Saturday 30 May 2020

PAUL MCCARTNEY: “IT WAS SO FANTASTIC ("Heartbreak Hotel") WE PLAYED IT ENDLESSLY AND TRIED TO LEARN IT ALL"

Elvis Presley and The Beatles are the most successful music acts of all time. And while the Fab Four sold more records that Presley, they’ve admitted over the years how much they were influenced by Elvis growing up as kids in the fifties.
Graceland’s official Instagram account have reposted Paul’s picture from his visit.

Captioned “Paying Respects #OutThere at #Graceland”, the photo sees Paul leaning over Elvis’ grave in the Meditation Garden.

Graceland wrote of the event: “May 26, 2013: Sir Paul McCartney made his first visit to #Graceland during the Memphis stop of his Out There tour.

“The #Beatles legend placed a personal guitar pick on Elvis' grave and said it was ‘so Elvis can play in heaven.’”
They added: “He also briefly played Elvis' 1956 Gibson J200 guitar.”

The Beatles and Elvis had one meeting in 1965, when The King invited the Fab Four to his Bel Air home in Los Angeles.However, the band were so in awe of their idol that they were totally speechless.In the end, Elvis had to break the ice by saying he’d have to go to bed unless conversation broke out, much to everyone’s amusement.

Of course, Elvis would go on to regularly cover The Beatles during his Las Vegas years.However, when The King visited President Richard Nixon in the White House’s Oval Office in December 1970, the singer called The Beatles anti-American.The comment was in the context of Elvis wanting to reach out to hippies and help fight drug culture.
According to The Beatles Anthology, Paul felt betrayed by Elvis in this instance. Speaking some time after Presley’s death in 1977, Paul said: “[I] felt a bit betrayed.The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him.” Paul was referring to Elvis’ overuse of prescription drugs in the lead up to his tragic heart attack at the age of just 42. Yet despite this, McCartney appears to clearly have forgiven The King, as he paid tribute at Elvis’ grave back in 2013.

On The King’s influence on him, Paul once said of his teenage years: “There was an advert for Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis looked so great: 'That's him, that's him - the Messiah has arrived!' “Then when we heard the song, there was the proof. That was followed by his first album, which I still love the best of all his records. “It was so fantastic we played it endlessly and tried to learn it all. Everything we did was based on that album.”

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