Summerfest Day 9: The best and worst

No bad performances, as artists shine in rain

Day 9 of Summerfest brought back memories Friday for two veteran performers.

Summerfest officials and his bandmates honored local saxophonist Warren Wiegratz for performing at each of the 50 years of the festival.

Meanwhile, rocker Huey Lewis remembered the big night in 1984 when his audience overflowed to the point that Summerfest decided it needed to build a new amphitheater.

Rain occasionally interrupted the music but couldn’t stop the flow of quality throughout the night.

Huey Lewis at the BMO Harris Pavilion

Thirty-three years ago a heartbeat thumped, tha-thumped to start Huey Lewis and the News’ set as the crowd began hollering when it realized it was about to hear a live version of “The Heart of Rock & Roll.”

Friday night: same opening, same response and Lewis and his band, though now sporting some gray hair, hadn’t lost a step. Or beat.

The funky, bluesy stylings of Lewis’ many hits were rolled out one after another — “If This is It,” “I Want a New Drug,” “Doing It All for My Baby,” “Hip To Be Square” and “Heart and Soul.”

Dressed in an untucked lavender button-down shirt and jeans, Lewis performed a few songs from a yet-to-be-released album. Unlike many audiences who only come for the hits, Lewis’ new songs didn’t send the crowd heading to the beer stand, probably because they were up-tempo rockers with plenty of harmonica.

Lewis’ gravelly baritone hasn’t lost any of the charm and luster which was on display during a few a cappella numbers including the Major Lance hit “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um.” — Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Atmosphere at Harley-Davidson Roadhouse

Atmosphere, the outfit that helped form Rhymesayers over two decades ago, once again headlined the Rhymesayers takeover at the Roadhouse Friday night and held up its own end of the quality control as if it was no big thing.

With organic flow drawn heavily from actual vinyl records, producer and DJ Ant and tour DJ Plain Ole Bill kept the beats and thus the bodies moving positively, while rapper Slug came across as one-third storyteller, one-third protester and one-third demotic poet inside his part of the rhythmic conversation.

Humorous realism like that embodied by the song title and refrain “Godlovesugly” and rhymes like “Irish name/Scandinavian frame” displayed a different quality, as well as quality control, of rap. It added to a totality that made sure Atmosphere and Rhymesayers owned the stage until the end of the night. — Jon M. Gilbertson, Special to the Journal Sentinel

Aubrie Sellers at Briggs & Stratton Big Backyard

Aubrie Sellers has the advantages of heredity (her mother is Lee Ann Womack and her father is Jason Sellers) and environment (born and nurtured in Nashville), but Friday evening she didn’t have the advantage of dry festival weather at the largely exposed Big Backyard.

The show had to occur, though, and, with the support of a sharp and steady five-piece band (probably also the result of environmental and hereditary connections), Sellers gave a sharp and steady performance that put her in the province of similar female alt-country singer-songwriters like Amanda Shires and Margo Price.

With just the one album, 2016’s “New City Blues,” Sellers is perhaps as experienced as Price is, and the material she brought to the set stayed in the pasture where tumbleweed two-steps, country-blues lowdown hoedowns and bar-closing weepers roam as freely as they can. Sellers roped them all with the kind of vocal lasso that genes and Music Row don’t hand a gal. — Jon M. Gilbertson, Special to the Journal Sentinel

Sa-Roc at Harley-Davidson Roadhouse

Let’s start with the good news: Summerfest made some solid strides booking hip-hop and EDM this year, popular genres that had been oddly underrepresented at the World’s Largest Music Festival.

Progress though must still be made. Every DJ playing Summerfest this year was a dude. Of all the rappers booked, only Sa-Roc was a woman. And she only had 30 minutes Friday afternoon at the Harley-Davidson Roadhouse.

She made a strong impression, though, with her short set, climaxing with the stirring tongue-twister “MetaMorpheus” and its poetic reflection, and uplift, for the disenfranchised.

“We’ve been so close yet so far, ain’t that a pity,” she sang on the chorus. “Trading freedom for just enough/Land of the plenty/No one’s gonna change it but us.”

I would love to see Sa-Roc return next year with a longer set and better time slot, hopefully with other female rappers, from Milwaukee and beyond, in the lineup. — Piet Levy, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel