Las Vegas, August 1969. The International Hotel had been open for 5 weeks when Roy Orbison came to see Elvis perform. He had driven from Nashville, which was not the obvious way to get to Las Vegas, but was the way Roy traveled when he did not want to be managed by schedules. The long flat highways through the middle of the country, the specific quality of driving alone through landscape that does not require anything from you, that simply passes and keeps passing without expectation.
He had driven for 2 days and checked into a room on the fourth floor and called down to the front desk and left his name with the person who handled Elvis’s messages. Elvis had called back within the hour. They had known each other since the Sun Records years, which meant they had known each other for 15 years in the particular way that musicians who come from the same small ecosystem know each other.
Not intimately, not with the accumulated detail of close friendship, but with the specific recognition of people who have been in the same rooms at the same moments when things were being decided. Who have shared the specific atmosphere of a time and place that both of them understood was significant while they were in it, which was rare enough to constitute its own kind of bond.
In 1956, they had both been young men with something to prove and a small studio on Union Avenue that was willing to let them try. In 1969, the distance between where they had each arrived from that starting point was considerable and it ran, like most distances, in more than one direction. Elvis was between shows, the afternoon gap between the dinner performance and the late show, the two hours when the machinery of the evening paused and the people inside it could briefly be something other than the machinery.
His suite on the upper floor had the specific quality of a temporary space that has been inhabited long enough to acquire a provisional personality. Things placed on surfaces, a guitar in the corner, the residue of occupancy without the settled quality of home. Roy came up at 4:30. There were people in the suite when he arrived.
There were always people in Elvis’s spaces in 1969. The specific orbit of management and friends and peripheral figures that had accumulated over years and tended to be present whether or not their presence was specifically required. Roy came in and Elvis crossed the room and they shook hands with the warmth of people who are genuinely glad to see each other without needing to perform the gladness.
They talked in the way of the group for a while. The general conversation of a room containing several people, easy and unfocused, moving across topics without settling on any of them. Roy sat with a drink he was not drinking and watched Elvis navigate the room with the quality of attention he brought to watching performers, which was the attention of someone who understands the craft from the inside and is therefore reading things that the ordinary audience does not see.
Elvis was good at this, Roy thought, at being in a room, at making everyone in it feel that the room was the right place to be and that their presence in it was the right presence. It was a skill and it was a real skill and watching it from the inside, knowing something about what it cost, what it required, what was happening underneath it, was different from watching it from from outside.
At some point someone mentioned dinner, and the group reorganized itself toward the door, and two people left, and then a third, and the natural attrition of a room in the late afternoon reduced the occupants until it was Elvis and Roy and a window that faced west where the Las Vegas sun was doing what the Las Vegas sun does in August, burning the sky into the specific colors of a place that has no interest in subtlety.
The man who had made the introduction, a music industry figure whose name Roy had not caught, someone connected to the hotel or the label or one of the several interlocking structures that produced evenings like this one, had said it in passing in the tone of someone making conversation that they expect to be received as a compliment.
“Two of the luckiest men in the business,” he had said, gesturing at both of them with the easy confidence of someone who believes they are saying something pleasant. “Everything you touch.” He had moved on before either of them responded. Roy had not responded. He had looked at the window and held his drink and let the comment pass through him the way certain comments pass through you when they are so far from the interior reality of the thing they describe that engaging with them would require more explanation than the moment allows.
But it had settled somewhere. It was sitting in him now in the quiet of the room after the others had left with the Las Vegas afternoon making its colors in the window and Elvis across from him in the chair he had dropped into with the specific tiredness of someone between performances. Roy looked at his drink.
“Lucky men,” he said. His voice came out quieter than he had intended with a quality that he recognized, the quality of something that has been sitting in you and has found an exit without asking permission. “That’s what he said,” Roy said. “Yeah,” Elvis said. Roy was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the sky was doing its thing, indifferent and spectacular, the way Las Vegas skies were in August.
