Elvis Presley
On April 2, 1957, Elvis Presley came to Maple Leaf Gardens, and it's fair to say that Torontonians - at least the older generation - didn't know what hit them. The 22-year-old Presley was just a year removed from the release of his first major label album, and his popularity was skyrocketing. In the past year, he freely acknowledged having earned more than a million dollars. The two shows at Maple Leaf Gardens were played in front of the biggest crowds he had ever entertained, though the earlier set drew just 9,360, nearly 5,000 less than capacity. They also represented the first of only five concerts Presley would perform outside of the United States during his entire career, including two the next night in Ottawa. At the press conferences before his Toronto shows, Presley was relaxed and engaging, sitting cross-legged on a table backstage, while dealing with skeptical journalists and answering a series of largely ridiculous questions. "He unabashedly admitted he couldn't understand classical music or opera, knows nothing about music and likes the shrieks of the teen-agers," the Globe and Mail reported. When Presley finally took the stage, following an opening segment that included a tap dancer, an Irish tenor (who was booed), and a comedian, flashbulbs exploded everywhere and those shrieks all but drowned out the sound coming from the stage. At the first 40-minute show Presley wore his famous gold lame suit in full for the last time. The press made much of Presley's gyrations and the primitive reactions they elicited from the crowd: "a calculated psychological binge," one CBC commentator called it. But members of Presley's entourage remarked later that the Toronto fans were some of the best-behaved they encountered - perhaps because the 90 special police officers on site made any fan who leaped to their feet immediately return to their seat. Afterwards, local jazz musicians predicted that rock and roll was just a passing fad, and critics didn't attempt to hold back their disdain. "It goes without saying he has the appeal of one-part dynamite and one-part chained-lightning to the adolescent girls; but to one like myself who is neither a girl nor adolescent, I could only feel he was strikingly devoid of talent," Hugh Thomson wrote in the Toronto Star. But the kids understood. -Stephen Brunt
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.