On 31 August 1957, in the changing rooms underneath a football stadium in Vancouver, a 22-year-old Elvis Presley sat down in front of a scrum of reporters shoving microphones into his face.
Most of the local disc jockeys had turned up without tape recorders. One had not. A 20-year-old named Red Robinson brought his machine, and what he captured that afternoon is now considered one of the finest surviving recordings of Elvis in the 1950s — and it documents a day that turned out to be historic for a reason nobody in that room could have guessed.
Robinson was already something of a phenomenon himself. He had started in radio at 16, was the first Canadian DJ to play rock and roll in Vancouver, and had introduced Bill Haley, Fats Domino and Little Richard to the city. When Elvis was booked into Empire Stadium, Robinson made sure he was in the middle of it. He was the one who introduced Elvis on stage that night.
Elvis Presley Vancouver press conference August 31, 1957
The press conference is fascinating because of what the room was trying to do. This was 1957, and Elvis was the most controversial young man in North America. Newspapers had spent a year accusing him of corrupting teenagers. One Vancouver paper thought so little of rock and roll that it sent its classical symphony critic to review the show. The reporters were not there to talk about music.
Robinson was, and he says Elvis noticed. “As the microphones were pushed into Presley’s face I fought to ask him questions mostly related to his music,” he remembered. “He seemed to understand that I was not out to gather any sensational news.”
Then the press left, and something better happened. Robinson and Elvis were stuck together in that locker room with two Vancouver police officers, waiting for the stadium to fill up, for what felt to him like an eternity.
So they talked. And what they talked about was not fame. “We talked about growing up poor,” Robinson recalled. “We discussed the changing world, his family, my family, his love of rhythm and blues, country and gospel music.” Elvis asked him about his radio show, about the kids who listened, about how they reacted to his records. Robinson’s conclusion says as much as any biography: he found a down-to-earth individual who had not been affected by the incredible success that fell upon him.
Elvis Presley Interview from Vancouver – August 1957
The show itself was chaos. Around 26,000 people turned up, a scale nobody had attempted before. As Robinson put it, that was the first time any performer had stood in front of 26,000 people in a rented stadium — not Sinatra, not Crosby, nobody. Fans surged the stage, Elvis walked off partway through, came back for a few more songs, and almost nothing could be heard over the screaming. Newspapers called it a riot. Both Robinson and Scotty Moore have spent decades insisting it was: no fire hoses, no arrests to speak of, just pandemonium.
Robinson also made the mistake of his career the next morning, and he owned it for the rest of his life. Live on air, he cheerfully mentioned which hotel Elvis had stayed in — and the room number. Fans got upstairs and stripped the place, tearing up carpet and cutting pieces out of the bed. It reportedly cost the radio station around $5,000 to put right.
And here is the detail that makes the whole day matter. Vancouver was one of only three cities Elvis ever played outside the United States. That night at Empire Stadium was the last concert he ever performed on foreign soil. He never played abroad again. A 20-year-old with a tape recorder happened to be the one who caught it.