“Palm trees provide the camouflage, ocean breezes bring the seaplanes and sailboats, tourists and travellers.
More than just a song, Margaritaville became a destination of popular legend, located “in the tropics somewhere between the Port of Indecision and Southeast of Disorder,” according to the official website.
While scrupulously non-judgmental, Buffett’s lyric subtly suggests that it might pay to be careful about what you wish as the singer finds himself “Wasted away again in Margaritaville/Searching for my lost shaker of salt”. Named after the tequila-based margarita cocktail, the song describes in exquisite detail the mixed feelings of whiling your life away in an alcoholic haze of sun-soaked downtime. It housed “Margaritaville”, the biggest of The Big 8, and the track which more than any other defined Buffet’s philosophy and enduring appeal. This was the collection which earned him his mass-market breakthrough and remains the best-selling studio album of his career. While Buffett made no apparent advances artistically or commercially with his 1976 album Havana Daydream, he had nevertheless refined his unique formula to something close to perfection by the time he came to release Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes in 1977. It was notable for the song “A Pirate Looks At Forty”, a rumination on a misspent life which became another of The Big 8. The album cemented the Key West geographical connection, Route A1A being the road that runs through many of the beachfront towns in Florida State. Buffett also enjoyed his first significant success in the album chart later the same year when A1A reached US No.25. The album also housed “Come Monday”, Buffett’s first hit single which reached US No.30 and featured in his setlist for many years thereafter as one of “The Big 8” – the eight songs which Buffett has nearly always played at his many live shows over the course of his long career. The theme was expanded on “God’s Own Drunk”, a song written by Lord Richard Buckley, which featured on Buffett’s next album, Living And Dying in 3/4 Time, released in 1974. The best-known song from the album, and one of the most notorious, was “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (And Screw)”, a plain-talking, albeit throwaway ditty which celebrated a lifestyle notable for its casual indulgence and heroic lack of political correctness. The first examples of this distinctive hybrid appeared – along with the first incarnation of the Coral Reefer Band – on Buffett’s album A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean, released in 1973. The tropical climate and relaxed, hedonistic lifestyle of the area inspired Buffett to start writing songs that eventually begat his own personal genre known as “Gulf & western”, denoting a combination of country (music) and Gulf Coast (lyric and narrative) influences. In 1971 Buffett went on a busking expedition to Key West in Florida, a place that later became his home and which exerted a telling influence on his musical outlook. After working as a correspondent for Billboard magazine in Nashville, he started his musical career as an acoustic singer-songwriter with a couple of independently released albums, recorded at the start of the 1970s, that gave little indication of the unique musical persona for which he later became known. He grew up in Mobile, Alabama and graduated with a degree in History from the University of Southern Mississippi. James William Buffett was born on December 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
And he has toured every year from 1976 to the present with his Coral Reefer Band, performing in beach shorts and bare feet to a legion of fans known as “Parrotheads” who have continued loyally to follow him, sometimes over successive generations in the same family. Since then, in a remarkably consistent career, Buffett has achieved US platinum status for sales of albums including Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes (1977), Son Of A Son Of A Sailor (1978), Fruitcakes (1994), Banana Wind (1996) and Licence to Chill (2004). Now well into his sixties, he has maintained the freshness and popularity of a musical formula which he invented on his major-label album debut, A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean, all the way back in 1973. Buffett has somehow insulated this essentially transient, beach-bum worldview from the passage of time and the encroaching demands of middle-age. His best-known hits, “Margaritaville” (1977), “Cheeseburger In Paradise” (1978) and “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” (a 2003 duet with Alan Jackson) celebrate an “island lifestyle” of never-ending cocktails, clambakes and carousing by the coast. Jimmy Buffett has created a world of his own.
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