CHECKING IN AT HEARTBREAK HOTEL
How Heartbreak Hotel transformed popular music
by Spencer Leigh

This is an expanded version of a 50th anniversary tribute to Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, which appeared in the Independent on 14 March 2006.

Fifty years ago, on 12 May 1956, Elvis Presley made his debut on the UK chart with “Heartbreak Hotel”. Up until that point, the rock’n’roll records in the so-called ‘hit parade’ had been good-time novelties such as “Rock Around The Clock” and “See You Later Alligator”, but “Heartbreak Hotel”, entering at Number 15, was the real thing. The top three records featured a Yorkshire balladeer, a sprightly pianist and a close harmony group, and the combination of Elvis Presley’s brooding presence with a menacing arrangement was as improbable as a visit from an extraterrestrial. Popular music would never be the same again, but how did Elvis Presley come to make such a groundbreaking record?

Elvis Presley started recording for Sam Phillips’ Sun label in Memphis in July 1954. Working with two country musicians, Scotty Moore on lead guitar and Bill Black on stand-up bass, he recorded “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” and, over the next year, Sun released five singles. Johnny Bernero played drums on “Mystery Train” and Jimmie Lott on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”, but mostly it was just Elvis, Scotty and Bill. Occasionally, Elvis worked live with D.J.Fontana, who played drums in the studio band for the radio show, Louisiana Hayride.

Presley had been too outlandish for the Grand Ole Opry, but he found a regular home at the Hayride. Fontana recalls, ““When Elvis came on the Louisiana Hayride, he looked stranger than most with his purple shirt and sideburns, ducktail and that greasy stuff. He was a good-looking kid and he had a charisma about him, but he didn’t do well the first time because it was a country-orientated, older crowd. They saw him running across the stage and decided he was a nut, but after a couple of weeks, they were telling their kids, ‘You gotta see this boy’. The crowd changed completely - we got the young kids coming in and that helped him a lot.”

With his idiosyncratic name, Elvis Presley was in a world of Hanks, recording for the country market and playing on country shows. Another performer, Mitchell Torok, remembers: “Elvis had such appeal and such charisma. His hair was falling over his face and he wore pink shirts with black ties, and black and white shoes. The country guys were wearing string ties, rhinestones and cowboy boots. You put a picture of Ray Price next to Elvis Presley and you’ll see the difference. Elvis was closing the first half on a lot of the touring shows, but the fans would still be screaming for him when the main act came out.”

This was the first time that there had been young audiences at country shows. Tom Paxton puts it succinctly: “Elvis was so new that the promoters didn’t know what he was and so the entire supporting bill was of country and western acts, and I mean hard-core country and western. Well, nobody suffered the fate that these poor people suffered. They were playing to kids who wanted Elvis and nothing but Elvis, and it was simply awful for them.”

In a way, it was awful for Elvis too. “The hard part for Elvis was that he was a fan of all these guys,” says Scotty Moore, “He loved country music and he had a respect for his elders. He didn’t like them having a bad time because of him.”

Despite regional success, Sam Phillips lacked the financial support (and possibly the nerve) to give his singles national distribution. Selling heavily in the South, Elvis Presley made the US country Top 10 with the hiccuping “Baby Let’s Play House” and followed it with an echo-drenched ballad, “I Forgot To Remember To Forget”, one of only two original songs that he recorded for Sun.

Encouraged by his partner, Colonel Tom Parker, the country star Hank Snow had taken Presley under his tutelage in Hank Snow Jamboree Attractions. He performed on Snow’s stage shows and he impressed a 40-year-old schoolteacher and publicist, Mae Boren Axton, when the show came to Florida in May 1955. She discussed him with a local musican, Tommy Durden, and suggested that they should write songs for him.

Durden showed her a story from the Miami Herald about a hotel guest who committed suicide and left the note, “I walk a lonely street.” The newspaper wondered if anyone recognised him. He told Axton that it could make a good blues song: a lonely man, a lonely street and a man’s life is over. She added that it must be a “heartbreak hotel” and continuing the imagery with crying bellhops and desk clerk in funeral attire, they completed the song within an hour. Axton asked Glen Reeves to cut a demonstration record for Elvis. In return, she offered him a songwriting credit, but he did it for free. Because they happened to be around, Axton offered the song to the more conventional duo, the Wilburn Brothers. They turned it down, which stiffened her resolve that the song was right for Presley.

