Writer: Corey Dagg
John Lennon once said that if it hadn’t been for Elvis, there would be no Beatles. At least that’s what experienced writer and performer Corey Dagg tells us at the beginning of his one-man show, The Love You Take. The title, of course, immediately takes us to the famous closing line of The Beatles’ The End, the final song in the mesmerizing Abbey Road medley. But then we read in the description that this solo performance is about Elvis, and about how Presley came to sing his hit Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis? The Beatles? The Love You Take? What’s going on?
It’s simple: Corey wants to sidestep both time and geography and take us into a kind of musical wormhole, connecting Elvis, the Beatles and his own childhood in the US through a shared inspirational lineage. Lennon wanted to be Elvis; George Harrison considered listening to Heartbreak Hotel at 13 his musical awakening, while Paul McCartney reportedly shivered with excitement when he first heard it in a Liverpool record shop. (Not to mention Corey’s own scary whereabouts at the time the song was launched). This pleasantly chaotic brewhaha becomes all the more intriguing given the relative obscurity into which Presley seems to have faded in recent decades, at least until Baz Luhrmann’s recent resurrection of the King. For there is still an unofficial tendency to reduce Elvis to a mere performer – perhaps even a second-rate one – while the Beatles had not only the voices but the brains! Well, Corey is here to correct that imbalance, presenting Elvis and the Beatles alike not only as road-openers and milestones in popular music, but as closely connected forces that would shape the sound of rock and roll for decades to come.
While the premise is hefty, it is not unbelievable. Especially when, as promised in the show’s tagline, Corey goes on to narrate, with melodious original accompaniment and visual evidence, the story that led to the writing and release of Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis’s first Billboard pop No. 1 and the song that effectively launched his career after years of uncertainty and disappointments spent playing gigs across the South. I won’t give away the intricacies of that serendipitous journey, because I strongly believe that Corey Dagg’s experienced, perfectly paced storytelling and confident delivery are themselves enough of a calling card to make you want to see the show.
Runs until August 29 2026 | Image: Contributed
