The King has left the building: 50 years ago, Elvis performed in Spokane for the third and final time

Nearly two decades had passed since Elvis Presley's first concert in Spokane when he performed in the Lilac City for the third and final time 50 years ago this week. A lot had changed .

The superstar was older and not in the same shape he had been when he first thrilled and horrified Inland Empire audiences with his hip gyrations. He would die of heart failure just a year later, and his tenuous health was by that point already a matter of rampant speculation.

His audience was older, too: During his first Spokane show in 1957, the massive crowd comprised mostly teenage girls, dozens of whom reportedly scooped up handfuls of the dirt where Elvis had crawled during his performance of "Hound Dog."

By the April 27, 1976 , show, the King was no longer the icon whose performance style was decried by some as "of a fundamentally base nature," as the Spokane Chronicle described it in '57. Twenty years later, he had long since become a part of the mainstream.

The '76 audience was primarily in their 30s and older, according to contemporary reporting by The Spokesman-Review, though there were still a "few teeny-boppers." The line for the $12.50 tickets stretched three blocks from the Spokane Coliseum box office, a venue that has since been replaced by the Numerica Veterans Arena. Some woke up early to get in line before the box office opened at noon; Then 28-year-old Judy (Palmer) Bendewald headed over after she got off work at 6 p.m. the night before, camping overnight in sleeping bags with her friends.

The older, drinking-age audience was also generally rowdier, remembered the late-Jack Latta, a Spokane police officer who served as security for the King's first show in Spokane in '57 and his last in '76. And to Latta's eye, Elvis was clearly in the twilight of his career.

"He was on his way up the first time," Latta said. "He was on his way down the last time."

But Latta wasn't a fan.

For those who adored Elvis, when he finally burst onto the coliseum stage following a suspenseful buildup of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," the Richard Strauss composition used to open "2001: A Space Odyssey," the aging King seemed eternal.

In retrospect, some fans in the coliseum today say they also knew something was wrong.

"With the benefit of hindsight we can all look back and see that he was not well," said Carla Savalli, a former Spokesman-Review editor who is the public information officer for Frontier Behavioral Health. "His voice was as strong as ever, that never ever diminished, but he was much slower and, sure, he put on some weight, and looking back it made sense he would pass a year later."

But in that moment, in that place, Elvis sparkled in a dazzling beadwork costume. Savalli's first concert was Elvis' second in Spokane, in 1973, but at 9 years old the memories of that first encounter are foggy. Not for the one in '76 however.

"When he walked on stage, I remember feeling, and I'm not the first fan to have said this, it was like God had just landed," Savalli said.

Savalli snuck in a cassette recorder. Playing it back later, she mostly heard her own screams.

It was the 12-year-old's second Elvis concert. For Bendewald, it was approaching the 70th.

She had been the president of the Kissin' Cousins Fan Club, named after the 1964 film in which Elvis starred, and on more than one occasion joined the crowd of "gate girls" who would stand outside of Presley's Graceland estate, including when his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, came home from the hospital after she was born. Bendewald had to abandon the fan club, whose newsletters she had written by hand and were reportedly read by Presley, shortly after her mother's death in 1971 during a botched robbery at the Bon Marche department store in downtown Spokane.

Presley reportedly learned of the death and along with his then-wife, Priscilla wrote his condolences to Bendewald .

It was customary for the young women in the crowd to surge to the stage during Elvis' performances of "Love Me Tender," hoping for a scarf and a kiss from the star. Security had been too tight at the '73 concert, with a veritable blockade of police blocking access to the stage, but Bendewald had attended an Elvis concert in Seattle just ahead of the '76 Spokane event and noticed the blockade had been removed.

"I decided I was going to be the first one up to the stage," Bendewald recalled 50 years later. "So I was the first one up, and he just smiled, and he said, 'What did you want?' And I said, 'A kiss and a scarf.' And he just smiled and gave me the kiss and the scarf."

There were 19 songs that night, she recalled, including Elvis' recently released cover of "Hurt," and at the end he was rushed off stage and into a limo ahead of a surging crowd as a voice piped over the loudspeaker relayed that "The King has left the building."

"It was mind-blowing," Savalli said. "I think even before death he had become an icon, which in many ways took over and surpassed him as a human being and an artist. He was just sort of performing his myth in a way."

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This story was originally published April 27, 2026 at 7:07 PM.