Zach Bryan’s Michigan Concert: Will It Join This List of Historic Shows by Taylor Swift, The Beatles & More?

Among the 168,000 fans who attended Zach Bryan‘s 3 July concerts astatine MetLife Stadium was a tiny radical fixating not connected guitars, video screens oregon singing on with Bryan, Kings of Leon and Bruce Springsteen. Instead, they were watching brew work — specifically, however unit astatine the bottommost of the stairs provided cups into which fans could determination their drinks, preventing them from bringing bottles onto the field. “Lesson learned,” says Rob Rademacher. “Those are the small tiny details we didn’t deliberation of.” 

Nonetheless, the strategy worked: “To my knowledge,” Rademacher reports, “no 1 threw anything.” 

Rademacher is main operating serviceman of Michigan Athletics, which decided past November, connected a Zoom telephone with promoters from AEG Live, to marque Bryan the first-ever performance astatine Michigan Stadium, besides known arsenic the Big House — a 107,601-capacity stadium that’s the largest successful the U.S. To hole for the amusement connected Saturday (Sept. 27), helium and a tiny radical attended 1 of Bryan’s MetLife shows to survey things similar parking, security, portable restrooms and, yes, however to debar flying brews.

The Bryan amusement is apt to gully arsenic galore arsenic 112,000 attendees, which would acceptable a Billboard Boxscore grounds — Coldplay packed 111,000 fans 2 nights successful a enactment into an Ahmedabad, India, venue successful January, trumping George Strait‘s 110,905 astatine Texas A&M University successful June 2024. (Reps for Bryan, who seldom gives interviews, declined to comment, arsenic did AEG Live.) The imaginable of luring that galore state fans to a stadium that has played big astir exclusively to assemblage shot games, arsenic good arsenic galore University of Michigan graduation ceremonies and the unusual shot match, is what Rademacher calls “an breathtaking challenge.”

“We worked with our occurrence marshal. We’ve got to marque definite radical person entree to restrooms. We talked to performance people. People who enactment with Port-A-Johns. We looked astatine code,” helium says. “There was this municipality fable that you couldn’t bash a performance astatine Michigan Stadium due to the fact that you couldn’t get a crane down the tunnel. I tin archer you it fits by inches. It’s tight.”

Michigan officials had been letting concert-business officials cognize for “a while,” according to Rademacher, that they were funny successful bringing a top-tier superstar to the stadium, and Bryan was the archetypal who wanted to bash it and had scheduling availability. From there, it was a substance of figuring retired however to compression each those radical and their cars into a surrounding field vicinity filled not with parking spaces but a precocious schoolhouse and a play course. 

“In the euphony industry, that has ever been the large question: ‘How bash you marque this work?'” Rademacher says. “Access to the field, getting instrumentality down the tunnel, however galore radical tin you enactment connected the level — each those things that are mean to facilities are not mean here.”

If Bryan’s Michigan Stadium performance is so historical — who knows, possibly Michigan autochthonal Bob Seger volition amusement up — it volition articulation thi...