By 1974, Elvis Presley was 39 years old, and something had shifted. He was still selling out arenas, still the King of Rock and Roll, but a new generation had arrived, and they were louder, younger, and hungrier than he was.
The biggest of them all was a British band called Led Zeppelin — four young men from England who played enormous, thunderous rock music, wrote “Stairway to Heaven,” and were at that moment selling concert tickets faster than Elvis was. And on the night of 11 May 1974, three of them bought seats to watch him work.
Elvis knew they were coming, and it clearly got to him a little. Before the show, he said something to the men around him that tells you exactly how he felt about it — part pride, part nerves: “Well, I may not be Led Zeppelin, but I can still pack ’em in.”
The reason they were there at all is wonderfully unglamorous. The same tour promoter, Concerts West, booked both Elvis and Led Zeppelin. So when Zeppelin were in Los Angeles launching their own record label, the promoter handed them free tickets to see Elvis at the Los Angeles Forum, plus passes to meet him afterward. Three of the band went: singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and drummer John Bonham.
Then, partway through the show, it happened. Elvis’s band came in raggedly at the start of a song. Rather than quietly counting them back in and moving on, Elvis stopped the whole thing and explained the problem out loud to twenty thousand people. It was captured on the recording of that night, and it is one of the funniest things he ever said on a stage: “Wait a minute. If we can start together, fellas, because we’ve got Led Zeppelin out there. Let’s try to look like we know what we’re doing, whether we do or not.”
When Led Zeppelin Met Elvis Presley | Letterman
After the show, the band was taken through the tunnels beneath the Forum and up into Elvis’s hotel suite. They brought their manager, Peter Grant — a former wrestler and bouncer who weighed around 360 pounds and terrified most people in the music business. He walked into the room, sat down without looking properly, and landed squarely on the lap of Elvis’s 58-year-old father, Vernon Presley, very nearly breaking the poor man’s legs by all accounts that broke the ice permanently.
Elvis normally gave visitors about ten minutes. He stayed with these four for two hours. Bonham talked cars with him. Page joked that Zeppelin never bothered with sound checks, and Plant admitted that when they did, all he really wanted to do was sing Elvis songs in the empty arena, because they sounded even bigger in there. Elvis asked which ones. Plant named a 1956 Elvis ballad called “Love Me” and sang him the opening line. Then, before they left, Elvis did something that must have felt unreal to four Englishmen: he asked Led Zeppelin for their autographs. They were for his six-year-old daughter, Lisa Marie.
And then came the bit Robert Plant has been telling for fifty years. The band said goodbye and headed down the corridor toward the lift. Suddenly Elvis swung back around the doorframe and shouted after him: “Hey Robert!” Then he started singing — treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel — and Plant, standing in a hotel hallway in Los Angeles, sang the answering lines straight back to him down the corridor.
Plant’s description of that moment has never changed in half a century of retellings. “We were all crying.”