Among the 168,000 fans who attended Zach Bryan‘s three July concerts at MetLife Stadium was a small group fixating not on guitars, video screens or singing along with Bryan, Kings of Leon and Bruce Springsteen. Instead, they were watching beer service — specifically, how staff at the bottom of the stairs provided cups into which fans could pour their drinks, preventing them from bringing bottles onto the field. “Lesson learned,” says Rob Rademacher. “Those are the little small details we didn’t think of.”
Nonetheless, the strategy worked: “To my knowledge,” Rademacher reports, “no one threw anything.”
Rademacher is chief operating officer of Michigan Athletics, which decided last November, on a Zoom call with promoters from AEG Live, to make Bryan the first-ever concert at Michigan Stadium, also known as the Big House — a 107,601-capacity stadium that’s the largest in the U.S. To prepare for the show on Saturday (Sept. 27), he and a small group attended one of Bryan’s MetLife shows to study things like parking, security, portable restrooms and, yes, how to avoid flying brews.
The Bryan show is likely to draw as many as 112,000 attendees, which would set a Billboard Boxscore record — Coldplay packed 111,000 fans two nights in a row into an Ahmedabad, India, venue in January, trumping George Strait‘s 110,905 at Texas A&M University in June 2024. (Reps for Bryan, who rarely gives interviews, declined to comment, as did AEG Live.) The prospect of luring that many country fans to a stadium that has played host almost exclusively to college football games, as well as numerous University of Michigan graduation ceremonies and the odd soccer match, is what Rademacher calls “an exciting challenge.”
“We worked with our fire marshal. We’ve got to make sure people have access to restrooms. We talked to concert people. People who work with Port-A-Johns. We looked at code,” he says. “There was this urban legend that you couldn’t do a concert at Michigan Stadium because you couldn’t get a crane down the tunnel. I can tell you it fits by inches. It’s tight.”
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Michigan officials had been letting concert-business officials know for “a while,” according to Rademacher, that they were interested in bringing a top-tier superstar to the stadium, and Bryan was the first who wanted to do it and had scheduling availability. From there, it was a matter of figuring out how to squeeze all those people and their cars into a surrounding campus neighborhood filled not with parking spaces but a high school and a golf course.
“In the music industry, that has always been the big question: ‘How do you make this work?’” Rademacher says. “Access to the field, getting equipment down the tunnel, how many people can you put on the floor — all those things that are normal to facilities are not normal here.”
If Bryan’s Michigan Stadium concert is indeed historic — who knows, maybe Michigan native Bob Seger will show up — it will join this list of events that changed stadium concerts forever:
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The Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York: Aug. 15, 1965
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}Contrary to legend, The Beatles‘ famous show before 55,600 screaming fans was not the first-ever stadium concert — Elvis Presley drew 26,000 people to the Cotton Bowl in 1956, and The Beatles themselves managed 20,000 at a half-filled Municipal Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., the previous summer. But it was the first successful rock show in a stadium, even if The Beatles’ speakers seemed like toys compared to the gear Bryan and Beyoncé regularly haul in today. And it changed the music industry. “It was very big and very strange,” Ringo Starr would say, but within years, promoters figured out how to handle acoustics and security as well as convincing sports teams that rock could raise cash.
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The Jacksons’ Victory Tour at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo.: July 1984
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}The reunion of The Jackson 5’s Michael, Tito, Jackie, Marlon and Jermaine (plus Randy!) racked up 135,000 tickets in its three opening dates, but it wasn’t easy. The shows cost $160,000 owing to their 375 security guards, 170 local police officers and 70 metal detectors, while stadium officials also had to bulldoze a roadbed to accommodate a tractor-trailer. (Later, Giants Stadium officials had to hire engineers to cut a concrete beam to make way for the big rigs loading in concert equipment.) The Jacksons wound up blazing a logistical trail for other stadium acts to follow for decades.
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Live Aid at Wembley in the U.K. & JFK Stadium in Philadelphia: July 13, 1985
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}The one-two stadium punch of Wembley in the U.K. (102,000 capacity) and JFK in Philadelphia (72,000) showed the international power of rock, drawing a reported 1.9 billion viewers of Paul McCartney, Elton John, The Who, Madonna, a reunited Led Zeppelin with Phil Collins on drums and dozens of others, raising more than $100 million to fight famine in Ethiopia. It turned organizer Bob Geldof (briefly) into a saint and Queen into rock gods (its Live Aid version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” dramatized thoroughly in the band’s 2018 biopic, has 270 million YouTube views).
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Grateful Dead at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl in Las Vegas: April 1991
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}In addition to selling 39,000 total tickets to two shows, the Grateful Dead turned Vegas into a mass-market rock destination for the first time after years of Frank Sinatra, schlock-era Elvis Presley and other lounge and lounge-friendly acts. The 1991 shows were Nevada’s biggest entertainment event to that point, leading U2 to play the same venue the following year. Within a few years, as per Vegas tradition, pop and rock acts from Elton John to Britney Spears shifted to lengthy residencies at Strip casinos.
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Guns N’ Roses at Riverport Amphitheatre in St. Louis: July 2, 1991
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}After performing for almost 90 minutes, Axl Rose took issue with a fan in one of the front rows: “Take that! Take that!” the singer shouted, then dove into the crowd. The ensuing “violent and bloody riot,” as attendee Daniel Durchholz called it, led to 65 injuries, including 25 police officers, and Rose was arrested on five misdemeanor charges. Bad things had happened to stadium acts before — Led Zeppelin prompted a riot at a Tampa stadium in 1977 purely because the band refused to return to the stage during a thunderstorm — but none were as self-inflicted as the GNR riot. The band wouldn’t play St. Louis again until 2017.
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Michael Jackson at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.: Jan. 31, 1993
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}For the Super Bowl XXVII halftime show, employing a hold-the-pose move he’d perfected on his Dangerous tour — this time in a dark military jacket with gold tunic and belt — Michael Jackson and his band and dancers performed “Jam,” “Billie Jean,” “Black or White,” “We Are the World” and, while surrounded by 3,500 singing children, “Heal the World.” It was a historic Super Bowl performance, breaking the dam for rock, pop and country stars: Before MJ, the shows were Winter Magic, Be Bop Bamboozled and A World of Children’s Dreams; after MJ, it was Diana Ross, Clint Black, Stevie Wonder, U2, Janet Jackson, Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.
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U2’s 360° Tour: 2009
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}Until U2 dragged “the claw,” a massive, spidery contraption, into the center of football fields around the U.S., artists had a rough time achieving “in the round” shows at stadiums. “We have been trying to find a way of doing 360 for years,” Paul McGuinness, the band’s manager, told Billboard. “The engineering to build a temporary structure capable of bearing the weight that this carries, hundreds of tons, nobody had come up with a way of doing that.” That year, the band sold 3 million tickets and grossed $300 million.
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Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: 2023-2024
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}What else can you say about Taylor Swift and Eras, other than repeating the massive metrics? After the last of the pop megastar’s shows on Dec. 8, 2024, the tour had sold more than 10 million tickets and grossed over $2 billion, not to mention what Billboard estimated as $132 million in merchandise sales and hundreds of millions in revenue for host cities.
This story originally appeared on Billboard
