How John Lennon made Elvis fly into “a fit of rage” every time his name was mentioned

Posted On February 21, 2025February 21, 2025

No one likes to hear that they’re yesterday’s news after years at the top. It’s disheartening for any artist to see one of their albums manage to slip even one spot down the charts, but as soon as the new blood starts coming in and audiences start flocking to them instead, it’s usually enough for someone to wonder what they had to offer in the first place. And despite being known as one of the monarchs of rock and roll, even Elvis Presley had moments when the new school of artists started getting to him.

Then again, fame may have been both the best and worst thing to ever happen to Presley. The world may have fawned over his salacious gyrating back in the day, but when purely listening to his music, songs like ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ set the precedent for what rock and roll would become, even if he did borrow a lot of his melodies from black R&B artists who had come before him.

If there was one ex-factor to Presley’s music, though, it was that it was against the grain compared to every other white singer at the time. Sure, Pat Boone may have made his own version of ‘Tutti Frutti’ like Presley had, but when looking at what ‘The King’ did, Boone’s version is the kind of rock and roll tune that sounded like it was being sung by someone who had never felt rebellious in their lives.

But if Presley managed to get the girls screaming whenever he played, what would that be like if an entire band had that kind of star power? While The Beatles probably didn’t think they were going to dethrone Presley at the time, their charming attitude and arrival in America after the assassination of President Kennedy was exactly what the country needed to get over their collective grief.

Even if the band admired Presley, that didn’t mean they shared the same beliefs as him, and once they had a voice in their own voices, John Lennon was going to do everything he could to speak out against the Vietnam War. It was time for someone to start preaching about peace, but no matter how much he expressed his disdain for war, that wasn’t going to earn Lennon any points with his idol.

When the band first met ‘The King’, journalist Chris Hutchins remembered Presley and Lennon getting off on the wrong foot immediately, saying, “John had annoyed Presley by making his anti-war feelings known the moment he stepped in. Lennon hated President Lyndon B Johnson for raising the stakes in the Vietnam War … As we left and were walking down the drive, [Colonel Tom] Parker called out after me: ‘Tell the fans it was a wonderful night.’ John turned to me and said: ‘Tell them it was crap.’”

From then on, Presley eventually did a massive U-turn on Lennon, eventually going into “a fit of rage” whenever he saw the Beatle on television and even breaking out his gun and firing bullets at the screen if he heard something he didn’t like. If Presley thought that Lennon should keep politics out of the music, though, he was in for a rude awakening.

For the rest of his career, Lennon knew he had a vehicle to speak his mind. Whenever he worked on a new record, he made sure it had more depth than the typical love song and talked about the greater problems with the world. It might not have been Presley’s idea of how to make a career, but it was hard to argue with the practices that Lennon preached about wanting a happier world for all of us to share in.

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