“You know what I was thinking?” Roy said. When he said that, Elvis waited. “I was thinking about the drive here. Two days, just me and the road.” He paused. “I don’t have a There’s nobody waiting for me in Nashville, not anymore.” He said it plainly, without the performance of pain, the way you state a fact that has been a fact long enough to be simply that.
“I play shows, I come home, I sit in a house that has my name on the mortgage, and I” He stopped. He looked at Elvis directly. “You have no idea how lonely this gets,” he said. The room held the sentence. Elvis did not respond immediately. He did not offer the response that the sentence usually received, the reassurance, the redirection, the sympathetic pivot toward something more comfortable.
He sat with what Roy had said in the way of someone who was actually receiving it, actually letting it land where it lands, without managing it. Roy watched him do this, and felt something that he had not expected to feel, which was the specific relief of having said something true to someone who was not going to immediately try to make it untrue.
“I know,” Elvis said. Two words, quiet without emphasis, delivered with the flatness of someone saying something they mean, rather than something they want to sound like they mean. Roy looked at him. “The show ends, everybody goes, and you’re” He looked at the window. “You’re in a room, and the room doesn’t know who you are.
The room is just a room.” He paused. “The room is always just a room. Roy was quiet. Graceland has 40-some rooms, Elvis said. You’d think He stopped. Something moved in his expression that Roy recognized because he had felt versions of it himself. The specific irony of a life that contains everything you were supposed to want and has somehow arranged itself so that the wanting doesn’t resolve into the thing that the wanting was supposed to produce.
You’d think 40 rooms would be enough. Roy looked at his drink. The thing is, Roy said slowly, it looks like He searched for the word. It looks like fullness. All the time, people, noise, lights. He glanced toward the door, toward the direction in which the group had gone. Lucky men. Yeah, Elvis said. But it’s Roy paused.
It’s like standing in a stadium. All those people and none of them He stopped again. None of them know you. Elvis said. None of them know me, Roy said. They know He gestured vaguely, a gesture that encompassed the room and the hotel and the name on the marquee outside. They know that, whatever that is. Elvis nodded. The Las Vegas sun had moved further into its descent and the window was producing different colors now, deeper, more orange.
The sky doing the thing it does in the last hour before dark when it stops being subtle and commits to the spectacle. I used to think, Elvis said, that enough people knew who you were, you couldn’t be lonely. He said it with the tone of someone reporting a belief they have tested and found inaccurate. That loneliness was about not being seen and if you were seen by enough people, it would add up to something? Roy said.
Yeah, Elvis said. It doesn’t.” Roy looked at him. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” They sat with this. The room held it the way rooms hold things that are true and do not require decoration, plainly, without emphasis, the truth simply present in the air between them. “The songs know,” Roy said after a while. Elvis looked at him.
“When I’m writing or when I’m in a session and something is working, there’s a moment when the song knows something about you that you didn’t tell it.” He paused. “It found it anyway, and you feel” He thought about how to finish the sentence. “You feel found for a minute.” “And then the minute ends,” Elvis said.
“And then the minute ends,” Roy said. “And you’re back in the room.” Elvis was quiet for a moment. “But you write another song,” he said. Roy looked at him. “That’s why you write another song,” Elvis said. “Not as a consolation, as an observation, the identification of a mechanism, the way you identify how something works when you have been watching it long enough.
” “Not for the people, for the minute.” Roy considered this. Outside, a car horn somewhere on the strip, the sound reaching them faint and distant and immediately swallowed by the general noise of Las Vegas being Las Vegas. A city that had decided a long time ago to make noise the default condition and silence the exception.
“When did you figure that out?” Roy said. Elvis smiled, small, private, the smile of someone who is not entirely sure the figuring out was complete. “I haven’t,” he said. “I’m just” He paused. “I’m saying it out loud and seeing if it’s true.” Roy looked at him. “Is it?” he said. He thought about it honestly, which was visible, the actual thinking, the actual uncertainty, the absence of the performed confidence that was available to him in most contexts, and that he was choosing in this room on this afternoon not to deploy.
