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Concert review: Jimmy Buffett's Frisco performance was a party

The old battle-scarred "Son of a Son of a Sailor" didn't have to navigate stormy seas after all.

Performing Saturday night at the tail end of Texas monsoon season, Jimmy Buffett couldn't stop raving about the dry weather and the moon shining over Toyota Stadium as he dedicated the concert "to all the people manning the pumps tonight."

Granted, the party would have kept going come hell or high water. Buffett and his diehard Parrothead fans don't let anything stand in the way of their annual orgy of tequila, beer and tropical-themed costumes. The revelry comes first and everything else - including the music - is an afterthought.

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Parking lots started filling up 24 hours before show-time with partiers willing to pay exorbitant prices for a temporary slab of concrete. Toyota Stadium charged $50 to $100 for cars and $200 to $1,120 for campers, making it feel like a Grateful Dead gig for well-off Baby Boomers, except with portable bars instead of bongs and grass skirts in place of tie-dye clothing. Note to the shirtless, pot-bellied guy sporting a skirt and a coconut-shell bra: There's a reason why your kids de-friended you on Facebook.

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Most partiers eventually stumbled their way into the stadium, where they lined up for $16 margaritas and $9 Bud Lights. But not all of them held their liquor to the finish line. I saw two seasick-looking gray-haired guys being wheeled out during the show - although, in their defense, they may have gotten woozy from staring at the psychedelic cheeseburger spinning around the video screen during "Cheeseburger in Paradise."

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Fans who made it until the end of the show enjoyed the usual jumbo buffet of standards, obscurities and cover tunes - in this case, Lyle Lovett's "If I Had a Boat," Alan Jackson's "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere" and a sledgehammer version of Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Southern Cross."

The set got bogged down at times in forgettable Caribbean pop tunes. But singer-instrumentalist Mac McAnally and the rest of Buffett's well-oiled big band did an excellent job of running the gamut from the singalong honky-tonk of "The Great Filling Station Holdup" (1973) to "Workin' and Playin,'" a raucous Little Feat-style boogie that shares the name of the tour.

Although never a great singer, the 68-year-old Buffett was in decent voice and amiable as ever. He spun lively stories about gigging around Texas during the lean days of his career and playing a big show years later at Fair Park on a day when the thermometer hit 119 degrees.

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He was exaggerating a bit -- Dallas' all-time high is 113 degrees - but his sweaty tales of yore made the pleasant moonlit eve seem that much nicer.

Most concertgoers showed up early enough to see Huey Lewis & the News, the '80s-era band once considered so unfashionable that only a deranged killer in American Psycho would admit to loving them.

They skipped "Hip to Be Square" - "the band's undisputed masterpiece" according to the lead character in American Psycho. But they got plenty of mileage from the punky blues-rock of "Working for a Living" and a version of Curtis Mayfield's "It's All Right" -- not to mention Top 40 ear worms like "The Heart of Rock 'n' Roll" and "I Want A New Drug."

The News was impeccably tight with the notable exception of Lewis, who sounded worn-out and struggled to hit notes throughout the set.

"Man, they make a good margarita here!" he said -- proof, perhaps, that Lewis, too, got a little too caught up in the spirit of Margaritaville.

By Thor Christensen, Special Contributor