Beatles roadie Mal Evans's lost memoir to be published 50 years on

By Grace Kim

A 95,000-word memoir by Beatles road manager Mal Evans, unpublished for 50 years, will finally appear in December under the title With the Beatles. The text includes his first-hand account of the band's only meeting with Elvis Presley in Bel Air in August 1965 — a day Evans called the biggest of his Beatles years.

Evans wrote that meeting Elvis was "the biggest day of all the years I have spent with the famous Beatles." He had planned to publish the memoir with the band's permission before his death in 1976, aged 40, in a shooting by Los Angeles police. Distraught over the breakup of his marriage, it is believed to have been "suicide by cop" after he repeatedly pointed an air rifle at officers.

Evans's family made the material available to Kenneth Womack, described as one of the world's foremost Beatles experts. Womack told the Guardian: "It's the book Mal was going to publish, taking us into the heart of Beatlemania, reminding us how electrifying it was. He pulls no punches. He shows us the Beatles. It's very powerful. It's a treasure trove of new material."

Who was Mal Evans?

Evans joined the Beatles as their roadie in their early days at Liverpool's Cavern Club, where he had worked as a bouncer. He documented his years with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in diaries and notebooks, took thousands of photographs and scooped up discarded lyric sheets, receipts and other ephemera on the road and in the studio. Womack calls him the Beatles' first archivist.

For the memoir, Evans hired a stenographer and dictated the text into a portable cassette recorder in 1975. Womack holds all the recordings. Although he drew on the manuscript for his 2023 Evans biography, the memoir itself has never been published until now.

What happened when the Beatles met Elvis?

Womack calls the Presley encounter a meeting of "rock's greatest heavyweights of all time." He explains why Evans covered it so densely: "Mal loved Elvis more than he loved the Beatles, in terms of music. So, for that reason, when they meet Elvis in Bel Air in August 1965, Mal writes page upon page about the experience and what happened."

"There's been so much debate among writers about that meeting — and now we have this complete record of Mal saying: 'Here's exactly what happened,'" Womack added.

Evans wrote: "If there is one day in my life I shall never forget, it is the day when the two biggest phenomena in showbiz met for the one and only time." He recalled that Elvis played the visitors Beatles LPs before finding guitars for each of them, and that he listened in awe as "they began to make the place rock with … improvised beat music."

What else does the memoir cover?

The book follows the group from the Help! album through the Magical Mystery Tour EP to the Get Back single sessions and the final studio years. One chapter recounts the band's perilous 1966 tour of the Philippines, after they unintentionally insulted first lady Imelda Marcos by turning down an invitation to an official event.

Evans described armed men surrounding the party on departure day. "A large number of the promoter's staff were wearing automatic pistols in their back pockets … this was brought home to me personally the morning of our departure," he wrote. One man brandished a gun in his face while demanding autographed pictures. At the airport, "a dozen men appeared to impede our progress, and started to jostle us."

"To stand there and see my beloved Beatles treated so roughly was heartbreaking," Evans wrote.

Womack assembled the memoir from material Evans stored in "six massive boxes." The published edition will feature about 400 photographs, including some never seen before — a trove that lets the Beatles' inner circle speak directly, half a century after its author's death.