Looking back at the great Elton John Harley 100th fiasco
Elton John is one of the most accomplished and celebrated artists of all time, in the midst of a blockbuster farewell tour that brings him to a soldout Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee Saturday.
But there was one show in Milwaukee where thousands of people weren’t so happy to see him — the Harley-Davidson 100th anniversary bash in 2003, where John performed as the big surprise headliner.
The centennial celebration for the Milwaukee motorcycle company was a very big deal. With more than 200,000 bikers expected to attend, all the hotel rooms in the region were booked seven months in advance, and homeowners were getting paid to leave town so their houses could be rented to guests for a week. (How much was the going rate? $1,900 for a four-bedroom, and even as much as $1,500 a night for mansions. And that was years Airbnb.)
And all the festivities that final week in August — including a threeday festival dubbed “The Celebration” at Maier Festival Park — led up to a free concert Aug. 31 in Veterans Park.
Rockers like Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Poison and REO Speedwagon were booked for the fest. As for that grand finale, dubbed “The Party,” Harley-Davidson officials opted to keep the lineup a surprise until the acts took the stage.
Between the unusual secrecy and all the hype around the Harley happenings, imaginations ran wild.
Nearly two weeks before the big show, the Journal Sentinel’s Dave Tianen, via industry sources, pegged John as the likely headliner — “an odd choice for a biker crowd,” he suggested.
Perhaps Harley riders didn’t want to believe it, because rumors spread anyway that the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen would show up — even though the Stones were in Europe around the time of the Harley bash, and the Boss was scheduled to play Miller Park the following month.
About 150,000 free tickets for “The Party” were distributed through Harley dealerships, and before John even appeared, there were other problems that day at the park.
Lines for hot dogs lasted up to three hours, and some stands ran out of beer before 7 p.m., the Journal Sentinel reported.
Actor Dan Aykroyd seemed unprepared as the MC, Tianen wrote in his review, resorting to “lines like ‘I love all of you!’ … After about 10 minutes, the crowd was clearly tired of the patronizing.”
The Doobie Brothers played first, backed by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, which was completely drowned out by guitars, Tianen said. Then came Tim McGraw, a Harley fan who didn’t have many fans himself at the 100th bash, Tianen wrote.
“Guys behind me were yelling ‘Take the rest of the night off ’ or ‘You’re done. Thank you. You’re done,’ “Tianen wrote. “McGraw certainly didn’t help his cause with love songs like ‘She’s My Kind of Rain.’ These guys came to party, and he gave them a romantic weather report.”
In the middle of McGraw’s set, Kid Rock came out for a three-song set, the bright spot of the day, Tianen wrote.
But then came John, and “monster hit after monster hit” — including “Bennie and the Jets,” “Rocket Man” and “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” — “was met with scattered applause and a smattering of boos.”
“At the end the crowd had thinned out so much up front that the concert staff let down the barriers and let everybody filter into the VIP area,” Tianen wrote. “It wasn’t so much an outright disaster as an unmitigated flop.”
On the bright side, traffic out of Veterans Park wasn’t so bad. Instead of having 200,000 people leave at once, thousands bolted early, Capt. Chris Luedke from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department told the Journal Sentinel.
But as fans rode out of town, they drove under a handmade sign on the interstate on Milwaukee’s south side apologizing for Elton John.
“Harley-Davidson officials need to admit that they screwed up horribly,” Roger and Phyllis Brown, of Fergus Falls, Minn., wrote in a letter to the editor. “This was a big big moneymaker for Harley-Davidson, and Elton John was our reward? What were they thinking?”
“It took only one opening chorus to kill the 100-year mystique that has made Harley-Davidson motorcycles so popular,” wrote John Laatsch of Milwaukee, who left the show early in protest. “The last image that several hundred thousand people have in their minds is of Elton John playing his piano under the Harley-Davidson logo.”
The concert was such a fiasco that it became shorthand in Milwaukee for momentous hype followed by crushing disappointment. When the Packers blew a game against the Minnesota Vikings early the following month, the Journal Sentinel headline suggested the team fared “about as well as Elton at Harley bash.”
Two years later, John would return to a much friendlier crowd at the Bradley Center, a show that Tianen wrote was the performer’s best in Milwaukee in years.
And when Harley-Davidson announced at its annual meeting in 2007 plans to host a 105th anniversary bash in Milwaukee, then-CEO Jim Ziemer promised John would not be back, to the sound of cheers.
He was true to his word. For the grand finale in Veterans Park, Harley booked one of the rockers Harley fans most wanted to see in 2003, Bruce Springsteen.
And they made sure Harley fans heard the news eight months in advance.