In November 1955, Axton attended a radio convention at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville for disc-jockeys. She played the demo for Elvis Presley and he reacted instantly: “Hot dog, Mrs. Axton, play that again!” He heard the demo a dozen times, by which time he had memorised the song.

The major labels were keen to poach Presley from Sam Phillips, and no one was keener than Steve Sholes, the A&R manager at RCA. 45-year-old Sholes had worked his way up the company, producing both Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton and his bulk testifying to years of good living. Phillips had five years to run on Presley’s contract and Sholes offered him $35,000 with an additional $5,000 for Elvis himself. The price included RCA’s rights to the Sun masters. It appears ridiculously low, but the deal was unprecedented. Phillips leapt at it because he had cash flow problems and besides, he had faith in his new signings – Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.

The press photographs from the deal with RCA on 22 November 1955 are all smiles. Presley is giving his sensual, trademark smirk: Phillips and Sholes are blissfully happy: Presley’s parents are happy but bemused, and, most of all, Presley’s new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, is the cat with the cream. Hank Snow thought he was getting a slice of the action but Parker had skilfully ensured that he saw none of it. Snow, an immensely proud man, never spoke of the deception because he did not like to admit that he had been duped.

Charlie Louvin of the Louvin Brothers knew Parker well: “If you put a great performer with an extremely smart manager, you’ve got a winning combination. Parker would sell his mother if it would advance his artist: there was nothing he wouldn’t do. If you didn’t have the potential to make big bucks, then he didn’t want to mess with you.”

Although not revealed at the time, RCA only came up with $20,000. The rest came from the music publishers, Hill and Range, who set up a music publishing company for Presley and obtained an agreement that at least one side of every Presley single would be a Hill and Range song. Nice work if you can get it.

Like Parker, Sholes had realised that Elvis Presley was much more than a country act and had mass appeal. He could spearhead the new rock’n’roll music, offering an alternative to the square dance calling of Bill Haley and his Comets. The RCA executives were unsure: Sholes’s job was on the line if their investment was not recouped within a year. It’s surprising that Sholes was worried about this. Even if Presley did not have crossover appeal, he would still sell to the country market. Sholes’ first move was to reissue his Sun singles on RCA including “I Forgot To Remember To Forget”. RCA took out a full page in the trade paper, Billboard, calling him, “The most talked-about new personality in the last 10 years of recorded music.”

Whilst retaining the feel of the Sun records, Sholes wanted a fuller sound. RCA’s Nashville studio was run by the distinguished country music guitarist, Chet Atkins, and he asked Atkins to arrange the musicians for Presley’s first session in Nashville in January 1956. “Steve Sholes conducted the buyout from Sun, and he was very smart as he bought all the masters, “said Atkins, “He called me after he had got the contract and said that he was going to record Elvis and he wanted me to get a band together, which I did. We kept Scotty and Bill, as they gave him his sound, and we added Floyd Cramer, D. J. Fontana and myself, along with a vocal group.”

Ah, the vocal group. Elvis Presley was keen to supplement the sparse sound that he had on Sun and he wanted to use the vocal group, the Jordanaires. Atkins demurred: RCA had signed the white gospel quartet, the Speer Family, and Atkins preferred to use them. Not all of them wanted to sing on secular records, and so Atkins had the makeshift trio of Gordon Stoker from the Jordanaires with the brothers, Brock and Ben Speer. Gordon Stoker recalls, “I knew Brock and Ben and liked them, but I said to Chet, ‘Brock is a bass, Ben is a lead and I’m a first tenor, so who’s gonna sing baritone?’ Chet said ‘Don’t worry it won’t make any difference.’”

On January 6 Elvis Presley played in the gymnasium of Randolph High School in Mississippi: it marked the last time he would play in a small town setting. He turned 21 on January 8, but try as I may, I can’t find any record of Elvis celebrating his birthday. Maybe he was too psyched up to celebrate.

RCA had one of the most successful country labels and its Nashville studio was in constant use. In 1955 they had taken a lease on a second studio, a decommissioned church at 1525 McGavock Street, which was still owned by the Methodists. Atkins felt that this would be a safer bet than the main studio for recreating the echo, and hence the excitement, on the Sun recordings. The Sun artist, Charlie Feathers, saw how it enhanced his own recordings: “Knowing how to use and record that slapback is an important part of it. You had dead mikes when Bing Crosby used to sing and everything was smooth and level. You have much more of an edge with a slapback.”

