When The Beatles first started, back when they were just teenagers, Elvis Presley was one of their biggest influences. They were ecstatic when they finally got to meet him on one of their trips to the United States, and his songs were big favorites of the band for a long time. However, as time went by, that bond between the rock legends soured. Elvis’ career changed drastically in his later years, and the Fab Four, particularly John Lennon, were disillusioned with him. Lennon, who was never one to hold his tongue, had very strong opinions about the King.
The Elvis Presley Song John Lennon Despised
Out of the Fab Four, John Lennon was probably the bluntest. He always expressed his opinion, no matter how ruthless, about politics, music, love, and anything in between. He got more brutal after The Beatles broke up, turning even against his best friend and collaborator, Paul McCartney. But even in the early ’60s, when he was yet to become an international icon, he had no qualms about expressing his feelings, even about the most popular singer in the world at the time.
He was, admittedly, a big Elvis Presley fan in the ’50s, and the King was one of his biggest inspirations when he first started. Reportedly, when he first met Paul McCartney, one of the things that attracted Lennon to him was that he “looked like Elvis.” But despite his admiration for the man and his songs, Lennon disliked a lot of things about the way Elvis presented himself, and felt like he had lost his spark in the ’60s.
In an interview with Juke Box Jury in 1963, he spoke candidly about Elvis Presley’s song, “(You’re The) Devil in Disguise,” saying that “I used to go mad on Elvis, like all other groups, but not now. I don’t like this. And I hate songs with ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in it — you know, those lyrics. She walks, she talks. I don’t like that. And I don’t like the double beat: doom-cha doom-cha, that bit. It’s awful. Poor ol’ Elvis.”
He seemed disappointed about the direction Elvis’ career had taken, but that didn’t taint his love for his older music. “I’ve got all his early records and I keep playing them,” he added in the same interview, but insisted that “he mustn’t make another like [Devil in Disguise] . Somebody said today he sounds like Bing Crosby now, and he does.” When asked if sounding like Crosby was a bad thing, he replied,“Well, for Elvis… yes. I don’t like him anymore.”
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This legend’s attitude certainly epitomized “Suspicious Minds.”
John Lennon Disliked Elvis’ Stage Acts
Lennon’s dislike for Elvis Presley extended beyond just certain songs. While he loved his early rock music, he was never a big fan of Elvis’ stage presence and even admitted that The Beatles tried to go the opposite direction. “This is interesting: in the early days in England, all the groups were like Elvis and a backing group, and The Beatles deliberately didn’t move like Elvis,” he said in an interview in 1971. “That was our policy because we found it stupid and bulls***.”
When they had the success they did, Lennon was hopeful it meant the era of theatrical frontmen was over. But soon enough, The Rolling Stones burst that bubble. “Then Mick Jagger came out and resurrected the ‘bulls*** movement,’ wiggling your a**. So then people began to say The Beatles were passé because they don’t move. But we did it as a conscious move.”
John Lennon wasn’t the only one with conflicting feelings about Elvis. In The Beatles Anthology,McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr talk about the moment they met him, and while they were starstruck, they all remember the experience as a little disappointing. Starr, in particular, expressed that he was hurt that Elvis apparently felt “threatened” by the success of The Beatles, and claimed that the singer had collaborated with the U.S. government to take legal action against the band and have them banned from the country. Harrison, for his part, said that when they met Elvis, it became obvious that they could never have become friends, unlike they had with other people they looked up to, like Bob Dylan. “Never meet your heroes” is a phrase that certainly applies here, but regardless of how the relationship (or lack thereof) ended, without Elvis’s influence, The Beatles wouldn’t have been the same.
