Meeting Elvis Presley was described as "the biggest day of all the years I have spent with the famous Beatles" by Mal Evans, the band's loyal road manager. This revelation comes from a memoir Evans had planned to publish with the group's permission before his death in 1976 at the age of 40. Evans died in Los Angeles after being shot by police; distraught over his marriage breakdown, it is believed he committed "suicide by cop" after repeatedly pointing an air rifle at officers.
Fifty years later, the memoir is finally being made available to the public. Evans's family provided the materials to Kenneth Womack, a leading Beatles expert and author of numerous books on the band. Evans had originally worked as a bouncer at Liverpool's Cavern Club before becoming the group's roadie during their early days. He meticulously documented his time with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr through diaries, notebooks, thousands of photographs, and by collecting discarded lyric sheets and receipts.
For the memoir, Evans hired a stenographer and dictated his recollections into a portable cassette recorder in 1975. The resulting manuscript spans approximately 95,000 words. Although Womack utilized this material for his biography of Evans published in 2023, the text itself will be released this December under the title With the Beatles. Womack described Evans as the band's first archivist, noting that the book takes readers into the heart of Beatlemania with powerful, unfiltered accounts.
A central passage details the fabled meeting between the Beatles and Elvis Presley in Bel Air in August 1965, which Womack calls a record of "rock's greatest heavyweights of all time." Evans idolized Elvis more than the Beatles musically, writing extensively about the event. He recalled that Elvis played Beatles LPs before finding guitars for each member, after which they improvised beat music that made the place rock. Evans wrote that witnessing the two biggest phenomena in showbiz meet was a day he would never forget.
The memoir chronicles the group's journey from the Help! album through the Magical Mystery Tour EP to the Get Back single sessions and their final studio years. It also includes harrowing accounts of their tour of the Philippines, where the band faced danger after unintentionally insulting First Lady Imelda Marcos by declining an official invitation. Evans described a morning of terror where promoter staff brandished automatic pistols to demand autographed photos.
Evans recounted waiting for the Beatles at the airport before being jostled and jabbed by men looking to cause trouble due to the previous evening's fiasco. He wrote that seeing his beloved band treated so roughly was heartbreaking, though he felt it inadvisable to retaliate under the circumstances. Womack has pieced together the memoir from material stored in six massive boxes, which will feature about 400 photographs, including some never before seen.
Sources: The Guardian World.