Mick Jagger says he still regrets never meeting Elvis Presley, and now he is putting the blame on John Lennon. In a new interview on Conan O’Brien’s Needs A Friend podcast, Jagger said Lennon told him he should never meet his heroes and urged him not to meet Presley.
That advice stuck. Jagger said he followed it, then later decided the choice was “really stupid of me, really.” He added, “I’d have loved to have met Elvis!” and said he did not want his own version of Presley shattered the way Lennon’s had been after the Beatles’ August 1965 stop to meet Presley during their second American tour. Jagger’s account gives a fresh, first-person answer to a rock-era question that has lingered for decades: the meeting never happened because he listened to Lennon.
The timing of the remarks matters because they came as part of Jagger’s promotion for the Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues, and because they place a long-rumored omission in plain language. Lennon’s warning was blunt, recalling Presley as “a total anti-climax” and saying he seemed uninterested and uncommunicative. Jagger said he understood the point at the time, even if he now thinks the wiser move would have been to ignore it.
There was another layer to his reasoning, and it was more personal than practical. Jagger said he wanted to keep his own version of Presley to himself, untouched by disappointment or reality. That is the friction in his regret: he wanted to preserve the image, then came to see that the preserved image cost him a real encounter he would have valued. The old fascination still sounds alive in his words, but so does the knowledge that the chance is gone for good.
Jagger also used the interview to revisit another star who never stayed at arm’s length, David Bowie. He said Bowie was “SO competitive, much more competitive,” and described him playing “Jean Genie” during a very Stones-y period. Jagger said he told Bowie, “God, you’ve nicked all my things,” and Bowie shot back, “Yeah, I know, man. I know. It’s like a homage to you.” The exchange fits the same pattern as the Elvis story: admiration, rivalry and a clear sense that the best-known names in rock were always watching one another.
Jagger has also been in the news for a smaller, stranger live moment. He said he had dinner at an Oxford College before singing at a small pub in Oxford, after a student invited him along with an Irish band when he mentioned he played mandolin. He said he performed a song he had recorded after learning no one there was singing, and had to rehearse it in his head because he had not sung it in years. The performance added a lighter note to the interview, but the Elvis regret was the line that landed hardest: after all these years, Jagger still sounds as if he knows exactly which door he left closed.