“Some of it,” he said. Roy nodded slowly. “Some of it,” he said. “Yeah.” They did not talk for a while after that. It was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who have said the true things and are now sitting in the space that the true things leave behind, which is a different kind of space than the space before them.
More room in it somehow. The specific quality of air that has had something heavy set down in it and is redistributing around the absence of the weight. Roy looked at the window. The sky had committed fully now to the colors of the late hour, deep orange at the horizon, fading upward through gradations that the eye tracked without the mind needing to name them.
The Las Vegas strip was beginning to assert itself below. The neon starting to matter as the daylight retreated. The city’s primary identity emerging as its secondary one withdrew. “I’m glad you came,” Elvis said. Roy looked at him. “I needed to get out of Nashville,” he said. “I needed to” He paused. “I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t the house.
” “I know,” Elvis said. “And I wanted to see you perform, properly. Not just” He gestured again at the vague general category of industry events, chance encounters, the professional proximity that was not the same as actually watching someone do the thing they do. “You’re good at it,” he said. “You’re very good at it.
” “You are, too,” Elvis said. Roy looked at his drink, which he had not touched. “Different,” he said. “Different,” Elvis agreed. “Not less.” Roy was quiet. This was the kind of thing that was easy to say and difficult to mean, and the difficulty was in the gap between the saying and the meaning, and Roy had spent enough time in that gap to be alert to it.
But Elvis had said it with the flatness that meant he meant it. The same flatness as I know 20 minutes ago. Roy believed him. Which was its own kind of thing, to be believed by Elvis Presley in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 1969 about whether you were less. He put the drink down on the table beside him. I should let you rest before the show.
Elvis nodded. You’ll stay for it? Yeah, that’s why I drove two days. He stood up. Elvis stood up. They looked at each other across the room in the late afternoon light. Two men who had come from the same small studio on Union Avenue in Memphis 15 years ago and had arrived at different versions of the same place carrying different versions of the same weight.
Roy, Elvis said. Roy looked at him. Next time you’re in Nashville, don’t sit in the house. Roy looked at him for a moment. Okay, he said. Simple. Not a promise, exactly. More the acknowledgement of something received, the verbal equivalent of taking something from someone’s outstretched hand. He went to the door. He did not look back.
Not because the moment didn’t warrant it, but because it was complete. It had been what it had been, and it did not need to be extended or marked. He walked out into the corridor, and the door closed behind him. And the room on the other side of it held what had happened in it, the way rooms hold things, silently and without judgement.
In the corridor, Roy stood for a moment. The Las Vegas corridor was what Las Vegas corridors were, carpeted, lit, indifferent, carrying the sounds of the building’s operations in its walls, an ordinary space. The room behind him had been, for an hour, something other than ordinary. And now it was the ordinary corridor and the ordinary sounds and the ordinary light.
He started walking toward the elevator. He was thinking about what Elvis had said about the minute, the moment when the song knows something about you that you didn’t tell it, the minute of feeling found, and then the song is done and you’re back in the room, but you write another song, not for the people, but for the minute.
He thought about Nashville, about the drive here, about two days of highway that had been, in some way he had not fully identified until now, its own version of the minute, the movement, the landscape passing, the specific quality of being in transit between the house and wherever he was going, not yet arrived and no longer departed, suspended in the space between.
Maybe that was its own kind of song. He pressed the button for the elevator. The doors opened. He got in and the doors closed and the elevator descended. And outside the International Hotel Las Vegas was fully committing to being Las Vegas, the lights coming up as the sky came down, the city’s version of the minute beginning, the brief spectacular transition between the day it was pretending to be and the night it actually was.
Roy Orbison stood in the elevator and looked at the floor indicator counting down and thought about a man in a room with 40 rooms who still ended up in just one of them. He thought about how that was not the whole story. The minute existed. The songs found things. That was not nothing. It was not everything, but it was not nothing.
The elevator doors opened. He walked out into the lobby and the lobby was what lobbies were and outside the doors Las Vegas was waiting to be exactly what Las Vegas was and Roy Orbison walked through the doors and into the evening and let it be what it was.
