Mick Jagger is currently promoting The Rolling Stones’ latest album, Foreign Tongues, and in an interview with Conan O’Brien, he recalled that he never met Elvis Presley after taking John Lennon’s advice not to meet one of his heroes. According to Jagger, Lennon had been quite disappointed when he got the chance to meet the American music icon.
Why John Lennon advised Mick Jagger not to meet Elvis Presley
“I remember John telling me, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.’ And so I didn’t. I took John’s advice. It was really stupid of me, really. I’d love to have met Elvis, why I took John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring, he told me (the story of meeting Elvis) more than once. So it sort of put me off, so I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis. So I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was, but maybe my Elvis version would have been different.”
The Beatles went to the king’s house in Bel Air, Los Angeles in 1965 and spent a whole evening with him. “When we arrived at his house, he was sitting on a couch, watching TV, playing a Fender bass,” George Harrison told Creem Magazine back in 1987. According to him there were also in the house a few friends of Elvis, his manager Colonel Tom Parker, The Beatles’ manager and roadies.
“He was really nice and he was charming. It was a big thrill for us, meeting him—especially because… well, we looked forward to it. But it was probably up on Mullholland Drive, which goes around and around and around. We were in the dark, in the back of this limo. And we used to smoke these herbal cigarettes in those days. We had a couple of those and we had the giggles, going into hysterics. Then we totally forgot where we were going or what we were doing,” Harrison said.