Alice Cooper was the most notorious shock rocker in America, famous for performing with a live snake. One night in Las Vegas, he received a message he did not expect: “Elvis Presley wants to meet you.” He went. Within an hour, he was standing in a hotel kitchen holding a loaded .38 revolver, with the King of Rock and Roll telling him to point it at him. And for a few genuinely dangerous seconds, Alice Cooper stood there thinking about pulling the trigger.
The evening got strange before he even reached the room. Cooper arrived at the Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis and his entourage were occupying several floors, and stepped into a lift already containing three other guests: Liza Minnelli, Chubby Checker and the actress Linda Lovelace.
Cooper’s own thought as the doors closed is perfect. “Three of us are going to be coming back downstairs tonight, and one person’s going to stay up there. I wonder who it’s going to be?”
Alice Cooper On Meeting Elvis
They were frisked for weapons on arrival, which Cooper found hilarious about ten seconds later. “I don’t know why they bothered — when we got inside the place was full of guns.”
Then Elvis appeared, greeted him warmly and correctly identified him as “the kid with the snake.” A moment later he beckoned Cooper away from the others and into the kitchen. “He opens the drawer, takes out a loaded snub-nosed .38, puts it in my hand, and says, ‘I’m gonna show you how to kick this gun out of somebody’s hand.’”
When Alice Cooper and Liza Minnelli Met Elvis in Las Vegas – Greatest Rock & Roll Stories
And there it was. A rock star holding a live weapon on the most famous man alive, in a kitchen, with security in the next room. Cooper has described the two voices in his head ever since, and he tells it as comedy now, though it was clearly anything but at the time. One voice said this is history, do it, you will always be the man who shot Elvis. The other said you cannot; it is Elvis Presley — maybe just wound him and you will only get a few years.
He never got to decide. Elvis had spent years training in karate, and he was not bluffing. “A fraction of a second later Elvis did a flying kick on the gun and sent it flying, before tripping me and pinning me to the ground by my neck.” Then, standing over him, he delivered the line: “That’s how you stop a man with a gun.” Cooper’s own description of the aftermath is the funniest part of the whole thing. “I was on the floor, and he had his boot on my throat. I was like, ‘That’s great, Elvis. That’s great.’”
They got up. Nobody was hurt. And here is the part that lifts this above a mad anecdote. Elvis then offered to show Cooper his most prized possession — and produced a set of X-rays showing a broken jaw and ankle he had caused in a recent scuffle. Cooper looked at them and thought, “This is your prized possession?” That was the moment it landed for him. As he later put it, Elvis had no life outside his own capsule. He could not go to the cinema. He could not play pool. He could not do anything.
Cooper, now in his late seventies and a churchgoing Bible study teacher, still tells the story, and his summary has grown gentler with the years. “Elvis was the ultimate American icon. But sometimes I think the guy was just lonely.”