Phillips had used two tape recorders with a delay mechanism but Atkins with his engineer, Bob Ferris were moving into Heath Robinson territory. Scotty Moore: “The studio had a real long, big, huge hallway right down the front of the building with a tile floor and some glass. They had this great big speaker at one end and a microphone at the other and a sign up telling people to be quiet when they came through the door.” The Coca-Cola dispenser was off limits as the rattle could ruin a take.

Presley was heading for the top of the country charts with “I Forgot To Remember To Forget” and everyone should have been full of confidence. It wasn’t so: nearly everybody was paranoid or apprehensive. Sholes knew that some executives were out to get him. Sun Records had just released Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” and Sholes wondered if he had bought the right act. Chet Atkins wasn’t sure whether he could replicate and improve on the Sun sound.

Elvis, Scotty and Bill were cutting a record outside of Memphis and Sun Studios for the first time: Moore learnt to play by copying Atkins’ style and didn’t relish playing in front of him. When he asked Atkins for guidance, Atkins said, “I’m just playing rhythm. You go on doing what you been doing”. D.J.Fontana felt adrift, knowing he was playing in a city of drummers. If he wasn’t up to scratch, Atkins only had to whistle for a replacement. Cramer, who had come from the Louisiana Hayride and knew Presley slightly, had settled in Nashville with his young wife and was wondering if he had made the right move. Only Bill Black seemed confident, chewing gum and cracking jokes.

Scotty Moore remembers, “It was a larger studio than Sun’s and more regimented - they called everything by a tape number and we weren’t used to that at all. We would sit around at Sun, eat hamburgers and then somebody would say, ‘Let’s try something.’ Sam used tape echo to make it sound like there was more of us than there was. He also kept Elvis’s voice close to the music, treating it like another instrument, and the vocal on country and pop records was normally far out in front. Elvis liked it Sam’s way: he kept saying, ‘Don’t make me too loud, keep me back.’”

RCA was so unsure of the session that no photographer had been invited. We know that Presley was wearing pink trousers with a blue stripe, and he was deferential, addressing authority figures as “Mister” or “Sir”. He had confidence in his vocal ability but he has uncertain about his guitarplaying, especially in front of Chet Atkins. Here was someone who had played with Hank Williams.

The first song was Ray Charles’ rhythm and blues hit, “I Got A Woman” It was a shrewd, easy choice as Presley had been doing it in performance and had devised a slow and bluesy ending. It was sung infectiously but Presley was moving around so the levels on his voice varied, especially when he dropped to his knees. Sholes said, “Hold it son, you’re gonna have to stand still while you sing.” Presley retaliated with “I’m sorry, Mr. Sholes, I don’t feel right standing still.” Ferris added two microphones so Presley could move. After eight takes, they had the master. Even Cool Hand Atkins was impressed. He called his wife and told her to come down, “You’ll never see anything like this again. It is just so damn exciting.”

Another problem was Elvis’s guitar. He was playing his new Martin D-28 percussively, and it was bleeding into his vocal microphone. Atkins gave him a felt pick which had a much softer sound.

“Heartbreak Hotel” started with Elvis, accompanied by a walking bass from Bill Black, going “Waalll, since ma baby left me”, which was reminiscent of Willie Dixon’s work with Muddy Waters. Scotty Moore played some assertive chords and Cramer’s piano was pattering like rain. Elvis breaks down at the end of each verse, effectively method acting like his hero James Dean. The song was nailed on Take Seven, but sadly, most of the original tapes were wiped so we haven’t a definitive record as to how “Heartbreak Hotel” came into being. The influence of Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” is self-evident and indeed, the song could be regarded as a parody of “Cry”.

Donald Clark, Frank Sinatra’s biographer, has called “Heartbreak Hotel” as “a disgraceful recording for 1956. It sounds like it was made underwater in a breadbox.” On the other hand, Paul McCartney has called it “perfect”: “It’s as if he is singing from the depths of hell. His phrasing, use of echo, it’s all so beautiful.”

Presley’s dirt-seeking biographer, Albert Goldman, told me: “‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which is an extravagant and highly exaggerated account of the blues, was more a psychodrama than a musical performance. As such, however, it was an extraordinary novelty and it moved rock music into another imaginative space. Had Elvis been able to continue in that genre, he could have been counted as one of the great creative forces of rock’n’roll, rather than just its master image.”

