What was the key difference between Elvis Presley and The Beatles?
Despite being the pinnacle of boomer nostalgia acts, there’s a world of difference between The Beatles and Elvis Presley. One could list the multitude of ways that the two biggest acts of their generation lived in two separate worlds from each other. Like whether they wrote their own songs, how much they toured, and what their influence on the culture was, but these are all merely symptoms of the core difference between the two acts.
Fundamentally, Presley belonged to an earlier era of showbiz where the artist was a prop for his record label and management. For The Fabs, it was the other way around. It all came from an almost Machiavellian level of con-artistry, playing the established system’s greed against each other in a bid for control over their own art. By developing themselves as songwriters, The Beatles could at first present themselves as a record label’s wet dream, an act that could sell a bunch of records without paying for outside songwriters.
Of course, Ringo Starr’s lot played the game at first, their first handful of records containing as many covers as Lennon/McCartney originals. However, the combination of writing undeniably brilliant songs and selling them by the truckload was a lethal one. One that meant when the band wanted to start experimenting with their art, the labels and management didn’t have them by the short and curlies the way that Elvis’ handlers had him.
It seems slightly ludicrous to state that Elvis’ career was a missed opportunity. To this day, he is one of the most famous names music has ever produced, and yet no matter how many records he sold, he was still utterly beholden to his corporate overlords. The man himself was reportedly much more thoughtful, self-aware and creative than his reputation suggests in some circles. One who probably envied the level of creative control The Beatles were taking to ludicrous levels of success in the 1960s while he was chained to Hollywood, making godawful movies for nearly the entire decade.
While he’d (thankfully) leave the movie set behind, by the 1970s, he was still as in thrall to Colonel Tom Parker as he ever was. The Beatles had the privilege of splitting up when they couldn’t go on any longer, which Presley could not. In 1972, Elvis was gearing up for a concert at Madison Square Garden and was introduced to a man he’d first met nearly a decade earlier, the newly solo Beatle George Harrison. In an interview with Creem conducted in 1987, Harrison recalled this meeting with conflicting emotions.
Sat in the locker rooms of MSG, Harrison describes Elvis as “about eight feet tall and his hair was black, and his tan was perfect, and he had this big white suit, a gold belt about four feet wide, and he was towering above me and I just put a hand out and said ‘Hello, Elvis, how are you?’” – Despite Harrison being in full hippy mode at the time, looking in his words like “a little rag-man”, something about this version of Elvis didn’t sit well with the bullshit-averse Harrison.
He goes on to say, “I wanted to say to him, ‘Why don’t you just come out in your jeans and your black shirt, get rid of all them horrible women singers in your band, all them horrible trumpet players and just have James Burton and the drummer and the bass player and the piano player? Just come out and do ‘That’s All Right, Mama.’ But instead, he came out and did ‘I did it my way’. Oh, Jesus.”
Everything we know about Elvis today suggests he would have jumped at the chance to follow Harrison’s advice. As incisive as Harrison was, perhaps he couldn’t see what we now can—that his position as a former Beatle, with complete creative freedom and the ability to do precisely as he pleased, was a once-in-a-generation privilege. Not even the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll could claim the same.
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