Earlier this month, singer/songwriter/author/entertainer/entrepreneur/pilot/sailor/beach bum Jimmy Buffett died from a rare form of skin cancer. As I said some time back regarding the death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, I don't normally get bent out of shape over celebrity deaths just because I don't know them personally. I've had the pleasure of meeting a few and shaking some hands in my life, but I never got to know them as people. But as I get older, if a celebrity's work leaves a lasting impression on me, their death does tend to hurt. Like Charlie Watts, Jimmy Buffett's passing hurts.
I really became affected by Buffett's music in the early 1990s. Like most people, I knew his 1977 song "Margaritaville," his second of only two Top 40 hits in his career and the only one to crack the Top 10. But through the influence of my Uncle Frantz, who had a couple of his CDs, most notably the 1985 compilation album Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hit(s), I started to absorb other songs into my musical consciousness. I found myself quite drawn to his work. Perhaps it was his clever rhymes and wordplay. Maybe it was his mischievous sense of humour that isn't always as prevalent in pop music as it probably should be. It was almost as if he was daring people to enjoy themselves in spite of the dramas and traumas of everyday life.
("Dramas and traumas"--now there's a phrase I've used a few times in various essays I've written. I've never seen it used anywhere else, so I'll take credit for it, but I think it's safe to say that, if nothing else, Buffett certainly had an influence on me as a writer.)
Whatever it was, it began to resonate with me. Even today, when I listen to his songs, I feel like I'm actually inside of them, witnessing everything he's singing firsthand. He was first and foremost a storyteller which added a certain quality to his songs that is unusual... in a good way. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was regularly calling up my local DJ, the great Johnny Henderson ("The Big Guy"), to play some of his songs on the radio during my morning bus ride to school. They became part of the soundtrack of my life, especially after I went to college and started experimenting (badly) with poetry and/or songwriting. I actually found a lot of inspiration in Buffett's works. The titles alone were enough to bring a smile to anyone's face--songs like "Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season" (a particularly timely notion right now, especially down south), "Growing Older But Not Up," "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful," "Last Mango in Paris," "If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me," "Please Bypass This Heart," "Son of a Son of a Sailor," and--one of my personal faves--"My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don't Love Jesus." I also have to give him serious props for the greatest title ever bestowed upon a live album, 1978's You Had To Be There. The only other artist I've ever known who wrote such catchy titles was Frank Zappa and even he never came up with something as drunkenly silly as A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean.
His ability to tell stories transcended music. In fact it only seemed natural that he would expand this skill into the field of literature. Over the years, he wrote a number of bestselling books, both fiction and nonfiction, for both children and adults. In fact, he's one of only a handful of writers to top The New York Times Bestseller list in both fiction and nonfiction. His collection of short stories, Tales From Margaritaville: Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions is one of my all-time favourite books. As part of a media writing class in college, I even wrote a screenplay to his story "I Wish Lunch Could Last Forever." It couldn't have been too bad, I got a B on it... actually, it may have been a B-. I'd have to go back and look to make sure. I'm still waiting for someone to make a movie of his novel Where Is Joe Merchant? When I read it initially, I found that it had such a cinematic quality to it, that I was even casting the movie in my head (I seem to recall picturing Tommy Lee Jones in the role of the missing title character).
I never had the opportunity to see the man in concert. There was a possibility of seeing a show in 1997, complete with backstage passes, but I was flat broke at the time. There was talk of seeing him again as a family event at Wrigley Field in 2005, but that never came to pass. I have a DVD of that specific concert so I can at least see what I missed. Like the Grateful Dead, he's one of those artists that I would like to have seen just to be able to say I had. I consider myself a "Parrot Head" just because I enjoy his music and have a weakness for brightly coloured floral print shirts, but I'm not as obsessive about it as some.
Perhaps my favourite thing that I like to point out about Buffett (and, sadly, I share this every chance I get) actually involves someone else's music. It was Labour Day Weekend, 1996. I was driving to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, to pick up my sister for the holiday weekend. I got stuck in traffic somewhere between Indianapolis and Muncie and the classic rock station out of Indy played Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 epic "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" about... well the real life shipwreck. The song became an earworm and was stuck in my head the rest of the night. This would be fine except for the fact that--as is the case with any truly effective earworm--I didn't know the words. 27 years later, I still don't. So I substituted the only other song I knew regarding boats, Buffett's 1978 song "Son of a Son of a Sailor." Amazingly enough, I found that you can actually sing the lyrics of Buffett's song to the melody of Lightfoot's. In 2017, Buffett released an album of early recordings that had been presumed lost and suddenly resurfaced titled Buried Treasure. In the liner notes, he wrote that he had been heavily influenced by Gordon Lightfoot's music. The whole connection suddenly made so much more sense to me. *
In April of 1996, I performed my own rock concert for my Senior Honours Thesis. As I always say, this just shows you what kind of leeway they give you in the Honours College at Ball State University. For the show, I decided to perform a cover of Buffett's 1974 song "A Pirate Looks at Forty." Buffett once said of the song, "I guess I wrote this for an old friend of mine a few years back that could just not find his occupation in the twentieth century. So he just chose to live in a fantasy world. And then I looked at him and I went, 'well, what the hell is wrong with that?' So if this song has been able to ease your pain ever so slightly, I'm glad I wrote it, 'cause that's what it's for."
I found I identified with the character in that song. In the written portion of my thesis, I wrote, "I sometimes think I was born about eighty years too late and I would have had a very successful career in vaudeville. 'My occupational hazard is/My occupation's just not around.' Nobody my age really has any respect for the way things use[d] to be anymore. Sometimes I feel old, even though I'm only twenty-one at the time of this writing. That's why this song means so much to me--It's for all those pirates and vaudevillians who are lost and forgotten in this God-forsaken, computerized wasteland known as the 1990s." Damn--that's pretty good if I do say so myself. Damn--it's amazing how certain things never seem to change.
Jimmy--and, even though I never met him, I do feel like I'm on a first name basis with him--is one of those rare celebrities whose work not only meant something to me, but one that I've been exceptionally grateful for over the years. If nothing else, he's one of those people that I've always wanted to meet just to thank him for his art. He was never a favourite among critics and most music snobs (at least the ones I know) always seem to exhibit disdain for his work, but he never seemed to care about any of that. His goal always seemed to be to put a smile on people's faces, make them forget their troubles for a bit, and not take anything--including himself--too seriously. And while his songs may not be as revered as those by Dylan, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, The Stones, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, or any number of artists who are known for writing their own material, they've left a permanent impression on my psyche and my world viewpoint. Personally, I think we need more people like Jimmy Buffett in this world. Whether we realize it or not, I believe society has lost one of its greats and we are poorer for it.
* If, like me, you don't know the words to "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," you can also substitute the lyrics to Billy Joel's "Piano Man" as well as "Amazing Grace." Go ahead--you know you want to try it.
