{"id":615475,"date":"2026-04-30T15:26:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T15:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/615475\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T15:26:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T15:26:12","slug":"when-the-boss-almost-met-the-king-the-night-bruce-springsteen-raided-graceland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/615475\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Boss (almost) met the King: the night Bruce Springsteen raided Graceland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peer closely at the cover of Born to Run \u2013 Eric Meola<\/a>\u2019s enduring, black-and-white portrait of Bruce Springsteen<\/a> as he leans against his bandmate, sax player Clarence Clemons \u2013 and you\u2019ll notice a button clipped to the singer\u2019s Fender Telecaster guitar strap. Small and easily missed amid all that leather, it reads: \u201cElvis the King, King\u2019s Court, Elvis Presley<\/a> Fan Club of NYC.\u201d It\u2019s no great secret that from a young age the Boss had worshipped the King. So on the night of 29 April 1976, 50 years ago today, the then 26-year-old decided to demonstrate exactly how much.<\/p>\n

It was 3am. Springsteen had just played a show in Memphis \u2013 another stop on his Born to Run tour, the eight-month crusade that had turned a scrawny, scrappy bar-room poet from New Jersey into a cover star on both Time and Newsweek. Fizzing with post-gig adrenaline, he hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to an all-night diner. \u201cYeah, there’s one right out by Elvis’s house,\u201d the driver replied, as Springsteen later recalled on The Graham Norton Show. \u201cElvis\u2019s house?!\u201d he said. \u201cYou know where Elvis lives? Take us there, right now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Coming along for the ride was Steve Van Zandt<\/a>, fellow E Street Band guitarist, fellow Elvis obsessive. As the cab pulled up outside Graceland<\/a> on Elvis Presley Boulevard, the driver offered a word of counsel. \u201cThey\u2019ve got big dogs over there,\u201d Springsteen remembered him saying. \u201cDon\u2019t go over that wall.\u201d At the end of the driveway, a light shone in an upstairs window. Springsteen looked at Van Zandt. \u201cSteve,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019m going in.\u201d <\/p>\n

Springsteen has told the story from stages for years, usually as an introduction to \u201cFollow That Dream\u201d, his haunting rearrangement of an Elvis deep cut. And follow it he did, this young pretender, flush with his first great fame, sprinting across the immaculate lawn in the Memphis dark, propelled by hero worship and the reckless momentum of youth. <\/p>\n

He was seven years old when he first saw Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, shaking and swivelling his way through \u201cHound Dog\u201d, \u201cDon\u2019t Be Cruel\u201d and \u201cLove Me Tender\u201d. \u201cIt was the evening I realised a white man could make magic,\u201d he once told a SXSW crowd in a keynote address, \u201cthat you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to 1976 and Elvis was on the wane. Just as Springsteen had caught fire, his vignettes of blue-collar longing and highway romanticism burning up the radio, so the King was palpably struggling. Hollowed out by prescription drug dependency and nine gruelling tours in a single calendar year, he was running on legend alone. The performances still sold out; the Las Vegas residency was now in its eighth year. But gone was the seductive, lascivious electricity of the man who had snake-hipped his way into the world\u2019s consciousness \u2013 replaced by a figure clinging to the microphone stand, forgetting his lyrics and slurring his words.<\/p>\n

Not that any of this put Springsteen off. Having evaded the dogs, he was soon at the front door. A gentleman answered; the exchange was brief. \u201cIs Elvis home?\u201d Springsteen asked. He was not \u2013 the King, he was informed, was in Lake Tahoe. Still, Springsteen had one more card to play. \u201cYou can tell him,\u201d he recalled, \u201cthat Bruce Springsteen was here \u2013 and he may not know who that is, but I was just on the cover of Time and Newsweek.\u201d Unimpressed, the guard politely escorted him to the gate. \u201cThat\u2019s as close as I ever got to Elvis Presley,\u201d Springsteen said.<\/p>\n

\"BadgeBadge of honour: Springsteen shows off the Elvis pin on his leather jacket (Courtesy of Eric Meola)<\/p>\n

Well, not quite. He did see him from afar at a show in Philadelphia, Presley focusing not on his rollicking rock\u2019n\u2019roll hits but on gospel songs and ballads that felt, Springsteen noted, \u201cclosest to Elvis\u2019s heart\u201d, such as \u201cHow Great Thou Art\u201d and \u201cAmerican Trilogy\u201d. Moved by what he saw that night, Springsteen wrote a track that he hoped would help his hero rediscover flashes of his old flame. He called it \u201cFire\u201d. A demo was allegedly sent to Graceland, but Elvis died on 16 August 1977, aged 42, before it could have arrived.<\/p>\n

Recorded in New York that December by rockabilly singer Robert Gordon \u2013 with Link Wray on lead guitar and Springsteen himself on uncredited piano \u2013 \u201cFire\u201d eventually reached The Pointer Sisters, who took it to No 2 on the US charts in 1979. The King had at least known of Springsteen, and approved of him. \u201cHe liked Springsteen,\u201d his childhood friend George \u201cGK\u201d Klein later confirmed on SiriusXM\u2019s Elvis Radio. \u201cHe came on the scene real quick and hard and heavy, and Elvis liked him because he was a rock\u2019n\u2019roller.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley,\u201d Springsteen said. Fifty years on from gatecrashing Graceland, he remains among the handful of that era\u2019s giants still crafting sophisticated hymns of depth and illumination; still delivering three-hour shifts of blazing rock\u2019n\u2019roll. This was a man born to run \u2013 even from Elvis\u2019s guard dogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peer closely at the cover of Born to Run \u2013 Eric Meola\u2019s enduring, black-and-white portrait of Bruce Springsteen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-615475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}