Mal Evans memoir recalls Beatles’ meeting with Elvis and life on the road

An encounter between the Beatles and Elvis Presley was the high point of Mal Evans’s years working for the band, according to a memoir by their road manager that will be published for the first time in December. Titled With the Beatles, the book recounts his experiences alongside the group, from recording sessions to the dangers they encountered on tour.

Evans had intended to release the memoir with the Beatles’ permission before his death in 1976 at the age of 40. He was shot by Los Angeles police after repeatedly pointing an air rifle at officers. Distraught following the breakdown of his marriage, he is believed to have provoked the shooting deliberately. His family subsequently made the memoir available to Beatles author Kenneth Womack.

The manuscript runs to approximately 95,000 words. Evans hired a stenographer for the project and dictated his memories into a portable cassette recorder in 1975. Womack holds those recordings and used the manuscript while writing his 2023 biography of Evans. He has assembled the forthcoming memoir from material Evans kept in six large boxes. The book will contain about 400 photographs, some previously unseen.

Evans’s association with the Beatles began in their early Liverpool days, when he worked as a bouncer at the Cavern Club before becoming their roadie. He documented life with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in notebooks and diaries. He also took thousands of photographs and collected abandoned lyric sheets, receipts and other items from their travels and studio work. Womack regards him as the band’s first archivist.

Among the memoir’s detailed recollections is the group’s August 1965 visit to Presley in Bel Air. Womack said Evans preferred Presley’s music even to that of the Beatles, helping explain the extensive account he left of their meeting. Evans remembered Presley playing Beatles LPs for his guests and then finding guitars for them. He watched as the musicians began playing improvised music together, an experience he considered unforgettable.

Other passages describe a far more threatening encounter during the Beatles’ Philippines tour. The band had unintentionally offended first lady Imelda Marcos by declining an invitation to an official event. Evans recalled that, on the morning of their departure, a member of the promoter’s staff demanded autographed photographs and pointed a gun at him when he explained that he had few left.

The intimidation continued at the airport, Evans wrote, where roughly a dozen men blocked their way on a staircase, jostled them, stood on their toes and jabbed them with elbows. He believed retaliation would have been unwise, despite his distress at seeing the band treated roughly. Alongside these touring accounts, the memoir traces his time with the Beatles through Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, the Get Back single sessions and their final studio years.