Thanks for everything, Jimmy Buffett. We adults need times to dress silly and act crazy.
It was 1979, the final semester of my senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the headliner for the university’s free Springfest outdoor concert was Jimmy Buffett. My friend Marion and I were Buffett fans, but I had never attended a live show, so we went early to get good seats in the football stadium.
A spread in the 1979 Yackety Yack yearbook indicates that there were other bands — Marion recalls that The Spinners thought they were playing in Raleigh — but we were there for Margaritaville.
Then the music started, and the beach balls, leis and grass skirts came out. I was hooked. I was a Parrot Head for life.
A Jimmy Buffett concert (with alcohol or not, by the way) was the most fun you could have standing up, to copy another writer, and in the darker parts of the lawn at Raleigh’s Walnut Creek, they might have been having that kind of fun, too.
I eventually got too old to handle the lawn, and my husband, whom I had broadened from a college-era diet of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, and friends took to the reserved seating. Party stores sold out of leis and inflatable palm trees when Jimmy was in town, and I Martha Stewart-ed my glue gun to decorate special hats.
One year, I talked my husband into donning a shark costume. (“Fins to the left! Fins to the right!”) Photos of the event have mysteriously disappeared.
The Buffett show in the parking lot
On my first newspaper job in Salisbury, N.C., the “Ski and Outing Club” never went skiing, to my knowledge, but existed to organize a bus to a Buffett concert in Charlotte. My husband and I jumped on board in our Hawaiian shirts and availed ourselves of refreshments along the way. It rained during the outdoor show, but I didn’t care.
Strolling through the parking lot before a Jimmy Buffett concert was a show in itself, with some fans creating fake beaches around their cars using bags of sand and real palm trees.
Over the years, Buffett’s audience seemed to gray and settle as I did, with children and grandchildren in tow, and he went with that. Marion moved across the country, but our love for his music still connected us. Marion even sat in the front row of a concert while pregnant, then brought her daughter to a later one.
We were sharing a fantasy that we knew didn’t exist anymore, if it ever really had for most of us.
But we were having a hell of a good time. I need opportunities in my life when I can be silly and dress crazy before going back to being a grownup, taking my proper dose of vitamin D and eating kale.
Friends who are devoted to Springsteen and local indie bands have denigrated Buffett to me for decades. Shallow and silly, they say.
“He doesn’t really live like that stuff he sings, you know,” a Bruce-obsessed friend once slung at me.
I asked her if she thought The Boss still rode a motorcycle through New Jersey and met people in roadside bars.
Beyond the booze in the blender
Performers have personas, but the best ones are true to lived experiences.
What kept me listening to Buffett beyond the booze in the blender was the storytelling.
Look at many of his songs, and you see closely observed characters and places, written by a person with a sense of adventure, and a hungry curiosity about the world. And, as in “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” knowledge that time is passing.
“Pascagoula Run” (he was born in the Mississippi town) is vivid to me, about a young man being shown the world outside of home and it’s a darn fascinating place. I sure wished I’d had an uncle in a red convertible Jaguar encouraging me to “cross the wild meridian.”
I’m not about to argue that Buffett was Hemingway, but the characters in the songs came from someone with a sharp eye, and who wasn’t taking them — or himself — too seriously.
It’s why his novels are pretty decent reads.
And as far as not living that life anymore — artists who do are dead by 30.
We’ve all had to change.
Jimmy Buffett: a Raleigh photo album
To start watching our blood pressure. To be evaluated for “fall risk” each time we go to the doctor. To put Amsler Grids on our refrigerators.
Marion and I have traveled a long way from that Springfest evening.
His loss reminds me that, yes, we’re all going to die — as if I needed a reminder when it seems I buy more sympathy cards than birthday cards these days.
But there’s still time for a good party and a great story.
Thanks, Jimmy.
Fins up!
Debbie Moose is a former food editor for The News & Observer, author of seven cookbooks and loves a good cheeseburger. Reach her via her website, debbiemoose.com.
