I’ve previously alluded to my Buffet-ization, or my increasing desires to be laying on a beach somewhere, leathery, drunk, barefoot, and sun-bleached. It’s an escapist fantasy I think a lot of people, especially boring Americans, can relate to. And despite my best efforts I am very much a boring American.
Part of unlocking these desires has come with the realization that I do, in fact, un-ironically, like Jimmy Buffet. You know, the guy with the restaurants and the hotels and the merch and the small town in Florida. The guy who wasted away in the Keys before making billions of dollars singing about cheeseburgers and parrots.
I was reading a Jim Harrison book of essays and such and he mentions Buffet, speaking about the character “A Pirate Looks at Forty” is based on.
We writes,
“I was in Key West tarpon fishing and made friends with Phil Clark, about whom Jimmy Buffet wrote his song “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” These tarpon trips lacked wisdom, as drugs, booze, and other nonsense were integrally woven into our sporting life. Clark was a wonderfully raffiné character involved in commercial fishing and smuggling, not a unique combination of vocations in the Keys in those days.”
I think what struck me here, besides Harrison’s writing, was that I’ve always imagined Jimmy Buffet just falling to Earth from some corporately-funded Margarita™ in the sky, not coming from an actual scene of seedy stoners and folk musicians in the Florida Keys in the ‘70s. And even if he’s made a caricature of his initial identity, it still was there at some point.
I was once talking to my pal Jasper about Buffet and he informed me that Bob Dylan once claimed that Jimmy Buffet was one of his favorite songwriters of all time, and even covered “A Pirate Looks at Forty” live in the early-80s with Joan Baez. Now, I’m not saying everything Dylan touches or speaks about is gold. But most of it is, and the stuff that isn’t is “Lenny Bruce.”
So, it does make me wonder if maybe Buffet just gets a bad rep, or has created his own bad rep by monetizing leisure and every single aspect of his discography, and that if you just take the music for what it is, it’s pretty decent ‘70s stoner rock about hanging out on the beach and getting too drunk.
Which, like I said, is innocent and fun to me. And maybe even good.
Thanks for listening,
Will
parrotheads rise up