Nothing Remains Quite The Same
It tracks that the last song Jimmy Buffett ever played before a live audience was the one on which he built his empire of relaxation: “Margaritaville,” a final salvo over this past July 4th weekend as a surprise guest of Mac McAnally, long a member of Buffett’s Coral Reefer band. Not unlike Prince exiting the stage following “Purple Rain,” or Tom Petty’s last performance ending with “American Girl,” there is something to going out on exactly the tune that laid the path for the rest.
Buffett, who passed away September 1st at the age of 76, defined the idea of getting away, however briefly. When a disgruntled coworker hits the bottle in the early afternoon, justifying it with the requisite “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” that’s a credit to the lifestyle Buffett envisioned for himself and sold at massive scale.
A failed gospel singer and ex-Billboard scribe, Buffett was born in Mississippi and made his bones digging around the Gulf Coast, looking for so much more than the lost shaker of salt that he’d end up singing about thousands of times over. He didn’t take up guitar until college at Auburn; he’d leave there headed for Southern Miss, from which he’d graduate in 1969[1].
After heading to Nashville, he ended up under the wing of Jim Croce and seemed inevitably on the road to James Taylor mundanity – but as he spent more time in New Orleans and Key West, Buffett was able to incorporate West Indian musical stylings that gave his music a particularly island-forward flair. Equipped with the same handful of chords that contemporaries like Taylor and Stephen Stills had exhausted, Buffett nevertheless became a burgeoning force in Gulf and Western music, the country-based genre he helped start and for which he would become the face.
With 1977’s Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes, Buffett became the portrait of beach bum guitar strum. Featuring the title track as well as “Margaritaville,” the album catapulted Buffett to the forefront of aspirational productivity – it’s not that he was lazy, obviously, touring almost constantly until his death; it’s that he just didn’t have to work that hard to be the guy he wanted to be.
He never left behind his country bona fides, working with Steve Goodman and hanging with the outlaw greats as, perhaps, a touch of levity in the midst of their various battles against addiction. Collaborations with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Alan Jackson followed[2]. He managed to be a small footnote in the autumn days of the Heat-Knicks rivalry, getting kicked out of a game in 2001. One has to imagine that current member of the Heat and fellow Jimmy, Butler, would love everything about that tale.
When possibly apocryphal stories of surgeons listening to Buffett in order to calm their nerves started making the rounds, Buffett himself was carving out a niche as the expired pirate CEO: his Margaritaville resort, restaurant and hotel chain would soon balloon his net worth into the hundreds of millions. Suddenly, the son of a son of a sailor had buying power far beyond that of the average panhandle weekender, an omnipresent smile and juuuuuust enough of a tan cutting a figure becoming of his songwriting ethos.
It didn’t totally play out like this, but whenever I see people criticizing billionaires for not fucking off and enjoying the rest of their days apart from society, I think of Jimmy Buffett: a consummate businessman, sure, and someone who bit off exactly the piece he knew he could chew, but also someone who made the idea of just hanging out and having a good time seem within reach. That’s a tribute to branding, which he was great at, but it’s also simply who he was. He was just better at it than the rest of us.
[1] For a guy who wrote “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” this seems fitting: nice.
[2] And, yes, sure enough – Jimmy Buffett is a direct bridge within jam band culture, having worked with Jerry Garcia, Phish and Dave Matthews. His Parrothead fandom maintains many of the hallmarks of Deadheads and Phans, up to and including an exclusive SiriusXM radio channel.
Tuesdays With Horry 