17,000 All Shook Up by Elvis
by Lawrence DeVine
Detroit Free Press
September 30, 1974

The King came to Detroit Sunday, and the world could have come to a silent halt outside Olympia Stadium. Few of the 17,105 screamers inside would have bothered to notice.

For time, in its way, stood still as Elvis Presley, the regal rock-and-roller, cannonaded onstage in his third decade of breaking hearts and launching dreamboatds.

Olympia looked - and sounded - like an atomic testing ground. Awash in the glare of hundreds of Instamatic flashbulbs, elvis sang "Love Me Tender" and kissed the girls and made them scream"

IT WAS HIS THIRD visit to Detroit in recent years. He will repeat the concert Friday, a reported sellout like Sunday's appearance.

Sunday the kettledrums were pounding out his theme, borrowed from Richard Strauss".

"Also Sprach Zarathustra," a phalanx of his hefty body guards hustled him onto the stage as if he were heading off-tackle.

Presley sang a couple of notes. And then came the same delirium that has followed the onetime Tupelo, Miss. guitar player ever since his first gold record of "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1954.

Out front, wearing a six-inch rhinestone pin that spelled out "Elvis" in script was Mrs. Darlene Chandler of Romulus. She said she and her husband , Edward, had come to see their idol for the eighth time since high school days

"We drove to Cleveland once to see him," said Mrs. Chandler, "and we went to Las Vegas twice. We're still paying for that. He's awful sexy."

Her husband, who combs his pompadour in late-1950s Elvis-style, nodded approvingly and said his favorite Elvis song as "Poke Salad Annie" Detroit in the black, rented.

PRESLEY, who arrived in Playboy Bunny plane for his concert Sunday, showed up on stage in a pure white jump auit with a stand-up collar. On his back was a red-and-green rhinestone-encrusted Chinese dragon. A testament to Presley's innate good taste, the dragon did not light up or stick out its glass tongue

Presley, now 39, the age at which Shakespeare was writing "Hamlet," sang most of his own rock-and-roll classics with the enduring titles like "Hound Dog," "Teddy Bear" and "All Shook Up"

To the sorrow of Mrs. Ruth Ray a housewife from White Lake, Mich., celebrating her 30th birthday, he did not sing her favorite, "You Gave Me A Mountain."

Mrs. Ray was carrying an Elvis Poster, a copy of the "Strictly Elvis" fan magazine, an a lapel button, which the on-stag announcer said was fashioned in "Van Gogh-like erds, Picasso-like splendor and living, loving color"

Presley sang "Fever," quivering in his familiar onstage ecstasy, as if his pelvis were hooked to a live plug. When the magic got too much for him, he fanned himself with the mike.

A pair of 30-ish twin ladies, in identical beehive hairdos, squealed in unison. By unofficial count, Elvis gave away 37 of his trademark neck scarves to graping fans at the stage apron.

Before he left, the lithe, strong-looking Presley gave them a couple of more bumps, and bent down to kiss an adoring blonde at ringside. When her husband's camera jammed, Presley kissed her again for the family's recorded posterity.

Courtesy of Ron Theisen