Mick Jagger Regrets Lennon’s Elvis Advice

“They were all high,” O’Brien said of the Beatles lore. “The Beatles were high and none of them have their story straight.”

Jagger said Lennon, however, was clear about one lesson he took from the night.

“I remember John telling me, ‘Yeah you know, you should never meet your heroes,’” Jagger recalled. “‘I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.’”

Jagger now thinks he made the wrong call

At the time, Jagger took the warning seriously. Looking back, he is less impressed by his choice.

“And so I didn’t,” he said. “I took John’s advice, which was really stupid of me, really. I mean, I would love to have met Elvis! Why did I take John’s advice? At the time, it seemed to ring.”

O’Brien added that Lennon’s disappointment in Presley has long been part of Beatles history. During the band’s first major trip to America, Lennon was reportedly fixated on meeting Elvis.

“Famously, in the ’64 tour, the minute they got to America, John kept saying, ‘Where’s Elvis, where’s Elvis,’” O’Brien said. “That’s the only person he wanted to meet. Then they met Elvis in Bel-Air at his house. John walked out and said, ‘Where’s Elvis?’ because that was not the guy he wanted to meet.”

O’Brien summed it up plainly: “He disappointed him.”

Jagger said Lennon repeated the story to him more than once.

The Elvis Jagger kept in his head

Presley died in 1977, meaning Jagger never got another chance to test Lennon’s warning for himself. The Rolling Stones singer said the story shaped how he thought about meeting one of his own musical heroes.

“It sort of put me off,” Jagger said. “I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself. My version of Elvis. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was.”

Still, Jagger now seems to know he may have let someone else’s disappointment close a door he didn’t need to close.

“Maybe my Elvis version would’ve been different,” he said.

That is the small sting in the story. Lennon met Presley and felt let down. Jagger stayed away and ended up with his own regret. Advice from famous people, as ever, is only useful until it turns into someone else’s missed opportunity.