Daily Mail, October 6 2011
As summits go it might have been a secret meeting of heads of state. It was the evening of August 27, 1965, and police motorcyclists had been deployed to block any following traffic as three limousines sped west down Sunset Boulevard and into the gated Bel Air millionaire community of Beverly Hills.
But this wasn’t a political meeting of giants. It was a cultural one. The Beatles, then the most famous people on earth, were being taken to see Elvis Presley, the “king” of rock and roll.
It should have been a meeting of minds: only the four Beatles and Elvis knew what it was like to be so universally worshipped; only they had experienced being in the eye of a global musical hurricane. And as John Lennon would repeat until his death fifteen years later, “Before Elvis there was nothing”.
But, as the exhibition “The Beatles and Elvis”, which has just opened in Liverpool recalls, in the event the party that took place that night at Elvis’s house, 565 Perugia Way was something of an anti-climax.
With a nervous John Lennon being characteristically smart ass before his idol, Elvis was shy, embarrassed and almost certainly jealous.
That would be understandable. Before the Beatles had invaded America twenty months earlier, he had been the undisputed leader of all he surveyed in rock music. Now they, the young pretenders, had stolen his throne. And, while he found himself contractually imprisoned in one tacky Hollywood beach movie after another, for which he recorded the worst songs of his career, everything the Beatles touched was turning to gold and critical praise.
Only 30, he, who just a few years earlier had been the great young revolutionary, was looking old fashioned and out of touch. He hated it…and probably them for what they represented.
Not that the four Beatles could have been fully aware of this. Even if they were disillusioned with Elvis’s recent records, they knew how much they owed to him. Indeed the very emergence of Elvis and Heartbreak Hotel nine years’ earlier had summoned the instigating moment that had led the schoolboy Lennon to form his own skiffle group, the Quarrymen.
Paul McCartney had been similarly obsessed, and all through their years playing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club and in Hamburg the Beatles had included over a dozen Presley songs in their repertoire.
So, universally famous and feted as by 1965 they had become, as they were led across the deep white shag carpet that night into the sitting room where Elvis sat with his heavily made up and bouffant haired girl friend Priscilla Beaulieu, they were nervous. In fact so overawed were they, that at first none of them could think of anything to say.
It was Elvis who broke the ice. “Well, if you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me all night, I’m going to bed,” he said, before calling for guitars to be passed around. Things got a little better after that, with Ringo, in the absence of a drum kit, beating time on a table with his fingers.
This meeting of idols had not come about by chance. Rather was it due to the work of a young music paper journalist called Chris Hutchins who was reporting on the Beatles latest tour of America and who got on well with Elvis’s manager, the self styled ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker.
Hutchins was after a scoop, and, as he recalls in his memoir Elvis Meets the Beatles, (which has just been republished as an eBook on Amazon) having met Elvis and quickly realised how curious the star was about the Liverpool group, he set about coaxing Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein and Parker into the meeting.
It was a venture that required not a few diplomatic niceties. Firstly the Beatles would have to go to Elvis. The king would not go to the new pretenders. Secondly, there were to be no reporters, other than Chris Hutchins, in tow, no photographs, no recordings and no advance leaking of the plans.
Barrow remembers that at first George Harrison was doubtful about the evening. Already disillusioned with Beatlemania, he feared a publicity and fan hoopla. While John Lennon suspected Elvis might cancel before they got there.
Elvis didn’t cancel. Arriving at the huge Bel Air mansion (once the home of the Shah of Persia) the Beatles found a Rolls Royce, two Cadillacs and a herd of Harley Davidson motor-cycles waiting for them beyond the sentries at the gates.
Elvis had summoned a dozen of his Memphis mafia and their molls, and now greeted the Beatles and their retinue (which included their road manager Mal Evans – a huge Elvis fan) with much polite shaking of hands in a large circular room that was bathed in red and blue lights. At one end of the room, Paul McCartney would later remember, a juke box kept playing Charlie Rich’s Mohair Sam, with Elvis playing along on his bass guitar.
With conversation at first pretty limited to reminiscences of near-misses while flying around on tour (the Beatles’ plane having caught fire a couple of weeks earlier, and a plane Elvis was flying on having had an engine cut out on his way to an early recording session), it was only a jam session that helped everyone relax.
The Beatles I Feel Fine had been a recent hit and as Elvis played along with it on bass he joked, “See, I’m practising.”
To which McCartney replied “Don’t worry, between us, me and Mr Epstein will make a star of you,” before, as a nod to Priscilla (wearing a sequinned mini-dress) he played a little of You’re My World, a recent hit for another Priscilla, the Beatles’ old Cavern friend Cilla Black.
John, as usual, was just being John. “Why have you dropped the old rock stuff?” he asked Elvis bluntly, adding that he’d loved his early records and didn’t go for the film songs.
Elvis, not used to being even mildly criticised, and hating the film songs himself, responded that he would be making rock records again soon.
“Oh, good. We’ll buy them when you do,” came back John.
The Beatle probably wasn’t being rude. That was the way he always talked, as he wasn’t making fun either when, putting on a funny Franco-German accent, he added: “Zis is ze way it should be…ze small homely gathering wiz a few friends and a leetle muzic.”
According to some memories there was worse to come. Overhearing Elvis say that he was being paid a million dollars a movie and one had only taken him fifteen days to shoot, Lennon is reputed to have cracked: “Well, we’ve got an hour to spare now, let’s make an epic together, shall we.”
History doesn’t recall Elvis’s reactions that night, but five years later when the Beatles had broken up, a by-then drug-soaked Presley would make an extraordinary secret trip to Washington, ask for and be given an audience with President Nixon, and tell him of his worries about the bad influence of stars like John Lennon on the youth of America.
The meeting of the musical giants had begun at ten o’clock and as the evening wore on Ringo went off to play pool in the next room, while Brian Epstein began trying to persuade “Colonel” Parker to let him present a series of Elvis concerts in the UK. It was never to happen.
At two a.m. the party came to an end, with the Colonel handing the Beatles and their friends going-home presents by way of Elvis albums, and John standing in the garden shouting, his comedic foreign accent: “Sanks for ze music, Elvis. Long live ze King,” before suddenly inviting his probably puzzled host to join the Beatles at their place the following night.
“Well, I’ll see. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it,” came the inevitable reply from the star who only ever socialised in his own home.
At which Lennon turned to some of the Memphis Mafia and said: “Well, you’re welcome to come with or without him”. They went.
As they got into the waiting limousines Tony Barrow reckons he heard John Lennon say: “Elvis was stoned.”
To which George Harrison replied quietly: “Aren’t we all!”
The next day John Lennon would be telling everyone: “ There’s only one person in the USA that we ever wanted to meet – not that he wanted to meet us,” before adding privately somewhat disappointedly “It was just like meeting Engelbert Humperdink.”
That being said there were Elvis records on John Lennon’s juke box when the Beatle was murdered. I wonder, did Elvis have any Beatles record on his?
