and on The Milton Berle Show!
“Since-a-my-baby-left-me….” It was a seminal song. In San Francisco when I was eight, I sang it, rotating my leg at the hip trying to be just like Elvis. This it turns out was more or less exactly what Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards were doing as well…… (From “ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY“)
MCCARTNEY: Before I actually heard an Elvis record, I was aware of him as an image because I’d seen him in an ad for “Heartbreak Hotel” on the back page of the NME. They weren’t playing much of Elvis’ stuff on the radio in those days. To hear “Heartbreak Hotel’ I had to go into a record shop in Liverpool and listen to it through headphones in one of those booths. It was a magical moment, the beginning of an era. Listening to it that first time was the start of my Elvis experience.
LENNON: It was Elvis who really got me buying records. I thought that early stuff of his was great. The Bill Haley era passed me by, in a way. When his records came on the wireless, my mother used to hear them, but they didn’t do anything for me. It was Elvis who got me hooked on beat music. When I heard Heartbreak Hotel, I thought ‘this is it’ and I started to grow sideboards and all that gear…”
KEITH RICHARDS: “The one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy.”
