In 1974, Alice Cooper received a phone call from Elvis Presley’s agent, inviting him to meet the King of Rock and Roll at his suite at the Hilton in Las Vegas.
When Cooper went to the hotel, where Elvis and his ‘Memphis Mafia’ entourage were occupying several floors, he found himself sharing a lift with his friend Liza Minnelli, rock and roll pioneer Chubby Checker, and porn star Linda Lovelace, of Deep Throat fame.
“I remember thinking, Three of us are going to be coming back downstairs tonight, and one person’s going to stay up there,” Cooper recalled while telling the story to Classic Rock‘s Geoff Barton. “I wonder who it’s going to be?”
Cooper also told the story in detail during an appearance hosting BBC TV music quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, in 2016, but suggested that the meeting took place in 1970. This doesn’t actually seem at all plausible, given that Deep Throat wasn’t released until June 1972, meaning that Linda Lovelace wasn’t famous in 1970, so let’s assume here that 1974 was the correct year, as he told Geoff Barton.
But we digress…
“So we went up, and they search us for guns,” the singer told teams captained by comedians Noel Fielding and Phil Jupitus, “which was kinda silly, because there were guns everywhere once you got in.”
“When he came in the room he was Elvis, he wasn’t the fat Elvis, he was Elvis. He goes, ‘Hey man, you’re the cat with the snake, ain’t ya?’ I said, Yeah, and he said, ‘That’s cool man, I wish I’d have thought of that, that’s cool man.’ He said, ‘Here, I wanna show you something.’ We go in the kitchen, he opens a drawer, and takes out a loaded snub-nosed .38, puts it in my hand, and says, ‘I’m gonna show you how to kick this gun out of somebody’s hand.’
While the show’s guests absorb this information, Cooper pauses, and then says, “The little devil here on my shoulder says, Shoot him! The little angel over here says, Don’t kill him, just wound him. But before I could decide what to do, I was on the floor, and he had his boot on my throat. I was like, [choking voice] That’s great Elvis, that’s great.
“Of course, only three of us came down on the elevator that night,” Cooper said, adding the punchline, “I don’t know what he did with Chubby Checker all night…”
When the laughs died down, Cooper described Elvis as “an amazing character” and “a very funny guy”.
Watch the clip below.
