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This Just In...
Kevin Fischer is an award-winning veteran broadcaster who has been seen and heard on Milwaukee TV and radio stations for nearly three decades.
Kevin, who is a legislative aide to state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), can be seen offering his views on the news on the public affairs program, “INTERchange,” on Milwaukee Public Television Channel 10. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Franklin.
Taking a walk down Lonely Street
By Kevin Fischer
Friday, Jan 11 2008, 04:00 PM
It’s not Elvis Week.
That’s reserved for August to commemorate the passing of the King of Rock and Roll.
But this is still an important week for Elvis and his fans.
Tuesday of this week, Elvis would have been 73 years old.
Two days after his 21st birthday, on January 10, 1956, Elvis had his very first recording session with RCA. The historic session produced his first gold record, “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Tommy Durden wrote the lyrics, and the story behind the song is captured in a Durden bio on www.musicianguide.com that says he wrote the lyrics in the mid-50’s.
It was during this time that Durden would write the lyrics to his most famous song, "Heartbreak Hotel," and in one story that survives, the Swing Billys were the first group to play the then-unknown song. The group, however, didn't like the song because it was a rock-n-roll number, and teased Durden about it. Durden, however, would have the last laugh.
The idea for "Heartbreak Hotel" came to him after reading an article in the Miami Herald. He had glanced at the front page before turning to the racing section, and saw a story about a man who had destroyed all of his identity papers and committed suicide. The well-dressed man had left behind a note reading, "I walk a lonely street." Durden thought the story had the potential to become a great song, so he drove over to see his songwriter friend Mae Axton (the mother of Hoyt Atxon). Axton had met Elvis Presley when he had performed in Jacksonville and had promised to write him his first million-seller.
Axton liked the song idea, so Durden sat down at the piano and started to improvise. Axton, thinking of the heartbreak of the man's family, suggested that there should be a "heartbreak hotel" at the end of the "lonely street." While writing the song, a third friend, Glen Reeves, dropped by, and Axton asked if he'd like to help with the composition. Reeves declined, saying that the title was silly. Reeves left to run errands, returning "an hour later to find the song completed and recorded by Durden on Axton's tape recorder," according to Albert Goldman in Elvis. Axton then asked Reeves, who was also known for his ability to impersonate Presley, to sing the song into the tape machine. If it was in a style that Presley could relate to, she believed, he would be more likely to consider it. Reeves recorded the song, and although he was offered one-third writing credit for his help, he once again refused. Durden would later note of Reeves's involvement, "I was convinced when I heard the record that Elvis was even breathing in the same places that Glen did on the dub."
Axton approached Presley with the song at the Nashville DJ (disc jockey) convention and he liked it so much that he asked her to play it several times until he had it memorized. Axton and Durden offered Presley one-third of the writing credit to sing the song, and in 1956 "Heartbreak Hotel" became his first single for RCA and his first number-one hit. "It's ironic," Goldman wrote, "that this now-legendary composition should have been offered to him by a couple of obscure writers who had never set foot inside the Brill Building." The song, however, caught on slowly. When Presley first performed what would become one of the most famous songs in rock history, an orchestra, complete with a trumpet solo, accompanied him. The studio version, however, quickly shot to number one. "Presley never recorded anything else remotely like it," wrote Michael Gray in the London Guardian. "Nothing so spooky, moody, jazz tinged or weird." The song was also one of the few Presley recorded at the time that had not been written by professionals.
While Durden continued to have a successful, if low-key, career, interviewers inevitably wanted to know about the role he had played in penning "Heartbreak Hotel." "He wrote more songs," noted Bruce Eder in All Music Guide, "but never anything ... as successful, but the one hit gave him a degree of financial security stretching out for more than 40 years, paying the rent a good deal of the time." Durden, however, had been surprised by the song's success, and later told the Chicago Sun-Times, "Evidently, it is a better song than I thought it was when I wrote it." When asked why he was never able to repeat the task of writing a number-one song, Durden was circumspect. "I have given it a lot of thought. I have come to the conclusion that the good Lord only allows one 'Heartbreak Hotel' to a customer."
The producer of “Heartbreak Hotel,” Buddy Killen tells another great story about the song, and about meeting a very nervous Elvis Presley backstage at the Grand Ole Opry.
Elvis sang the song on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey TV show, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Is it ever!
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