SAN DIEGO — Jimmy Buffett’s May 6 concert with his Coral Reefer Band at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium was a suitably celebratory affair. It turned out to be his last performance anywhere with the group, which he had led various iterations of since the 1970s,
Buffett’s death Friday at the age of 76 came barely four months after his Snapdragon concert, which also featured Jason Mraz and a brief opening set by Coral Reefer Band mainstay Mac McAnally. It also came just days after the opening of the Margaritaville Hotel in downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, which is themed to reflect the beachy lifestyle in Buffett’s music, merchandise and concert decor.
That show was a makeup date for Buffett and Mraz’s originally scheduled Snapdragon show last October. It was postponed after Buffett was hospitalized for still-undisclosed reasons.
In an announcement in his website last September, Buffett said he “needed to refrain from touring for the rest of the year” because of “health issues and brief hospitalization. That led him to cancel his October shows in Salt Lake City and Nampa, Idaho, and to push back his shows in Las Vegas to March of this year.
Buffett was hospitalized again this May, again for undisclosed reasons, not long after his San Diego concert. “Getting old is not for sissies, I can assure you,” he said in a statement later that same month.
If the veteran singer-songwriter-turned-billionaire- entrepreneur was feeling under the weather at his final San Diego concert, he gave no indication of anything being amiss. Indeed, Buffett was in good spirits throughout his 19-song set, which opened with “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” and concluded with a buoyant version of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Southern Cross.”
Our coverage of that concert was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on May 7. Here is the review in its entirety, along with the complete set list of Buffett’s performance.
Jimmy Buffett and Jason Mraz turn Snapdragon Stadium into a giant beach party, 8 miles inland
By George Varga, The San Diego Union-Tribune
May 7, 2023
Jimmy Buffett and Jason Mraz have each performed numerous times in San Diego over the years — Buffett since the early 1970s and native Virginian-turned-Oceanside resident Mraz since the late 1990s. But Saturday night was the first instance in memory at which either played second fiddle here to a large, new, outdoor concrete edifice.
So, take a bow, Snapdragon Stadium, which opened last September as the home of San Diego State University’s Aztecs football team — and this weekend made its largely promising debut as a concert venue.
“I don’t usually wear a suit, but this is such a special occasion I had to dapper it up a bit,” said Mraz, 45, prior to performing the buoyant, reggae-infused “Wise Woman,” the fourth song in his engaging, hour-long set. “I thought this day would never get here, but I’m glad it did.”
Longtime Buffett collaborator Mac McAnally was, in fact, the first artist to perform at Saturday’s concert. The show had been pushed back from its original date last October, after Buffett was hospitalized for undisclosed reasons.
Now 76, the star of the night was in good spirits as he took to the stage at 7 p.m. He warmly greeted the audience, then introduced McAnally, who did an engaging, five-song opening set with percussionist Erik Darken.
“We finally made it!” Buffett, clad in a track warm-up suit, told the cheering audience. “Thank you for waiting.”
Prior to his first number, “Blame It On New Orleans,” McAnally said: “We are honored to kick off the inaugural concert at Snapdragon Stadium.”
Buffett and Mraz delivered crowd-pleasing sets with their respective bands, each of which performed with a winning combination of polished precision and festive celebration.
Mraz and his brassy band performed tender ballads, funk-fueled romps and the disco-styled “I Feel Like Dancing” with equal poise and verve. He gave some extended solos to his musicians — something rarely heard in a stadium setting — and tenor saxophonist Carlos Sosa and guitarist Molly Miller were especially impressive.
Buffett opened with the tropical-flavored “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” the title track of the 1977 album that propelled him from cult status to stardom. He concluded a bit more than 90 minutes later with an animated version of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Southern Cross.”
In between came 16 other songs, including such favorites as “Fins,” “A Pirate Looks at 40,” “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and the inevitable “Margaritaville.”
Buffett fondly recalled his first gigs here, 40 years ago, “at a coffee shop at SDSU” — the now-defunct Back Door — and sprinkled in a number of local references during his set. (Mraz in turn gave a shout out to Java Joe’s, the Ocean Beach coffee house where he got his start.)
Buffett’s enduring appeal was perhaps best summarized Saturday by Lauren Mackin, who flew in from Arizona with her husband, Brian, a 27-time Buffett-concertgoer, their 19-year-old son, Darren, and his girlfriend, Emily.
“The great thing about a Jimmy Buffett concert,” Lauren Mackin said, “is that it’s like you’re at a karaoke bar with 50,000 of your best friends that you didn’t know you had.”
The concert’s promoters declined to disclose the attendance, but it looked like close to a full house for the 28,000-capacity show at Snapdragon. The new venue is at the same Mission Valley site that once housed San Diego Stadium, San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, Qualcomm Stadium and SDCCU Stadium — to cite the four successive names of the larger stadium that used to stand there.
With a concert capacity of 28,000 — 7,000 less than for football games and other sporting events — Snapdragon is, by comparison, an intimate, streamlined venue. It seats half as many people as the sprawling, 53-year-old stadium it replaced.
The sight-lines were good from most of the nearly dozen locations I watched from during the course of Saturday’s nearly four-hour event. And the sound was much better than at any concert I can recall attending at the previous stadium.
The crisp, well-balanced audio mix may also reflect the skill of Buffett and Mraz’s respective sound engineers. They, thankfully, resisted the urge to turn everything up to 11, which has long been an unfortunate tendency for far too many stadium music acts.
Where Snapdragon faltered Saturday was in the extremely long wait times for concertgoers to purchase food and, more often, drinks.
While there’s no known scientific study, so far, that confirms Buffett’s fans consume significantly more alcoholic beverages than college football-game attendees, the inordinately long lines at his concert here suggest that may well be the case.
Then again, by the end of the night, a couple seated in front of this reviewer posed for a selfie with 10 empty plastic cognac glasses that they had consumed during the concert.
And Buffett, a billionaire whose empire includes more than one alcohol-related product, was happy to toast the crowd in song, at one point ad-libbing the lyric: “What would Jimmy Buffett do right now? Go to the Belly Up and buy you a drink!”
Set list
“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”
“Fins”
“Pencil Thin Mustache”
“Son of a Son of a Sailor”
“Boat Drinks”
“It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”
“School Boy Heart”
“Volcano”
“Come Monday”
“Growing Older But Not Up”
“One Particular Harbour”
“Little Martha”
“Cheeseburger in Paradise”
“He Went to Paris”
“Last Mango in Pari”s
“A Pirate Looks at Forty”
“Back Where I Come From”
“Margaritaville”
“Southern Cross”