Escalator To Transcendence: Elvis Presley: "Heartbreak Hotel" pt. 1

“Walk with me.” – Levi Stubbs, “Still Waters”

If you want to, come with me down my street. It’s not a long walk; you can see the destination just by looking east: the HMV Superstore on Yonge St. in Toronto. The walk takes us past the charmingly named World’s Biggest Bookstore (it’s a big place, but not the biggest) and to Yonge St., where we have to walk north a little to cross the street at Gould. Having crossed, and walked past the fashionable clothes shop and a Belgian waffle nook, the warm smell of maple syrup pouring out – we walk into HMV, the doors automatically opening…

The ground floor is almost all devoted to dvds; there are cds, of course, but they are stashed here and there, the new ones up front at the heads of aisles, and the chart cds and a few more ‘obscure’ new releases on the left-hand wall. The inevitable 2/20 and 2/25 cds are here, but not much else…

So we go up the escalator (yes there is an elevator, but you have to know where it is, in the back) up to where the cds actually are. Again there are aisles; and at the heads of the aisles, various new releases are displayed in a vaguely thematic way. The Rock/Pop section is right here. To the right, if you walk only a few meters, and down a step or two, is the Urban section, which goes from Gospel to R&B, Electronica to Reggae and World Music, with an island, so to speak, of Hip Hop right there in front of you as you walk in…

…if you turn around and go back to the Rock/Pop section and hang a left, you’ll walk around to the Heavy Metal/Industrial/Goth/Punk area, not far away from the magazine section; and around the corner are rock/pop dvds, but we aren’t interested in them and so go up another escalator to…

Face the classical room – not of interest to us today – and so we go into the right-hand door to find Easy Listening, Movie/Broadway/TV soundtracks/compilations, Francophone (music from Quebec & France)…and going around the corner there’s Blues, Jazz, Folk and Country, taking us back to the other side, right by the exit/entrance where there’s a water cooler, where we can have a little pause before deciding what, if anything, to buy.

The regular guy/gal who comes into the store is no doubt aware of the layout, but (depending on how narrow his/her tastes are) they may never go to certain areas, or even certain floors. Each large section has its own music, which you only hear if you are in said area (there is some overlapping of course, but not much) – and you may as well know that this was my usual route to wandering around almost every time I went in, especially if I felt like buying something but had no idea what it was I was going to get (an exhausting process, at times, thus the very necessary water cooler stop).

I would like to think that if I was with a certain elderly gentleman – the subject I will write about more directly in my next posting – that he would happily tag along with me, if of course he was alive. Elvis was a musical omnivore; in as much as he grew up immersing himself in whatever he could either hear in person or on the radio. Nothing wasn’t of some interest, from Dean Martin to gospel, folk to blues, country to Sinatra. It was all of a piece to him – it was, quite simply, music. The idea of a ‘monoculture’ would not have made much sense to him, simply because ‘polyculture’ was where he was at. (As the woman in the 70s commercial used to say loudly – “Abundanza!”) He might even agree with me that even this Superstore didn’t have enough; as exhausting as it can be, you really cannot have enough music if you really love it. My childhood and Elvis’ were vastly different, to say the least, but I grew up in a household were music wasn’t just background but foreground – a profound, if invisible, expression of life itself.

Certainly, you cannot forget that music is a business in a place so full of sales and specials and deluxe this-and-thats, but music has a freeing quality and any barriers you find in it (besides those of geography and time itself) are artificial and worth tearing down or ignoring altogether. Elvis’ casual disregard for these barriers wasn’t his alone – many other musicans had it before him, primarily in jazz – but in the static world of the UK charts of 1956, it was new.