Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
Trying to reason with what Jimmy Buffett's music (and Margaritaville) means to an over-forty victim of fate.
Where it all ends I can't fathom my friends
If I knew I might toss out my anchor
So I cruise along always searchin' for songs
One of my best friends texted me the morning of September 2nd with the news about Jimmy Buffett dying, sending a link with a text that simply read “We never went.”
My friend had never seen him; I had once, years ago, but we still made plans to get tickets and make our big Parrothead trip last year. A weekend in Vegas, betting on boat drinks and sailing ‘round the roulette tables.
When Jimmy Buffett postponed those shows, and more this past summer due to illness, I knew in my gut that ship had sailed. I would never see Jimmy Buffett play again.
I was grateful I did get to see him play once, in 2015. So I have that.
I wish I had more.
I selfishly wish I had seen him back when he opened for Loggins & Messina, or when he was working out songs by playing bars in Montana, or even seeing him in the 90’s or early 00’s playing shows in the Keys to his flock.
I got to see him, yes, but I didn’t get to experience him the way I wanted to, mostly because the way I wanted to is, essentially, via a Jimmy Buffett song. On a beach, in the tropics, possibly as a volcano erupts, tropical drink in one hand, cheeseburger in the other, avoiding the sharks and reflecting on my past mistakes.
That is the real Jimmy Buffett experience, what he sings about in his songs1 and sells in his gift shops and touts in his restaurants: escape.
I wanna be there
Wanna go back down and and get high by the sea there
As a kid, I didn’t grow up listening to Jimmy Buffett. He wasn’t someone my mom or dad listened to, and he wasn’t really played on the radio stations we grew up with. Nor were my parents and family beach goers, or Florida people, or Southerners in that way. Even though Oklahoma has more shoreline than any other state2, the closest I got to sailing the high seas as a kid was going to the lake. Sure, we listened to The Beach Boys, but The Beach Boys are the sound of California. Jimmy Buffett is the sound of the Gulf.
I was in high school the first time I remember hearing his music. “Come Monday” was played on KOMA, the oldies station in Oklahoma City, which at that time meant the 50’s-70’s3. I remember hearing “Come Monday” and being instantly transported somewhere… else. I instantly went to a Borders Books & Music4 and bought his greatest hits CD, ‘Songs You Know By Heart.’ I didn’t know any of them by heart then, but I soon would.
I became a fan pretty quickly. This was music that promised a better life in a tropical location, a life full of good food and pretty sunsets and sandy beaches5 and, honestly, not a lot of troubles. You might step on a pop-top and blow out a flip-flop, but that was essentially the worst of your worries.6
Even the ‘down on your luck’ or ‘sitting at a bar looking back at your mistakes’ songs that he wrote, they’re full of a kind of hope that sad people know and relate to. His songs are stories, and even the ones without a happy ending don’t end that tragically.7
And that’s where, I think, the division between Jimmy Buffett the singer/songwriter and Jimmy Buffett the Parrothead happens. Because he has two types of songs: the ones about a man reflecting on his past while he sits at a bar in Paris, or laments the weather in LA while heading to San Francisco, or sailing on a boat looking for whatever comes next; and then he has the Parrothead anthems, the fun songs about what goes on a perfect cheeseburger or about just getting drunk and having sex, the songs that detractors of Jimmy Buffett point to as somehow indicative of his lack of talent or the fact he’s a joke.
And I love them all.
But anyone who dismisses his music because of the latter has never listened to the former. One of the things I found fascinating after he died was how much he was played on KCRW, the independent music station here in Los Angeles. In fact, I was shocked when I heard “Boat Drinks” opening Raul Campos set on Sunday, September 3rd. And then Anne Litt played “Come Monday” on Labor Day!
Can I understand why people dismiss him as a joke? Hokey bar music, music for drunkards and frat boys? Sure. And those same people call him a sell-out, pointing at the Margaritaville restaurants and resorts and merchandise. The thing is, he owned all of that. He owned his music, he had his own label, and he owned (some of) Margaritaville. Per Forbes: “In 1985, Buffett founded Margaritaville Holdings as promotional side business to his music career, using the company to concert tickets and merchandise, before incrementally expanding the business to include resort destinations and restaurants, as well as home decoration, tequila and margarita mixes, pool floats and pickleball sets.”
