Seeking spiritual clarity, I went, late and alone, to the Jimmy Buffett tribute act.
I have never been to the ocean, or in my memory, had a margarita. Not one. (I did once wear a Hawaiian shirt every day for work, a place where surprisingly little Buffett ever plays over the aisles, except for “Come Monday,” which sneaks through on a Muzak radio station titled “8-Tracks.” They keep that one around for first shift, when the lifers and the recently retired work. I’m in there too, thinking I’m somewhere in between.)
My attendance tonight at “BLUFFETT & THE SON OF A SAILOR BAND: A CELEBRATION OF JIMMY BUFFETT” is an attempt to practice that tipsy platitude I’d learned from the man himself long ago, the one about latitudes and attitudes. Would it still work this far north? And in February? I wasn’t hopeful, but I did wear my buttoned shirt with little jeeps and mountains on it to show my willingness to try at least.
Plus; look at what they promised:
We walked into the theater about the same time, Not Jimmy and I. And from my seat way in the back, Not Jimmy looked a hell of a lot like Jimmy. Not Jimmy wore a blank yellow baseball cap, a pair of those rip-off Rastafarian sweatbands, some sitcom dad sunglasses, and dark cargo shorts. And he was barefoot, as was the bass player, which should have been the first indication of the night's many excesses to come. He started with his own modest Hawaiian, then ditched it about halfway through the set between songs with an exaggerated shake that was meant to be suggestive. It got a few dispassionate, obligatory, “woo’s” including a quiet one from me.
Is it actually important that he’s in costume at all? Does it affect our ability to enjoy these songs?
A large part of Jimmy Buffett’s enduring allure is that he could be just about any one of us assholes sitting out in the crowd. I’m thinking it for sure, that I could be up there wearing swimming trunks and strumming cowboy chords, already knowing most of the words somehow. I imagine each of us here are doing it, especially the 60-plus year old men who did not have to search hard to find these Hawaiian shirts in their closets. There is a palpable sense amongst the assembled that the riskiest thing left for them to do in retired life is come watch a Jimmy Buffett tribute act on Saturday night.
But, hey, I’m also here, out in the shadows of the theater and I can't stop taking pictures with my phone of a guy who is not Jimmy Buffett.
Now what does that say about me?
I’ve payed $37 for the privilege to be in his presence, which is approximately $32 more than I ever payed to “Bubba” himself. I own just one Jimmy Buffett record. I felt very, very cool walking out of that Walmart at sixteen holding Songs You Know by Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hit(s) and running it loud through my 1998 Ford Ranger that shook violently past 65 miles per hour.
It wasn’t entirely my fault. It’s important to remember that Pandora in the late aughts presented Buffett as a quintessential American songwriter. And now, sitting way out in the shadows and watching Not Jimmy and the rest of the Son of a Sailor Band, I’m starting to think that maybe Real Jimmy was. By the end of his life, he’d enjoyed a truly unique level of public fame and a devoted fandom that only a limited few musicians have ever received.
Most have been summoned forth from the depths by that economic megalith that is “Margaritaville,” an amorphous psychological and geographic conception that is equally able to sell both at-home blenders and hotels and resorts in all the usual sandy places. There are also ones in Times Square, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Biloxi, Mississippi and Bossier City, Louisiana. Also, there’s this Margaritaville pickleball paddle that is, I shit you not, $160.
One of his more recent enterprises was a series of retirement complexes, known as 55 and Better Communities, which I first learned about in The New Yorker. It features this sentence: “In his books and songs, his world view metastasized into something akin to an empire of attitude, a Margaritaville of the mind and of the travel brochure.”
In the piece, Nick Paumgarten also describes Buffett’s musical and entrepreneurial transformation from “a poor man’s Gordon Lightfoot” into “a drinking man’s Martha Stewart.”
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People really hate Jimmy Buffett, and I’d like to know why.
By all accounts, Buffett was an altruistic guy who fought to save manatees and played countless benefit and charity concerts, including one after the BP oil spill in 2010. I went ahead and watched the whole thing so that you don’t have to. It’s less a concert and more a musical infomercial for the Gulf Shore, which at that very moment was, I have to stress, actively covered in oil. Remember this: when they had to sell Americans on the very idea of a beach, they sent in Buffett and broadcasted everything live on CMT.
Sara hates him because there was this place in Des Moines that only played Buffett music that used to serve her underage. She remembers being drunk in a black leather jacket yelling, “Salt, Salt, Where’s the Goddamn Salt?”
That’ll do it.
