(Credits: Far Out / Apple Corps LTD)
Sun 14 December 2025 12:44, UK
For George Harrison, his life changed forever once his eyes were opened to the power of rock ‘n’ roll.
The discovery proved to be a seismic event, which set the wheels in motion for The Fab Four to exist. It took hearing rock ‘n’ roll on the radio for Harrison to realise that he could follow this pursuit, and for him, the journey can be traced back to one particular song.
The track in question is the seminal ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, released by Elvis Presley in 1956. While ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ didn’t mark the invention of rock ‘n’ roll, it did bring it to the masses, ensuring that teenagers from Liverpool, like Harrison, were aware of its existence. It was no longer a niche musical interest that people had to consciously seek out, but part of the mainstream and impossible to avoid.
While Presley never made any public appearances in the UK, this only added to his mystique and made him feel like an alien that had been dropped down on Earth to give rock ‘n’ roll to the people. Similarly to Beatlesmania in the US years later, across Britain in the late ’50s, Elvis hysteria swept up the youth of the nation, and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was the initial catalyst for the craze.
Harrison wasn’t alone in being mesmerised by ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which also changed the lives of The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, and Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, who once stated, “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.”
For Harrison, his first exposure to Elvis was purely accidental and the case of being in the perfect place at the ideal time. Harrison, who called this moment his “epiphany”, once recalled, “When I was about 12 or 13 riding my bike and I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ coming out of somebody’s house.”
On another occasion, he said of the song: “It had an incredible impact on me just because I’d never heard anything like it. I mean, coming from Liverpool, we didn’t really hear the very early Sun Records. The first record I remember hearing was probably the big hit by the time it got across the Atlantic. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – ‘Heartburn Motel’ as Elvis called it.”
From that moment onwards, Harrison knew that he wanted to devote his life to the church of rock ‘n’ roll. Less than a decade later from hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, his band would deplace Presley at the top of the musical mountain, and the man who was once his hero was envious of his success.
With The Beatles, Harrison was fortunate enough to visit Presley’s house with the rest of his bandmates. While the encounter was initially awkward, once they broke the ice, the collective decided to have an impromptu jam, but unfortunately, Harrison’s later meetings with Elvis weren’t quite as pleasant.
“When I saw him, I was like a hippie, and I had denim on and all this long hair and stuff. It was in the early ’70s, and I went backstage to meet him, and there was, you know, one of those massive dressing rooms with miles of toilets and stuff,” Harrison recalled during a round table with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
The guitarist continued detailing the sobering incident, which showed Presley was human after all, adding: “He looked like Ringo: all of his beard was varnished [laughs], all of his hair was black, and he was tanned and stuff. And he seemed…I thought I was meeting Vishnu or Krishna or somebody, it was just like ‘Wow’.”
He also remembered meeting Presley shortly before his death at Madison Square Garden and admitted “it was a bit sad” because of the singer’s ailing health.
As much as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ lit up his life, the illusion of Elvis eventually shattered as Harrison spent time in his company. Nevertheless, he always maintained an unshakeable level of respect for Presley’s music, which played a vital role in his story.
Related Topics