Long before he was a rock legend, Bruce Springsteen was a young singer on the road who’d try just about anything to meet his hero.
That hero was Elvis Presley. And one spring night in Memphis, Bruce decided he wasn’t leaving town without at least trying.
It was April 29, 1976. Bruce had just finished a concert in Memphis, and he was nowhere near ready for bed. So he grabbed his guitar player, Steve Van Zandt, and the two of them climbed into a cab. As Bruce later told a crowd, “We got a taxi to take us out to Elvis’ house.”
It was the middle of the night when they pulled up at Graceland. The gates were shut tight. But Bruce looked up toward the mansion and saw something that made him think his luck was in. In his words, “you could see a light on, and I figured that Elvis has gotta be up readin’ or somethin’.”
That was all the invitation he needed.
Bruce climbed over the stone wall and took off running up the long driveway toward the front door. He didn’t make it. Guards stepped out of the trees and stopped him halfway up.
Bruce has told this story more than once over the years, and he still sounds a little amazed by his own nerve. Hear him tell it himself on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2019, more than 40 years after that run up the driveway.
Bruce Springsteen tells Graham Norton about his night at Graceland
So what does a young rocker say to a guard who has just caught him on Elvis’s front lawn? He tries to impress him. “I had to pull out all the stops to try to make an impression, you know,” Bruce remembered.
He told the guard he was a guitar player with his own band. He even mentioned he’d been on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
The guard wasn’t moved. Bruce put it this way: “I don’t think he believed me, though, ’cause he just kinda stood there noddin'”.
Then came the line that ended the whole adventure. “No, no, Elvis isn’t home, he’s in Lake Tahoe”.
That’s what the guard said, anyway. And he wasn’t finished. According to Bruce, “he took me by the arm and put me back out on the street with Steve.”
So that was that. Two young musicians were back outside the gates in the dark, and Elvis was nowhere in sight.
The story found a whole new audience decades later. Austin Butler, who played Elvis in the 2022 movie “Elvis,” got to hear Bruce tell it in person. He said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “I had heard of this mythical story, and to hear it from him…”
Why would Bruce take a chance like that? He’s never been shy about what Elvis meant to him. “Elvis is my religion. But for him I’d be selling encyclopedias right now,” he once said.
Back in 1985, Bruce told the Graceland story on stage as his introduction to “Follow That Dream,” a song from Elvis’s 1962 movie of the same name. This fan-saved audio from a 1985 show lets you hear the Elvis song Bruce picked to go with it.
Bruce Springsteen sings Elvis’s “Follow That Dream” in 1985
Bruce never did get his answer from Elvis. He’s admitted the question stayed with him: “Later on, I used to wonder what I would have said if I’d knocked on the door and if Elvis had come to the door”.
He’s also said Elvis “came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear.” On that spring night in 1976, Bruce just wanted to tell him so in person.