At 4 a.m. on a mid-June Thursday in the nearly empty parking lot of the Harrah’s Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I’m awakened by the car door slamming shut. “OK, we should start driving to Summerfest so we get there when it opens,” a guy from Germany says to me, as I try to find my eyeglasses and ascertain my surroundings and life circumstances.
Oh, yeah, my friend, Tanjev Schultz, normally a well-respected media professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, wanted to spend a couple of weeks experiencing Milwaukee Summerfest – a music festival I bragged about to him thirty years earlier when we were both working on degrees at Indiana University. Back then, we had already taken some rather interesting road trips, including one to Baltimore that included sleeping at rest stops and in the middle of the campus at Ohio State University.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Somehow, this year he scored a sabbatical involving music and journalism and he finagled it to include “research” at Summerfest.
I readily agreed to be his expert guide but only if we’d do it the All-American road-trip way, sleeping in parking lots and, once in Wisconsin, staying at my brother’s house in West Allis and assorted friends’ houses elsewhere “up north.”
TJ (my Americanization of his name) foolishly agreed.
And TJ somehow survived this year’s first two weekends of Summerfest, with nonstop music, plentiful schmoozing with Milwaukeeans and endless walking, before I dropped him off exhausted at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport this week for his flight back to Frankfurt. At Summerfest, I showed him all the tricks of getting into the grounds free, utilizing shuttles from local bars (and getting to know the locals a bit) and finding cheap beer outside of the grounds. I told him my super-secret way of strategically moving between the more than dozen stages to arrive at the right time for the song he wants to hear.
His nights were filled with music from the likes of the Record Company, Grand Funk Railroad, Lindsey Stirling and the Mavericks. He even bought himself a ticket to see the Killers show at the Amphitheater (I had already seen the Killers’ fantastic Summerfest show back in 2019, so I opted to see Cake at the BMO Pavilion instead). He said the show was great, but his hearing was abused by two 14-year-old girls sitting next to him and screaming during the entire show. He sent me a video and the girls’ shrill screaming was indeed nonstop over the Killers’ songs. “At least I had plenty of room because they didn’t take up much seat space,” he noted, positively.
And I tested his endurance levels by filling the days with other Milwaukee favorites like the Colectivo coffee shop on the Lakefront, tacos at Conejito’s and frozen custard at Leon’s, Kopp’s and Gilles (yes, our arteries really did visit all three). We walked both Bradford Beach and the beach at Grant Park. And I introduced him to several dive bars in West Allis and Milwaukee. More on that later.
Oh, where to begin? Let’s start as we were driving from my home in Colorado – we hadn’t even entered Nebraska yet, when I saw a sign announcing free ice cream at the First Farm Bank in Sterling, and one of the workers gave us suspicious looks as we readily accepted the ice cream sandwiches.
Then headed across the Missouri River to sleep at my favorite parking lot, outside of the Harrah’s Casino, where we could use the bathroom inside and drink free soda whenever we wanted. “I don’t believe they just let anyone in there, at any time in the night, to brush their teeth,” TJ wondered. “Well, they do expect you to actually gamble and lose money,” I responded, adding that I never play any games but I do have a history with Harrah’s in Las Vegas and outside San Diego, so it’s all justifiable.
After the early awakening in the dark, we hit the road again, making it all the way to Milwaukee, only stopping for gas and Wisconsin cheese curds. As we entered Wisconsin, the radio played Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” with its chorus of “Looks like we made it…We knew we’d get there someday,” which interestingly was a big hit on our last big road trip, from Indiana to Baltimore, in 1998, and it became that trip’s soundtrack. When my family visited TJ and his wife in Germany a few years ago, TJ appropriately blasted that song to wake us all up.
OK, enough with the preliminaries. After eight hours of nonstop driving that opening day, I started teaching TJ the proper way to do Summerfest, cheaply and efficiently. I luckily found street parking a few blocks from Summerfest and we started walking. After a block, I realized I had forgotten the canned goods in the car that would allow us to get in free that afternoon. So we walked back and retrieved them. “I’m already exhausted,” TJ complained, as we finally reached the entrance gate. Once inside, I gave him a quick tour of the main stages and we bought a couple of cheeseburgers from Major Goolsby’s, where I noticed he was drinking a Miller Lite. “I thought you said you weren’t going to drink beer today,” I said.
“Is it still today?” he tiredly asked in his understated German way.
And that kinda set the tone for his Summerfest weekends, with barrels full of music at the festival followed by a few days of gentle mayhem exploring Milwaukee and Wisconsin.
