THE KING WHO ROCKED OTTAWA
Elvis remembered as part of exhibit of city’s rock ’n’ roll past
Brockville grandmother Pat Allport describes herself as a giggly teenager the day she met Elvis Presley backstage at the Ottawa Auditorium in 1957. She doesn’t remember much about the concert itself, but she’s never forgotten the encounter. Then a 16-year-old High School of Commerce student, Allport and nine other Ottawa-area girls, winners of a radio station contest administered by CFRA’s Gord Atkinson, were in a state of near-hysteria at the chance to meet the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and get his autograph.
“I honestly don’t remember the actual sitting down at the concert because I was so pumped,” Allport says now. “We met him in his dressing room. He spoke to us, he was gentlemanly. We were all crying. I still have the Kleenex I cried with.”
That day, Presley signed her arm, her white blouse and her autograph book. She refused to wash her arm, added song titles to the blouse and went on to fill her autograph book with the signatures of other rock ‘n’ rollers, including Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. “I wasn’t just an Elvis fan, but he was the best,” she says.
Today, the autograph on the shoulder of Allport’s blouse has worn off but it and the autograph book are part of a new exhibit chronicling the history of rock music in Ottawa. So are her prized Elvis ring and her I Like Elvis button, which were also worn that day.
Presented by the City of Ottawa Archives, Ottawa Rocks! distils six decades of popular music in the nation’s capital into a series of panels, each decade augmented by photos, songs, video footage and a wide variety of artifacts, from Allport’s blouse to Bluesfest posters. Also included is a page from Jimi Hendrix’s diary about his 1968 visit to Ottawa, when he met Joni Mitchell and went to a party in Vanier with her and Ottawa music mogul Harvey Glatt.
The exhibit begins with Bill Haley’s 1956 appearance at the Ottawa Auditorium, which archivists consider the first major rock concert in the city.
“He was the first real bigtime rock ‘n’ roll artist to come to Ottawa,” says city archivist Paul Henry, who headed the project.
“What we were looking for in the exhibit was the local experience, so something that really spoke to the personal experience of music in Ottawa, whether it’s a ticket stub or a sheet from a punk ‘zine or an album cover or photograph,” he says.
Part of the goal in collecting the artifacts was to prove the stories that people remembered.
“We knew some of what happened, but couldn’t prove everything that had happened,” Henry says.
“The gap between what we knew or thought happened and what we could prove was the story we really needed to tell.
“That’s really what the archives is all about. It’s the tangible bits of memory represented through artifacts and texts and remembrances that have been captured in a tangible way. We find the authentic, the reliable and we preserve it until the end of time, plus or minus a day.”
To prepare the exhibit, Henry and his staff conducted interviews with more than 60 people in the Ottawa music scene, including Glatt, radio pioneer Gord Atkinson and Zaphod Beeblebrox impresario Eugene Haslam.
In addition to covering the artists who came to Ottawa, the exhibit looks at the ones who came out of the city and made names for themselves, including Paul Anka, Bruce Cockburn, Alanis Morissette, Furnaceface, Kathleen Edwards, Hollerado, A Tribe Called Red and more. The playlist at each listening station features songs from Ottawa artists throughout the decades.
The influence of radio is also illustrated, starting from CFRA in the 1950s, which ran the Elvis contest, to CHEZ 106 in the ’70s and ’80s, and Live 88.5 in the 2000s. Another part of the story is the venues, from Le Hibou to the Chaudiere Rose Room to Barrymore’s and Lansdowne Park. The exhibit includes a wooden owl sign from the 1960s coffee house Le Hibou as well as concert photos from the 1970s heyday of arena rock, when Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley all played in Ottawa.
As disco died, the ’80s saw a growing diversity of genres, including punk, alternative, metal, hip hop and reggae.
For Allport, who attended the exhibit’s opening reception on Thursday with her husband of 54 years and their 19-year-old granddaughter, it’s a thrill to relive her brush with a rock legend.
She’s also hoping to get in touch with the other winners of the Elvis contest. Although they didn’t know each other back in 1957, Allport is certain they all felt blessed to have shared the experience.
“Everybody wanted to go, but it was $3 so not everybody had the money,” says the vivacious 73-year-old. “I remember people, hysterical girls, touching us when we were taking our seat at the concert. And when I went to school the next day, people were touching me like I was somebody.
“It was overwhelming. My wish is to find some of the other girls who were part of that.”