He formed Margarita Holdings in 1985, less than ten years after “Margaritaville” hit the charts. He was smart, he knew what he was doing, and he captained that ship to a billion dollar payday.
He also gave his fans exactly what they wanted, even if what they wanted was mediocre restaurant food. But they don’t care. I don’t care. As much as I wish going to a Margaritaville restaurant was an amazing tropical experience, I’ve always known that the real Margaritaville is not a place you go, it’s an idea. Margaritaville is wherever you want it to be, whenever you need it to be.
But there's booze in the blender
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on
The first time I went to a Margaritaville was also my first time in The Florida Keys.
I spent spring break in the Keys my sophomore and senior years of high school, the former learning to scuba dive and the latter expanding on that new skillset. Those two trips had a lot of impact on me, for various reasons. For one, on the first trip when I was getting scuba certified, I almost drowned when the hose in my regulator disconnected and I inhaled a mouthful of seawater 30 feet below water.8 For two, I was able to connect a lot of the feelings and ideas behind Jimmy Buffett’s songs with actual locations and moments in the Gulf, Atlantic and Keys.
Florida weather, it’s clouds and sunsets, storms and skies, are radically different from those I grew up with on the plains of Oklahoma, and it’s also radically different from SoCal, where I’ve spent the last 18 years. There’s something about being so close to the equator, and specifically on the Keys with the Gulf on one side and the Atlantic on the other, that makes the world just look and feel different.
I was underage my first trip to Key West and the Margaritaville there, and my memories of it now are hazy at best. But what I took from it, from those two trips and future trips to Florida and the Caribbean in college and after, is that I now had a plan for what I could do if and when I ever failed at life: I would move to the Keys, live in a shack on the beach, sit at an old typewriter by day and lounge on the beach with a drink in hand at night.9
Yes, my end of life dream is to live out my existence in one of Jimmy Buffett’s sadder, better songs. The ultimate escape before the ultimate end.
His body was battered, his world was shattered
And all he could do was just cry
While the tears were falling, he was recalling
The answers he never found
So I became a fan of his music in high school, and became a fan of his lyrical locations as well. That continued into college, where to say I became a bigger fan is something of an understatement. For better or worse, I went all in on Jimmy Buffett music and vibes.
And why not? Why wouldn’t I? I’ve previously wrote about how I wanted and needed to escape from my life in Oklahoma, and what better escape is there than Margaritaville?
Besides starting his own company to manage his music and merchandise, Jimmy Buffett did something else very smart in the late 90’s and early 00’s: he went in early on the Internet. Margaritaville fan forums allowed fans to connect, share bootlegs and recipes and stories, and via his website he’d stream his concerts, something he proudly proclaims on his live album ‘Tuesdays Thursdays Saturdays”10: “We’re also broadcasting this live from Radio Margaritavile, free of charge, like we do all of our shows.”
He united the Parrotheads in a digital tailgate, perpetually partying online for all of time. This, more than anything else, was one of the smarter things he could have done. When so many artists, his peers both older and younger, across the genres, were all struggling to figure out how or why to have a digital presence, Jimmy made sure Margaritaville had a modem and that it was always on.
He also made sure to stock his website full of his merchandise, and outside of eBay my first real purchase of anything on the internet was a bunch of tacky Margaritaville stuff, some of which I still have:
My college years dovetailing with he rise of the internet, combined with Jimmy Buffett’s early online presence, meant I was able to be more connected to his music than I would’ve ever thought or imagined. Even though I wasn’t an avid concert goer in those days, and I don’t think I ever even thought about going to see him play, I did the next best thing, buying or downloading as much of his live music and albums as I could.11
But as much of a fan I was, and am, when I graduated from college, instead of moving east towards the music of Jimmy Buffett and setting sail for the warmer waters of the Gulf, I moved West to the sounds of Brian Wilson and making port in the cold waters of the Pacific.
We can go hiking on Tuesday
With you I'd walk anywhere.
