One Track Can Change A Life!

They say a song can change a life. In Mark Lewisohn's book, this is the track, recorded for RCA in Nashville in 1956, that blew minds and changed the trajectories of lives of a few teenagers, who later became pretty influential people in England. It's an atmospheric little song about a suicide, and hard-luck love.

It's hard to time-travel back and to hear this song with fresh ears.  We have heard so much r&r music over the years. We know so much about Elvis, and all that knowledge sort of clouds the crystalline simplicity and otherworldly spookiness of the track. It's like a voice of a ghost.  We hear the voice, and then flash on all the stages of Elvis' career, the terrible, cheesy movies, the Vegas schlock, the emergence of the clown-like specter of the Drug-Addled, Great White Whale Elvis. But the Elvis of this song, is not yet that Elvis.

It's impossible to experience this song, this Elvis for the first time. To hear it with ears that had never heard anything like it before. Hard to understand or convey what the impact must have been on those who heard it in 1956. But just listen to the track. Otherworldly echo & reverb. Essence of R&R. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison & Starkey all say this was the track that changed everything (Keith Richards too mentions this track as seismic and seminal in his book, "Life"). Lennon talks about how it was hair-raising, spine-tingling, (he experiences the song on a deep physical level), and it was just the pure sound of it that gave him a new mission and purpose in life. The song was a shared experience that connected and shaped these four teenagers before they even knew each other. And then, surprisingly, they found each other, and then well, they had a story to tell too.