How Bruce Springsteen Tried and Failed To Meet Elvis Presley Early in His Career

Elvis Presley, what else can we say about the man that hasn’t already been said far more than a thousand times? He was a complicated man, with both positive and negative qualities, but above all, he was a major influence on the future generation of rock ‘n’ rollers. We’ve posed this question before, and we will pose it again: what aspiring musician of the 50s and 60s didn’t receive influence from Elvis Presley? Seemingly not too many, and one incredibly outspoken musician who has cited Elvis as a major source of inspiration is Bruce Springsteen.

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Springsteen has praised The King on a plethora of different occasions. Furthermore, Springsteen wrote “Fire” as an homage to Presley, as well as to dive deep into the pitfalls of fame and desire. Needless to say, Springsteen had a great deal of admiration for The King, so it comes as no surprise that he ambitiously tried to meet him during a quick stop in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1975.

Bruce Springsteen Hopped the Gate and Ran Right up to Elvis’ Front Door

Every individual who has a hero has certainly had dreams of meeting that hero, and folks often romanticize those dreams into impractical hypotheticals. Well, Bruce Springsteen made such a hypothetical into a reality when he hopped the gates at Graceland in hopes of meeting Elvis Presley.

Recalling the moment, Springsteen stated on the Graham Norton Show, “I said, ‘Well, when is the opportunity going to come again?’ Jumped over the wall, ran up the drive, got to the front door, and I was just about to knock on the front door, and a security guy came out of the bushes.” “He said, ‘Can I help you?’… I said, ‘Yes, is Elvis here?’”

Unfortunately, Elvis was in Las Vegas during Springsteen’s unscheduled visit, but that didn’t stop Bruce from relaying a message. “I said, ‘Well, okay, can you tell him, and I generally don’t like to do this, but that Bruce Springsteen was here. He may not know who that is, but I was just on the cover of Time and Newsweek,’” said Springsteen.

“That was the closest I ever got to Elvis Presley,” he concluded. Two years after that visit, in 1977, Elvis Presley passed away. Springsteen never got to meet the man who helped push him to pursue a music career, but at least he tried. Not many could probably say that, especially in the way Springsteen did.

Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns