“And although it’s always crowded / You still can find some
room / For broken-hearted lovers / To cry there in the gloom.” Very appropriate, for today began very gloomy, gray and dull, then snow.
Really. Maybe two inches or more before it ended.
Today’s song is the best Elvis Presley song. There was worry
that the song was too “morbid” for a Top 40 hit, but a hit it was, in 1956. It
left its mark on many who heard it then, people like Keith Richards and John
Lennon, who would be major influences on their own generation. The song is
stark and lean, sung with an amazing bravado that leaps out of the speakers and
grabs you by whatever is grabbable: “Well, since my baby left me / I’ve found a
new place to dwell.” We’re all ready to go along with him, to take a walk down lonely street.
The way Elvis slurs over the chorus “You make me so lonely,
baby / Well, I’m so lonely / I’ll be so lonely I could die” is definitive. The
cool mumble gets established right then, the elision of diction for the sake of
effect. And I’ve always loved “The bellhop’s tears keep flowing / The desk
clerk’s dressed in black”—it’s easy to imagine Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff,
maybe Peter Lorre, signing up for those roles. It’s not a funereal song but it
definitely rocks with an eye on the end, we might say.
The song was memorably covered by John Cale on Slow Dazzle in 1975, with a vocal that
reminds me of Karloff, and when Cale sings “we could die” he screams it as if
he’s actually ready to. Elvis doesn’t go for such histrionics; he just rides
that superb strum and lets the reverb do a lot of the work for him. The notion
of a “heartbreak hotel” is quite an inspiration. There should be a place you
can check into to wallow in your misery—“if your baby leaves you / And you need a new place to dwell.” And
it’s like that, isn’t it? You check in and stay as long as you need to. Kind of
like a soul asylum.
Today’s song is in honor of an “Elvis man” who departed this
world way too soon—my brother-in-law, Leoance Simpson, who turned 8 the year
this song came out, and died this month at age 65. He is deeply mourned and
greatly missed.
So long, Leoance, it was good knowing you. Thanks for everything.
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