I have to admit that on the surface he always looked, and I can’t stress this enough, So. Fucking. Happy. If I ever hear the phrase “shit-eating grin,” I can’t help but see Jimmy Buffett smiling across many album covers.
And why shouldn’t he have smiled like that? He turned out to be the ultimate plundering capitalist, an actual pirate, able to turn a single song into an unmatched conglomerate that encompassed all the important aspects of American contemporary life: real estate, media, and home appliances.
I believe that is where a lot of this Buffett anger arises from. His whole act feels disingenuous, able to be received more as marketing than music, selling island escape as the ultimate purpose of a life spent working. He sold it for decades to our parents, some of whom are still earnestly waiting for that Republican “health care plan.” (He once pissed off the MAGA Parrotheads when he changed the lyrics of “Margaritaville” at a Democratic campaign rally in Florida in 2018: “Some people say that there’s a red tide to blame, but I know that it’s all Rick Scott’s fault.”)
I think the hatred simply comes from the fact that his music is constructed in a world that does not, and will never, exist for us.
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It's far easier to look and sing like a chosen performer than to talk like them, so stage banter amongst tribute acts is understandably tight. Not Jimmy speaks incredibly fast, almost unintelligibly, perhaps as an attempt to maintain the facade.
At one point, one of his sentences ends "...you go to Florida and nobody is from Florida."
“I’m from Florida!” the only person close to me screams.
The drink in her hand held a little blue umbrella. She danced in the aisle at the start of almost every song, until she realized that she was the only one standing up. Her husband drank two Rockstar Energy drinks during the 90 minute set.
I worried for them both.
I’ve been thinking about Bubba since his death in September. (He died of Merkel cell carcinoma, which according to the National Cancer Institute is “a very rare disease in which malignant cells form in the skin. Sun exposure and having a weak immune system can affect the risk of Merkel cell carcinoma.” I’ll certainly pay for this someday, but in a sense, wasn’t Jimmy Buffett killed by irony?)
Anyway, I did my part and put on the hits and listened to his last record, Equal Strain on All Parts, which he finished just before he passed. The album features, among other things, a cover of Dylan's "Mozambique," the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and a song called "My Gummie Just Kicked In," which features none other than Sir Paul McCartney on the bass. Because of course it does.
On the “About” page on Buffett’s website, it says that his songs possess “Hemingway's eye for detail and Mark Twain's inclination for mischievous humor…Buffett's music tells the stories of the hustlers, the beach bums and the pirates from all corners of the world. Through it all are woven the themes of escapism, wanderlust and an unbridled curiosity that makes life a journey worth taking.” Which is quite a lot to say for "Summerzcool," or “I Wish Lunch Could Last Forever,” or "Math Suks."
But his transformation into drunken party orator brutally dismisses his earlier, earnest songwriting career. He first discovered Key West while out on tour with Jerry Jeff Walker. Haggard and Willie both recorded some of Buffett's early songs. On the cover of Steve Goodman’s 1972 Somebody Else's Troubles, he’s standing adjacent to John Prine.
Later, when you needed a hit, you could always call on “Bubba.” Kenny Chesney, Zach Brown, Alan Jackson, and many, many others all did, selling sandy music videos and swinging for summer radio play on otherwise heartbreak-only radio stations. I think that gets lost, and rightfully so, amongst the chain restaurants and the “5 O’Clock Somewhere” clocks where all the numbers are fives I know have to exist.
Don’t worry: they do.
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The Bluffett Setlist
“Volcano”
“Cheeseburger in Paradise”
“Havana Daydreamin’”
“Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit”
“Boat Drinks”
“He Went To Paris”
“One Particular Harbour”
“Pencil Thin Mustache”
“A Pirate Looks at Forty”
“Brown-Eyed Girl”
“Come Monday”
“Sea Cruise”
“Son of a Son of a Sailor”
“Why Don’t We Get Drunk”
“It's Five O'Clock Somewhere”
“Only Time Will Tell”
“Fins”
“Margaritaville”
Encore:
“Sweet Home Alabama”
Let’s take a moment here to critique this setlist. “Cheeseburger” is clearly too early here, and “Fins” too late, right? “Pirate Looks at Forty” into “Brown-Eyed Girl”? I mean come on. It is telling that almost a quarter of the tribute band’s set are covers of Jimmy Buffett covers. Technically, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” isn’t a cover, though Jimmy only sang on the chorus, so it feels disingenuous to not call it a cover song, the whole crux of that song being the question "What would Jimmy Buffett do?" and then Jimmy Buffett immediately answers, which Bluffett, to his credit tonight lets the crowd ask. A mother and daughter had even packed in a flag with those words and a single parrot on it, stood up and unfurled it when that one kicked in.
