Joe Locricchio, a young land developer and amateur pilot, was flying over northern Oakland County in 1969 when a sprawling property near Clarkston caught his eye. Turning to his cousin in the next seat, he declared, with typical impulsive confidence: “I’m going to buy that.”
The 600-acre site known as Pine Knob, which Locricchio indeed acquired by year’s end, had the wheels turning in his head. He envisioned an Up North-style resort for southeastern Michigan — ski hills, lodges, restaurants, golf courses, condominiums.
And the 28-year-old builder foresaw a cherry on top: an outdoor summer concert venue that could fill out a year-round schedule at the property.
Pine Knob Music Theatre, conceived and built by the late Locricchio, will turn 50 on Saturday, marking half a century as one of the most successful music venues in the United States. Country duo Brooks & Dunn happens to be the headliner for the anniversary occasion, the latest of 3,100-plus shows at the amphitheater since David Cassidy kicked things off on June 25, 1972.
The litany of Pine Knob’s summer regulars runs deep: In 2019, hometowner Bob Seger played his 33rd show at the venue, making him the 10th most prolific artist in a list led by Chicago (81), the Beach Boys (61), the Doobie Brothers (59) and Eddie Money (38).
These days, Pine Knob is a cornerstone of Michigan’s concert scene, holding a sentimental spot in the hearts of area music fans. Drawing hundreds of thousands of fans annually for artists old and new, it’s rich with nostalgia and thriving with business. In 2019, the last full concert season before the COVID-19 pandemic, Pine Knob ranked No. 1 nationally in amphitheater attendance.
But in 1972, Pine Knob Music Theatre was a bold leap of faith 40 miles north of Detroit.
The amphitheater is owned today by Detroit Pistons mogul Tom Gores, who acquired it with his 2011 purchase of Bill Davidson’s Palace Sports & Entertainment, which had taken over the venue in 1990. It’s overseen by 313 Presents, a joint venture of Gores and Detroit’s prominent Ilitch family, which partners with Live Nation to book the artists.
Those are all big names, and Pine Knob rolls on with big-dollar momentum. But in the early ’70s, it was Locricchio, a construction specialist developing projects across metro Detroit, who was the visionary, as attested by his children, friends, associates and others. They say his role has been overshadowed over the decades.
“For so many years, Pine Knob has been everything to my family,” said son Joe Locricchio. “Because of the time gap, my dad gets lost in the shuffle in the discussions. But Pine Knob isn’t Pine Knob without him, without his concept, without his abilities to get it done and see it grow.”
Amphitheaters have been around since ancient Greece, and at the turn of the ’70s, there were a handful of prominent ones in the U.S. — the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Jones Beach in New York, Blossom Music Center in Cleveland.
But those had all been built for the fine arts. Locricchio’s amphitheater at Pine Knob was to be among the first ever designed for popular music, tapping into a market of Detroit concert fans who had a growing reputation as among the most fervent in the country. And it became a model that eventually helped change the nature of live touring.
The venue’s logo, with its groovy ’70s feel, reflected the spirit. This wasn’t some staid civic auditorium. This was the energy of now on the outskirts of Detroit. This was fresh, cool, rock ‘n’ roll.
“My dad knew there was nothing like it in the area. He didn’t see it as a gamble,” said daughter Ginny Locricchio Zerang. “He saw it as: ‘Well, of course we need this, and there’s nothing I can’t do.’ He sensed a need and he ran with it.”
The charismatic Locricchio could be larger than life — quick to laugh, tough to negotiate with. His mode was: Don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness later, said longtime Independence Township planner Dick Carlisle.
“He was a visionary, and nobody would claim otherwise,” Carlisle said.
“From the time he was young, he was always looking at the next cool thing, the next great idea,” said Locricchio’s son. “And Pine Knob just worked.”
In 1971, Locricchio and his Indusco business partner Gary Francell had already renovated Pine Knob’s lodge and expanded the site’s ski hills when they took their venue idea to the Nederlander Organization. The Detroit-founded, New York-based Broadway group was a showbiz juggernaut, represented locally by Fisher Theatre operator Joey Nederlander.
That fall, the companies signed a deal to create the amphitheater at Pine Knob, a site once owned by aviation pioneer Sidney Waldon and named after a 1,200-foot hill jutting out of the rural landscape, now the winter ski attraction.
Locricchio was to build the music venue; the Nederlanders would operate and book it.
Joey Nederlander was easily sold on the concept. He had recently visited an amphitheater out west and relished the idea of one in metro Detroit, as recounted by his stepdaughter Kathi Cohen: “Joey and my mom loved the idea of an outdoor entertainment space here.”
“I just remember feeling like it was so far away. I’d never even heard of Clarkston,” said Cohen, who lived in Huntington Woods and would later work in the Pine Knob ticket office. “I had to learn how to drive there.”
Locricchio died in 1998 at 57, and Nederlander passed away last year at 93. Together, they spearheaded a venue that helped transform the concert industry, spurring the rise of the now-abundant “summer sheds” — the amphitheaters that dominate much of the modern touring business.
When they publicly unveiled their Pine Knob theater plans in January 1972, ‘Locricchio had just months to build the venue in time for summer. What followed was “a monumental feat” of construction, said his son, who was 9 at the time and is now a builder himself.
