After seven weeks of hashing out words (when I was able) about the rehearsal process for a production of Waiting for Godot I’m currently co-starring in at Birmingham Festival Theatre, it is refreshing to sit down at the old computer and write about something else for a change. But boy oh boy, do I wish the subject were a happier one.
I woke up this last Saturday morning in my usual fashion. I don’t watch or read the news. It depresses me too much. But what I do to keep current on recent events is, first thing in the morning, I check out the topmost-read articles on Wikipedia from the previous day. If I see something that piques my interest or makes me wonder why it piqued so much interest from others, I may google the news on the subject. Saturday morning brought with it, for me, terrible news.
I wasn’t quite prepared for my reaction. When I read that Jimmy Buffett had passed away, I reflexively, instinctively cried. The man seemed so ubiquitous—I don’t know if I thought he’d live forever or what, but his death hit me like a ton of bricks. There was a moment, too, where I wondered where such emotion had come from. After all, Mr. Buffett had not produced new music of note in many years. I had even recently re-watched the “Tonsil Trouble” episode of South Park where Buffett was ridiculed in the way most people ridicule him—as a novelty hitmaker, a one-trick-pony.
I suppose I know him almost exclusively from the songs anthologized on the record Songs You Know by Heart. But, boy, do I know them by heart—and so do millions, not just the “Parrotheads” who would attend his concerts, which were more like parties I’m told. My brother, having been born in the late sixties, had the greatest music collection. When I was growing up, I would rifle through all his audio cassettes, LPs—yes, even 8-track tapes—and would always come up with something worth listening to. I probably wore out Songs You Know by Heart more than any of his other tapes. My sister-in-law joked it was probably just for “Cheeseburger in Paradise” because I was so young, but it wasn’t.
Like so many, I was lulled into a kind of island peace with songs like “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” and I was most affected by what is perhaps his greatest song—the Country/Western-twinged “Come Monday.”
Buffett indeed straddled many styles. Being born in Pascagoula, Mississippi and partly raised in Fairhope, Alabama—easily my favorite place in my home state—you could most certainly hear Country, but also the famous tropical rhythms he became famous for while busking for drinks down in Key West, Florida.
Of course, there is no one on God’s green Earth who doesn’t know his most famous hit—“Margaritaville”—said to be written within a six minute span. (Boy, I wish I could write something in six minutes and be set for life financially.) His style may have seemed easy, the persona perhaps a bit affected, but the music was always tuneful, reflective, and spoke to the common person. Perhaps it was this universality that was so much disliked. Some music fans are snobs—what can you do? But Buffett fans span the gamut from rednecks in back waters to anyone who is able to afford a tropical vacation. His music has been the soundtrack to not just many a vacation, but many lives in general.
Appropriately, I first fell in love with his music on the water. We would blast his cassettes in a boat, roaming around Lewis Smith Lake, which straddles Walker, Winston, and Cullman counties. That music is perfect for the rocking back and forth of a sea vessel with nothing to do but roll with the waves while getting burnt by the sun. In some ways, Buffett’s style speaks to the lackadaisical in all of us—the part of us that feels rich lying on a beach even though we go home to being broke, work-a-day folks.
My iPhone is loaded with my entire music collection. On the way to work, I will typically skip a lot of tracks—mostly the weird French classical music, the Mendelssohn, the Broadway tunes—but I never fail to let Buffett’s “Volcano” play all the way to the end. A true example of his tropical rock, the song remains a song for our times. The lyrics speak of a volcano about to blow. Don’t we live in such a world? There is this uneasy feeling, at any moment, that everything could go up in smoke and “Volcano” (“Mr. Utley!”) always gives one comfort that everything’s going to be okay, even though that seems less feasible as the days trudge on.
On the boat, I remember my mother being particularly upset when “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)” would start up on the tape. You could fast forward in those days, but not fast enough for an eight-year-old boy to still marvel and wonder at the lyrics, which are low-brow, yes, but also unbelievably funny. And Buffett was funny. The ultimate feeling one has when listening to his music is joy, a commodity rare in our day and time.
