It was 50 years ago...
The day Elvis met the Beatles
It is one of the most mythical meetings in pop history: in August 1965 the Beatles sat around Elvis’s Bel Air mansion, watching TV, listening to records and jamming on electric guitars, with Elvis on bass. No photos were taken, no recordings made, and recollections are hazy at best, shrouded in clouds of the pot smoke the Beatles had been inhaling in their limo, or washed away by the whiskey and uppers favoured by Presley’s entourage, the Memphis Mafia.
Radio 2 is commemorating the event with a weekend of programmes celebrating the music of Elvis and the Beatles, including a new play by Jeff Young, When Elvis Met the Beatles, which tries to get to the bottom of the encounter. The trouble is, there is really very little to get to the bottom of. This was no great meeting of the minds, with no wise words of wisdom and experience shared between old hand and young pretenders, and certainly no ritualistic passing of the baton. It was, rather, a slightly awkward collision of sensibilities, overshadowed by an ominous future all parties may have subconsciously sensed: the Beatles were on course not to inherit Presley’s showbusiness mantle, but to obliterate it.
Initially it was a rather stiff and uncomfortable gathering, overcome with jokes and jamming. “We walked in and Elvis was sitting on the settee in front of the TV,” Ringo Starr recalled years later. “He was pretty shy and we were a little shy but between the five of us we kept it rolling. I felt I was more thrilled to meet him than he was to meet me.” John Lennon, who had idolised Presley since his delinquent youth, later noted: “We didn’t talk about anything, we just played music – he just wasn’t articulate.” According to Beatles press officer Tony Barrow, who was instrumental in setting the meeting up, the band were distinctly underwhelmed. “John said it had been about as exciting as meeting Engelbert Humperdinck.”
The subtext of the meeting, which had taken a year to set up, was that an increasingly insecure and culturally isolated Presley considered Beatlemania a threat to his popularity. “Elvis was scared,” according to Alan Fortas, a member of Presley’s gang present at Bel Air. If so, Lennon can not have helped with his blunt opening remarks. “John asked Presley what had happened to the old rock ’n’ roll Elvis, who at that point was mainly singing the soundtracks to his films,” according to Barrow. “He was half joking, but he meant it.”
“Before Elvis there was nothing,” is how Lennon famously described Presley’s impact on his teenage psyche in 1957. “When I first heard
Heartbreak Hotel, I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end.” An extraordinarily handsome, stylish, audaciously physical southern white boy instinctively synthesising the energetic but culturally marginal black musical styles of rhythm and blues with country and pop, Presley made music that sent a lightning bolt through the world.
“We wanted to be bigger than Elvis,” is how Lennon described the Beatles’ early motivation. But what emerged from Presley as a natural expression of personality was adapted and developed by the Beatles generation as a vehicle for something much deeper. Educated, arty, rebellious and empowered by the economics of the baby-boom generation, the Beatles wrote their own songs, shaped their own careers and gave pop a new sense of progressive and artistic purpose. It was the moment when pop began to take itself seriously.
Presley was never really able to take creative advantage of the freedom he unleashed. For all that he represented something thrilling and new, he was quickly co-opted by established entertainment forces, guided by a huckster manager Colonel Parker. By contrast, Beatles manager Brian Epstein saw his job as a creative facilitator.
The strange thing is that, 50 years on, the Beatles vanquishing of Presley no longer seems so complete. The modern music business is full of charismatic stars singing songs written by others, their all-round entertainment careers shaped by Svengali figures like Simon Cowell. If a talent like Presley appeared today, he would be snapped up. It is much harder to imagine where the next Beatles might come from.
The Hollywood meeting lasted around three hours. The Beatles knew it was over when Elvis’s manager doled out party bags, containing Presley records. There was no attempt on either side to meet again. Presley
went on to record a few
Beatles songs, including
and but also described them in 1970 as “anti-American”.
For all their differences, the most iconic pop stars of the 20th century remain linked in the public imagination.
As Lennon acknowledged: “If there hadn’t been an Elvis, there wouldn’t have been the Beatles.” And for one night only, the Fab Five rocked Bel Air.