These days Michael Bublé is the smooth voice a lot of us hear every December. He’s also a coach on NBC’s “The Voice,” where he won two seasons in a row.
But long before all that, he had a night at a football stadium that he still can’t tell without laughing at himself.
Bublé was born on Sept 9, 1975, in Burnaby, British Columbia, in Canada. Early in his career he got a big booking for a young singer. He’d sing “O Canada,” the Canadian national anthem, before a BC Lions football game at BC Place in Vancouver.
There was a catch. At the time he was part of a revue, and the act decided to do the anthem as an Elvis-style 1950s doo-wop number.
Elvis was a natural choice for him. Bublé has always listed Elvis Presley among his influences, and he can do the voice. In a 2016 interview with Dan Rather on AXS TV, he broke down what made Elvis sound like Elvis: “Elvis would get real deep … He had a quick vibrato.” That sit-down is worth a look, because Bublé shows the Elvis sound right there instead of just talking about it.
Michael Bublé does his Elvis for Dan Rather
So how did an Elvis-style “O Canada” go over with a stadium full of football fans?
Bublé told the story on “The Voice,” and NBC’s official “The Voice” Instagram posted the clip. Daily Hive and 3DownNation both reported it the same way.
He didn’t dress it up. “I don’t think we were great,” he admitted.
The announcer had his own review. Bublé says that when the song ended, the stadium announcer told everyone, “Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building, and we hope they never invite him back.”
Ouch.
When he was asked whether he’d ever do it again, his answer was quick. “Never again.”
The best part of the story might be the person who saved the moment for history. “I remember my grandpa taped it,” Bublé said.
That fits, because his grandfather was there for so much of his early career. Demetrio Santagà was an Italian-born plumber, and he traded plumbing work for stage time so his grandson could play his first nightclub shows at 16. He paid for Michael’s singing lessons too.
Bublé once described those years on BBC radio. “We would go back and forth to hotel lounges and bars and clubs,” he said.
He’s had plenty of Elvis moments since the football game, and most of them went a lot better. He covered Elvis’s holiday classic “Blue Christmas” on his 2011 album “Christmas,” which spent five weeks at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 album chart. And in a 2020 studio session for BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, he sang “All Shook Up” live with a full band. You can see he’s having a ball with it, and this time nobody needed a stadium announcer to weigh in.
Michael Bublé sings Elvis’s “All Shook Up” live on BBC radio
As for that first Elvis number at BC Place, Grandpa’s tape is the reason Bublé can still tell the story, and he clearly enjoys telling it on himself.