I don’t know if the man was as care-free as his image. Certainly, the last days couldn’t have been. There has been this trend among celebrities recently to not disclose their illnesses to the public. That just wasn’t the case ten years ago. I’ve lost so many of my idols recently to secret battles with cancer. There’s a part of me that wants to say, “Why didn’t you tell us?” and a part of me that says, “No, I get it. You don’t want us worrying—you want us to remember who you were.” And, yet the ka-blam that happens when they go—is it more painful for it be sudden or would it be better if we were prepared? Ah, well, that is the prerogative of the ill, I suppose. I don’t know what I’d do in the same situation, so I can’t judge. All I can do here is write a tribute to the man.
When you saw pictures of him, he didn’t seem to match the voice on the records. I don’t know what it was, but that moustache just didn’t jibe with the image I had in my head as I listened to him. Of course, in his lifetime, Buffett was criticized for not living up to his image. The equally legendary David Allan Coe, who was criticized for plagiarizing Buffett’s style with his minor hit “Divers Do it Deeper,” wrote a rather cold-hearted song called “Jimmy Buffett,” in which he opined that “Jimmy Buffett doesn’t live in Key West anymore,” calling the singer a sell-out to Malibu after making his money dropping “island beats.” Ah, well, if you know Coe, he was, as Johnny Cash put it, “different,” to say the least.
Buffett’s interests were diversified in many different commercial directions. For those of us who’ve made trips down to Florida, there are “Margaritaville” “restaurants” that certainly don’t live up to the music’s reputation. I’ve never been much for frozen margaritas anyway, but those cheeseburgers are certainly not paradisical. Sorry, Jimmy, but “medium rare” is great for filets, but not burgers, and those burgers don’t do your song justice.
He even had some forays into the theatre. In Miami, he and novelist Herman Wouk collaborated on a musical called Don’t Stop the Carnival, which failed. All that resulted was a concept album with a few good tunes. Most pop song writers don’t do well in the theatre and Buffett was no exception. Eventually, La Jolla Playhouse did a jukebox musical of his, Escape from Margaritaville, which may be exceptional only in that it recalled another of Buffett’s projects: writing books.
My copy of Tales from Margaritaville is certainly a guilty pleasure. Buffett wrote at least one good story in it, “Take Another Road,” which introduced his doppelganger Tully Mars, who is the lead character in the musical. A story of giving up the work-a-day life for travelling the high seas, it is a distillation of all Buffett’s music signified—he wrote songs perfect for vacations, those weird moments where we feel invincible and away from our real lives.
Buffett, in fact, perfected the idea of escaping reality. Perhaps this is why his music is so everlasting and we do know his songs by heart. We all want to throw away the shackles of corporate or blue-collar life and take to the high seas, finding women and rum along the way. Perhaps that is why I cried when he died. We feel shackled to our jobs, slaves to our everyday lives. We all want escapism and his music provided that.
But not at the expense of sometimes bringing us back to earth. Introspective songs like “He Went to Paris” and the aforementioned “Come Monday” speak to basic life truths—longing, heartbreak, wishing, hoping, plus the dreaming of orange-bathed sunsets and endless glasses of tequila, rum, or “Boat Drinks.”
A toast to Jimmy Buffett! who was a thousand times more tuneful than his peers, who carved out his own niche in the world, and made us feel better about the troubles in our dailies.
The first person I thought to contact when he died was my brother, whose tape is probably unplayable now. He wrote back, simply but to the point (as always), “He was a legend.” He was.
To legends! And to joy! And to happiness! And to Paradise (with or without cheeseburgers).
The following is a taste of “Volcano.” I don’t know where I’m a-gonna go when the volcano blows, but I wouldn’t mind landing next to Jimmy and having a party out of nothing but the feeling of goodness and laughter.
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