Mick Jagger would have met Elvis if it hadn’t been for John Lennon.
Jagger, 82, said during his appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend on Tuesday that he was “really stupid” to have listened to Lennon, who had advised him to “never meet your heroes.”
The rocker explained that Lennon often told him the story of the time The Beatles visited Elvis at his home. O’Brien filled in a few details from the anecdote, “They walked in, and he was playing bass,” but “The Beatles were high and they—none of them have their story straight. None of them can remember exactly.”
Jagger interjected, “But I remember John telling me, ‘Yeah, you know, you should never meet your heroes. I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.” He said the anecdote about the meeting shook him, as O’Brien suggested that Lennon was “disappointed.”
“He told me that, all this story, more than once,” Jagger said. “And so it sort of put me off.” It was “really stupid of me, really,” he continued, “Why’d I take John’s advice?” he wondered aloud to himself before revealing that at the time, he feared he’d experience the same disappointment Lennon did.
“I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis,” he said. “I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. But maybe my Elvis version would have been different.”
According to The Beatles’ press officer in the 1960s, Tony Barrow, at the beginning of the band’s meeting with Presley in 1965, “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 told the Guardian. “He was half-joking, but he meant it.”
Barrow said the meeting improved once the musicians began to play together. “They all started jamming, and that is when the party took off,” Barrow told the site. “With words, they didn’t have much to say. But as soon as they got into the music, the conversation began to spark.”
Still, “John said it had been about as exciting as meeting Engelbert Humperdinck,” Barrow recalled.
Whatever Lennon’s impression was, Jagger expressed regret that it had led him to miss out on meeting one of his “heroes.”
“I would love to have met Elvis,” he said.
