Meeting Elvis was ‘my biggest day with the Beatles’, says road manager’s book

Mal Evans’s tale of historic meeting among revelations in forthcoming memoir unpublished before his death in 1976

Meeting Elvis Presley was “the biggest day of all the years I have spent with the famous Beatles”, the band’s loyal road manager wrote.

It is among recollections in a memoir that Mal Evans had planned to publish, with the band’s permission, before his death in 1976, aged 40, in a shooting by the Los Angeles police. Distraught over the breakup of his marriage, it is believed to have been “suicide by cop” after he repeatedly pointed an air rifle at police.

Now, 50 years later, that memoir is to be published for the first time, having been made available by Evans’s family to Kenneth Womack, one of the world’s foremost Beatles experts and author of numerous books on them.

Evans became the Beatles’ roadie from their early days at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, where he had been a bouncer.

He wrote of working with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in diaries and notebooks, while taking thousands of photographs and scooping up discarded lyric sheets, receipts and other ephemera when they were on the road and in the recording studio.

For his memoir, he had hired a stenographer. Womack has all the recordings that Evans dictated into a portable cassette recorder in 1975. The memoir manuscript spans about 95,000 words. Although Womack drew on it for his Evans biography in 2023, the text itself will finally be published in December, titled With the Beatles.

Describing Evans as the Beatles’ first archivist, Womack told the Guardian: “It’s the book Mal was going to publish, taking us into the heart of Beatlemania, reminding us how electrifying it was. He pulls no punches. He shows us the Beatles. It’s very powerful. It’s a treasure trove of new material.”

Its passages include Evans’s first-hand account of the fabled meeting between the Beatles and Elvis – “rock’s greatest heavyweights of all time”, Womack said.

He added: “Mal loved Elvis more than he loved the Beatles, in terms of music. So, for that reason, when they meet Elvis in Bel Air in August 1965, Mal writes page upon page about the experience and what happened.

“There’s been so much debate among writers about that meeting – and now we have this complete record of Mal saying: ‘Here’s exactly what happened.’”

Evans idolised Elvis, writing in one passage: “If there is one day in my life I shall never forget, it is the day when the two biggest phenomena in showbiz met for the one and only time.

“The day the Beatles met Elvis Presley. I was there that day in El’s palatial Hollywood home. And that will always be the biggest day of all the years I have spent with the famous Beatles.”

He recalled that Elvis played them Beatles LPs before finding guitars for each of them. Evans listened in awe as “they began to make the place rock with … improvised beat music”.

Evans’s memoir follows the group from the Help! album through the Magical Mystery Tour EP to the Get Back single sessions and the final studio years.

In one chapter, he wrote of the band’s perilous tour of the Philippines, after they caused unintentional insult in turning down an invitation to an official event with the first lady, Imelda Marcos.

“A large number of the promoter’s staff were wearing automatic pistols in their back pockets … this was brought home to me personally the morning of our departure,” he wrote.

“I had just finished packing when one of the gentlemen entered my room asking for autographed pictures.

“I was in the middle of explaining that I had given away most of the photographs, keeping a few for the plane crew on the way home, when I was cut short by the same gentleman brandishing a gun in my face and repeating the demand. I couldn’t give them to him fast enough.

“This was the prelude to a morning of terror … I waited for the Beatles to arrive, then we proceeded to immigration. We were climbing a stairway inside the airport when suddenly … a dozen men appeared to impede our progress, and started to jostle us.

“It was obvious that they were looking to cause trouble … because of the fiasco the previous evening with the first lady.

“They were standing on our toes, jabbing us with elbows, generally giving us a bad time … I would give my right arm for any of those boys but, under these circumstances, it was most inadvisable to retaliate in any way whatsoever. To stand there and see my beloved Beatles treated so roughly was heartbreaking.”

Womack has pieced together the memoir from material that Evans had stored in “six massive boxes”. It will feature about 400 photographs, including some that have never been seen before.