Zach Bryan was only a few songs into his show at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Stadium on Saturday when he shouted, “Thank you so much for the best night of my life.” And later, during “Dawns,” he marveled, “This might be the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”
What could be so crazy about a show at Michigan Stadium? For starters, there’s no place like it – the big House, as Michigan Wolverines football fans call it, has a capacity of 107,601, making it the largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere. Football fans in Ann Arbor are used to setting attendance records. Not to be outdone, Bryan fans looked to set a new mark for the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history. Final attendance figures are not yet available,but organizers announced before the show that more than 112,000 tickets had been sold,which would eclipse the 110,905 mark set by George Strait at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field last year. For a guy like bryan, who was still in the Navy four years ago and was playing small clubs as late as 2022, crazy indeed.
Just as crazy: Throughout its 98-year history, the Big House had never hosted a concert (unless you count a small show organized in 1987 by legendary football coach Bo Schembechler’s wife, Millie Schembechler, to warn a crowd of 5,000 high-schoolers of the dangers of substance abuse). It might be an unachievable task to work every bit of a 112,0000-strong crowd, but Bryan was up for the challenge. He scored points before he played a note,as he and the band walked onstage to the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” an unofficial hype song played during every home football game, and Bryan wore a customized maize-and-blue football jersey, Number Two.
from there, Bryan effortlessly moved between quite, self-reflective acoustic songs (“God Speed,” “28”) and country-rock anthems (“Quittin’ Time,” “Revival”). If there’s a common thread through all of Bryan’s songs, whether loud or soft, fast or slow, it’s the shout-along chorus. When Bryan was at his best, as on the devastating song of love and loss, “East Side of Sorrow,” the stadium shook as tens of thousands joined him in the anthemic chorus, and when Bryan would drop out and let the crowd take the lead, he looked as much a spectator as a performer, taking in the magnitude of the scene.
Bryan got some help from a huge name. At 47, John Mayer is a ways removed from his days as a blues-pop heartthrob, but he’s still in his prime. While he hasn’t released a solo record as 2021’s Sob Rock, he’s kept plenty busy defining an increasingly impressive legacy. Mayer has been a part of Dead & Company for a decade now,and the band spent parts of the past two years in residence at the Sphere in Las vegas before celebrating the Dead’s 60th anniversary with a series of shows in golden Gate Park last month.
The night was about Bryan – Mayer himself said, “Zach is the guy right now, carrying the torch” – and the tone of Mayer’s set seemed to recognise that. Mayer steered away from the megahits of his youth in favor of a career sampler that included a soulful rendition of 2006’s “Gravity” and the breezy “Who says,” during which Mayer substituted “Ann Arbor” for “Austin” in the chorus. From his more recent catalog, the delicate and disillusioned “I Guess I just Feel like” from Sob rock showed how much Mayer has matured since he launched onto the scene with 2001’s Room for Squares.
Mayer’s time with Dead & Company has left a mark on his guitar playing. While he’s always been a virtuoso, these days Mayer seems less interested in blues-rock shredding and showing off as he does in finding out where Jerry Garcia’s more fluid and laid-back improvisational style might take him.