“So,” Bahl says, “I met the general manager from Highmark and he said, ‘You should do it here,’ and it ended up being the only spot, but the only way to do it there was to get a band that was five times over my budget.”

In February, he landed one, a big one: One of his all-time favorite bands, Blink-182, even if he’s not crazy about them carrying on without Tom DeLonge. That’s a whole other story.

“I had Blink verbally confirmed,” Bahl says, “and their agent said, ‘I need you to keep a little bit of money aside for their support.’ So, I said ‘no problem.’ I’m stoked out of my mind, doing backflips. Three weeks later, I get the email that the support is Lil Wayne.”

That was devastating.

“I couldn’t afford it, first of all, but even if I could, it just deviates too much from the ethos of what I’m trying to do, so it didn’t make any sense. So, I tried to get them to do this as a one-off, without Wayne on it and they said they weren’t interested in doing that. So, I said, ‘Where does that leave me? I’ve now booked a venue, I have everything in motion,’ and they said, ‘What about The Offspring?’ ”

The Offspring, back in the ’90s, was one of “the big three” pop-punk bands with Blink and Green Day, having blown up with the 1994 album “Smash,” that produced the Alternative chart hits “Come Out and Play,” “Self-Esteem” and “Gotta Get Away.” It only got bigger in 1998 with “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” — to the point that in ’99 the Orange County, Calif., band headlined the Civic Arena and Star Lake Amphitheater for X-Fest within a few months.

In 2019, The Offspring, running with two original members in singer Dexter Holland (vocals) and guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman, hasn’t held up quite like Blink and Green Day in terms of popularity.

Being a sucker with no self-esteem (just kidding), Bahl was happy to settle for The Offspring, who is prepping its first album since 2012, and when the agent suggested adding Canadian hit-makers and fellow Warped vets Simple Plan (“Perfect”), “that was a no-brainer for me,” Bahl says. Being a pharmacist and band leader, not a promoter, he partnered with Drusky Entertainment to absorb some of the financial risk for this show on Sunday.

From there, he built the rest of the Four Chord Festival 6 with Anberlin, Real Friends (which played the inaugural festival), Knuckle Puck, Grayscale, Seaway, Patent Pending, Keep Flying, Harbour and local bands Eternal Boy, Look Out Loretta and Atlantic Wasteland.

Eternal Boy just spent a few weeks touring Europe with the Mount Sinai, N.Y., band Patent Pending, which built a following overseas after touring there with Bowling for Soup.

“They appreciate music in a different way than in the U.S.,” Bahl says of those audiences. “They love the older kind of punk and pop-punk music.” When he mentioned they were from Pittsburgh, he adds, “all they wanted to do was talk about Mac Miller.”

Adding to the festival atmosphere will be live professional wrestling, BMX bike demos, a tattoo parlor and even barber team from Boston.

The scene at Station Square will all have to come together overnight because there is a Riverhounds soccer on Saturday and the stage and everything else has to be in place Sunday morning.

As for Four Chord’s future, Bahl isn’t giving up on Blink-182.

“The pinnacle point of this festival will be to get Blink one day,” he says, but stops himself. “Well, Taylor Swift — a long time away, hopefully, which will never happen — and then Blink.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.