The Orange County Register has a review of the show on Saturday night at San Diego State’s Viejas Arena: “Jimmy Buffett skips O.C. but stays lively in San Diego”
“We’ve been coming to this campus for a long, long time,” the amiable 65-year-old reminded the locals not long into his two-hour-plus set. Later, he recalled a personally historic detail most of the audience (myself included) likely didn’t know: “This is the very first place where we ever played ‘Margaritaville’.”
No, not the arena, which didn’t exist in the ’70s (it was then the Aztec Bowl football stadium). Rather, Buffett and longtime right-hand man Michael Utley debuted that signature song – the one that decades later would lend its name to brands of tequila, chicken wings, patio furniture and footwear – sometime in 1976 “in a coffeehouse in the student union,” probably not much more than six months before an abbreviated single version of it was issued on Valentine’s Day ’77.