said,” he explained. “It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They always sang like [Frank] Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about … It took us a long time to work what was going on. To us, it just sounded as a noise that was great.”
Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant had a similar reaction to “Heartbreak Hotel”, saying, “It was so animal, so sexual, the first musical arousal I ever had. You could see a twitch in everybody my age. All we knew about the guy was that he was cool, handsome, and looked wild.”
The Elvis Presley song ‘changed everything’ for Elton John
Elton John grew up in a suburban neighborhood in London in the 1950s. Rock n’ roll had been building in the U.S. and was making it’s way overseas to the U.K. In an interview with The Guardian, John recalled the day when his mother introduced him to Elvis by playing him “Heartbreak Hotel”.
“My mum always used to buy a record every Friday. She came home, and she had the 78 of Elvis Presley, and she said, ‘I heard this in the record shop, and I’ve never heard anything like it!’ She played it to me, and I’d never heard anything like it either,” he shared. “It was weird because, about 10 days before, I’d had my hair cut in the local barbers, where I went as a little boy, and I’d noticed a Life magazine. I was reading this article on a man who looked like an alien but was so handsome – I’d never seen anything like him, and I put two and two together and said, ‘That was the man I saw in the magazine!’ So that was the record that really changed everything.”
John’s meeting with Elvis inspired him to become sober
Elton John’s fame allowed him to meet Elvis Presley at a concert in Maryland. In June 1976, John and his mother went to meet Elvis, and the king’s health was deteriorating due to excessive drug use. In a 1996 interview with Oprah, John called the meeting “pathetic” and said he was almost a different person.
“It [the meeting] was so sad because he turned into this big man with no eyes,” John said. “They had sunk into the back of his head, and it was pathetic.”
Elvis died three years later, and his story put Elton on the road to recovery. The “Tiny Dancer” is still going strong today and is currently on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.