Roy Orbison Told Elvis “You Have No Idea How Lonely This Gets” — Elvis’s Answer Was Unexpected
Las Vegas, August 1969. The International Hotel had been open for 5 weeks when Roy Orbison came to see Elvis perform. He had driven from Nashville, which was not the obvious way to get to Las Vegas, but was the way Roy traveled when he did not want to be managed by schedules. The long flat highways through the middle of the country, the specific quality of driving alone through landscape that does not require anything from you, that simply passes and keeps passing without expectation.
He had driven for 2 days and checked into a room on the fourth floor and called down to the front desk and left his name with the person who handled Elvis’s messages. Elvis had called back within the hour. They had known each other since the Sun Records years, which meant they had known each other for 15 years in the particular way that musicians who come from the same small ecosystem know each other.
Not intimately, not with the accumulated detail of close friendship, but with the specific recognition of people who have been in the same rooms at the same moments when things were being decided. Who have shared the specific atmosphere of a time and place that both of them understood was significant while they were in it, which was rare enough to constitute its own kind of bond.
In 1956, they had both been young men with something to prove and a small studio on Union Avenue that was willing to let them try. In 1969, the distance between where they had each arrived from that starting point was considerable and it ran, like most distances, in more than one direction. Elvis was between shows, the afternoon gap between the dinner performance and the late show, the two hours when the machinery of the evening paused and the people inside it could briefly be something other than the machinery.
His suite on the upper floor had the specific quality of a temporary space that has been inhabited long enough to acquire a provisional personality. Things placed on surfaces, a guitar in the corner, the residue of occupancy without the settled quality of home. Roy came up at 4:30. There were people in the suite when he arrived.
There were always people in Elvis’s spaces in 1969. The specific orbit of management and friends and peripheral figures that had accumulated over years and tended to be present whether or not their presence was specifically required. Roy came in and Elvis crossed the room and they shook hands with the warmth of people who are genuinely glad to see each other without needing to perform the gladness.
They talked in the way of the group for a while. The general conversation of a room containing several people, easy and unfocused, moving across topics without settling on any of them. Roy sat with a drink he was not drinking and watched Elvis navigate the room with the quality of attention he brought to watching performers, which was the attention of someone who understands the craft from the inside and is therefore reading things that the ordinary audience does not see.
Elvis was good at this, Roy thought, at being in a room, at making everyone in it feel that the room was the right place to be and that their presence in it was the right presence. It was a skill and it was a real skill and watching it from the inside, knowing something about what it cost, what it required, what was happening underneath it, was different from watching it from from outside.
At some point someone mentioned dinner, and the group reorganized itself toward the door, and two people left, and then a third, and the natural attrition of a room in the late afternoon reduced the occupants until it was Elvis and Roy and a window that faced west where the Las Vegas sun was doing what the Las Vegas sun does in August, burning the sky into the specific colors of a place that has no interest in subtlety.
The man who had made the introduction, a music industry figure whose name Roy had not caught, someone connected to the hotel or the label or one of the several interlocking structures that produced evenings like this one, had said it in passing in the tone of someone making conversation that they expect to be received as a compliment.
“Two of the luckiest men in the business,” he had said, gesturing at both of them with the easy confidence of someone who believes they are saying something pleasant. “Everything you touch.” He had moved on before either of them responded. Roy had not responded. He had looked at the window and held his drink and let the comment pass through him the way certain comments pass through you when they are so far from the interior reality of the thing they describe that engaging with them would require more explanation than the moment allows.
But it had settled somewhere. It was sitting in him now in the quiet of the room after the others had left with the Las Vegas afternoon making its colors in the window and Elvis across from him in the chair he had dropped into with the specific tiredness of someone between performances. Roy looked at his drink.
“Lucky men,” he said. His voice came out quieter than he had intended with a quality that he recognized, the quality of something that has been sitting in you and has found an exit without asking permission. “That’s what he said,” Roy said. “Yeah,” Elvis said. Roy was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the sky was doing its thing, indifferent and spectacular, the way Las Vegas skies were in August.
