Where I Go I Hope There's Rum!
Where I Go I Hope There's Rum!
A goodbye to Jimmy Buffett
When you’re a kid you don’t care how cold a pool is. You don’t even notice.
When I was a kid and teenager, my friends and I would all go to our friend’s grandma’s house just about every weekend in the summer. Or even not on the weekends, because every day is the weekend in the summer when you’re a kid. Her house was in a town called Marysville, and if you’re not from Central PA I don’t expect you to know about Marysville. But for us, it had just about everything a brain of a certain age would want.
There was a trampoline. There was a school up the street with smooth concrete to skateboard on. There was a carnival every year that felt especially carnival-like. Extra gritty. The kind of carnival where a 14-year old could hit a balloon with a dart and leave with a poster with three girls pulling their Daisy Dukes down in the bed of a truck with “Haulin’ Ass” in giant letters. When we slept over we slept on a hardwood floor surrounded by taxidermy animals mounted on the walls, and sweat from lack of central AC.
And there was the pool, which had a hand-made basketball hoop in the shallow end.
I remember a lot about those days in Marysville. In a lot of those memories is Jimmy Buffett.
In the pre-Spotify days, you relied on the CD’s you had on hand. The stereo on the deck overlooking the pool regularly had Buffett in rotation, so all of these core memories were scored with songs like “Fins,” “Pencil Thin Mustache” and “Volcano.” They’re inextricably linked to memories of beating the hell out of each other in some pool or trampoline game that only teenagers could come up with, or learning how to do backflips and deciding to really commit this time to hucking your legs over your head.
At this point in the 2000s, we were decades younger than most of Buffett’s core audience, meaning that for every warm-weather memory we were forming alongside a Buffett song, there were countless others who did the same over the years. And I think that’s a pretty great legacy for someone to leave: Memories of fun outside, preferably with a drink in your hand, maybe even one you weren’t old enough to buy.
I have a draft on here I called “The Case for Jimmy Buffett.” I never published it, because I never quite got it to where I felt it was worth publishing. The Crux of it was that Buffett was a misunderstood songwriter unfairly relegated to novelty act status. Having a theme restaurant certainly doesn’t help, but even the goofier songs like “Margaritaville” have a core of real emotion tied in.
Another piece of that story is about the time my friend told me about when her dad, who worked as a journalist in New Jersey, debated someone on Buffett versus Springsteen.
Now, I don’t really like side-by-side comparisons of music, despite all of the brackets I filled out during the bored days of 2020 lockdown. Beatles vs. Stones, Oasis vs. Blur. Music isn’t supposed to be competitive like that. (It’s Beatles and Oasis aside from “Coffee and TV,” though.)
But I think what this debate does is show Buffett can be, and probably should be, seen on a similar plane as Bruce – and my friend’s dad did a pretty damn good job defending him. It helps that his Springsteen proxy opponent tried to just rest on “But it’s Bruce!” as an argument.
It reminded me of when I was watching Tim Kaine and Mike Pence debate before the 2016 election. I was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency veterinarian clinic in South Philly because my cat went on a hunger strike when I had gone to England on vacation. I watched Kaine trying to form attacks that didn’t stick, often speaking too quickly, making it so all Pence had to do was chuckle and calmly respond to things, easily brushing off any ad hominem argument Kaine tried.
I vividly remember the sinking feeling of realizing, “Holy shit Pence doesn’t have to say a single thing to win this. He just has to not be a weird aggressive asshole.”
That’s basically the only strategy my friend’s dad needed in his Buffett vs. Springsteen debate. Every time he was faced with “But, but, ‘Born to Run’ is so meaningful!” all he had to say was “It certainly is. But that doesn’t mean Buffett doesn’t also have meaningful lyrics. ‘I don’t know where I’m gonna go when the volcano blows’ is plenty meaningful.”
There are plenty of songs in the Buffett catalog that deal with personal struggles, the rigors and unpredictability of blue collar work, loneliness, and escaping your problems – literally through geographically or metaphorically through substances (with mixed results). It just so happens that a lot of these stories take place on the coast, and not the dreary New Jersey one that Bruce sings about. Instead of motorcycles and muscle cars, Buffett’s characters are on fishing boats.
To imply that all of Buffett’s songs are shallow is to say that bad things can’t happen in places with good weather.
Hell, I’d argue that “Margaritaville” is his “Born in the U.S.A.” in that it could be an ironic twist on its surface level message.
The whole song is about how the narrator is getting drunk because he’s unhappy. He’s searching for someone external to blame, only to come to the realization that a lot of his problems that led him to drinking in excess are his own (damn) fault.
It just so happens that his drink of choice is delicious.
I’d even argue that their fanbases aren’t too different. If anything, Buffett’s is more representative of what Bruce is singing about.
It’s not like Bruce’s audience is made up of solely that grease-stained proletariat he sings about. Tickets for his upcoming tour could go as high as $5,000. You could even get financing to pay for them in installments.
But again, this is not a Bruce or Buffett argument. And I’m not going to invite the smoke that would come from saying that one is better than the other (even though I did that once on Twitter, but no one seemed to care).
When I woke up this morning and saw the news that Jimmy Buffett died, I reacted in a way that made Michele think something was actually wrong. And, yes, 76 isn’t young, but I don’t think we saw this coming the way you do for some people. He was still posting on instagram on boats and on the beach, rehearsing with the Coral Reefers, being Jimmy Buffett. He obviously could have been hiding some illness from the public eye, but from where we were sitting he was still living the life he sang about all these years.
And I felt sad because it felt like something that was part of such happy times in my life was gone. But, it will always be a part of it.
When I hear “Come Monday,” I’ll still picture that pool overlooking the Susquehanna River. And there are countless people who picture their own fun memories in the sunshine, and that’s a pretty good legacy to leave.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Ratboys.