PRODUCTION PROFILE
SUMMERFEST Now in its 53rd year, the massive music mêlée in Milwaukee, Wisconsin remains a showcase for AVL technology and sets the pace for music festivals in the COVID era.
Words: Dan Daley Photos: Jay Baumgardner @Clearwing
Summerfest is the biggest little event you may or may not know about. Certified in 1999 by the Guinness Book of World Records as ‘The World’s Largest Music Festival,’ in 2017 it celebrated its half-century mark and in preCOVID times routinely attracted over 750,000 concertgoers. They could see and listen to nearly 300 shows as they wandered between 11 stages peppered throughout Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Henry W. Maier Festival Park – 30 hectares on the shores of Lake Michigan 100 miles north of Chicago, which had previously served as the city’s first airport and the site of a Nike missile facility in the ’50s. This year’s attractions included Luke Bryan, Chance the Rapper, Twenty-One Pilots, Chris Stapleton, Megan Thee Stallion, Miley Cyrus, Tommy Gunn, REO Speedwagon and Guns N’ Roses. The performance stages, named for locally based but national corporate sponsors, such
as the generator giant Generac, AmericanIrish systems management maker, Johnson Controls, and Miller Lite, seat anywhere from 400 to 4,000 or more and are a string of shiny, noisy pearls connected by county fair-type midways and food tents, and anchored at the south end by the 23,000-seat American Family Insurance Amphitheater. Five performers per stage per day cycle through what is usually the festival’s fortnight in July, its traditional month. This year, however, after being cancelled completely in 2020, it reassembled itself as a series of three-day weekends in September. Summerfest has also been morphing into a kind of working AV expo, where sound and lighting systems manufacturers – most notably Harman Professional’s JBL, Crown and Martin brands in recent years – see an opportunity to wave their brands’ banners before hundreds of musicians, FOH engineers, and production
managers each year. Behind the music and the festivities that hundreds of thousands of concertgoers enjoy, there is a huge machine – and with 53 years’ worth of experience, a rather well-oiled one – that was ready to take on producing a massive music festival under COVID’s combat conditions. Summerfest might be the perfect festival for the way the music market has evolved. Like the various streaming services that now dominate the industry, Summerfest puts a huge smorgasbord of styles, sounds, attitudes and aspirations in front of consumers, who can graze easily between scores of aural tastings daily for not much more than they pay for a year of Spotify. At nearly two weeks and 12 hours a day, it’s immersive, ringing another culturalmedia bell, but unlike Bonnaroo or Burning Man, most people get to sleep in their own beds every night. And it’s about as egalitarian as it