From the year it opened in 1990, sure as the sun coming up, Jimmy Buffett was going to play the Star Lake Amphitheatre.
And it was going to sell out.
The affable beach-bum folk-rocker, who died Friday at 76 of unspecified causes, was practically the house band at the Burgettstown venue, where he and his Coral Reefer Band presided over colorful Parrothead parties that began in the parking lot well before showtime with Hawaiian shirts, fins and tropical drinks.
His first show there was on Aug. 10, 1990, when he appeared on a stage stacked with Corona beer cases and glass lizards on the lights.
At the concert, a fan told the Post-Gazette, “It’s just not summer until Jimmy Buffett shows up,” and that’s the way it was for decades at the Burgettstown Beach.
“Despite all its traffic hassles that apparently haven’t lessened through the years, Jimmy ‘made’ every Star Lake season my 10 years of involvement there,” says former Star Lake manager Tom Rooney. “The parking lot party scene for the JB shows taught people to come early and to stay late. No choice really. He was Star Lake. One summer he took a family European vacation. It was like we were going out of business.”
Buffett, who was born in Mississippi, raised in Mobile, Ala., and established in Key West, Fla., brought beach life and sing-along songs to Star Lake every year through 2018 (with the exception of 2005 and 2017 when he played PNC Park). On many of those occasions, he sold out the venue for two-night stands, and never needed to speak to the local press to promote them.
Buffett’s days in Pittsburgh dated back to July 1977 when he played his first show here at the Syria Mosque, four months after his breakthrough with “Margaritaville,” his signature hit from seventh album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.”
Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Tom Breiding posted on Facebook Saturday morning, “I’d like to think my brother is enjoying a heavenly Corona with his hero right now. Mark was a Parrot Head before there was such a word and he took me to the coolest, weirdest show I ever saw at the Syria Mosque many years ago. I carry his old Corona bottle opener with me in the Chevy. It saw a lot of action. RIP JB.”
Within two years, he was playing the Civic Arena, which he did twice. The 1986 show there was part of a summer series where the dome opened during the concert, turning it into an outdoor party with beach balls bouncing and fans lofting 49-cent McDonald’s burgers during “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”
With the Star Lake shows, he upped the spectacle, sometimes taking the stage on the Margaritaville Clipper, a model of a 1940s seaplane.
Several of the core members of his band (including keyboardist Michael Utley, steel drum player Robert Greenidge, guitarists Peter Mayer and Mac McAnally, bassist Jim Mayer and drummer Roger Guth) were with him for virtually every show there, guaranteeing that the Caribbean rhythms were tight — and yet loose at the same time.
One of the more memorable nights was June 10, 1994, when he brought a little tropic thunder.
“Lightning made a direct hit on our venue’s main transformer rendering a sold-out show in darkness before Jimmy Buffett hit the stage,” Rooney recalled on Lance Jones’ Musicasaurus blog. “We were standing on the backstage deck when we saw the bolt hit and we were all lucky to survive. We were saved by two things: The Iguanas, the opening act, traveled with a portable generator and Mark Susany, our electrician, ingeniously hooked it up on the main stage and we got (barely) through an unplugged show...I still remember the local fire departments showing up with their trucks to provide lights for the parking lots.”
Even after Buffett began to cut back the number of shows he played between Memorial Day and Labor Day, beginning in 1996, to spend time with children, he was sure to make Pittsburgh one of his stops.
“What’s in the water here that makes you people so crazy?” he asked the Star Lake crowd at the 1998 show.
Prior to the PNC Park show, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a resolution designating June 23, 2007, as “Jimmy Buffet Day,” noting “Jimmy Buffett is a world-class entertainer known for his support of charitable and environmental causes throughout the region.” It stated that in Pennsylvania there were 12 Parrot Head clubs with more than 1,500 members logging more than 14,000 hours of volunteer work and raising $264,000 for charitable organizations in 2004.
Buffett’s unparalleled streak of Pittsburgh’s shows was broken in 2019, following the 2018 show at Star Lake when thousands of fans were stuck at the gates at showtime due to the new metal detector system. The summers of 2020 and 2021 were sadly Buffett-free due to the pandemic.
He was back for one final show here on July 18, 2022, on the Life On the Flip Side Redux Tour, at the ripe age of 75, still sounding like the same old Jimmy Buffett.
It was Pittsburgh show number 35 for the legend, who, during the song “Volcano,” sang, “I don’t wanna land on the damn Kremlin. I’ll take Pittsburgh all day!”
First Published: September 2, 2023, 2:47 p.m.
Updated: September 4, 2023, 6:46 p.m.