Michael Jackson at Summerfest!

Monday night in Milwaukee. The clouds bustle over the city casting occasional showers, keeping the inhabitants of our fair city damp and honest. Thousands of people find their way to Maier Festival Park despite the less than ideal weather. Here’s what’s remarkable to me. On a night when I travel down to Summerfest with my wife, my son (14), and one dear friend, we have the good charm to meet with four of our other very close friends for an evening of music, food and refreshments. Whose spirit settles over the summerfest grounds? Not Henry Maier, the ex-mayor who’s lent his name to this park. Not Bo Black whose driving optimism and unquenchable passion for summerfest will forever inspire anyone unlucky enough to follow in her footsteps. No, nether of these folks stood watch over us all on this blustery June evening. Instead, I’m reasonably sure it was the king of pop himself. Yep MJ, Michael Jackson.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not one of these folks who hustles over to the nearest memorial to lay flowers and sparkly gloves in honor of my fallen idol. In fact, I’ve never really had much appreciation at all for the man. I come firmly from the generation split in its views about Michael. Half of the population thinks of him as an immense talent who’s transformed pop music and led us all down a path of self discovery. And the half that includes me generally thinks of him as some crazy whack job that barely brooks attention in a world engulfed in many more problems than we can normally count.

Tonight was different. I heard a funky cool indie rocker (Brett Dennen), an aging Wisconsin area blues band (the Velveetatones), a crazy cool hip hop artist (Lupe Fiasco), and one of the finest show bands ever to slide a bottle neck across a pedal steel guitar (Robert Randolph Family Band) all pay this man tribute. Michael’s music took many forms: it wafted on the gentle lake breezes; it dodged pesky skirmishes with the rain, it drove from guitars and it sang from the voices of musicians who all know that his music helped pave the way for their success.

Tonight I can’t help but thank my lucky stars that I live in a city like Milwaukee, that I have the friends and family that I do and that I get to listen to artists as in tune to their musical heritage as these folks seemed to be tonight. It was a rare night at Summerfest. I am glad I was there.