No one is equipped to handle fame when it comes to them. It’s one thing to be able to do a job incredibly well, but once there are a billion eyes on someone 24 hours a day, it’s impossible for it not to affect their psyche at least a little bit. Mick Jagger may have managed his stardom as well as he could back in the 1960s, but in terms of rock star standards, he thought that Elvis Presley took every wrong step that he could have taken.

Then again, can you really blame ‘The King of Rock and Roll’? Before him, there was no real way to gauge what a rock star was supposed to be, and as Patient Zero, he was going to be subjected to every problem in the book, whether that was girls idolising him, trying to live outside the law, or giving into his diva tendencies every once in a while.

That’s not to say that every wrong move was Presley’s fault, though. His drafting into the Army was out of his hands, and once he garnered massive acclaim with his comeback special, it was clear that Colonel Tom Parker did have a little bit of an axe to grind and treated ‘The King’ like a bit of a meat puppet in the public eye.

But even when Presley was in his physical prime, the British invasion was about to respond in kind. Presley was only one man among the rock crowd. However, once The Beatles and The Rolling Stones arrived on American shores, fans were getting a group with four or five different versions of Presley, which, when using basic math, means that they are going to get a lot more attention than just one singer that could shake his ass.

When Jagger looked back on how Presley dealt with fame, he believed that Presley’s influence wasn’t the kind of thing that rock bands should aspire to, telling Rolling Stone, “Elvis just did it all wrong, didn’t he? Put all these silly ideas into people’s heads. And John [Lennon] picked up on it. It seems incredibly crass and superficial, doesn’t it?”.

If Presley was a look at what rock and roll could be with just one man, though, The Beatles and The Stones took that mentality to new heights. Since they were all a unit, it was all about trying to make the most out of every song, instead of Presley’s model, where they had him pumping out as much music as possible in the hopes that something would stick.

But whereas Jagger is still rocking into his twilight years today, Presley’s final days in the spotlight read like a tragic story these days. Compared to every other act that tried their hardest to keep themselves together, Presley seemed to deteriorate over the years, not taking care of himself and ultimately spiralling out of control until he was found dead in his bathroom in Graceland before he could see 40.

While Jagger may have been right in not following Presley’s every move, that did at least give him some incentive when putting in his miles with The Stones. Rock and roll can feel like an impossible business to navigate, but at least Jagger looked at Presley and saw what not to do in certain situations.