The artist who made Paul McCartney love rock and roll: “He made me take an interest”
Rock and roll was never supposed to be music for the masses until The Beatles came along. This was the kind of underground music that felt like the death of proper technique to some snobs, but it was impossible to resist once people saw those lovable moptops shaking their heads on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. Paul McCartney may have been chasing after the same celebrity that most movie stars had, but he didn’t really love rock and roll until Elvis Presley came along.
Then again, anyone in the 1950s who owned a radio or a halfway decent television most likely knew Presley and all the controversy he was causing. Outside of the sharp divide between people of colour making music that parents didn’t approve of, it suddenly seemed okay when Presley came along, making his own take on rockabilly and blues the first time he sang songs like ‘That’s All Right Mama’ and ‘All Shook Up’.
For parents, though, the true crime that he committed was daring to actually dance fairly well. Since most high school dances were considered risque if someone engaged in anything more than a waltz, seeing Presley shaking his ass seemed to activate something in the teenage mindset, shaking his hips in a style that may as well have looked like the devil incarnate for many higher-ups.
While everyone was looking at the spectacle of Presley, McCartney was there for the music. Fitting somewhere between rock, country, blues, and pure attitude, half of Presley’s songs were saying everything that most teenagers wanted to hear, either the traditional breakup song or looking to make as raucous a noise as possible.
When singling out Presley’s best material, McCartney remembered the first time he heard the song ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, saying, “To me, that takes me back to when I was first buying records. Up until that point, it had all been sort of [like] Billy Cobham and swing and all that, but suddenly rock and roll sort of burst on the scene, and Elvis was one of the first people that really made me take an interest”.
As McCartney was getting transfixed by the music, John Lennon was on the other side of Liverpool, also getting shaken up by what Presley did. He may have had to get by calling it blues in social circles, but Lennon figured a job where all you did was play music, and people would scream when they saw you had to be pretty good.
Then again, The Beatles may have been the one band strong enough to dethrone the ‘King of Rock and Roll’. Even though Presley was known to give his all at every show, you were never going to remember who the bass player was once he started gyrating his hips and singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’.
Whereas with The Beatles, it was easy to know every single one of them, all having distinct personalities and being able to squeak by on their lovable charm. The public may have just seen four versions of Presley when the band came to America, but this was something different. There had been rock and roll singers before, but The Beatles practically invented the idea of the rock and roll band.