California has worn me quite thin
I just can't wait to see you again
It would be easy to say my love for Jimmy Buffett waned after I moved to Los Angeles, but I think the better way to phrase it is that I simply found other music to help me escape, and that my need to escape, and why, changed as well.
At least, for a little while. The longer I was out here, the more the sea called, in more ways than one.
I was never a big drinker when I was younger, and the first time I ever got properly good and drunk (and hungover) was on my 21st birthday in college, where I drank enough Hurricanes to make the next day a tropical disaster. Boat drinks, as the man sang, were what I liked, and it was about five or six years after I moved out here that I honed in on what would become a new hobby, passion and love: tiki bars and tiki drinks.
From about 2011 to this day, I love a great tiki drink served in a neat tiki mug while sitting in a cool tiki bar. Tiki is one of the ultimate escapes, a mid-century throwback that received a resurgence a few years ago to an almost alarming degree. What was a niche yet passionate fanbase became something bigger, broader and with way more mass appeal, not unlike the fandom and music of Jimmy Buffett.
Tiki bars, the good ones anyways, are exactly what Margaritaville restaurants should be: relaxing, fun, boozy escapes from the day-to-day existence, a place and a drink to take you away to a tropical state of mind. It’s exactly where Alan Jackson wants to escape to on “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” except he ends up at a TGI Fridays or, well, a Margaritaville.
Maybe that’s my problem with the Margaritaville’s I’ve been to: none of them feel like you’re escaping anything at all. The one here in Los Angeles, located at Universal Citywalk outside Universal Studios, is usually a ghost town; if you’re looking to grab food or drink in CityWalk, it’s not in the top ten places anyone would choose to go.12 My Parrothead friend and I stop in occasionally before a movie, and we are, nine times out of ten, the only people there.
Las Vegas, Nashville13, Jamaica… the restaurants are less an escape and more of a chore. But again, for me, the real Margaritaville is the one in my head. I’ll still stop by whenever I pass one, a ritual that takes on new meaning now, but I’d rather be in a tiki bar, to be honest.
My fascination14with tiki connected me back to that desire I had to be near or on the water, to be someplace tropical, to have my toes in the sand and my eyes on the horizon as the sun melts into the sea. Which means it also connected me back to Jimmy Buffett’s music.
Waitress, I need two more boat drinks
Then I'm headin' south 'fore my dream shrinks
The first and only time I ever saw Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band was on October 22, 2015.
They played the Hollywood Bowl, a venue that I spent most of my time in Los Angeles looking down on15, but have come to appreciate way more as I’m older and no longer need to stand for an entire concert. The Bowl is a great place to see a band you don’t really care about.
I was working on a major reality show at the time, and managed to get out of work early in order to park at Hollywood and Highland and then walk up the hill to the Bowl16, and as I did I passed plenty of moms already two or seven margaritas deep, their husbands hands full of bacon-wrapped hot dogs as they all Parrotheaded their way to the concert.
I went alone, found my seat, and then immediately left it, moving down to a lower section to watch the show where I wouldn’t be in a throng of people who were already seasick.
It was a good show, and to this day I’m glad I went, but again, it wasn’t the concert experience I wanted it to be, and thus the failure there is mine. I had an expectation for something that could never be fulfilled: I expected to be transported to the Margaritaville of my youth, the place I go in my head when I listen to his music.
He did play his cover of “Southern Cross,” which is really all I needed or wanted to hear. And for the time of year the concert was, days before what would have been my younger brothers birthday, it meant enough to me to treasure forever.
So I'm sailing for tomorrow, my dreams are a-dying
And my love is an anchor tied to you
Tied with a silver chain
I have my ship
And all her flags are a-flying
She is all that I have left
And music is her name
As the years passed, I remained a fan. I was no longer buying every live album he put out, and I wasn’t listening to his new stuff as much, but I continued to listen to his music and long for the ocean. I didn’t necessarily need his music to escape from my life, but I still appreciated what his music meant to me and the frame of mind it could put me in.
At some point, without realizing it, my life started to resemble the singer of so many of the Jimmy Buffett songs I loved. From the small coincidences like driving up to San Francisco to visit a long-distance girlfriend I missed to the larger if more abstract moments where I’d be traveling alone, for business or pleasure, and find myself at a bar reflecting on all the regrets and missed chances and what ifs of my life and longing for the adventures yet to come.
