His music is a balm for all seasons, a soundtrack that keeps us afloat as we trudge along, not just through the workweek, but every day of our lives.
His music is a balm for all seasons, a soundtrack that keeps us afloat as we trudge along, not just through the workweek, but every day of our lives.
J immy Buffett dying on Labor Day weekend is like Adams and Jefferson dying on July 4. It’s fitting, almost providential that the man who personified island living would sail off into the sunset for the last time as summer gave way to fall.
The Jimmy Buffett we came to know and love truly began 50 years ago. Buffett had released two country albums before dropping A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean in 1973. It was his first album with the Coral Reefer Band, was the first example of his signature “Gulf and Western” sound, and was the first appearance of Buffett’s “trademark mustache.”
Buffett toured nonstop for half a century. He was followed all the while by the oft-mocked Parrotheads, who became synonymous with the type of responsibility-averse Baby Boomers who racked up DUIs while crippling the American economy.
But Buffett has also cultivated a loyal following among younger generations, even those who spurn their parents’ proclivity for wastin’ away. The Parrotheads may be mourning their fearless leader on Facebook. But on Twitter and Instagram, it’s the socially conscious Phish phans and enlightened John Mayer acolytes raising a Landshark for the Mayor of Margaritaville.
Buffett’s enduring appeal is curious considering his seemingly superficial catalogue. Stylistically, his closest musical relatives are the Eagles, whose appeals to take it easy have earned them scorn from critics. Buffett’s suggestion that we get drunk and screw, meanwhile, has earned him a fan base rivaled only by that of the Grateful Dead, whose improvisational shows and appeals to higher levels of consciousness more clearly lend themselves to such intense levels of devotion.
So, what explains Buffett’s enduring and reverent following? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, as the New York Times put it in a 2018 profile, “Jimmy Buffett [was] not really Jimmy Buffett anymore” and “hasn’t been for a while.” Since the opening of the first Margaritaville store in 1985, Buffett transformed from island crooner to industrial titan.
In the Times profile, Buffett the Businessman sounds a lot like anyone with a stressful job: waking up early, hustling between meetings, worrying that major projects won’t come together in time. It was only when Buffett got back on stage that he became his old self, relaxing and jamming and having a good time.
Becoming a multimillionaire didn’t alienate Buffett and his fans — it brought them closer. For the last 30 years of his life, Jimmy Buffett was just another hardworking American for whom Jimmy Buffett shows were a respite from the work week. He practiced what he preached, which was not the promise of perpetual island time but the assurance of occasional escape.
But despite what it seems, that’s not all Buffett sang about. Like the man himself, Buffett’s songs were deeper than they appeared on the sunkissed surface.
Take his biggest hit. At first blush, “Margaritaville” is a breezy vacation jam about killing time between blended binges. But the lyrics suggest that the narrator is engaged in a kind of examination of conscience, trying to get to the bottom of just why he stays in the titular locale all season. Wondering as he wanders, Buffett moves closer towards taking responsibility for his actions with each chorus. Noting each time that “some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,” he moves from the universally exculpatory (“It’s nobody’s fault”) to the introspective (“Hell, it could be my fault”) before finally admitting, “It’s my own damn fault.”
The escalating movement to confession mirrors the three-step admission of guilt at the heart of the confiteor, a prayer Buffett would have learned from his years of Catholic school. Almost two decades later, Buffett would actually chant “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” in “Fruitcakes.” In the music video, he strikes his chest accordingly, flanked by a group of altar boys.
Still, it would be a mistake to identify Buffett — who gleefully proclaimed, “I don’t go to church” in “Pencil Thin Mustache” — as a secret orthodox Catholic. But an elemental Christian spirituality undeniably runs through his songs. “A Pirate Looks at 40” is an ode to what the late Peter Lawler called the “natural compensations for our distinctively human misery,” which stems from the fact “that our true home lies elsewhere.”
This is why Jimmy Buffett endures. It’s easy to mock him as a purveyor of escapist pablum, a pied piper for Parrotheads looking to dull the pain of their nine-to-five. But what critics don’t realize is that Buffett isn’t merely offering a tropical soundtrack for people trapped in an endless cycle of working for the weekend. Indeed, in the famous “lost verse” in “Margaritaville,” he mocks the “old men in tank tops, cruisin’ the gift shops” who “dream about weight loss, wish they could be their own boss,” and for whom “three-day vacations become such a bore.”
For Buffett, the beach was more than a beach. It was a tropical river Jordan, a relief from our earthly toil. His music is a balm for all seasons, a soundtrack that keeps us afloat as we trudge along, not just through the workweek, but every day of our lives. The reward he promises isn’t just any cheeseburger. It’s a Cheeseburger in Paradise.