Vintage Chicago Tribune: Jimmy Buffett, our favorite tourist

Kori Rumore, Steve Rosenberg, Marianne Mather, Chicago Tribune
·4 min read
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If you’re a Jimmy Buffett fan, then you’ve probably read about all the places the singer-songwriter traveled before he died last week.

But maybe no destination was as special to him as this one.

“Chicago was the first city in which I gained recognition outside the South,” Buffett told Tribune critic Chris Jones in 2016. “And it was Steve Goodman who turned me into a lifelong Cubs fan.”

Buffett met Goodman, who penned “City of New Orleans,” while performing at folk venues Quiet Knight and The Earl of Old Town in the 1970s. Goodman introduced Buffett to Wrigley Field, but it would be Buffett who would have several career-defining moments at the Friendly Confines after his friend’s death on Sept. 20, 1984.

Though there aren’t any photos in the Tribune’s archive of Buffett’s early years in Chicago, there are plenty of him on stage — often shoeless and adorned in tropical colors — from his recent visits. So, please forgive us for not skewing too vintage this week. Let’s remember all the good times so many of us shared with him.

“I have always thought of Chicago as a beach town, a pretty big one, but still a beach town,” Buffett wrote in 2010, when it was announced one of his Margaritaville restaurants would open at Navy Pier.

Though many of us dream of moving to the islands when listening to Buffett’s songs, it’s comforting to know that he found a little chunk of his own paradise right here in Chicago.

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Oct. 2, 1984: ‘This is for Steve Goodman’

Just a few weeks after “Go Cubs Go” songwriter Goodman died from leukemia, Buffett sings the “National Anthem” before the first game of the 1984 National League Championship Series at Wrigley Field — the Cubs’ first post-season appearance since 1945.

The Cubs beat the Padres 13-0 in that game, but lost the series 3-2. Buffett returned to sing the “National Anthem” in the first game of the 1989 series. The Cubs lost that game — and the NLCS — to the San Francisco Giants.

June 21, 1998 (and Oct. 7, 2003): ‘I have your glasses, Harry’

Buffett, then a partial owner of two minor-league baseball teams, sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field after the Cubs’ longtime play-by-play man Harry Caray died earlier in the year.

Buffett returned in 2003, to sing it again.

Sept. 4, 2005: Wasting away in Wrigleyville

On Labor Day weekend, Buffett becomes the first musician to perform at the Friendly Confines — after 10 years of conversation with the ballpark’s brass. He covers three songs by Chicago folk legend Goodman, as well as such introspective odes to revelry as “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

In a summer where Lollapalooza began its annual Grant Park run and Northerly Island also began to host concerts, Buffett’s two-night ballpark bash was a hot ticket.

Aug. 14, 2010: Hockey, heat and humor

Buffett didn’t ever really need a reason to celebrate, but he got a big one in Chicago Blackhawk Patrick Kane — who emerges minutes into a concert at Toyota Park (now SeatGeek Stadium) with the Stanley Cup in hand. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the grinning Kane grabs a tambourine as Buffett performs “Boat Drinks” and footage of the winger’s championship-winning goal is aired on projection screens.

Buffett, Kane and the Stanley Cup reunited for another sold-out show on Northerly Island in 2013 and in Tinley Park in 2015.

July 15, 2017: A stop at Wrigley before an ‘Escape to Margaritaville’

The overdue World Series celebration for 41,000 fans — including a guest appearance by the Commissioner’s Trophy — is nine months late, but none less revelatory. Buffett tells the crowd he watched the Cubs clinch the championship in an expat’s bar in Tokyo.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he says on stage. “But you should see how this looks from here.”

But a new musical based on Buffett’s songs didn’t quite work in its Chicago debut later the same year.

“If, like me, you consider Jimmy Buffett one of the narrative musical giants of his era and an inclusive, populist genius who blended rock, pop, country and reggae with his roots in protest folk music, and whose unique and massively influential songbook lies at the complex intersection of released sexual repression, impecunity and profound existential angst, then you’ll likely lament the musical’s seeming lack of interest in any of that,” Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote in November 2017.

Buffett played Wrigley Field for the last time in 2018.

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Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.