“Miles and miles of toilets”: the day George Harrison met a god in a corridor in Las Vegas
If you had experimented with mind-altering substances to the extent of George Harrison, you might be on first-name terms with God himself. During the height of his hippiedom, though, the closest the former Beatle came to meeting a higher being was in the corridors of Las Vegas.
Given its penchant for lawlessness, gambling, and a general underbelly of seediness, you would assume that Las Vegas is a place devoid of any spiritualism, but Harrison seemed to bring that spirit to wherever he laid his hat. With the spiritual awakening that he experienced during the mid-1960s, during The Beatles’ journey to India, the guitarist was operating on a higher plane of existence than his various contemporaries during the early 1970s.
There was never any mistake, though, that Harrison’s faith was always rooted in rock and roll. It was that music, after all, that had afforded the songwriter virtually everything in his life. What’s more, rock stars – by and large – tend to be far less elusive than religious figures or higher beings.
So, rather than being on some week-long trail in the mountains of India, or an exhaustive pilgrimage to some far-flung corner of the globe, Harrison had a religious experience in the unexpected surroundings of Las Vegas.
Few names are quite as ubiquitous with 1970s Vegas as Elvis Presley; it was surrounded by all those neon lights and roulette wheels that ‘The King’ resurrected his ailing career, becoming a staple of the city’s nightlife, and rubbing shoulders with a new generation of rock revolutionaries, like George Harrison.
“When I saw him, I was like a hippie,” the songwriter once recalled of his first meeting with Presley, whose work he had admired long before The Beatles ever set foot on a stage. “I had all this denim on, and I had long hair down to here. It was in the early ‘70s. I went backstage to meet him and, you know, those big dressing rooms, miles and miles of toilets and stuff.”
It was within that corridor of lavatories that Harrison came face to face with his rock icon: “I was sitting there talking to the guys again, and he was nowhere to be seen, then finally he came around the corner,” he recalled. “He had that big white outfit with all the gold things and big belt buckle. All his hair was black, and he was all tanned and stuff, and he seemed like, I thought I was meeting Vishnu or Krishna or somebody.”
Exactly what Harrison said to Presley during that fateful meeting is up for interpretation. It is worth remembering, of course, that ‘The King’ had something of a rivalry with The Beatles during the early 1960s, with the thinking that the Fab Four had displaced him from the top of the rock food chain.
By the time the group had split up, and by the time that Harrison had run into Presley in Las Vegas, though, the white jumpsuited rockstar was able to appreciate the quality of The Beatles, going so far as to cover some of their tracks, including Harrison’s ‘Something’. For all his spiritual sensibilities, then, meeting Elvis Presley remained one of the ultimate religious experiences in George Harrison’s life, even if it did take place in a corridor in Las Vegas.
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