On September 2, 1957, Elvis, Scotty Moore, Bill Black and DJ Fontana performed one show at Multnomah Civic Stadium as the last stop on a whirlwind five city, four day tour of the Pacific Northwest that included Spokane, Vancouver, Tacoma, and Seattle.
It was only the second tour that year and was promoted by Lee Gordon, who had promoted the earlier tour in the Spring of Canada and the Midwest. According to Peter Guralnick, he had also been trying unsuccessfully to get the Colonel to agree to a tour of Australia. Gordon, originally from Detroit, had been promoting big names acts in Australia since 1953.
However, the mass eruption from the stands of beserk teen-agers, such as greeted Elvis in Chicago and recently in Vancouver, B.C., did not materialize. Instead, the woozy fans, many of them members of two Presley fan clubs here, were content to stay at their seats, to shake and wiggle hands, hips and feet, and to convince the singer that Portland, like all other U.S. cities, is 'real gone'.
From the time his convertible swept along the track and the gold sleeve waved to the top row of the stadium, his fans became one vocal acclaim of ear-splitting tumult. It was sometimes almost impossible to know which of his rock 'n' roll hits he was singing, burping and wiggling for his fans. The blare of the music whistled through the right ear and the screaming of the audience pierced the left ear conking out my equilibrium. But my eyesight was perfect, and there's no doubt that it's the bumps and grinds, the wiggles and the sinuous writhings that the fans love most. Each wiggle brought forth another in the succession of ecstatic screams.
There was the dazzling, writhing, rock 'n' roll Elvis in his gold jacket with rhinestone lapels, sorcering his madly screaming fans at Multnomah stadium into one frenzy of ear-splitting ecstasy after another, mounting in intensity to a bomb-burst of emotion with his concluding 'Hound Dawg' number.
It seemed as if the shrill adulation couldn't be more intense than during the 'I Got a Woman' number, when the rock 'n' roll idol grabbed his guitar and did his rhythmic contortions back of it-sort of like doing a cheek-to-cheek dance with it instead of playing it. But it was the 'Hound Dawg' number - the last on the list of hits-that created pandemonium. If the audience was going to swarm out onto the field, completely out of control, it would have swarmed during that number. Presley sat on the edge of the stage, swinging his long legs. Then he wiggled to the turf and writhed in a half-crawling position during much of the song. With the last moan of agony, he appeared completely exhausted, and dragged himself back of the stage.
Following a 40-minute performance, Presley issued a hurried goodbye and sped in the convertible from the tumultuous cheers, an enthusiastic but very much exhausted young man.
In a flashhe was into the convertible, and the 14,000 were still wildly screaming and stamping when the loud speaker blared: 'Ladies and gentlemen. Elvis Presley has left the stadium!' The silence was as deafening as the performance.
The sudden departure of Elvis left many of the fans in a frenzied, stifled condition. The announcement from the stage that Elvis had gone and the show was concluded was certainly not news. They had lost him, the lead actor in so many teenage dreams, and he was not to return. But for seven hours, give or take a few precious minutes, he belonged to Portland. The Oregonian reported that even the dirt Elvis Presley kneeled on was a souvenir for about 50 teenagers who swooped down out of the grandstand for a handful after Presley left the stadium. The crowd was extremely noisy but well-behaved.
