Rock & Roll Archives - chimesfreedom

In the pre-Internet days of the 1980s, when people used cassette recorders for music, I would often record songs off the radio. There was a talent to doing it. Often, songs started without any introduction, so you had to be ready with a cassette in your stereo and hit the record button as soon as you heard the first notes of the song you wanted.

In 1982, a radio station was playing a series about the history of rock and roll, and I recorded part of it on a cassette tape. At the end of the series, they played a mix that featured every number one pop song since the start of the rock and roll era. After I recorded the mix, I listened to the tape a number of times, like the track was a song by itself. The mix was fun, and it seemed to incorporate a large piece of the history of popular music.

Up through this week, I had not heard that clip for close to thirty years, but through the miracle of the Internet, I heard it again recently when Salon featured the same mix of every number one song through 1982, along with a second mix of number one songs since then, apparently through 1993. Although I had not heard the pre-1982 mix for decades, the sequence of the clips is still familiar to me. The mix is a great overview of popular music, and the sounds weave together so the segment sounds like a symphony of music history.

Salon did not explain who put these clips together, and I still do no know. But hit the play button and listen while you do some work or surf the Internet. You recognize these songs and you love them. You know you do. And how perfect is it that this collection, which will bring back so many memories for you, begins with a song called “Memories are Made of This,” the first number one song of 1956? If you wish to follow along with the song names and artists, you may start with Wikipedia’s list of Best Sellers in Stores from 1956 and then follow through subsequent years. [2024 Update: Unfortunately, the audio is no longer available for putting in this article.]

Whoever put these together did a great job. The clips weave together better than when I used my old cassette tape recorder to record complete songs off of the radio.

What do you think? Do the clips reveal something great about popular music or do they represent the decline of Western Civilization? Leave a comment.

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Lonely Street: The Sad Story Behind “Heartbreak Hotel”

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On December 9, 1955, Elvis Presley performed “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time, although he would not record the song until a month later in January 1956. The song would eventually become a hit, but many listeners did not know that the song came from a tragic story.

“It’s gonna be my first hit.”

According to Ernst Jorgensen’s Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, the performance on Dec. 9 was at a club near Swifton, Arkansas before a full house of 250 people. The 20-year-old Elvis was already a regional star but he had yet to appear on national television. Having just moved from Sun Records to RCA, he sensed he was on the brink of something big.

That night in the Arkansas club, he played the songs he’d recorded for Sun and a few covers. Then, he introduced the new song, “I”ve got this brand new song and it’s gonna be my first hit.”

He was right. “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley’s first Gold Record, selling more than a million copies. Rolling Stone Magazine has it listed as one of the greatest fifty songs of all-time. And when then presidential candidate Bill Clinton made his famous appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, he chose “Heartbreak Hotel” to play on his sax.

There’s something joyous about the way the song sounds, despite its sad lyrics. But there’s an even darker story underneath the inspiration for the song.

The Suicide That Inspired “Heartbreak Hotel”

Mae Boren Axton wrote the lyrics for “Heartbreak Hotel.” At the time, she was a schoolteacher and songwriter who would later be the mother of country singer and actor Hoyt Axton. The son would grow up to star in Gremlins and write “Joy the the World” (“Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) as well as another song that Elvis would later sing, “Never Been to Spain.”

One day in 1955, Mae Axton and her friend Tommy Durden read a story in the Miami Herald about a man who had committed suicide. The man had no identification, and he only left a note with a few words on it: “I walk a lonely street.”

Axton, inspired by the note, sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” locating the hotel of heartbreak on the street where the man walked. Tommy Durden wrote the music, and the song was complete in only one hour.

Nobody remembers the name or the life of the unfortunate man who wrote the suicide note. And of course, he never got to see that his final act of great agony led to poetry — and to millions of people screaming joyously and dancing to his final words of despair.

I bet he would have liked to have seen it.