http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/festivals/rolling-stones-summerfest-show-s...Summerfest Sellout!!
It's only rock 'n' roll. But that's likely little consolation for the thousands of Rolling Stones fans who failed to snag a ticket Monday to the legendary band's Summerfest kickoff concert on June 23.
About 25,000 tickets, originally priced from $94.40 to $421.95, were gone seven minutes after going on sale at 10 a.m. Monday.
"You can't always get what you want," yelled Scott "Wizzy" Wisinski outside the Summerfest Mid-Gate box office, where a couple hundred people gathered Monday morning to try to buy tickets. Wisniski was sporting a Stones shirt from the band's 1975 County Stadium show, a wooden sign of the Stones' tongue and lips logo he made himself draped around his neck.
"It's sad," Wisniski, 54, said. "I got a new liver in 2002, and I was mostly drinking (at past Stones concerts). This time, I would have remembered it."
Almost everyone who gathered at the Summerfest box office went away empty-handed, competing not only with each other, but also with thousands of people flooding Ticketmaster's website and phone lines.
Joann Rader, 55, of New Berlin was one of the unlucky ones, even though she was the first person at the Summerfest box office Monday, arriving at 5:30 a.m. But tickets at the box office were issued through a lottery system, which hadn't been announced previously.
"It is what it is," said Rader. "My husband is a huge Rolling Stones fan, and we don't get to go out a lot, so to have that night out, we'd want it to be special....I'm going to try winning them on the radio."
But Steven Nowak, 59, is sitting pretty. His number was the first to be called out, and he walked away with six tickets in Section 3. "It was meant to be," said Nowak, who last saw the Stones in the early '80s.
Each customer could purchase up to eight tickets for the Stones' concert, not just Monday, but through a number of pre-sales that began Wednesday, where all of the inventories were quickly wiped out.
Sharon McGinnis, 57, of Greenfield acquired an American Express card just to take advantage of an exclusive pre-sale last Wednesday; after trying the pre-sale for three hours, McGinnis and friend Rick Grams gave up. They tried again Monday at the Summerfest box office, but again came up short.
"To me, this is the best band ever," McGinnis said. "I believe the limit should have been four tickets per person for this band, because then the brokers and the scalpers got (tickets), and us ordinary folks are getting no tickets and have to go online where they're thousands of dollars."
As of noon Monday, there were already 3,580 resale tickets for the Stones' show on StubHub, priced from $173 for a single bleacher seat to an incredible $10,748.55 for two tickets in the pit.
There also are a handful of "official platinum seats" available at ticketmaster.com, with prices structured based on demand. As of 11 a.m. Monday, they ranged from $1,533.08 for two seats in Section 7 to $3,721.22 for two seats in Section 1.
Those who did score a ticket will likely see the last Stones show in Milwaukee, at least with the current, long-running lineup. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are 71, Ronnie Wood will be 68 in June, and Charlie Watts will be 74 in June. The band last played Milwaukee 10 years ago.
Ticket holders also will be seeing the band in by far the smallest venue on its 15-city "Zip Code" summer stadium tour. By comparison, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the band is playing July 4, has a permanent seating capacity of 257,000.
Those factors, plus the fact that the band is skipping Chicago on this tour, led to extremely high demand for the Stones' Summerfest tickets.
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