A decade after making Summerfest history, Imagine Dragons close Milwaukee fest with a bang

For the final night of Summerfest’s 55th anniversary, it was fitting that the Milwaukee music festival would host the band that created one of the wildest nights in its history.

It was 10 years ago this summer when Imagine Dragons — their popularity rapidly rising with breakout single “Radioactive” — was the chief culprit behind one of the biggest turnouts in the festival’s history.

Milwaukee Police estimated about 117,000 people were at Maier Festival Park on June 29, 2013, most of them showing up for Imagine Dragons’ Miller Lite Oasis show. The bottlenecks outside of the gate were so intense that officials decided to let between 5,000 and 7,000 people in without paying to relieve the congestion.

Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds didn’t comment on that night from the American Family Insurance Amphitheater stage Saturday. And the band's hour-and-45 minute show isn’t going to go down in the Summerfest history books.

But the sold-out spectacle was a reminder of how this band became so huge in the first place.

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Unlike many rock bands that came before them, Imagine Dragons never tried to be cool. Ten years later at Summerfest, they still weren't all that cool.

Multiple times throughout the show, guitarist Wayne Sermon was experiencing a weird static electricity situation, with the ends of his long hair sticking straight up, a moment seemingly straight out of "Spinal Tap." Frontman Dan Reynolds still delivers the kind of melodramatic messianic poses that turned Scott Stapp into a laughingstock, and the band unfortunately retained the pretentious narrated interludes from their 2022 tour (which included a Fiserv Forum show) for this one-off gig.

But Imagine Dragons' sincerity is indisputable, and admired, carrying them to superstardom as it has for Coldplay and U2. They've admirably treated their concerts as affirming safe spaces, with Reynolds being one of the first music A-listers to talk openly and positively about mental health on stage, sentiments he shared again at Summerfest.

And, perhaps most crucially for the longevity of their success, they've remained family-friendly, delivering dramatic shows with no expletives or adult situations in sight. Reynolds even took a moment to acknowledge the children in the crowd, dedicating "Thunder" to a beaming 12-year-old in the pit.

That performance Saturday, like most of the 21 songs that made up the show, also demonstrated Dragons' ongoing ability to deliver towering, often uplifting anthems with life-and-death urgency. Some like "Believer" and "Thunder" raced into senses-smashing bombast, and the band was generous with the confetti cannons, using them for probably a third of the setlist.

But the best-delivered songs Saturday started from a smaller place. "It's Time," "Follow You," "Natural," "Whatever It Takes," "Bad Liar," "Demons" — they all started with Reynolds' sturdy voice singing softly a cappella, or perhaps over some sparse guitar strumming or piano melodies from Sermon, before reaching their crowd-energizing, neck-muscle-bulging, screamed-vocal conclusions.

Similarly, a performance of "Sharks" brought some much-needed levity, courtesy of some child-like shark sunglasses a shirtless and buff Reynolds briefly wore after they were given to him by a fan. "On Top of the World," an atypically frivolous hit, was accompanied by giant colorful balloons bouncing down into the lower bowl and onto the stage.

A four-song stripped-down set from a second stage in the middle of the amphitheater included a gentle cover of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds," and also a seemingly unplanned bit in which Reynolds ran off that stage and into the crowd in the upper sections as he sang over a campfire rendition of "I'll Bet My Life." (I'm guessing it was unplanned, since the video cameras filming the show never found him among the masses.)

Then, as the show reached its conclusion, Reynolds and company took fans back to the song that started it all — "Radioactive" — with the full amphitheater letting out the dramatic gasp from the recording in unison.

Across much of Summerfest's finale, Reynolds was in warrior mode, pounding his chest, arching his back.

He could have done the same, too, during "Radioactive." If other rock bands did what Dragons did a decade ago, they'd still be high on the ego trip.

But it wasn't pride or swagger that took precedence for the song's climax. Instead, Reynolds offered one of the band's smallest, and ultimately strongest, gestures of the night: a sweet, gracious, humble smile.

Benson Boone, The Moss opened, replacing AJR

Band of brothers AJR were supposed to open Saturday, and canceled a planned amphitheater headlining performance Thursday. (Their father, sick for a year, had taken a turn for the worse, and ended up dying earlier this week.) As a result, Summerfest’s talent team scrambled and secured two other openers with just a week’s notice.

The Moss, Saturday's first opener, actually played Summerfest on opening night 16 days earlier. The Utah quartet’s name is fitting, considering their sound and style covers familiar rock territory, from the funky grunge sound, reminiscent of Red Hot Chili Peppers, for set closer “Dog Valley,” to lead singer Tyke James’ Jagger-like stage moves. Nothing earth-shattering, but solid enough, and the band was clearly having fun.

Imagine replacing a beloved band on three days’ notice, and stepping onto a stage in front of a huge crowd that largely doesn’t know you and didn’t know you’d be there. That’s what Benson Boone had to deal with it.

So what did he do to make a first impression? A cartwheel and a flip for his entrance. Bam, crowd in his corner, just like that.

And they stayed there for his remaining 45 minutes, charmed by the 21-year-old pop artist’s pleasant personality and a surprisingly killer falsetto, on par at times with Adam Lambert. (Coincidentally, Boone even has a single to his name also called “Ghost Town.”)

And like Lambert, Boone capably channeled Freddie Mercury, doing his own take on the late Queen king’s famous repeat-the-melody moment from Live Aid for an unreleased original. (The mustached Boone even did it in a white T-shirt.)

As a newcomer with just three years’ experience, the songwriting could use some sharpening — “Nights Like These” sounded like an icky cross between My Chemical Romance and Maroon 5 — but, in a classy move, he dedicated mournful original “In the Stars” to AJR and their recently departed father. And in the end, Boone managed to transform a tough gig into a fan-scoring win, giving the people another crowd-pleasing flip on the way out.

Imagine Dragons' Summerfest setlist

1. "My Life"

2. "Believer"

3. "It's Time"

4. "I'm So Sorry"

5. "Thunder"

6. "Birds"

7. "Follow You"

8. "Natural"

9. "Next to Me"

10. "Amsterdam"

11. "Three Little Birds" (Bob Marley cover)

12. "I'll Bet My Life"

13. "Whatever It Takes"

14. "Sharks"

15. "Enemy"

16. "Bad Liar"

17. "Demons"

18. "On Top of the World"

19. "Bones"

20. "Radioactive"

21. "Walking the Wire"

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Imagine Dragons deliver Summerfest finale, decade after historic night