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The elder Locricchio was a concrete contractor who’d gotten into real estate, and his firm oversaw some notable Troy projects, including industrial buildings, business parks and a Hilton hotel along Stephenson Highway.
But fast-tracking a summer amphitheater during a Michigan winter was a new challenge. Locricchio took it on with gusto and smarts, friends said.
“Joe always had ideas,” said Carlisle. “He was a very interesting guy and incredibly creative. And he was a master concrete guy.”
With design by Southfield architectural firm Neumann/Smith, Locricchio and his team kicked into action.
“It was seven days a week and as many hours a day as you could put in,” said son Joe Locricchio. “They had the right type of crews, the right number of bodies. The logistics of construction in the dead of winter in Michigan are hard — the concrete and other things that are weather-dependent, moving all the earth they had to move. But it was the guy leading the show who made it happen. Every bit of his construction abilities and knowledge came to be.”
Locricchio Sr. was very much in the trenches as the project came together. Wood panels were built in his own Troy shop, the steel carted in from Mount Clemens.
“He wasn’t up in the ivory tower,” said Dale Scrace, an engineer who worked for Locricchio at the time. “We did our own concrete work, our own foundations. He was always in there chugging, and he had a really great mind for overviewing problems.”
Hours before teen idol Cassidy stepped onstage June 25 to perform his afternoon show for a screaming young audience, workers were still scrambling, paintbrushes still rolling.
On that opening day, Pine Knob’s box office wasn’t finished. Its floor, being prepped for tiles, was sticky. Cash drawers weren’t yet installed, so dollar bills were chucked into cardboard boxes. The staff included many town locals, lacking theater experience and learning on the fly.
“We also paid a lot of cleaning bills after that first show, because a lot of (concertgoers) ended up with orange stains on their clothes,” said longtime Nederlander employee Marc Roland. “The seats weren’t completely dry from the paint.”
Cassidy will forever reign as Pine Knob’s inaugural act. But the TV heartthrob was really just a test run.
“He was there primarily to make sure the lighting and sound and everything worked. The real opener was Andy Williams (two days later),” said Scrace. “You don’t want to start off with a lot of hiccups. So there were a couple days in between to fix any glitches.”
When crooner Williams played his June 27 concert, metro Detroit’s glitterati showed up for the occasion. They gave the amphitheater rave reviews. Much of the tony audience missed opener Quincy Jones, the Free Press reported: Concertgoers were “still busy ogling the handsome new facility with its orange seats and brown seats under a towering roof on concrete and steel.”
“How they got it all together in 15 weeks is anybody’s guess,” wrote Freep reviewer Lawrence DeVine. “In that time, Pine Knob went from bare earth to a handsome orange amphitheater with 5,000 covered seats and rolling green hillsides enough for another 5,000 supine dawdlers.”
Final touches at the venue continued through the summer.
“We were about 90% done when it opened. Some of the back lot things weren’t finished,” recalled Scrace. On event days, “they would take the workmen up to the lodge at 4 p.m. for dinner, and as soon as the show was over, they went back to work.”
Early weeks were rough. Parking was a mess, I-75 traffic at Sashabaw Road was a nightmare, and Independence Township residents raised a royal fuss about the noise.
“One of the biggest problems was not enough toilets. The lines were pretty staggering in the beginning,” said Scrace. “Especially the women’s restrooms. The guys would say, ‘Screw it, I’m going behind that trailer over there.’ We learned as we went.”
Things got better as the inaugural summer rolled on. The season was packed with artists who often played multiple nights, and many — like Chicago, the Beach Boys and Neil Diamond — became Pine Knob fixtures through the decades.
Locricchio grew tight with a few of the visiting acts, his family said, including Diamond, Willie Nelson, Cheech & Chong and Sha Na Na. As the developer’s kids grew into their teens, Pine Knob was excitement at their fingertips, a go-to summer hang with friends.
“It was a really cool, blessed way to grow up, having that in my high school years,” said son Joe. “It’s certainly among my fondest memories in life, and among my friends, too, because we all got to share it.”
Pine Knob’s early success paid off: Four years later, Locricchio was enlisted to build the Aladdin Theatre (now Zappos) in Las Vegas, while the Nederlanders hit the Chicago market in 1980 with the Poplar Creek amphitheater, inspired by their Michigan venue.
“There were a lot of copycats not long after, wanting to capitalize on that summer business,” said Locricchio’s son. “Pine Knob was 100% the impetus for many other outdoor venues.”
Joe Locricchio divested his interest in Pine Knob by 1982, and eight years later, the music facility was sold by the Nederlanders to Bill Davidson. By then, the amphitheater had hit a lull, down to a couple of dozen shows annually, before it was revived by Davidson’s Palace team to regularly top the box-office charts.
In its 50th anniversary year, Pine Knob still looms large.
Scrace, the engineer who helped build it, said he plans to attend a show there this summer — to “sit in a seat and tell my grandkids this is something I helped make.”
“When you’ve been in the same construction market for a long time, you see things come and go,” said Scrace, 74. “But this one just keeps going. And I’m so happy about that, because Pine Knob really is a keystone in the greater Detroit area. There are families that have been going there for 50 years. It’s a really important place.”
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or [email protected].
