Elvis Presley and The Beatles are the best-selling music artists of all time and they met only once. The five talented young men crossed paths on August 27, 1965 at The King’s Perugia Way home in Bel Air, Los Angeles on his invitation. Paul McCartney remembered a “darn cool” star who inspired the Fab Four in their youth and left them starstruck upon meeting their hero.
McCartney claims a year later that it was the rock and roll legend who actually inspired the Fab Four to quit touring for good.
At the end of their 1966 US tour, The Beatles had really had enough of live concerts and wondered what they could do to avoid more.
Reminiscing of their final show at Candlestick Park in California, McCartney previously told The Adam Buxton podcast: “It was wet, it was raining, we were stuck on some little tin pot stage in the middle of this great big baseball arena. We couldn’t hear ourselves, we weren’t having any fun. And then to add to the indignity of it all, we were driven away in the back of a steel-lined meat wagon.”
As for the solution to ending their touring, McCartney said: “And what happened was we’d heard that Elvis Presley had sent his gold-plated Cadillac out on tour. He didn’t go with it, he just sent it out! And people would flock to see Elvis’ Cadillac. And then it would go to the next tour and those people would flock
“That is brilliant! Only Elvis could have thought of that. What we should do is we should make a killer record and that can do the touring for us. So that’s what Sgt Pepper was all about.”
“It’s crazy to think that 52 years later we are looking back on this project with such fondness and a little bit of amazement at how four guys, a great producer and his engineers could make such a lasting piece of art,” says Paul McCartney.
"What really happened was I was coming back from a trip abroad with our roadie, Mal Evans, just the two of us together on the plane. And we were eating and he mumbled to me, asked me to pass the salt and pepper. And I misheard him. He said [mumbles] 'saltandpepper'.
I go, 'Sergeant Pepper?' I thought he said, 'Sergeant Pepper'. I went, 'Oh! Wait a minute, that's a great idea!' So we had a laugh about it, then I started thinking about Sergeant Pepper as a character. I thought it would be a very interesting idea for us to assume alter egos for this album we were about to make.