“You know what I was thinking?” Roy said. When he said that, Elvis waited. “I was thinking about the drive here. Two days, just me and the road.” He paused. “I don’t have a There’s nobody waiting for me in Nashville, not anymore.” He said it plainly, without the performance of pain, the way you state a fact that has been a fact long enough to be simply that.
“I play shows, I come home, I sit in a house that has my name on the mortgage, and I” He stopped. He looked at Elvis directly. “You have no idea how lonely this gets,” he said. The room held the sentence. Elvis did not respond immediately. He did not offer the response that the sentence usually received, the reassurance, the redirection, the sympathetic pivot toward something more comfortable.
He sat with what Roy had said in the way of someone who was actually receiving it, actually letting it land where it lands, without managing it. Roy watched him do this, and felt something that he had not expected to feel, which was the specific relief of having said something true to someone who was not going to immediately try to make it untrue.
“I know,” Elvis said. Two words, quiet without emphasis, delivered with the flatness of someone saying something they mean, rather than something they want to sound like they mean. Roy looked at him. “The show ends, everybody goes, and you’re” He looked at the window. “You’re in a room, and the room doesn’t know who you are.
The room is just a room.” He paused. “The room is always just a room. Roy was quiet. Graceland has 40-some rooms, Elvis said. You’d think He stopped. Something moved in his expression that Roy recognized because he had felt versions of it himself. The specific irony of a life that contains everything you were supposed to want and has somehow arranged itself so that the wanting doesn’t resolve into the thing that the wanting was supposed to produce.
You’d think 40 rooms would be enough. Roy looked at his drink. The thing is, Roy said slowly, it looks like He searched for the word. It looks like fullness. All the time, people, noise, lights. He glanced toward the door, toward the direction in which the group had gone. Lucky men. Yeah, Elvis said. But it’s Roy paused.
It’s like standing in a stadium. All those people and none of them He stopped again. None of them know you. Elvis said. None of them know me, Roy said. They know He gestured vaguely, a gesture that encompassed the room and the hotel and the name on the marquee outside. They know that, whatever that is. Elvis nodded. The Las Vegas sun had moved further into its descent and the window was producing different colors now, deeper, more orange.
The sky doing the thing it does in the last hour before dark when it stops being subtle and commits to the spectacle. I used to think, Elvis said, that enough people knew who you were, you couldn’t be lonely. He said it with the tone of someone reporting a belief they have tested and found inaccurate. That loneliness was about not being seen and if you were seen by enough people, it would add up to something? Roy said.
Yeah, Elvis said. It doesn’t.” Roy looked at him. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” They sat with this. The room held it the way rooms hold things that are true and do not require decoration, plainly, without emphasis, the truth simply present in the air between them. “The songs know,” Roy said after a while. Elvis looked at him.
“When I’m writing or when I’m in a session and something is working, there’s a moment when the song knows something about you that you didn’t tell it.” He paused. “It found it anyway, and you feel” He thought about how to finish the sentence. “You feel found for a minute.” “And then the minute ends,” Elvis said.
“And then the minute ends,” Roy said. “And you’re back in the room.” Elvis was quiet for a moment. “But you write another song,” he said. Roy looked at him. “That’s why you write another song,” Elvis said. “Not as a consolation, as an observation, the identification of a mechanism, the way you identify how something works when you have been watching it long enough.
” “Not for the people, for the minute.” Roy considered this. Outside, a car horn somewhere on the strip, the sound reaching them faint and distant and immediately swallowed by the general noise of Las Vegas being Las Vegas. A city that had decided a long time ago to make noise the default condition and silence the exception.
“When did you figure that out?” Roy said. Elvis smiled, small, private, the smile of someone who is not entirely sure the figuring out was complete. “I haven’t,” he said. “I’m just” He paused. “I’m saying it out loud and seeing if it’s true.” Roy looked at him. “Is it?” he said. He thought about it honestly, which was visible, the actual thinking, the actual uncertainty, the absence of the performed confidence that was available to him in most contexts, and that he was choosing in this room on this afternoon not to deploy.
