Noah Kahan wants to know if his uber-packed Summerfest show over the weekend had the Big Gig's biggest crowd ever

Noah Kahan wants to know if his uber-packed Summerfest show over the weekend had the Big Gig's biggest crowd ever.

We don't know about that. But we do know it was, indeed, massive.

The 26-year-old folk-pop singer-songwriter headlined the UScellular Connection Stage Saturday just months after selling out the Miller High Life Theater.

Summerfest shared photos from Kahan's performance on Instagram, including one of him sporting a Brewers jersey and a birds-eye view of the crowd.

From the latter, it appears Kahan's crowd stretched as far east as the Lakeshore State Park Inlet to as far west as the Ethnic Village. And, from the stage to as far south as the image shows, which appears to be just before the entrance to the Sound Waves Stage.

On Sunday, the "Stick Season" singer shared the crowd shot on his Instagram Story and posed the question: "@Summerfest I'm hearing that was the biggest crowd in the history of your festival??"

Summerfest said the festival's 2023 total attendance number will be released following the conclusion of the fest.

Other massive Summerfest shows

Anytime there's an extraordinary turnout for a Summerfest show, what immediately comes to mind? Ahh, yes, the 2013 Imagine Dragons concert at the Miller Lite Oasis.

Back then, the then-breakout rock act's song "Radioactive" was a huge hit.

At 7:30 p.m. on June 29 that year, lines stretched into the street, according to a previous Journal Sentinel report. Two hours later, the crowd was still so large, security took the unprecedented move of opening the gates for 15 minutes to thin out the throngs, allowing 5,000 to 7,000 people to get in for free.

In total, 117,000 people were on the grounds that night, according to Milwaukee Police.

Before that show, "nothing in recent memory" came "remotely close" to the enormous bottlenecks when Wiz Khalifa performed at the Harley-Davidson Roadhouse in July 2011, Journal Sentinel music writer Piet Levy reported back then.

"Clusters of sweaty people were smashed on top of each other, body against body, at times unable to move even when they pushed," Levy wrote. "This wasn't just in front of the stage, but all the way back by the concession stands and around the periphery."

Both Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons would later end up headlining Summerfest's American Family Insurance Amphitheater. And, Imagine Dragons is scheduled to play it again July 8, the final day of this year's festival. Will Kahan share a similar fate? Time will tell.

Also worth a mention in the biggest Summerfest crowds conversation is Sly and the Family Stone.

The pop-funk legends attracted more than 100,000 people to Milwaukee's lakefront on July 26, 1970 — and made an indelible mark on the festival's history as the first huge concert at the Summerfest grounds, a previous Journal Sentinel report said. Though, it's also worth a mention that both Summerfest attendance tallies and Milwaukee Police crowd estimates weren't the most reliable sources in those days.

Piet Levy and Chris Foran of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Noah Kahan had a massive crowd at his 2023 Milwaukee Summerfest show