Jimmy Buffett Goes Back to Margaritaville
Jimmy Buffett awoke in a panic one morning last year in one of his many homes — he can’t remember which one. His new Broadway musical, “Escape to Margaritaville,” was coming along nicely, but something was off.
It wasn’t the music — they’d been careful to include a playlist of crowd pleasers. It wasn’t the book — the TV writers Greg Garcia (“My Name Is Earl”) and Mike O’Malley (“Shameless”) managed to create an accessible romantic comedy that appealed to Parrotheads, as his fans are called. It wasn’t the casting, either; Paul Alexander Nolan is a compelling early-Buffett avatar as Tully Mars, a dreamy bar singer at a rundown Caribbean hotel called Margaritaville. And he was happy with the direction of Christopher Ashley, off a best direction Tony for “Come From Away.”
The producers were taking great care with the show experience as well; they had decided to deluge the audience with beach balls at the end, which Mr. Buffett thought would be fun and memorable.
In the early-morning light in either Palm Beach or St. Barts or Los Angeles or Waikiki or New York, it hit him like a thunderbolt. It was Mr. Nolan. He wasn’t tan.
“Get to a tanning salon,” Mr. Buffett told Mr. Nolan. How could you have a bar singer beach bum in the Caribbean who wasn’t tan? “Tourists in Margaritaville are white and turn red. You need to be tan.”
In December, Mr. Buffett was still looking to make the show (which is set to open in March on Broadway), an even more authentic testament to the lifestyle he created. The show’s pre-Broadway runs in San Diego, New Orleans, Houston and Chicago had been well-received, but he still had concerns. He wanted to figure out another song to add to the mix, but every time he tried to remember what it was like to be a Tully Mars of the world, he blanked. Mr. Buffett realized that in order to remember his time as Tully Mars, he had to become Tully Mars again.
Mr. Buffett hasn’t stopped touring in his nearly half- century as a performer, but it had been a long time since he did a last-minute set at a bar. He had to get on a stage and really get back into the original iteration of Jimmy Buffett.
That night, he went to the original Margaritaville bar in Key West, Florida, which he opened in the mid1980s and, unannounced, played a set. He told stories between songs. It felt good to be remembering who he once was.
Because that, in a coconut shell, was the problem. Jimmy Buffett is not really Jimmy Buffett anymore. He hasn’t been for a while. Jimmy Buffett — the nibbling on sponge cake, watching the sun bake, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere Jimmy Buffett — has been replaced with a well-preserved businessman who is leveraging the Jimmy Buffett of yore to keep the Jimmy Buffett of now in the manner to which the old Jimmy Buffett never dreamed he could become accustomed. The more successful you become at selling the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle, the less you are seen as living that lifestyle.
“The glue that holds this thing together is authenticity,” he said. “People can smell it if it isn’t real.”
In 1979, Mr. Buffett showed up years late to a Rolling Stone interview, barefoot, in St. Barts, where he was living off a boat. Now he is surrounded by publicists and producers and a bodyguard. Now he has two boats and some airplanes. Now he wears shoes. He’s 71, a married father of three adult children. He only occasionally drinks margaritas. And he doesn’t smoke pot anymore.
To be Jimmy Buffett is to understand that the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle is one not simply of leisure, but of a leisure born of resistance to middle- class convention and upward mobility: We work too many long hours, we would rather be at a bar. The Jimmy Buffett lifestyle shakes its fist at the establishment even while, Jimmy Buffett, with his 5,000 employees, is basically now the establishment. How do you maintain a brand that is about being cool when it is maybe the least cool thing in the world to wake up in the grip of panic about your new multimillion- dollar musical?
Most of his songs are seemingly simple ballads. But listen closer. “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which he wrote after a precarious sailing trip, is about a cheeseburger, plain and simple, with a euphoric bridge that is just a list of condiments he loves. Where are our simple pleasures now, it asks without asking?
Mr. Buffett has grappled with dark thoughts about time and existence. The ocean is often so far away. But a T- shirt that says “No Shoes No Shirt No Problem”? That you can take with you.
Mr. Buffett still shares the existential worry of how to spend a day. He protects your experience of the lifestyle he sells in a way that someone living that lifestyle should be incapable of.
Mr. Buffett arrived at the rehearsal space. He spotted Mr. Nolan and complimented him on his tan.