Rocking the lakefront, 1970-style Green Sheet,
Fifty years ago, Sly and the Family Stone gave more than 100,000 at Summerfest a wild night.
Summerfest, the largest music festival in America, has hosted tens of thousands of bands across its 53-year history.
But there was never a performance like Sly and the Family Stone’s, on July 26, 1970. Less than a year after their famed appearance at Woodstock, the soul-rock band drew more than 100,000 people to Milwaukee’s lakefront — and brought an already fraught situation to the brink of chaos by taking the stage nearly an hour late.
“It was by far the greatest crowd that ever gathered in the area to see a single performing group,” wrote Dean Jensen in his review for the Milwaukee Sentinel. Fifty years later, that figure is only rivaled by the Elton John debacle at Harley-Davidson’s 100th anniversary bash in 2003.
“If they had all stood up, held hands and formed a circle, they could have surrounded Milwaukee,” wrote Dominique Paul Noth in his review for The Milwaukee Journal. “As it was they were crammed into every available space within earshot and eyestrain of the Summerfest ’70 bandstand … with barely enough elbow room to make a peace signal comfortably.”
Warren Wiegratz, the only musician to perform at every Summerfest since the first one in 1968, said it was a show unlike any other. He played saxophone for local band Yesterday’s Children at the time, which opened for Sly and the Family Stone that night.
“All you could see was this mass sea of people,” Wiegratz said. Summerfest was “not prepared for what was about to happen.”
Summerfest finds a home
After falling $164,000 into debt in 1969 with its multiple-venue approach, Summerfest relocated to a single site in 1970 — a former Army Nike base on the lakefront. Millions have been pumped into what’s become Maier Festival Park, but that first year, there was no pavement, a few stages just five feet or so off the ground — and Wiegratz said, an inadequate number of port-a-potties and food vendors.
As Wiegratz recalls, Summerfest ran an ad campaign in Chicago to try to boost attendance, and festival organizers assembled an impressive roster of artists, including James Brown, Chicago, José Feliciano, Sarah Vaughan, Bobby Sherman, Ramsey Lewis and Buddy Guy.
But Sly and the Family Stone, the festival’s closing-night act, was the big get.
‘Junior echo’ of Woodstock
By early afternoon on July 26, a large crowd had gathered, Noth wrote for The Journal, turning the scene into a “strong junior echo of the Woodstock phenomenon.”
“People were sprawled over probably half of the 15-acre site,” the Sentinel’s Jensen wrote. “Marijuana smoke was so thick in the area that if there had been a shift in the wind a good share of the community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, might have gotten stoned.”
During Yesterday’s Children’s opening set, “the fences they had to keep people away from the stage, four or five feet from the crowd, people just knocked them down,” Wiegratz recalled. “You could see people’s hands on stage, reaching for stuff. It was a little bit scary.”
Noth reported that six people “fainted and had to be handed from person to person, over the fence into the arms of police and off to the hospital. … Babies and toddlers were also handed to safety.”
Sly Stone’s ‘getaway’
To make matters worse, Sly Stone was late, “apprehensive over his escort and getaway arrangements,” Noth wrote. Reportedly, Stone also was anxious about the fence in front of the stage being dismantled.
Jensen reported that Stone only agreed to leave his suite of rooms at the Pfister Hotel after Summerfest officials sent over three limos for his transportation, and Wiegratz said Stone eventually had to arrive to the site on a police boat because of the traffic.
With the Family Stone running late, Yesterday’s Children had to return to the stage for a bonus 45-minute set, Wiegratz said. After that second set, they were asked by the stage manager to play some more.
“I’m usually, like, ‘Man the torpedoes, full speed ahead,’ ” Wiegratz said. But after playing such a long time on a hot and sticky night, “we were dragging.”
Noth wrote that people were mainly peaceful, with police reporting just a few arrests for disorderly conduct and marijuana possession. Nevertheless, “the huge crowd rose and dipped in worried waves,” he wrote.
Officials were worried, too, “that the loudspeakers would topple or someone would be electrocuted on the voltage box in front of the stage,” Noth wrote. In the changeover from Yesterday’s Children to the Family Stone, Wiegratz recalled seeing “20 people on each speaker stack crawling up like monkeys.”
Local radio DJs Bob Reitman of
WTOS and O.C. White of WAWA, who had taken the mic between sets to try to keep the crowd under control, told the speaker-climbers to get down or else the Family Stone wouldn’t play.
“Summerfest did not have enough security guards to get to them to get them down,” Wiegratz said. “The crowd guilted those people to get down.”
Sly & Co. get lost
Nearly an hour after their scheduled 9 p.m. start time, Sly and the Family Stone finally took the stage, the Sentinel’s Jensen reported, kicking off their set with “Dance to the Music.”
But Wiegratz recalls just a couple minutes into a relatively simple song, the band appeared to get lost.
“They were probably so high, they may not have even realized it,” Wiegratz said. “It was just horrendous.”
The headliners were on stage for about 50 minutes, Jensen wrote, and about 20 minutes of that time “was spent tinkering with microphones to little avail,” Noth wrote. Evidently, someone stepped on a loudspeaker cable, and “only a few thousand could hear more than a crackly portion of Sly’s voice,” Noth wrote.
“Somehow, Sly’s ‘You Can Make It If You Try’ came through, and his ‘Higher’ number, of Woodstock fame, made everybody friendly,” Noth wrote.
After the set, police wearing riot helmets and carrying nightsticks kept fans back so the band could get in their cars and be escorted off the grounds, Jensen wrote.
“With rock fests, if no one gets killed or seriously injured, it’s a success,” Noth wrote. “Milwaukee’s Summerfest box-office explosion did better than that — it stayed fairly cool and survived traumas of sound and fury.”