Pictures from the Today Show 5/28/99
Songs Played on the Today Show:
Margaritaville - "and I know this is all Katie Couric's fault!"
Pacing the Cage - Jimmy mistakely swapped the 2nd and 3rd verse
Volcano - "No time to count what I'm worth, that's Warren Buffett by the way"
Not included on the Today show but played for the crowd:
Come Monday
I Will Play for Gumbo
Cheeseburger in Paradise
In the VIP section was the Police Commissioner of New York City Howard Safer. Singing and dancing along was Al Roker (he knew all of the words to Margaritaville and CIP) and some others from the Today show crew. It was a very lively and vocal crowd, several times during the show the crowd chanted "Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy ...". A one point a few loud parrothead yelled out "Math Suks, Math Suks" when Matt Lauer was on stage talking to Jimmy. Matt thought they were saying "Matt Suks". When Jimmy explained to Matt what they were saying they both had a good laugh.
I arrived just after 3:00am and watched the road crew finishing setting up. A small crowd of about 25 people were there, the first ones began to arrive around 1:30am.
Sound check: the rehersals began at 5:00am with the horn section showing up first (Amy Lee, John Lovell, and Tom Mitchell). At 5:30 the rest of the CRB came out and played some songs without Jimmy on vocals (instrumental): Margaritaville, Pacing the Cage, Volcano, Come Monday
At 5:45am Jimmy made his way in and said "Good morning everyone this is a first for us", about 1500 people were there at that time.
They played:
1) Margaritaville - "all of you parrotheads up since dawn"
2) Pacing the Cage - JB said "you already know this"
3) Volcano
JB "said don't you people have a job"
4) Come Monday
JB said "I glad my crew is enjoying there breakfast, after this song we are going to feed the band". Someone from the crew brought over a box of doughnuts. The picture above shows Jimmy opening a box of Krispy Kreme doughtnuts (there's a red logo on the side of the box and they were sugar glazed). The other picture shows Jimmy throwinng one into the crowd (the doughnut is in the upper left top near the camera). Jimmy had to lick the sugar glazing off of his fingers.
5) Margaritaville was played again
Jimmy said "I got a sugar rush in the middle of that song"
6) Magaritaville for the third time, this time for an audio check
Then Jimmy said "This goes out to all of you who skipped school today, and Math really does s***, I could get in trouble for that".
7) I Will play for Gumbo - they had some problems with the equipment and didn't finish the song. Jimmy said "after all it's six oclock in the morning, what do you expect"
Jimmy then went around and autographed some things for the people up front, right next to me, and he left around 6:25am.
Members of the Coral Reefer band that performed at the Today show:
Jim Mayer, Peter Mayer, Roger Guth, Tina Gullickson, Nadirah Shakoor, Robert Greenidge, Michael Utley, Ralph McDonald, TC Mitchell, John Lovell, Amy Lee, Fingers Taylor, Doyle Grisham