The Beatles only ever met Elvis Presley once. He was their hero, their shining standard – and, indeed, John Lennon famously claimed that “Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles” – but that still didn’t stop the interaction from largely falling flat on its face.
Yet even through the tense energy that coursed the walls of Graceland on August 27th, 1965, when the Fab Four came to visit, the inimitable power of being in the King’s orbit was something that evidently stayed with them forever, lacing its way into one of their later most prolific songs.
Two years after their evening in Presley’s presence, the sheer intensity of the rock star’s sonic calibre had clearly never waned far from The Beatles’ minds, and especially that of Paul McCartney’s. Of course, as much as the two were mostly seen as the musical heavyweights of the business, it’s fair to say that the eventual results of their respective outputs yielded very different results. You could never quite imagine Presley singing about strawberry fields or marmalade skies, after all.
But nevertheless, there was one specific unsuspecting song that McCartney liked to think captured the musical persona of the Graceland god, even if not in the most obvious of ways. That was ‘A Day in the Life’, taken from 1967’s seminal Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that, despite lyrically charting the most mundane events of the everyday, captured a sonic imagination fit for the King himself.
Complete with what McCartney branded as the perfect “Elvis echo”, the mystique and surrealism of ‘A Day in the Life’ was extremely reminiscent of Presley’s unmistakable booming sound, luring the listener in, almost as if they became bewitched under its enthralling spell. It goes without saying, however, that The Beatles’ eventual efforts were not just simply a carbon copy of their heroes – McCartney reached for musical inspirations near and far, but there was always one special Presley muse that kept reeling him back in.
The eight-bar blues beats of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, released in 1956 as one of Presley’s most enduring musical legacies, had a profound effect on the then-young McCartney, who remembered hearing it for the first time throughout the rest of his life. Confirming this, he told Guitar World in 2005: “Elvis is a truly great vocalist, and you can hear why on ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. It’s a perfect example of a singer being in command of the song. Musically, it’s perfect, too. The double bass and the walk-in piano create this incredibly haunting atmosphere.”
He added: “It’s so full of mystery, and it’s never lost that for me. The echo is just stunning. When The Beatles were recording, we’d often ask George Martin for ‘the Elvis echo.’ I think we got it down perfectly on ‘A Day in the Life.’” As such, as those spectral reverberations bounce down the generations of rock music, so too did they create their own golden nugget of history, connecting two of the genre’s most defining hits through one echoing emblem.
It’s difficult to ascertain what Presley truly made of the Fab Four when they stood in his presence for one night only in 1965. He would have no doubt recognised the godly worship status he held over them, but could his mind stretch so far as to envisage his impact making waves in absurdist psychedelia years down the line? Perhaps not – but then again, no one knew what had hit them the first time he hit the stage performing this thing called rock and roll.
