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When the Orange Bowl Became Miami’s Biggest Concert Stage
For decades, a stadium built for football gave Miami a place to hear some of the world’s biggest musicians at full volume.
Before there was a baseball park on the site, the Orange Bowl stood in Little Havana. Its history is usually told through football: the Dolphins, the Hurricanes, national championships and Super Bowls. But on other nights, crews carried stages onto the field, and the stadium belonged to music. The Miami Marlins, whose ballpark now occupies the site, include Prince, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen and the Rolling Stones among the performers in its history.
One of the early rock bills was Holiday Jam ’74. On July 7, Leon Russell headlined a day that also brought the Band, the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd to the Orange Bowl. The lineup reads differently now than it did then: several acts whose records would remain part of American rock history shared one Miami field on a summer afternoon.
A decade later, the stadium hosted Michael Jackson at the height of Thriller. He came with his brothers on the Jacksons’ Victory Tour for two Orange Bowl shows, November 2 and 3, 1984. Billboard later reported total Miami attendance of about 120,000 across the two nights. The concerts placed one of pop’s defining performers before a crowd of a size few indoor Miami venues could have held.
Then Prince took over.
His April 7, 1985, stop on the Purple Rain tour was billed at the Orange Bowl as the “Purple Bowl.” The concert closed that tour, with Prince and the Revolution playing Miami on Easter Sunday. A Miami Herald reporter, writing the next day, described Prince rising onto the stage to begin “Let’s Go Crazy” and an audience of roughly 55,000 responding from the field to the upper deck.
That Orange Bowl concert is its own chapter of Miami music history. Prince’s famous rain-soaked Super Bowl halftime show came 22 years later at a different stadium, Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens. The city had already seen him command its biggest stage in 1985.
Later that year, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played the Orange Bowl on September 9 and 10. Billboard recorded two sellouts and a combined attendance of 114,645. In the span of months, the stadium had held the elaborate world of Purple Rain and the enormous crowds of Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour. Its size made room for both kinds of show.
In 1987, Miami could have spent much of the year at the Orange Bowl listening to the decade’s major acts. Madonna opened the North American leg of her Who’s That Girl tour there on June 27. Heavy rain nearly stopped the show, according to a critic who attended; the opener, Level 42, was canceled while crews worked to dry the stage. Madonna performed before an estimated 60,000 fans. David Bowie and Pink Floyd also played the stadium that year, and U2 brought The Joshua Tree tour there on December 3.
The following June, the bill changed again. Van Halen’s Monsters of Rock tour brought Metallica, Scorpions, Dokken and Kingdom Come to the Orange Bowl on June 4, 1988. Metallica’s own concert archive preserves the date, the other acts and the band’s set. Here, too, the Orange Bowl could accommodate a scale of production and a combination of performers that a club could not.
The Rolling Stones arrived for two Steel Wheels shows in November 1989 and returned on the Bridges to Babylon tour in December 1997. The Orange Bowl had become a place where an act’s arrival could feel like a citywide event. It could hold the audience, the equipment and the spectacle.
Today, a baseball park stands where those concerts happened. The Marlins have incorporated tributes to the old stadium, including some of its original seats. They are reminders of a place Miami remembers for touchdowns and championships, but also for voices carrying across an open field: the Jacksons, Prince, Madonna, Springsteen, U2, Metallica and the Stones, each filling the Orange Bowl in a different way.