In a world that is simultaneously miserable and threatening, it is good for the soul to retreat to one’s happy place.
Music has been my own refuge, all these years. Listening to it. Wishing to make it. Researching it. Craving its magic. In this, I am with the great and currently under-the-pump Mark Steyn, for whom music has been a refuge, and is, for many of us. Steyn’s first career was radio and music. Each year, around the last week of December, he reflects on the great musicians who have passed. His most recent reflections included Burt Bacharach and his fellow Canadian, Gordon Lightfoot. Truly great contributors to our happiness.
I first heard the music of the late purveyor of “drunken Caribbean rock and roll” and the King of Key West, Jimmy Buffett, on Terrigal beach in the summer of 1974-75. It was through a portable cassette player, in the Aussie sand, and the song was Come Monday. Buffett was then 28, and I was coming up 18.
The music relationship of my life had begun. A little like a marriage.
It reached a pause, though by no means the end, in September 2023 when the news came through of Jimmy Buffett’s passing, delivered by my daughter. It was a shock, since I, and, no doubt, many of his fans, had no idea he was even sick. He died of a rare skin cancer, at 76. He had been on the decline for some years, but kept performing live and in the studio without pause. And without ever announcing his health crisis.
He has just had released what came to be a posthumous album, An Equal Strain on All Parts, a fitting, big exit. Like many of his musical references, it was a title inspired by his beloved grandfather. I never had grandfathers, at least not grandfathers that I knew. Now that I am one, I get the importance of GPs.
Buffett’s close friend of recent years, Paul McCartney, said that he still sounded magnificent on his latest album. His was right, there. They had become friends, I think, through a tribute concert for the suffering island of Montserrat following a volcano blow. There was a studio there where the fifth Beatle, the late Sir George Martin, did his thing. It was a studio used by all sorts over the years, like Mick Jagger and Mark Knopfler. Buffett had earlier done a song, Volcano, about that island. Buffett once shared the stage with Mac for a rendition of Hey Jude. Beatle Paul played bass guitar on his final album.
Buffett’s passing was noted by many beloved friends. And he collaborated with many stars.
Like The Eagles, who remembered him on one of their many farewell tours. He was a close friend of the late, great Glenn Frey, a near neighbour. He opened for The Eagles in the late 70s.
He apparently convinced Harrison Ford to wear an earring. Ford cracked his Indiana Jones whip on one of Jimmy’s albums. Jimmy got the astonishing Roy Orbison to contribute on one of his albums. He sang a song (Take the Weather with You) written by the magnificent Kiwi Neil Finn. He collaborated on Five O’clock Somewhere with Alan Jackson, possibly the greatest serious drinking song ever written. He wrote and performed a song for the great American sailor, Dennis Conner, in support of the American recovery of the America’s Cup off “Freo” in 1987. The very last song on his final album was a duet with Emmylou Harris, of a song made famous by Bob Dylan (Mozambique).
Jimmy Buffett mixed with the famous. Or, perhaps, more accurately, the famous mixed with him.
Buffett was a musical polymath. He was awarded an honorary PhD by a Florida university. His reach was sometimes surprising. He was also a pilot, a sailor, an entrepreneur, a man with (cliché alert) a great gift of friendship.
His great collaborator, Mac McAnally, an astonishing (guitar) musician in his own right, reported that, at their very last meeting, the dying Jimmy whispered in his ear, “it was a hell of a ride”. It was, indeed.
Many obituaries focused, unsurprisingly, on Buffett’s greatest hit, Margaritaville, and on the way that he parlayed that hit into a lifestyle business, with its restaurants and resort hotels. The humble purveyor of island, chilled chic had become a billionaire! Yes, he was, famously, a workaholic. For a university dropout, he did okay.
But he never lost sight of his core metier, making music. The riches flowed, but that didn’t matter too much, in the final analysis. He kept performing, typically barefoot, touring, singing his songs of utter joy and, often, respite. He had his mental health issues over the years, as do we all. When the demons came, he turned to, of all people, Christopher Columbus. A sailor, naturally.
Better keep your distance from this whale
Better keep your boat from going astray
Find yourself a partner and treat them well
Try to give them shelter, night and day
'Cause here in this blue light
Far away from the fireside
Things can get twisted and crazy and crowded
And you can't even feel alright
So, I dream of Columbus
Every time the panic starts
You dream of Columbus
With your maps and your beautiful charts
You dream of Columbus
With an ache in your traveling heart
I saw Jimmy Buffett live four times.
The first, and best, concert was in Brisbane in 1987, with my then heavily pregnant wife. Another was at the legendary Sydney Hordern Pavilion in 2011, where he miss-stepped and fell off the stage at the end, and we all, briefly, feared for his life. An ambulance took him off to St Vincent’s Hospital. Naturally, he wrote a song-line about that. The last concert was in Wellington, New Zealand, where he retraced the steps of his beloved hero, Mark Twain. His literary and musical roots were deep and broad.
There were two songs that, perhaps, sum up his oeuvre. He wrote neither of them, but he sang them with relish. They were Southern Cross, by Crosby, Stills and Nash, and, Sail on Sailor, by the Beach Boys. Jimmy Buffett did them extreme justice.
My son reminded me recently of the importance of passing down musical experiences in the family. Jimmy Buffett was a presence in my life as a father, unnoticed at the time, but now, handed on. Tradition matters.
Jimmy Buffett is somewhere now on the high seas, manouevring his barquentine across the waves, no doubt with his beloved grandad, and smiling back at us all.
One of his less well-known songs was called The Death of an Unpopular Poet. Buffett was a poet for troubled times, a poet for the ages with a song always in his enormous heart, and he was far from unpopular. Not widely known, perhaps, outside his many “Parrothead” fans.
But we know him, and love him, and we know who we are.
Paul Collits
1 February 2024
thanks deeply
Stellar post and commentary.....