The final song was “Money Honey”, a cover of a rhythm and blues hit by the Drifters. It is a humorous, hard luck story, and Presley carries it well, helped by Cramer’s hammering notes. After three hours, they had three recordings and broke up, contentedly, for the day. Stoker and the Speers had been paid for doing nothing, but they came into their own the next day.

The agenda for the following day was two new emotional ballads, “I’m Counting On You” and “I Was The One”. Cramer added some distinctive variations on “I’m Counting On You” (at 17 takes, the most troublesome song) and there is a big sound on the throbbing “I Was The One” (nailed in seven) with Presley going into falsetto. Again there are parallels with Johnnie Ray, and Presley was so pleased with “I Was The One” that he preferred it to “Heartbreak Hotel”. Presley left Memphis for a week’s touring with Hank Snow: it would be the last time that he would support anyone and the last time he would work with Snow.

Sholes took the five songs to New York – two R&B covers, two ballads and a weird original – and played them for his bosses. They did not care for them and suggested that he should repeat the sessions. He convinced them into releasing a single of “Heartbreak Hotel”, and if it did not sell, then he would push the more regular “I Was The One”, the Hill and Range song on the B-side. Colonel Parker had agreed with Axton that Presley would appear as a writer on “Heartbreak Hotel”, which gave him and Parker a third share of the writing credit.

The single was released in the States on 27 January 1956, and Sam Phillips was unimpressed, calling it “a morbid mess”. One Sun artist, Charlie Feathers, still dismissed the record 30 years later: “The Elvis that I knew died in ’55. RCA didn’t know how to record Elvis. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ sounds bad when compared to anything he did at Sun. You listen to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ next to ‘Mystery Train’, oh lordy, no.”

In April 1956 “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley's first American chart-topper, and made both the country and the normally black R&B charts. The single was released in the UK to poor reviews. The New Musical Express said, “If you appreciate good singing, I don’t suppose you’ll manage to hear this disc all through.” The Daily Mirror wrote a piece about the Elvis phenomenon and then, in May, Elvis Presley made the UK chart and the single climbed to Number 2.

Soon, “Heartbreak Hotel” had been satirised by Stan Freberg, his version including the credit, “Echo by Mammoth Cave”, but Tommy Steele now thinks that the original has comic qualities: “The excess use of echo on ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ gives you an idea of how primitive the music was then. We had to rely on atmosphere and this is a typical example. Some engineer decided to give it quality and atmosphere with this new-fangled thing called echo. It sounds very amusing now.”

In January 2006, a fiftieth anniversary reissue of “Heartbreak Hotel” topped the US singles chart. The anniversary was marred by the demolition of the Nashville studio to make a parking lot, but its reverberations will last as long as there is music. Carl Perkins once commented, “People ask me from time to time, ‘Carl, when is this Elvis thing going to die?’, and I say, ‘Why do you think it ever will? It will not.’ Elvis gave the world what it needed at the time, he was handsome, swift-moving, and he wasn’t vulgar on stage. You look back at him now and it is all motion and art. He was releasing that feeling right down through his body. He moved his legs like nobody ever did - he didn’t realise exactly what he was doing and he couldn’t help doing it. Moving is part of the music and if you don’t move, something is wrong.”

The New York songwriter, Paul Evans, who was to write for Elvis, nurses fond memories of “Heartbreak Hotel”: “I used to listen to the older singers like Perry Como, Doris Day and Nat ‘King’ Cole with my family, but once I had discovered Elvis Presley, I was banished to the basement with my own radio. I can still hear my father shouting, ‘Turn that damn radio down’. This was the first music to belong to just one generation. Rock’n’roll was a parting of the ways and a weapon in our hands. My generation celebrated our music and nobody else’s.”

When I met the maverick record producer Kim Fowley for Goldmine 618 (April 2, 2004), I thought that one of his passing remarks about meeting John Lennon at the Toronto Rock’n’Roll Festival in 1969 was highly significant. Fowley told me, “I asked John Lennon what his secret was. He said, ‘The Beatles were based on one idea - to improve our record collection. We would take our favourite records and then we would make better versions of them. We stopped being a group when we stopped trying to improve on the records that we liked.’” That quote did not appear in the feature because I was writing about Fowley himself and also because it merited further investigation. It appeared to me that John Lennon had made an insightful, very revealing comment about his songwriting.

