How John Lennon stopped Mick Jagger from ever meeting Elvis

1 July 2026, 11:07

John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Elvis Presley. Picture: Alamy

By Mayer Nissim

It's because of John Lennon that Mick Jagger never met Elvis Presley before the King died.

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Elvis Presley never toured outside North America. Thanks to his manager Colonel Tom Parker, his last travel outside of the continent was his Army stint in West Germany in 1960.

That was a few months before The Beatles popped over there to play the clubs of Hamburg, but the Fab Four did get to meet the King of Rock and Roll one time.

Their catch-up at Elvis's Beverly Hills mansion on August 27, 1965 was definitely awkward at first but warmed up when they got their instruments out for a bit of a jam.

But while The Beatles were okay with the meet-up, Elvis apparently later badmouthed the Brits to Richard Nixon, calling them "un-American" and laying into their "filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music".

But even before those shady facts emerged, John Lennon apparently warned his pal/rival Mick Jagger off meeting Elvis himself.

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After talking about his own odd meetings with Chuck Berry, Jagger once told Paul Du Noyer for Mojo: "I never met Elvis either, because John Lennon once told me he was a real disappointment.

"So I said I’d take his advice, because I'd already had it with Chuck Berry and I didn’t want it to happen again with Elvis."

He added: "Though now, of course, I wish I had met Elvis, you know what I mean? You never think, Oh he's gonna die soon, I’d better hurry up and meet him.

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"Because in those days he wasn’t very old. If nothing else, you’d still be able to talk about it, wouldn’t you? It would be awful if I’d never met Chuck Berry, after listening to his things over all those years."

Quizzed about his heroes, Jagger had said earlier in the interview: "Gawd, it’s hard to pick a hero of mine because they’re so disparate. There's Buddy Holly, there was Muddy Waters…

"There was Elvis, I suppose, though he was so ghastly in other ways and you somehow knew it."