Alice Cooper, Motley Crue and Def Leppard perform in Tulsa

Alice Cooper, Motley Crue and Def Leppard (they performed in that order) partnered Wednesday for the first major concert event at TU’s football stadium in 33 years.

Will people show up? The concert was oh-so-close to a sellout and the vibe was what you might expect when 25,000 like-minded folks — hey, let’s all have a good time — share a pilgrimage.

Former BOK Center general manager Jeff Nickler, who has long wanted to bring a stadium show to Tulsa, said there were no major issues and suggested the fan experience was “really great.”

“There will always be things we can improve upon, but overall I would call today a great first step in bringing more stadium concert business to Tulsa,” Nickler said near the end of the show.

Here’s the lucky part: The weather was a jackpot.

Tulsa in August can be an air fryer. Golfers and golf fans roasted in triple-digit temperatures when the 2007 PGA Championship was staged at Southern Hills Country Club in August of that year.

Tulsa’s high temperature Aug. 16, 2022 was 105 degrees. On Aug, 16, 2023 — concert day — the temperature was 87 degrees when Cooper took the stage at 5:45 p.m. and 77 degrees when Def Leppard wrapped up the show around 10:45 p.m. Once the sun retired, the weather was more than just tolerable. It was pleasant.

The show itself was a smooth five-hour operation with Cooper playing an hour and Motley Crue and Def Leppard playing about 90 minutes each (plus stage/equipment tweaks between acts).

Fans saw pros — and different flavors of shows. Cooper, who charted his first hit in 1970, is the godfather of theater rock whose props and allies include a snake, a guillotine, a straitjacket and a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster. Motley Crue puts on a bad boy show (with help from the dancing Nasty Habits.) And Def Leppard is just Def Leppard — makers of the kind of radio gold that easily translates to concert currency.

Cooper opened for Motley Crue during the band’s farewell tour performance at BOK Center in 2014. The Chapman Stadium show was Motley Crue’s first in Tulsa minus Mick Mars. The new guitarist is John 5, whose previous employers include Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and David Lee Roth and who has a sort-of Tulsa connection. His official bio says his love of guitar began at age 7 after he began watching the television show “Hee Haw” with his father. “Hee Haw” was co-hosted by longtime Tulsa resident Roy Clark.

Mary Beth Reeves of Owasso attended the show with family members, but it wasn’t her first time to see the John 5 incarnation of Crue. Three days earlier, she was in Omaha to catch a previous stop on the Alice Cooper-Motley Crue-Def Leppard stadium tour. She’s a veteran of 50-plus Motley Crue shows. She has traveled as far as Los Angeles to see the band, but this time the trip was about 10 miles.

“I love their music and how it takes me back to my teen years and I have always been a sucker for bad boys and Motley Crue is the baddest,” Reeves said, adding that she, meanwhile, is a good girl and a rule-follower.

The baddest Motley Crue behavior at Chapman Stadium was arguably Tommy Lee asking fans to show breasts. Some obliged. At the end of the Crue set, Lee kicked a couple of drumsticks and said “it’s good!” as if he had booted field goals through the stadium’s goal posts.

Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue and Joe Elliott of Def Leppard made references to the historical significance of Chapman Stadium hosting a rock show. The last major concert event at the venue was a sold-out New Kids on the Block show Aug. 28, 1990. That concert came the day after blues rocker Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash. New Kids member Donnie Wahlberg asked the crowd to observe a moment of silence in memory of the guitarist.

Otherwise, concert-type events at the stadium have been rare. According to Tulsa World archives, Ray Charles’ band played a benefit concert there for TU’s Quarterback Club in 1962. Evangelist Billy Graham drew a crowd of 28,000 for a one-night rally in 1956. Blues Traveler performed at Chapman Stadium (then Skelly Stadium) in 1998. Other music artists have performed post-game shows at TU that were free with the cost of a football ticket.

Did you know James Taylor played there? James Taylor was a tackle with the USFL’s Oklahoma Outlaws in 1984, when the team played home games at the stadium. That still counts, right?

A concert stage was constructed above the north end zone for Wednesday’s show. A hard plastic surface was installed across the length of floor seating to protect the playing field.

The concert came 40 years after Motley Crue and Def Leppard released milestone albums — “Shout At the Devil” and “Pyromania,” respectively.