Around the same time as my interview, a 2CD set, John Lennon’s Jukebox was scheduled for release with an edition of the TV arts programme, The South Bank Show, devoted to it. The portable jukebox weighed 10 pounds and was apparently used on tour by Lennon around 1965. My immediate reaction was to call Tony Barrow, the Beatles’ press officer, and ask him if he was the muggins who carried it around. “I don’t remember it at all,” he said, “so I certainly didn’t transport it. Surely he had some singles in his bag and a record player in his hotel rooms. It doesn’t really make sense.” Making sense or not, there is a list of contents in John Lennon’s handwriting on the jukebox and they throw some light on his tastes: vintage rock’n’roll, soul music and early folk-rock.

Here are some Beatle songs that were directly influenced by earlier records.

When the Beatles were in Hamburg in 1961, John and George Harrison wrote an instrumental, “Cry For A Shadow”, and as the title implies, it was a homage to the Shadows – or was it? See if you can get your hands on John Barry Seven’s 1958 single, “Rodeo” and speed it up.

It was start as you mean to go on. Paul McCartney based “Like Dreamers Do” on one of his stage favourites, “Besame Mucho”.

The genesis of the Beatles’ first Parlophone single, “Love Me Do”, was probably the melody for the verses of “Don’t Be Cruel”, and the arrangement followed the voice and harmonica combination of Bruce Channel’s 1962 hit, “Hey! Baby”.

Lennon and McCartney constantly used Chuck Berry’s rhythms – Lennon’s “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” and McCartney’s “Get Back” being good examples. Lennon went a little too far with “Come Together’ and had to settle with Chuck Berry’s publisher. In July 1990, when asked about the bass line in “I Saw Her Standing There” by Guitar Player magazine, McCartney said, “I’m not going to tell you I wrote the bloody thing when Chuck Berry’s bass player did.” Lennon and McCartney’s candour in making such remarks is very refreshing.

Did the Beatles’ transform Elvis Presley’s “Oh yeah yeah” in “All Shook Up” into the “yeah yeah yeah” of “She Loves You”? Even if that wasn’t the inspiration, the high-pitched scream, the “whooo”, is lifted from the Isley Brothers’ version of “Shout” and “Twist And Shout”.

The intro of “I Feel Fine” is a dead ringer for Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step”, which in turn owed something to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Bobby Parker says that he is flattered that the Beatles knew his record, but “some residuals would be nice”.

When McCartney was struggling to complete “Michelle”, Lennon suggested that they borrowed “I love you, I love you, I love you” from Nina Simone’s “I Put A Spell On You”.

In “Run For Your Life”, John Lennon sneers, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.” It’s a direct steal from Elvis Presley’s ‘Baby Let’s Play House”. Possibly Lennon thought that it was an old blues lyric and anybody could use it.

In addition to lifting snatches of lyrics or melodies for their own recordings, the Beatles paid tribute to their favourite genres and artists:

The initial version of “Please Please Me”, although it no longer exists, was a Roy Orbison-styled ballad. When I was with the Apple recording artist Jackie Lomax a few months ago, he played me ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ on his guitar: “Now,” he said, “I’m going to rearrange the notes a little differently and what do we have?” The answer was “Day Tripper”.

McCartney loved Little Richard and “I’m Down” is any Little Richard record with a Liverpool spin. Maybe the form had become a cliché but he had added some surprises to the style when he recorded “Helter Skelter”. On September 18, 1968, the Beatles took a break from a recording session at Abbey Road to watch a TV screening of The Girl Can’t Help It at Paul’s house. They returned for the frenzied “Birthday”, clearly inspired by Little Richard, the musical star of that film.

Another rock’n’roll pianist, Fats Domino, was the inspiration for “Lady Madonna” which was tempered with jazzman Humphrey Lyttelton’s 1956 hit, “Bad Penny Blues”. The mouth music in the middle of that record was because McCartney remembered a Liverpool band, the Fourmost, who did the same thing. When Domino recorded his own version of “Lady Madonna”, he didn’t have to change a thing as the melody was spot-on even if the words were psychedelic.

John showed his love of Del Shannon with “I’ll Get You”, the song containing shades of both “Hey Little Girl” and “Runaway” as well as the Kingston Trio’s “All My Sorrows”. The similar feeling in their songs was noticed by Shannon himself who covered “From Me To You” for the American market and became the first person to place a Lennon-McCartney composition on the US charts.

The Beatles often performed Tamla-Motown songs and although it didn’t happen, you could imagine the Marvelettes’ following “Please Mr. Postman’ with “There’s A Place”. Lennon loved Smokey Robinson’s ballad, “You Really Got A Hold On Me”, and as a result, “This Boy” sounds like pure Smokey.

