For more than 60 years, people have argued about one day in Los Angeles.
On Aug 27, 1965, the Beatles went to Elvis Presley’s home in Bel Air. They were in town for two shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Priscilla was there, along with Elvis’s friends.
But what happened once everyone settled in? That depends on who you ask.
John Lennon later said they played music together, and Priscilla has said so too. About 30 years later, in “The Beatles Anthology,” George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr couldn’t recall playing with Elvis. And Elvis’s friend Jerry Schilling has said that if a jam happened, he would have seen it.
Graceland’s own look back at that famous meeting is a good place to start, before the new chapter of the story.
Graceland looks back at the day Elvis met the Beatles
Now there’s a new voice, and he was there.
Mal Evans was the Beatles’ road manager. He’d been a bouncer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the band played in its early days, and he stayed on as their roadie from then on. Mal passed away in 1976, at just 40.
In 1975 he dictated his memoir onto cassette. He planned to publish it, with the band’s permission. It runs about 95,000 words, and it never came out.
That’s about to change. The Guardian reports that the memoir will be published for the first time in December under the title “With the Beatles,” with about 400 photos, some never seen before. Beatles expert Kenneth Womack, who wrote Mal’s biography in 2023, got the material from Mal’s family.
Mal’s son Gary sat down with Womack to talk about Mal’s years with the band, and it’s worth a listen if you want to know the man behind the memoir.
Mal Evans’s son and his biographer talk about Mal’s life with the Beatles
Womack told The Guardian that Mal was a huge Elvis fan. “Mal loved Elvis more than he loved the Beatles, in terms of music. So, for that reason, when they meet Elvis in Bel Air in August 1965, Mal writes page upon page about the experience and what happened.”
So did they play together? Mal Evans remembered that they did.
According to The Guardian, Elvis “played them Beatles LPs before finding guitars for each of them.” Mal listened in awe as “they began to make the place rock with … improvised beat music”.
Womack said there’s been so much debate among writers about that meeting, and “now we have this complete record of Mal saying: ‘Here’s exactly what happened.'”
“If there is one day in my life I shall never forget, it is the day when the two biggest phenomena in showbiz met for the one and only time,” he recalled.
He went on: “The day the Beatles met Elvis Presley. I was there that day in El’s palatial Hollywood home. And that will always be the biggest day of all the years I have spent with the famous Beatles.”
This is Mal’s memory, and others in the room remembered it differently.
And the Beatles have had their own say. Here they talk about meeting Elvis in their own words, so you can compare.
The Beatles talk about the day they met Elvis
No film or photo of the meeting itself exists. What does exist is film from the same trip. Two days after the visit to Elvis’s house, a fan’s 8mm camera caught the Beatles on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.
Fan film of the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl that same week
Mal Evans spent years on the road with the most famous band in the world. Of all those years, the day he picked as the biggest was the one at Elvis’s house.
In December, readers will finally get to hear it the way he told it.