Jim Messina plays District Live

October 13, 2026

Behind the Cover, Back on Stage

Jim Messina is coming to District Live on October 15, and if you start listing what he has done over nearly 60 years in music, you can lose the plot pretty quickly.

Buffalo Springfield. Poco. Loggins and Messina. Producer. Engineer. Songwriter. Musician. He helped shape the sound that eventually blurred the lines between rock, folk and country, and made songs that have followed generations of listeners around ever since. But during our conversation, I happened to remember an old Rolling Stone cover.

It is a great photograph of Messina and Kenny Loggins together, close, relaxed, looking every bit like one of the biggest musical partnerships of the 1970s. I asked Messina what he remembered about it. His answer was definitely not what I expected.

“Kenny and I were at that point where we were getting ready to break up,” Messina says. “We were a little funky with each other.”

That created a problem for the photographer, the iconic Annie Leibowitz, one of the defining photographers of American pop culture. She needed an intimate photograph of two guys who, at that particular moment, did not particularly feel like being intimate. She positioned them together and asked Messina to put his arm around Loggins.

He resisted.

So, according to Messina, she tried another approach. Leibowitz suddenly lifted her blouse and flashed them. For one fraction of a second, the tension disappeared. Both men reacted. She hit the shutter.

The result was one of the iconic Rolling Stone covers of the 70’s.

“She took the picture, and that was the best shot,” Messina says. “There was no question. That had to go on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

Decades later, the photograph survives as one frozen moment from an extraordinary period in American music. But it is also only one frame in a much larger Jim Messina story, one Savannah gets to hear live this fall.

Before Loggins and Messina, he worked as an engineer and producer with Buffalo Springfield, eventually playing bass on the band’s final album. Then he and Richie Furay helped create Poco, one of the groups that pushed country rock toward becoming a genre of its own. What began later as Messina producing a young Kenny Loggins grew into Loggins and Messina and songs including “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” “Angry Eyes” and “Danny’s Song.”

Messina is hardly living in the past. He is still touring, painting and building things in his wood and metal shops. He is also finishing a book, and characteristically, he does not want it to simply chronicle his own accomplishments.

“I wanted to write a book that was really not so much about me, but more about the wonderful people who’ve helped me get to where I am in life.”

When he walks onto the District Live stage, you are not simply watching someone who happened to be around for an extraordinary stretch of music history. You are watching someone who helped make it.

Jim Messina performs Thursday, October 15, 2026, at 8 p.m. at District Live at Plant Riverside District, 400 W. River St. in Savannah. Tickets are available through District Live and major ticketing outlets.