Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Seven names in thirty-seven years, but Dallas has never stopped calling it the Starplex. Dos Equis Pavilion at 3839 South Fitzhugh Avenue in Fair Park opened on 23 July 1988 as the Coca-Cola Starplex Amphitheatre with a Rod Stewart concert - a 10-million-dollar outdoor shed built by the city, now operated by Live Nation, with 7,500 covered pavilion seats and a general-admission lawn lifting total capacity to 20,000, the first and largest venue of its kind in the metroplex. The naming-rights carousel maps corporate America: plain Starplex after Coca-Cola departed in 1999, Smirnoff Music Centre from 2000 - billed as The Music Centre at Fair Park for all-ages shows that legally could not carry a vodka sponsor - then Superpages.com Center, Gexa Energy Pavilion from 2011, back to Starplex Pavilion in 2017, and finally Dos Equis Pavilion in April 2018 when Live Nation partnered with Heineken USA, following more than eight million dollars of upgrades in 2017. The booking history is the history of the American summer tour: Lollapalooza, the H.O.R.D.E. tour, Lilith Fair, Ozzfest and the Vans Warped Tour all routed through, and recent seasons have carried Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters, Def Leppard, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert and Ozzy Osbourne, with the April-to-October calendar stacking thirty-plus national tours a year. The setting is unique among American sheds: Fair Park's 277-acre National Historic Landmark campus of 1936 Art Deco exposition buildings, with concert parking at the fairground gates and the State Fair of Texas wrapping the venue every autumn. From the standing pit through the reserved decks to the lawn blankets at the back, the pavilion remains what it was built to be - the place where Dallas sees the big summer tours under an open Texas sky. Practical notes hold few surprises for shed veterans: the season runs warm-weather months only, clear-bag and lawn-chair policies apply per event, and the venue sits close enough to downtown that the skyline glows behind the lawn once the house lights drop - a view that has framed Dallas summers for nearly four decades.