In early interviews, Lennon and McCartney hoped that they would end up as a songwriting team like Gerry Goffin and Carole King. The love of the New York girl groups, which they wrote for, is evident in “All I’ve Got To Do”, which sounds like a Shirelles’ single. George Harrison’s fondness for the Chiffons was deeply embedded in his mind and he was successfully sued for plagiarism after basing “My Sweet Lord’ on “He’s So Fine”.

The echo-drenched “Oh! Darling” recalls the doo-wop era and it’s intriguing that it follows Frank Zappa’s tribute LP, “Cruising With Ruben And The Jets”. At a guess, McCartney heard Zappa’s record and then wrote his own doo-wop song. His song provided the inspiration for 10cc’s “Donna”. When Paul McCartney was writing with Eric Stewart, he told him, “I’ll be claiming royalties if you’re not careful.”

When McCartney wrote “Yesterday” he was sure he had heard the tune elsewhere and copied it subconsciously. Could it be that he had heard Nat “King” Cole’s “Answer Me” which has a similar mood and lyrics? Did “She was mine yesterday, In my sorrow I turn away” become “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”? And if you speed up “Til There Was You”, don’t you arrive at “Little Child”? Maybe that’s why they sound so good next to each other on With The Beatles.

There are examples of the Beatles aping their contemporaries. With its melody, lyric and very title, “Dear Prudence” sound likes one of Donovan’s songs. I suspect that George Harrison owned the Byrds’ first album, Mr. Tambourine Man, as “Bells Of Rhymney” was surely the inspiration for “If I Needed Someone”. The start of “Something” – “Something in the way she moves” – may sound like James Taylor because it is. The American singer-songwriter had been signed to Apple but he didn’t expect the title line of his song to be used twice.

John Lennon copied Bob Dylan’s headgear and also what was inside it as both “I’m A Loser” and “I Should Have Known Better” reveal Dylan’s influence. John Lennon was flattered when Dylan took the melody for “Norwegian Wood’ for his own “Fourth Time Around”: the Beatles had never done anything so blatant, but they could scarcely object.

When Albert Goldman was researching his biography of John Lennon, he was keen to know what hymns he heard in church. This was not used in his text, but possibly he was thinking that hymns, with their preponderance for minor keys, found their way into Lennon and McCartney’s subconscious and hence, into their songs. When McCartney first offered “Let It Be” to Aretha Franklin, she turned it down. I’ve always thought that this was because she had been recording fairly straightforward lyrics and “Let It Be” with references to Mother Mary might be seen as strange. However, it could be that the song owes more to English church music than American spirituals and so Aretha didn’t see in the light that McCartney expected.

In their own way, the Beatles could be the Rutles, able to parody a leading act with wit and accuracy. “Back In The USSR” is a joke at the expense of the Beach Boys, although the lyrical idea comes from Chuck Berry’s “Back In The USA”. And John Lennon told Kim Fowley, “We liked Canned Heat but we thought they were humorless, so we wrote ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ which was our message to Canned Heat to put more humour in their music.”

Do all these examples detract from the Beatles’ legacy? No – quite the reverse, they strengthen it. Nobody works in a vacuum and every songwriter is influenced by what he hears. Between them the Beatles knew numerous genres and this is what separates them from the pack. Their very knowledge increased their own potential. They were so gifted both musically and lyrically and this was the springboard for their genius.

The Beatles even borrowed from themselves as several songs are inter-related. Compare “When I see you every day I say, mmm, hello little girl” with “In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs”.

It is also very significant that so many great names were at their most creative at the same time. It is hard to believe but the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson were inspiring and provoking each other. That clash of the Titans is not around today and it hasn’t occurred since the Sixties. That decade ended with the breakup of the Beatles, Bob Dylan going country and Burt Bacharach heading into a lost horizon while Brian Wilson was already there. John Lennon’s Jukebox shows exactly where he was at in 1965 and, 40 years on, I can’t see anyone make much sense of Noel Gallagher’s iPod.

The Beatle books invariably blame wives and girlfriends for the break-up, but that’s not the main reason. Lennon and McCartney were no longer listening to other records for inspiration and determined to be one step better.

Spencer Leigh is the author of “Twist And Shout! – Merseybeat, The Cavern, The Star-Club And The Beatles”, recently published in the UK by Nirvana Books.