An Over Forty Victim of Fate

IN MEMORIAM

Cheeseburgers and ice cold beer and departure signs in airports and grapefruit have an unusual allure in this stage of life.

---

Roughly anyone alive in the last fifty years who listened to the radio has almost certainly heard the chirpy steel drums and layered recorder intro to Jimmy Buffett’s ubiquitous “Margaritaville.” The trop-rock favorite saturates every summer, and together with the other Core 8 songs he was known for playing at every live show, the song anchored any beach trip soundtrack.

One of my strongest memories of “Margaritaville,” though, came when I was in college. I honestly didn’t care too much for Jimmy Buffett at the time–all for reasons that aren’t really worth defending anymore, but largely because in the early 2000s it felt like he was at the bottom of the value trough between his original luster and his late-career popularity*.

I was sitting in the back of Chris Hall’s Chevy Tahoe with some friends, four of us carpooling together to a high school about half an hour from our college. We were student teaching, the capstone to our education degrees that is effectively an entire semester of unpaid labor, and gas had gotten expensive, so we took turns driving every week to save money.

Student teaching was tough. There were a lot of early mornings, and none of us knew a lot about what we were doing (despite having learned a lot about it the previous three and a half years), and we were all bone tired. In the late winter, there was a span of two weeks where it snowed three times, keeping the school closed to students but open to faculty. If your cooperating teacher showed up, so did you. So I made a lot of treks over the Plott Balsams just to sit around an empty high school grading papers.

Not long afterward, we were pulling up to the school on a cold, dreary morning when the warm tones of “Margaritaville” piped over the radio. Chris was an ardent Parrothead, so he turned it up, and we sat in the parking lot together, the car’s heater blowing but the real warmth coming from visions of sponge cake and boiled shrimp and a lost shaker of salt. It felt good.

All of us in the car that day graduated and went off in different directions. Flash forward, et cetera. We get old(er). Kelly and I settle into a regular routine of bringing our three kiddos to Cherry Grove every summer. A number of things have been invented since the cold day in the high school parking lot: waterproof bluetooth speakers, satellite radio, smart phones.

There is a pandemic, and I turn 40. The kiddos reach an age where our trips to the beach are less about actively managing and supervising them and more about sitting out there with them. On a regular beach day morning, I carry out chairs and umbrellas and a cooler and a beach bag full of vacation materiel for a day on the sand.

I want music and I don’t want to think about it. Impulsively, I connect the iPhone and the speaker and launch the satellite radio app and tune it to Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville and I set up the umbrellas and unfold the low-slung chairs and soon I am confidently planted in the shade with a cheap Mexican beer crowned with a slice of lime.

It felt amazing.

Buffett’s music can be categorized as superficial. It isn’t terribly complicated. His live show recordings are busy and bloated. The lyrics at times border on farcical–a fact that fueled my snobbish dismissal of Buffett for a long time in my life.

Thank God I got over myself. I will admit that cheeseburgers and ice cold beer and departure signs in airports and grapefruit have an unusual allure in this stage of life. The sentimental image of climbing into your grandfather’s lap as a kid to listen to stories hits different these days. So does the feeling that you arrived somewhere at the wrong time, that your best days are behind you, that you are drowning, that you’ve sprung a few leaks, that you’ve got too much stuff, that there’s this one particular harbor out there, the one you don’t get to often enough even though you try, and if you can just get back there, everything will be okay. The bounty of the land is diminished, but there’s still abundance on the sea.

I still crank up Radio Margaritaville under the beach umbrella. On a day when I’ve just had too much late winter cold, I’ll tune in on the drive to work and try to imagine smelling salt air. I tuned in this morning to hear the DJ’s shaky voice announcing he passed away the night before. She was near tears.

There’s a certain part of Jimmy Buffett’s existence that feels immortal, which makes his passing so striking. Although he all but patented being a beach bum, and the billion-dollar commercial empire he cultivated made him one of the richest active recording artists in the world, he was still playing live shows earlier this year. The guy never looked like he was working at all, even though he worked all the time.

And Buffett brought high tide adventure everywhere. His live albums recorded in dry-dock destinations like Philipsburg, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Mansfield and Las Vegas are rounded out by adoring, cheering parrotheads who roar at his proficiency at ad-libbing geographic references. Fins to the left, Wrigley, he’ll cry, and you’ll swear you can hear them do it.

Yeah, Jimmy Buffett wrote all these songs for money, and he wrote them for himself, but he also really, really wants us to have a good time. That’s it.

Because there’s a pirate in all of us. Or more accurately, there’s a mischievous spark that we all desperately want to keep alive and burning, even as the world fills our hulls with decades of cold seawater.

May the seas lie smooth before you, Jimmy.

I said I know that this may sound funny
But money don’t mean nothin’ to me
I won’t make my music for money, no
I’m gonna make my music for me

He said that people only buy the love songs.
Rock and roll is not too long
He said son you got to be commercial
If you want to turn the people on.

And I said turning on the people
Now that’s a beautiful place to be
But if I spend my time makin’ memorable rhyme
Well who’s gonna turn on me?

“Makin’ music for Money”
jimmy buffett

* THIS IS IN ACCORDANCE with the theory that things are very valuable at first when they are popular, and then their popularity wanes and they lose value, and then they become rare and their popularity is lacquered with nostalgia and they become valuable. You see this with cars, for instance–while a new Corvette is pretty darn expensive, twenty year-old Corvettes in the bottom of the value trough can be had for a song, while Corvettes of a collectible antique age and type can cost you a million dollars.

Likewise–and not to be morbid–musical acts that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s dropped off a lot in demand at a certain point but are now in peak earning years due in part to the notion that this could be their last tour. Or even their last show. People drop a thousand dollars to sit in the last row at a Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen show because these guys can’t keep doing this forever.