Exile In Margaritaville
Florida bard Jimmy Buffett left us on September 1.
“DON’T TRY to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it,” Jimmy Buffett sang in the chorus of Mañana, a love song for the tropics, loneliness and honesty. “Don’t ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.”
Buffett, of course, had seen the ocean, and he got it right. Over exactly half a century, Buffett turned an aquatic ambit of pirates and pretty people, escape artists and adult adolescents, myths and mixed drinks into a homemade empire of wistful songs with underrated charms, perennial tours for endless escapism, and merchandising wings full of cheeseburgers in paradise.
Buffett died at 76 at the start of an extended American holiday weekend that marks summer’s last hurrah. It was as if the pied piper of trop-rock and beach
“…an aquatic ambit of pirates and pretty people, escape artists and adult adolescents, myths and mixed drinks…”
ballads had booked his own farewell.
Born in Mississippi but raised just east along the shore of Alabama, Buffett was indeed the son of a son of a sailor, the enthralled descendant of a grandfather who prowled the seas for decades. But it wasn’t until Buffett stumbled into Florida’s southernmost outpost of outlaws, Key West, alongside Jerry Jeff Walker, that he found the spiritual, artistic and chemical awakenings that made him an under-told master of American storytelling. By then, he’d dropped out of college, dropped out of marriage, and tried and failed to make it as a folk singer in Nashville with a sharp debut, Down To Earth. Juxtaposing those disappointments with the ease and esprit of Key West? That was his, well, boat fuel.
Rarely a chart-topper or award winner, Buffett first built his legion of Parrot Heads with a decade-long run of LPs that chronicled his misadventures
on the sea or near its salt line. There was romance, mystery, danger, and humour there, and he distilled it into records like A1A and Changes In Latitudes, Changes In
Attitudes. A natural storyteller and showman, he was ready-made for stages, too. After building his Coral Reefer Band in the mid-’70s, Buffett, not unlike fans Bob Dylan or Willie Nelson, began a travelling carnival that paused but never truly ended, amassing a legion of obsessive revellers to rival the Grateful Dead. He was a true American itinerant, and his audience revelled vicariously in those quests.
During the last 40 years, Buffett’s anthem Margaritaville became his merchandising cudgel, the brand name that bound a restaurant chain, resorts, bicycles, board shirts and liquor. Combined with the Boomers Gone Wild infamy of his concerts and his imprint on modern country’s Bacchanalian turn, Buffett became an easy punchline for cynical talk of selling out. But behind the near-billionaire was a set of wistful songs that perfectly twinkled – Come Monday, A Pirate Looks At Forty, He Went To Paris, Margaritaville itself – like navigational markers, guiding those who’d never really seen the ocean quite like Buffett somewhere else, at least for a few minutes.