Destination: Summerfest

A love letter to the Midwest’s most unpretentious music festival

There’s Memorial Day weekend and Summer Solstice, but for me, the summer officially starts when the first firefly arrives in our backyard. I had my first sighting a few weeks ago when I took our geriatric dog outside for her bedtime bathroom break; after I caught that familiar little pulse of light drifting over the grass, a wave of summertime nostalgia washed over me. Suddenly all I wanted to do was swim in a lake, binge watch Steven Spielberg movies, eat popsicles, and drive with the windows rolled down while blaring Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion album. More than anything, I get excited for outdoor music, which makes the timing perfect for one of my favorite festivals, Summerfest in Milwaukee.

I learned from Alice Cooper that Milwaukee is Algonquin for “the good land”

Milwaukee is one of my favorite American cities, and easily the one I visit the most often since it’s only ninety minutes from Chicago. A larger mid-sized Midwestern city with its own unique culture that goes heavy on cheese, sausages, and beer—why these are a few of my favorite things! Wisconsin brings out a certain side of me, a side that considers buying a t-shirt that says “In dog beers I’ve only had one” every time I brake for snacks at the Brat Stop in Kenosha. Midwestern cities look at the brief but glorious summer as a perfect encapsulation of the saying “here for a good time, not a long time” and so we wring out every possible drop of outdoor fun between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We flock to the shores of Lake Michigan, we swarm beer gardens and restaurant patios, we play hooky to attend afternoon baseball games, and we go to street fests to eat various encased meats and dance to cover bands.

Summerfest has the shaggy spirit of a street festival on steroids, overtaking the massive Henry Maier Festival Park spanning three consecutive weekends starting in late June, culminating with the 4th of July holiday. In addition to being the world’s largest music festival, there is a Ferris wheel and a SkyGlider, a kids playground and water garden, exhibitions of BMX riding and amateur wrestling, and a shopping area for local vendors where you can buy things like a brandy Old Fashioned scented candle or a t-shirt that says “Wisconsin: home of cannibal killers and Happy Days.” The moment I walk through the entrance gates, I am greeted by a waft of sizzling Johnsonville brats. Kurt once ordered a burger and it came with a topping of prime rib. You do not go to Summerfest to extend your life; you go to live your life.

I express my love for Summerfest, enjoying a cold Leinie's, the SkyGlider

If Coachella is the decider of what’s cool, creating a scene to be seen in, Summerfest gives zero shits about appearances. I happily wear my middle-aged-friendly Hoka running shoes and know that I will blend into the judgement-free crowd. The lineup is genre agnostic and offers something for every age group, with children’s entertainment scheduled early in the day and hitmakers from the sixties, seventies, and eighties to lure in nostalgic Boomers. The nightly headliner performs on a mainstage separated from the rest of the fairgrounds and requires a separate ticket; my sister saw Nicki Minaj open for Britney Spears at Summerfest in 2011, a true time capsule. Otherwise, an affordable day ticket gives you access to everything. This year we saw Deer Tick¹, The Family Stone², Father John Misty³, Styx⁴, and Amy & The Sniffers⁵, all for a total of $33 USD.

Now if this lineup made you go “WTF?,” this randomness is the beauty of Summerfest. You might catch a popular band that you’ve seen in a late afternoon slot at Lollapalooza, then a one-hit wonder from the early aughts, a living legend like John Fogerty, or the number one cover band of Des Moines, Iowa. Summerfest can often give a “Puppet Show and Spinal Tap” kind of vibe, and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible. In 1995 during Pearl Jam’s set, Eddie Vedder brought the local Neil Diamond tribute band Lightning & Thunder onstage to join the band in a cover of “Forever in Blue Jeans.” Because of Summerfest, I have on accident seen the Friends theme song performed by the actual Bodeans more times than ever expected in this life.

The first time I went to Summerfest was in 2007 to see Weird Al. I was in the thick of my Lollapalooza era, in which I attended every day of the fest in the summers of 2005-2012, giving me a PhD in crowd tolerance and navigating a porta-potty in pitch darkness. While both festivals use Lake Michigan as a backdrop, Summerfest was a totally different experience, its crowds spread over the fairgrounds allowing an easy laid-back flow very much the opposite of Lolla’s sweaty shoulder-to-shoulder wall of humanity. It was still early on in my relationship with Kurt, and we spent that night dancing on a metal bench in the pouring rain to Weird Al singing “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota.” I remember feeling exhilarated, my face hurt from laughing, and deeply happy despite the sopping wet Gap windbreaker plastered to my body. We drove home that same night, grabbing a few hours of sleep before meeting our friends at the first Michael Bay Transformers movie showing on the IMAX screen at AMC River East 21, because this was what you did in the summer as a youth. Perhaps now you might call it summermaxxing: staying up late to crush beers, dance on surfaces and howl at the Strawberry Moon, escaping the daytime heat in the dark cool cinema gorging on popcorn movies and watching robots beat each other up, then repeat for three months. To quote Bryan Adams’ summer-themed hit song, those were the best days of my life.

a view of Summerfest from the hill

I wish I had been better at keeping track of all of the bands I saw at all of those early festivals, countless days spent running between stages in dirty Chucks while sweating off my sunscreen. I might have stories like my friend Liz, who remembers seeing the not-yet-famous Lady Gaga play a midday set on a small stage at Lolla a year before “Just Dance” blew up. If I could go back in time, I’d tell my young self to start a music diary and keep track of every show I see, the date, and venue. Nowadays, I use my Instagram to document what shows I go to and where. I like to lazily scroll through my own grid and see a visual history of how I’ve spent my time, letting the images of green grass and amber beer bottles sweating icy cold condensation into their koozies reawaken my summer nostalgia.

But there’s a moment that happens at every festival that needs no reminders, usually later in the night when the sky has darkened and the stage lights shine across the field. I recognize the opening notes of one of my favorite songs and the whole crowd starts to sing along. Maybe I’m walking back from the bathroom and I’ve had just enough summer shandys to feel loose but not messy, and I see Kurt holding our spot and make my way to him through the crowd and throw my arms around him like a CEO at a Coldplay concert, and I feel so full of love and the music and the beauty of a warm summer night, and we sing along, shouting the chorus upwards at the stars, fully alive and present in a perfect moment before it fades away like a firefly.

fireworks during Bon Iver’s headlining set, 2019

1. a band I enjoy so much that I’ve flown to Dallas to see them

2. Legends! We danced to the music! RIP Sly

3. We caught a few songs to gauge his mood before staking out a spot for Amyl & The Sniffers. He seemed feisty.

4. I stuck around specifically to hear “You’re my LADY of the MORNING!!”

5. We caught them twice on this tour, first in Chicago less than a week earlier. They are a blast live and the lyric “Me and the girls are drunk at the airport” brings back many of my favorite roller derby memories.