It’s 1965, and John Lennon is perusing the entrance hall of Graceland, traipsing his finger through a film of dust on a commemorative ‘The King’ vase, awaiting Elvis Presley. When his former hero does arrive, the animosity is almost instant. In time, Elvis would go to the ultimate extreme and offer to serve as a spy for the FBI in a covert mission to have Lennon and his hippie cohorts in The Beatles deported. Sometimes, the old adage of never meeting your heroes really does stand up.
“Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis. Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles,” the singer once exclaimed. But as soon as he saw all the ‘All the Way With LBJ’ political paraphernalia in his lobby, that notion began to fade, and he dwelt on the dwindling returns of The King’s back catalogue. According to Tony Barrow, the former Beatles press officer who had organised this fateful tour excursion, “John asked what had happened to the old rock ’n’ roll Elvis, who at that point was mainly singing the soundtracks to his films. He was half-joking, but he meant it.”
Along with the eye-rolls at the LBJ-clad lobby, this prickly comment set the tone for a grim encounter that turned an old hero into a new villain. In truth, even before they entered Graceland, all of The Beatles had cooled off on the old King. George Harrison would assert that he was usurped by the rather more enlightened Bob Dylan, bemoaning that you couldn’t ask Elvis about the meaning of life. But none of the Fab Four were quite as iconoclastic as Lennon—it was part of his schtick not to have heroes in a spiritual sense.
But there were some deities out there who provided the bespectacled Beatle with such religious experiences that he had to ditch this dogma and bow down to kiss their feet. What a sight! Lennon, the Godhead himself, engaging in the ultimate act of subordination, ten stories beneath the high and mighty Jerry Lee Lewis. As Lewis himself would profess, without ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ “rock ‘n’ roll would be boring“. That’s a view that Lennon seemingly proscribed to after seeing him live in Los Angeles.