As a kid, a teenager, a young adult, I always saw my future a certain way. I wasn’t one of those people who saw themselves with a family of four, a white picket fence and a lawn and a minivan. In my much younger days, when I thought of my twilight years, it was sitting alone at a typewriter, pounding the keys on the next great American novel, dying cigarette17 dangling from my lips. Over time, that’s morphed into a clearer picture, the typewriter replaced with a laptop, and I guess the cigarette got replaced with a mozzarella stick. But still alone. Not lonely, but alone.
It’s not to say I didn’t try for a better or more stereotypical picture; lord knows I did and have. I’ve come close, closer than I ever thought, to that ideal life I never saw for myself. But as they say, a boat in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for. To put it another way, settling for a future I can’t imagine just so I can have that idea of someone else’s happiness isn’t what I was built for.18
Prior to the Global Pandemic of 2020, I started planning for my fortieth birthday party. My idea was to have a “Pirate Looks At Forty” party, named for the song of the same name, what to me is the near-definitive Jimmy Buffett song. I wanted to get a bunch of friends together on a boat, sail the tropics, live the life his songs promised for a week.
Once the world shut down and irrevocably changed in 2020, that plan looked very far from happening, and even as the years passed and vaccines arrived and the world started to open, the planning and resources and organizing of people required depended on a world that existed pre-pandemic.
So instead, last year I threw a “Pirate Looks At Forty” birthday party here, on land.19 Friends graciously and generously offered their backyard, which they went out of their way to decorate, and another friend offered to make and serve tiki drinks for guests. We didn’t have cheeseburgers in paradise but we did have Islands Fries20 catered, along with plenty of other snacks. And we had fun. It was better than being on a boat sailing the high seas in stormy weather, and afterwards I got to go see another band I like in concert with friends.21
Riding the Jimmy Buffett wave, when he announced his new tour in September of 2022, plans were hatched for a true pirate experience. One that, as we’ve caught up, never got to happen.
So many nights I just dream of the ocean, god I wish I was sailin' again
I’m not sure, at this point, what kind of legacy Jimmy Buffett leaves behind. Unlike, say, Elvis or The Beatles or even Taylor Swift or Beyonce, there’s not anyone working in music right now that’s anything like Jimmy Buffett; as inspiring as he was, as vast as his sound and music was, as large as his fandom of Parrotheads is, he never had any other artists really aping him, nipping at his heels, or trying to be the next Jimmy Buffett. He moved into more mainstream country later in life, touring with Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney, and then he leisurely moved back to whatever you call his music. His songbook isn’t covered the way other artists are, mostly because again, he had nobody trying to be him. He was singular, a one-man musical genre that has no parallel or equal.
I’ve been listening to his music more now than usual, which isn’t surprising, it’s what happens after an artist passes. But it doesn’t make me sad, the way, say, listening to Prince or Bowie does, thinking of their potential futures that never came to pass. That isn’t to say Jimmy Buffett didn’t have a third act in his future; he had just wrapped a new album featuring, among others, Paul McCartney playing bass on a track.
His music told and tells a story that is, mostly, complete. Could he have had an even later stage resurgence, a Johnny Cash “Hurt”-era? Sure. But he didn’t need one. He didn’t need a third act because he never needed a second act. He debuted “Margaritaville” in 1977, started Margarita Holdings in 1985, launched his restaurants and bars and resorts and toured ever since right up until he postponed last year for illness. And even then, he continued to record and plan for more. His first act never ended.
Joke all you want about the awfulness of the food at his bars, or the hokiness of a song like “Volcano,” but he died a billionaire who sailed to his own winds, winds that took him all over the world playing to billions of fans.
He helped so many escape, even if it was just in their heads. A kid growing up in Oklahoma dealing with trauma no kid should deal with was able to listen to his music and escape to calmer seas. That’s the legacy he leaves, at least for me.
He leaves songs and music that will help me wether the storms of life for the rest of mine, until that day comes where I pack up whatever I have left and head to that shack on the beach, boat drink in hand, as I watch the sun set one last time on this island earth.
Maybe I’ll see you there.
