Welcome to the digital home of the Lake Lanier Parrot Head Club, Inc, founded in 1994. We came together because we enjoy Jimmy Buffett's music, and the tropical lifestyle that surrounds it. What started out as a group of strangers has evolved into a strange group, who still enjoy getting together to have fun, and occasionally do good deeds in the community.
We currently meet at around 7 pm on the second Wednesday of each month at O'Charley's at 1711 Brown's Bridge Road in Gainesville, Georgia. Gainesville is just off of I-985, northeast of Atlanta.
------The following comes from our original website
You wanted to know how the LLPHC came to be...Hmmm, it's so long ago, I don't
know if I remember. It might have been like this.....
We weren't Buffett fans when he first started hitting it big. College and finances didn't
allow time or money for extras, like albums, so we didn't follow anyone closely at the
time. If it wasn't on the radio, we didn't hear it. Fortunately, JB WAS on the radio a lot
in the 70's, so we became very familiar with the basic stuff, the songs you know by heart.
While at that time we didn't know many of his songs, we did share a love of the sea. For
vacations, we headed south. After graduation from college, I made sure my first job was on
the coast. Even when we later moved to the foothills of the North Georgia mountains, our
dreams kept us at the beach.
It was around '88 that we started realizing that Jimmy's songs were so closely aligned
with our fantasies. Changes in Latitudes, One Particular Harbor, they all helped
satisfy our craving to be beachside. We had one or two CDs and by the time we took a
western Caribbean cruise in '90, we knew enough to hum Lovely Cruise as the boat came into
the harbor.
We were hooked, and bought everything we could afford, and were able to sing along with
Jimmy that summer as we attended our first JB concert ever. We had first draw in the
lottery, so we had excellent seats. A very great year.
In 1992, a co-worker heard me talking about having Jimmy Buffett concert tickerts
and with a slight smugness said her step-father knew someone on Jimmy's crew. Sure, I
said, right. She swore it was true. A couple of days later, her step-father came in,
introduced himself (BART) and we started talking about Buffett. He brought in his
scrapbook, with pictures of him, Fingers, Buffett, Tim Schmidt, and other Reefers.
Maybe she was telling the truth.
Bart had tickets lined up for one show that year, but needed tickets for the second show.
We worked out a trade, and got one of the biggest treats of our lives: touring
backstage, on-stage, and the buses. We watched Jimmy play basketball, talked with
Greenidge and Utley, and thought we'd died and gone to heaven. I fell in love with
Evangeline. It was a nice time.
Where is Joe Merchant? came out sometime that year, and Jimmy began a book tour,
contradicting a previous vow never to do book tours. He came to Atlanta's Symphony
Hall, but we didn't know tickets were on sale until late in the day. We still got good
seats, but were slightly pissed that we hadn't heard about it earlier. A desire to keep up
with what's going on in the world of Bubba planted the first seed of formation of the
LLPHC.
For the next year, Bart, his wife Sandy, my wife and I kicked around the idea of
starting a PH Club. We thought there might be enough folks in town who liked Buffett.
After all, look at the lines when tickets went on sale.
I'd seen the mentions in the CocoTel about Scott Nickerson and the Atlanta Club, so I
called him one day for advice. Any doubts or fears I might have had were quickly dispelled
by Scott. He was more enthusiastic than a roomful of Amway dealers. With his
encouragement, I decided to go ahead with it.
So, in March of '94, a group of 25-30 folks gathered in the meeting room at what was then
Peeches to see what a Parrot Head Club might be. From that, a hard core group went
on to meet at Henry O's the next month. So that's how we got started and it's just been
getting better.