“On his knees”: The only rock star John Lennon bowed down to
It’s 1965, and John Lennon is perusing the entrance hall of Graceland, traipsing his finger through a film of dust on a commemorative ‘The King’ vase, awaiting Elvis Presley. When his former hero does arrive, the animosity is almost instant. In time, Elvis would go to the ultimate extreme and offer to serve as a spy for the FBI in a covert mission to have Lennon and his hippie cohorts in The Beatles deported. Sometimes, the old adage of never meeting your heroes really does stand up.
“Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis. Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles,” the singer once exclaimed. But as soon as he saw all the ‘All the Way With LBJ’ political paraphernalia in his lobby, that notion began to fade, and he dwelt on the dwindling returns of The King’s back catalogue. According to Tony Barrow, the former Beatles press officer who had organised this fateful tour excursion, “John asked what had happened to the old rock ’n’ roll Elvis, who at that point was mainly singing the soundtracks to his films. He was half-joking, but he meant it.”
Along with the eye-rolls at the LBJ-clad lobby, this prickly comment set the tone for a grim encounter that turned an old hero into a new villain. In truth, even before they entered Graceland, all of The Beatles had cooled off on the old King. George Harrison would assert that he was usurped by the rather more enlightened Bob Dylan, bemoaning that you couldn’t ask Elvis about the meaning of life. But none of the Fab Four were quite as iconoclastic as Lennon—it was part of his schtick not to have heroes in a spiritual sense.
But there were some deities out there who provided the bespectacled Beatle with such religious experiences that he had to ditch this dogma and bow down to kiss their feet. What a sight! Lennon, the Godhead himself, engaging in the ultimate act of subordination, ten stories beneath the high and mighty Jerry Lee Lewis. As Lewis himself would profess, without ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ “rock ‘n’ roll would be boring“. That’s a view that Lennon seemingly proscribed to after seeing him live in Los Angeles.
The story goes that the newsman Elliot Mintz had recently done an interview with Jerry Lee Lewis, and the pair got on fine and dandy. Another fellow he had once interviewed and hit it off with was Lennon, and he recalled the soft spot that the Beatle had for ‘The Killer’. So, he told the star, idling on the cusp of his Lost Weekend phase, that his old hero was about to play The Roxy. Lennon eagerly implored whether he could get him in—that request alone hints at a lesser-known humility in Lennon—a shier side in the face of the piano stomper himself.
“I had only three childhood idols, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee, and I haven’t seen any live,” Lennon reportedly told his date for the evening. The Beatle and his buddy hurried to the venue. He watched in awe as The Killer ignited the room like a firecracker thrown into a mailbox. His playing was about as orderly as the top shelf of a dwarf’s fridge and all the better for it. Lennon watched on agog. This was the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll that had stirred him towards greatness when he was knee-high. Soon enough, he’d be knee-high once more.
“I looked at [Lennon’s] face and he was watching Jerry Lee the way a child would open a Christmas present,” Mintz recalls. Naturally, the next step was to introduce them. But something peculiar happened as they headed backstage and set about shaking hands. “I looked over at John and he wasn’t there,” Mintz explains. “And I looked down, and John was on his knees… kissing Jerry Lee Lewis’ boots.”
A little “embarrassed”, Lewis quipped, “Now, now, son, that’s not necessary”. But his point had been made; Lennon was bowing at the altar of all that had made him. It goes without saying that the altar was troubling and there are nettlesome implications to be found in this little vignette. But in a backroom at The Roxy, they mattered not as the present of rock ‘n’ roll royalty paid tribute to its flaming past, relinquishing ego for a moment and heralding a show that was not only worth worshipping but worth remembering as the kindling to a counterculture revolution that gave the world a sniff of freedom.
Comically, Lewis would later remark, “I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth”.
