My Trips Around the Sun with Jimmy
It's been said that regardless of the day of the week or the hour on the clock, there's always at least one person on the planet singing “Margaritaville.”
That's good, because I sure blew my chance to sing it the night Jimmy Buffett died.
I got the news in about the best way possible, I guess. My friends and I had just wrapped up our weekly band practice. I glanced at my phone and noticed a Facebook post from Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band; the emojis were all of people crying.
Without even reading the post, I knew.
And what timing. Ten minutes earlier, as we approached the end of a 30-song setlist, we had gotten to “Margaritaville.” A little tuckered out from the long day — hey, 30 songs and a full day's work is a lot for a man my age — I waved it off, saying “OK, we've got this song down, let's skip it tonight.”
That's probably the first time I've passed on a chance to sing about that woman to blame, and it'll be the last. Like Parrotheads bursting out of their grass-skirt-filled closets everywhere, I'm on a mission to keep the man and his music alive.
Look, I learned long ago that people either liked Jimmy Buffett or they didn't. I get that. He definitely wrote his share of cringe-worthy songs, but he also wrote dozens of great ones — songs so good that when Bob Dylan was asked to name his favorite songwriters a few years back, the very first person he mentioned was Jimmy Buffett.
“A Pirate Looks At 40.” “He Went To Paris.” “Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season.” “Death Of An Unpopular Poet.” And, of course, “Last Mango In Paris,” his ode to a Key West mayor and bar owner that's a lot more touching than its pun-filled title might suggest. Even more than “Margaritaville,” the tune that turned the business-savvy Buffett into a one-man international conglomerate, those songs painted images that will stick with me just as powerfully as anything even Dylan ever wrote.
“Yes I am a pirate, 200 years too late,
“The canons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder, I'm an over-40 victim of fate … “
The man could turn a phrase, but it wasn't the recordings that made Jimmy Buffett a household name. His concerts became the stuff of legend 35 years ago when his fans — without any encouragement from him — started showing up in Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras with everything from parrots to cheeseburgers on their heads. You'd go to one show, have a few margaritas and then two hours of escapism later, you were a fan for life. The Parrotheads kept coming year after year, and since they were (as Buffett put it) “just like Deadheads, only with credit cards,” the Buffett bank account swelled to unfathomable proportions.
I think his ego — or lack thereof — had a lot to do with it too.
A natural performer from his days busking on the streets of New Orleans, no one was quicker with a quip or faster with an improvised lyric to fit the times. More importantly, he never took himself too seriously, often pausing to note “Hey, I'm just the backing band for your party!”
He was keenly aware of who his audience was, and what was going on in their neck of the woods. When I saw him in Sacramento a few months after the Camp Fire in early 2019, he dedicated the final song of his encore, “Love and Luck,” to the people of Paradise and the surrounding communities. It drew the loudest ovation of the night.
Perhaps most impressively, he kept politics out of his shows. A staunch liberal, the only thing he ever really said about it was “I'm smart enough to know that half my audience are Republicans.” In a recent interview, he added “What's so beautiful is when they come to my shows, that stuff stays outside.”
That was key for me. Buffett concerts felt like the last place I could go where thousands of people with wildly mixed views could gather in one place and have a great shared experience. As I noted a long time ago, nobody ever got into a fight at a Jimmy Buffett show, and for a man who built a billiondollar empire on “escapism,” that just might have been his fanciest escape act of all.
So now he's gone, and we're finally faced with asking “What would Jimmy Buffett do?” without him around to provide the answer. Here's my advice: Sing every song. Dress as silly as you want and dance up a storm. Be good to people. Live every day like it's your last. Enjoy that perfect margarita and that cheeseburger in Paradise. And especially, find reasons to share great experiences with people from all walks of life instead of constantly fueling further division.
Do that, and I stubbornly believe that some day we can reflect on our own little trips around the sun with the same satisfied mind as the man himself:
“Some of it's magic, and some of it's tragic.
“But I had a good life all the way.”
The fact that somebody, somewhere, is singing “Margaritaville” right now is the living proof.