There were a number of other cardinal sins in the show, firstly that they didn’t have steel drums. I imagine that demand for steel drums is scant, leading to a high operating rate for those willing to take those pans on tour, a rate which the Pearson family seems unwilling to pay. Not Jimmy is Larry Pearson, and it turns out during band introductions that this whole thing is a family business, with a brother each on guitar and the congas, and Larry’s daughter swaying next to him. Larry never said, “I’m Larry Pearson,” though, and they never once acknowledged that Jimmy Buffett had died, which felt like a grievous error, likely only to me.
There’s always one person in every tribute band who has to hold it all together, and it’s never the one you’ve come to see perform. They are usually at stage right, have about 43 instruments they cycle through, usually multiple for each song. They are always working way too hard. Maybe they sobered up too late. Who knows, but for this show, it was this guy, which I’m ashamed to not be able to name:
On the whole, I think the only way I can describe listening to Bluffett is that its visual equivalent is watching too many episodes of the “Real Housewives” in a row. Specifically The Real Housewives of Miami, after the reboot, which is the absolute best of the myriad of Housewives' endeavors, the reasons for which might warrant themselves another, far too long essay in the future.
Unquestionably the worst offense that Not Jimmy committed all night was singing “I blew out my flip flops” during the final verse of “Margaritaville” when the lyric is actually “flip flop,” which may seem petty to point out but actually serves as the final catalyst to get the singer back home to the blender, to that frozen concoction that helps him hang on. He couldn’t possibly blow out both flip flops at once, and subsequently step on two pop tops, cut both heels and then have to cruise on back home.
It’s preposterous.
Listening to a lot of Jimmy Buffett in a short window of time will make you want to start writing your own Jimmy Buffett songs. I've got two songs started so far: “Our Turtle Years” and “Two Dollar Dave (Is Drinking Again)” They sound exactly as you would imagine. It’s a devilish dance, that one between homage and parody, and like nearly all of the man’s music after “Margarittaville,” it becomes increasingly unclear if most of them are meant to be taken as genuine, or as elaborate parodies of himself.
Again, I see that grin.
Seeking a more satisfying ending after a misguided and lukewarm take on “Sweet Home Alabama,” I followed a couple out of a side entrance.
Husband: “He did sound like him.”
Wife: "He sure did. I'm all turned around."
Husband: "You just need a little sense of direction."
Wife: "Of which I have none.” (Midwestern scoff)
I took that personally, because I was lost too.
I followed along, hoping they'd take me past my car, which eventually they did.
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For the following week, I woke up with the first two lines of "Boat Drinks" cycling through my head. It’s about a singer whose bandmates order boat drinks either before or after performing in a chilly place where there is hockey on TV.
It is the quintessential Jimmy Buffett song, referencing Star Trek, (“Could you beam me somewhere, Mister Scott?”) and features this oft-repeated and purely distilled Buffett mantra: “I gotta go where it's warm!” And yet, there’s a darkness in it, like many Buffett songs, even “Come Monday,” which features the line “I got my Hush Puppies on/I guess I never was meant for glitter rock 'n' roll.” I found this interview with Letterman when Buffett says writing “Come Monday” saved him from “killing himself in a hotel room.”
A part of me wants to see him as a man forever trapped in his own act, perhaps even scared and scarred by the thing he’d become, what he had to trade in exchange for his chance to be The Man Behind the Curtain.
Then I listen to "What if the Hokey-Pokey Is All It Really Is About?" and think he was probably this same guy all long, only that the “Margaritaville” machine gave him the financial and creative ability to do exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Which is write choruses about the Hokey Pokey.
This morning, I was listening to Buffett’s 1989 Off To See The Lizard, you know, like I do, and “Take Another Road” comes on.
Take another road to a hiding place
Disappear without a trace
Take another road to another time
On another road in another time
Like a novel from the five and dime
Take another road another time
Which I guess is just what I’ve done all week, flailing in the wake of Bluffett. If it’s not been a clarity exactly, it’s definitely provided obfuscation from these disillusioned days
Sara admits that finding the one Buffett song that says “ the five and dime” is “very, very ironic.” But, she quickly adds, “I fear for you coming back to this world after this.”
“I don’t know if I’m ever coming back,” I say, ascending the stairs because she won’t let me listen to Buffett around the cats. I should have been ready, said something better, more Buffett, like “If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.”
But I don’t want to worry her any more than I already have.