But there's this one particular harbour
So far but yet so near
Where I see the days as they fade away
And finally disappear
The last time I was in Oklahoma City and listened to KOMA, still the oldies station, their timeframe was now firmly the 70’s-90’s. “Oldies” being the music of my childhood. I died.
RIP Borders Books & Music.
“Cheeseburger in Paradise” is a song quite literally about eating an amazing burger in paradise, even if he wrote it in Montana.
I mean, I guess you could say there are in fact worse troubles in his songs: A volcanic eruption (“Volcano”) ; A woman being preyed on by predatory men (“Fins) ; Losing your wife and child to war (“He Went to Paris”).
You can make the case that ‘He Went to Paris',’ one of his more tragic tales, is sad almost throughout, but I think the fact the narrator escapes his past tragedies physically if not mentally and emotionally is enough. But I say that as someone who also sought to escape past tragedies by simply moving away from them, so, what do I know?
That is the second time I nearly drowned. The first was when I was much, much younger and my cousins took me into the deep end of a wave pool in a water park and lifeguards had to rescue me. And yet I became a swimmer, and still love water to this day.
To say I came close to pulling the trigger on this dream this year would be an understatement.
‘Tuesdays Thursdays Saturdays’ is one of my favorite albums, one I’ve listened to more than almost any other. It’s a perfect representation of what I assume the ideal Jimmy Buffett concert is, it’s a great live album, and it includes a pretty fantastic cover of my all-time favorite song ever: the Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Southern Cross.”
I have hard drives full of Jimmy Buffett music. Live from Las Vegas, live in Anguilla, live from Fenway Park, box sets and promo CDs and music you could only get when you bought one of his books.
in no particular order: Bubba Gumps, Antojitos, Buca di Beppo, NBC Sports Grill, Toothsome Chocolate Emporium, the combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell, Voodoo Donuts, the bar inside AMC, Jamba Juice and Ben & Jerrys. Also, Bubba Gumps is severely underrated.
Nashville, Tennessee is a cruise ship version of Austin, Texas.
obsession
Bowl traffic is quite possibly the worst traffic in Los Angeles. To attempt to explain it to anyone who hasn’t tried to get through Hollywood on a Bowl night is to try to explain Shakespeare to a dolphin. But for those who haven’t, imagine the worst intersections you’ve ever been at, and the worst drivers and the worst highway onramps and off-ramps. Now, imagine all of those in one place, and add to that 1 million people trying to get home at night after work. To that, add the traffic and parking and crowds that you’d expect at a Football stadium on game day. Once you have all of that, put it in the middle of Hollywood, take away all the parking lots but add 18 more streets and intersections, and then take away every drivers ability to properly operate their vehicle as if they’re all toddlers driving bumper cars. To all of that, add a mall with mall parking, a Trader Joes parking lot, and streets that are closed due to parades. Now add the traffic any town experiences on a Friday night or a holiday weekend when everyone tries to get out of town. Now add the traffic any big city has when people try to go to the downtown hotspots or club scenes. Add public transportation like buses that have taken away two to three lanes of traffic. Add hills and canyons that prevent people from going certain directions and limit how people can get there. Finally, pretend half the drivers are blind. And that’s what it’s like trying to go the four blocks around the Hollywood Bowl on a Bowl night.
The Bowl is a place you park at once, on your first trip, and then never again. Anyone who drives to park at the Bowl is either a fool or a millionaire.
I hate cigarettes, and can think of nothing grosser than smoking one, except kissing someone who just smoked one.
Nor should one sacrifice their own happiness trying to make an idea work. This is my real problem, wanting to make something work at the expense of my own happiness and at the expense of what’s good or best for me.
I do love that, when announcing this party, I had friends text in confusion: “Is this a pirate themed party? I thought it was a tropical/tiki party?”
Islands, the chain restaurant, is a better version of Margaritaville than any actual Margaritaville restaurant.
the band was Joseph, and the venue was the Troubadour. The party was technically the weekend after my birthday; I had friends getting married the weekend before my birthday and thus couldn’t throw a party then. There’s a lot more to that story, iykyk etc but needless to say I was able to enjoy my actual birthday even if it was one of the wildest weeks of my life.