Elvis and His Bodyguards Horrified a Gospel Band With a Cruel ‘Mass Slaughter’ Prank 

Elvis Presley and his bodyguards were bored on tour, so they decided to give the band performing with them the scare of a lifetime. Elvis received a number of death threats over the course of his career. While they put everyone on edge, Elvis decided to use them for a prank that could have gone very wrong. 

Elvis and his bodyguards pulled a prank on another band

In 1972, Elvis seemed bored of the monotony of his career. Priscilla Presley believed he dealt with this through elaborate stage costumes and onstage diversions. He also pulled pranks on the people around him.

“There was a group that had joined Elvis called J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet,” his bodyguard Red West said in the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “It was a very good gospel group led by J. D. Sumner, who must have the lowest bass voice in the world. Anyway, it was in 1972, when we’re getting a lot of these threats, and they were very nervous about this. To break the monotony and have a little fun, Elvis, Sonny and myself decided on a bit of a practical joke.”

They decided to pretend someone was acting on a death threat and had come to harm Elvis and whoever was around him.

“We decided to act out a fake gunfight with an assassin,” West said. “The assassin would be hidden, of course, because he was [bodyguard Sonny West]. Sonny and I load our guns with blanks and the security guards empty their guns, which, as it turned out, was a good idea for a reason that will become obvious. So I prime J. D. and his boys about what’s happening and I tell them very earnestly to be very careful because there is a madman loose. Well, we are up in the suite and J. D. is checking inside doors and his boys are pretty nervous about what’s coming down.”

Elvis and his bodyguards caused complete pandemonium with their joke

Sonny West burst into the room and began firing the gun. Red West and three other bodyguards fell to the ground, pretending to be dead. To Sumner and his band, it appeared that they were in the middle of a “mass slaughter,” as Dunleavy put it. Some members of the band went for the security guards’ guns which, luckily for Sonny, were not loaded. Sumner jumped in front of Elvis to protect him.

“I fired like I was shooting at his head from about ten or twelve feet away,” Sonny said, “and the wad from the blank hits [Sumner] in the head.”

All through this terror, Elvis lay on the ground laughing.

They congratulated the band on their heroics

Eventually, Elvis revealed it had all been a prank. While they laughed about it with the band later on, they did not find it particularly funny in the immediate aftermath. Sumner’s nephew Donny, who had tried to take out Sonny with a can of tomato sauce, was faint with terror. 

“It pretty much ended there, but we all thought Donny Sumner was out of it,” Sonny said. “It was a long while before the blood started circulating in his face. We had to fix him a drink.”

Elvis and the Wests congratulated the band on their heroics throughout the horrifying prank.