MEMORIES OF ALANIS …
It all started the day Elvis shook us up in 1957. The city is looking for memorabilia to document the last five decades of Ottawa’s musical history.
… and Elvis, Barrymore’s and beyond: The city wants to document five decades of rock and roll in our town.
The City of Ottawa has put out a call for tickets, posters, T-shirts and more for an exhibit on the history of rock ’n’ roll in Ottawa, starting with the day that Elvis came to town in 1957.
Ottawa music fans, dig out your old concert tickets, posters, T-shirts and cassettes. The municipal archives wants to fill out its collection of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia and mount an exhibit on the history of rock music in the nation’s capital.
“Ottawa’s rock history is something that is not well known, but needs to be told,” says city archivist Paul Henry, who’s planning to unveil the exhibit in October in the James Bartleman Archives and Library Materials Centre. The ground-floor gallery space will be devoted to artifacts that tell the story of rock in Ottawa, from Elvis to Alanis, Le Hibou to Barrymore’s.
According to a research paper commissioned by the city, rock ’n’ roll came to Ottawa in April of 1957, when Elvis Presley played the Auditorium, an event that thrilled 9,000 screaming fans and outraged others. The city has the moment documented in a series of photographs in its collection, but there are many gaps to fill to properly illustrate the last 50 years.
“When we originally looked at our collection on the history of rock in Ottawa, there wasn’t a lot,” Henry said. “To be quite frank, it’s an interesting story and we do need to collect the primary source material before it disappears. Concert tickets, posters and the music itself becomes ephemeral, and being able to capture that before it goes away is particularly important to us because of the predominantly oral culture around rock ’n’ roll culture in Ottawa.”
Archivists are not only interested in documenting the major concert events by big-name artists, but also chronicling the evolution of the Ottawa music scene, from Paul Anka to Zaphod Beeblebrox. Musicians, venues, studios, festivals, radio stations, instrument-makers and more are all part of the story. Collections can be donated or loaned.
“We really want to tell that local story,” Henry says. “It’s not just about bands that have come to Ottawa and played and are famous elsewhere, but it’s also local musicians who have either gone on to find fame elsewhere and then bring renown to Ottawa, like Paul Anka or Alanis Morissette, or others who are locally grown musicians who stick around and play and perform in the Ottawa area, and continue to build that music tradition in Ottawa.”
The exhibit will also showcase the archives’ new home in a state-of-theart building that was designed to be open and welcoming. “Traditionally archives have been seen to be black holes into which records fall which never seen the light of day and you have to be a credentialed academic to come in and use them. But we’ve been spending the last few years trying to dispel that impression. It’s no longer true,” Henry says, noting the large windows where visitors can watch staff process collections.