“Some of it,” he said. Roy nodded slowly. “Some of it,” he said. “Yeah.” They did not talk for a while after that. It was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who have said the true things and are now sitting in the space that the true things leave behind, which is a different kind of space than the space before them.
More room in it somehow. The specific quality of air that has had something heavy set down in it and is redistributing around the absence of the weight. Roy looked at the window. The sky had committed fully now to the colors of the late hour, deep orange at the horizon, fading upward through gradations that the eye tracked without the mind needing to name them.
The Las Vegas strip was beginning to assert itself below. The neon starting to matter as the daylight retreated. The city’s primary identity emerging as its secondary one withdrew. “I’m glad you came,” Elvis said. Roy looked at him. “I needed to get out of Nashville,” he said. “I needed to” He paused. “I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t the house.
” “I know,” Elvis said. “And I wanted to see you perform, properly. Not just” He gestured again at the vague general category of industry events, chance encounters, the professional proximity that was not the same as actually watching someone do the thing they do. “You’re good at it,” he said. “You’re very good at it.
” “You are, too,” Elvis said. Roy looked at his drink, which he had not touched. “Different,” he said. “Different,” Elvis agreed. “Not less.” Roy was quiet. This was the kind of thing that was easy to say and difficult to mean, and the difficulty was in the gap between the saying and the meaning, and Roy had spent enough time in that gap to be alert to it.
But Elvis had said it with the flatness that meant he meant it. The same flatness as I know 20 minutes ago. Roy believed him. Which was its own kind of thing, to be believed by Elvis Presley in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 1969 about whether you were less. He put the drink down on the table beside him. I should let you rest before the show.
Elvis nodded. You’ll stay for it? Yeah, that’s why I drove two days. He stood up. Elvis stood up. They looked at each other across the room in the late afternoon light. Two men who had come from the same small studio on Union Avenue in Memphis 15 years ago and had arrived at different versions of the same place carrying different versions of the same weight.
Roy, Elvis said. Roy looked at him. Next time you’re in Nashville, don’t sit in the house. Roy looked at him for a moment. Okay, he said. Simple. Not a promise, exactly. More the acknowledgement of something received, the verbal equivalent of taking something from someone’s outstretched hand. He went to the door. He did not look back.
Not because the moment didn’t warrant it, but because it was complete. It had been what it had been, and it did not need to be extended or marked. He walked out into the corridor, and the door closed behind him. And the room on the other side of it held what had happened in it, the way rooms hold things, silently and without judgement.
In the corridor, Roy stood for a moment. The Las Vegas corridor was what Las Vegas corridors were, carpeted, lit, indifferent, carrying the sounds of the building’s operations in its walls, an ordinary space. The room behind him had been, for an hour, something other than ordinary. And now it was the ordinary corridor and the ordinary sounds and the ordinary light.
He started walking toward the elevator. He was thinking about what Elvis had said about the minute, the moment when the song knows something about you that you didn’t tell it, the minute of feeling found, and then the song is done and you’re back in the room, but you write another song, not for the people, but for the minute.
He thought about Nashville, about the drive here, about two days of highway that had been, in some way he had not fully identified until now, its own version of the minute, the movement, the landscape passing, the specific quality of being in transit between the house and wherever he was going, not yet arrived and no longer departed, suspended in the space between.
Maybe that was its own kind of song. He pressed the button for the elevator. The doors opened. He got in and the doors closed and the elevator descended. And outside the International Hotel Las Vegas was fully committing to being Las Vegas, the lights coming up as the sky came down, the city’s version of the minute beginning, the brief spectacular transition between the day it was pretending to be and the night it actually was.
Roy Orbison stood in the elevator and looked at the floor indicator counting down and thought about a man in a room with 40 rooms who still ended up in just one of them. He thought about how that was not the whole story. The minute existed. The songs found things. That was not nothing. It was not everything, but it was not nothing.
The elevator doors opened. He walked out into the lobby and the lobby was what lobbies were and outside the doors Las Vegas was waiting to be exactly what Las Vegas was and Roy Orbison walked through the doors and into the evening and let it be what it was.