That first day, we returned in the evening with our pass-out wristbands, I taught TJ how to get on the Steny’s shuttle to Summerfest, with each of us balancing two plastic glasses filled with $5 Kölsch beer over the bumps and potholes of Milwaukee streets. Everyone on the bus was in the same predicament, as we all became best friends with our beer-soaked shorts. Inside the grounds, we roamed from stage to stage. A Summerfest employee handed us each two free tickets for this year, leading TJ to wonder about how Summerfest makes money if so many people get in free. I explained about corporate sponsorships and expensive beer. Speaking of which, TJ later checked out the bathrooms. “The bathrooms are very cultivated here. At Oktoberfest, we just pee into troughs. I don’t feel like cattle here.”
Although he didn’t mind all the jewelry and t-shirt stands, he wondered about the same vendors that I’ve been complaining about for years. “Who’s going to be buying new roofs, gutters and siding here?” He also noticed the presence of the impressive marketing efforts of a local attorney whose signs and billboards we had noticed all over town. “Who is this Gruber guy with his smile and teeth?” he asked. I told him I have a collection of Gruber t-shirts from over the years.
Among the dozen bands we saw that opening night, I made TJ watch the Record Company with me and my friend, Dr. Ernie, who was impressed with TJ’s knowledge of the ways of Summerfest in just a day. “The young Jedi has learned well,” Dr. Ernie said, imitating Yoda of Star Wars. TJ was so confident in his Summerfesting abilities, he even decided to break off on his own to watch Natasha Bedingfield while I went to watch Gary Clark Jr. and then the Allman Betts Band. We later reconnected at the Bedingfield show, where I recognized several of the songs. “Why didn’t you tell me who she was,” I complained. He defended himself, “I tried to but you didn’t listen.”
When a heat wave struck on Friday and Saturday, it didn’t slow us down at all. I wanted to catch a bit of Grand Funk Railroad – a gray-pony-tailed fan in a tie-dyed t-shirt filled us in on the history of the band and which band members were still in the band – before I headed off to the Hozier concert with Dr. Ernie while TJ went off to see Rick Springfield. “He looked like he was in his 30s from a distance but he’s really 75. It’s quite amazing,” TJ reported. We reconnected later at the Dispatch concerts. Neither of us knew the music of Dispatch but their last few songs were quite entertaining and improvised.
For Saturday night, we didn’t head to Summerfest until after 8 p.m. My must-see was Japanese Breakfast, but they were a bit boring. Lindsey Stirling always puts on a good show as I’ve seen her several times over the years at Summerfest and TJ liked the violinist’s energetic show. His must-see was a musical artist his daughter recommended, Artemas, who supposedly had a #1 hit in Germany. We caught a few songs of his on our way to Japanese Breakfast, but by the time we returned, the Artemas show was over – and TJ grumbled about that. “I paid essentially nothing for this show. How can they treat me like this?” Later, he continued with the whining about why we wasted time with Japanese Breakfast. “This is where the party was. They were sleeping over at Japanese Breakfast. No breakfast for her,” he shouted adamantly. But I knew it was the American beer talking, so no offense taken.
We then found the only band still playing after 11 p.m. – the oppressive heat had wilted everyone else, apparently – and that was the sweat-soaked country star Billy Currington, who had packed the UScellular Connection Stage with good-looking young people. “I had a different impression of country-western fans,” TJ stated. We forgot to look for the two women wearing nicotine patches and smoking cigarettes we had briefly talked with at our table during the earlier Shaylen performance at the same stage.
On the second weekend, it was more of the same. We had interesting encounters with a wide variety of Milwaukeeans, including Veronica and Elizabeth from the Steny’s shuttle. At Summerfest, they introduced TJ to a disgustingly sweet, seltzer-like alcoholic beverage called “Happy Thursday,” while I stuck to my Miller Lite. “Never again – no more Happy Thursdays,” he said to me, after we lost the two women in the crowd.
And then there was the music. The Avett Brothers were quite impressive, as always. At the Psychedelic Furs show, TJ complained about the lead singer’s voice. He even pulled up some articles on his phone to prove to me that fans often complain about the voice. At the Romantics show, I looked around at the older audience dancing and generally having a rollicking great time, and remarked to TJ, “This, sadly, is my age group,” as we entered into a philosophical discussion of the passing of time. Unfortunately, I can’t read my scribbled notes I wrote afterward, but I’m positive we had momentous and profound conclusions about life, as is always the case with my deep thoughts each year at Summerfest.
Well, that’s it. Overall, TJ said, Summerfest and Milwaukee were great experiences – “Why doesn’t everyone in Germany and Europe know about Summerfest?” he asked one night as we pushed through the late-night crowd.
I jokingly told him to keep that to himself. “We don’t want others to mess up our fest.”
Kris Kodrich is an associate professor of journalism and media communication at Colorado State University. A Milwaukee native, he has been attending Summerfest since he was a little kid at the first one way back in 1968, when he distinctly remembers the German word Gemütlichkeit being used by city officials to convey the idea of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer regarding this new summer festival.
