Fluid Imagination

Spider John is my name, friend,
I’m in between freights, and I sure would be obliged
If you’d share your company.”

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Ballad of Spider John”

I’m thirteen years old. My oldest brother has just come home from college for a break, bringing with him a lot of new music that he’d picked up from his new group of friends. I’m stepping out of the bathroom, and he calls out to me, “Kyle, come listen to this song.”

I enter his room. The curtains are drawn, and the ceiling light casts everything in an orange-ish glow. He hits play on the compact disc player, and the uptempo song starts with an explosive drum and keyboard combo that lasts for a measure and sets up the song’s melodic theme before quickly calming down and settling into the first verse. A man’s nasally half-twang begins to sing, using a playful-in-the-mouth phrase as an opening line, a sentence that bounces delightfully from consonant to consonant: “I tried to amend my carnivorous habits,”

My first thought is, “Well, that’s interesting.”

The song continues, each line a little masterpiece of ridiculousness, lines that don’t belong in a song unless you’re going for straight comedy in the vein of Weird Al Yankovic, and containing internal rhymes that add tempo and surprise to the lyrics: “Losing weight without speed, eating sunflower seeds” and “Not zucchini, fettuccini, or bulgur wheat,” until finally, the chorus, which reveals the subject of the singer’s longing: the American cheeseburger.

“I like mine with lettuce and tomato,” he explains, “Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, a big kosher pickle, and a cold draft beer,” before exclaiming to the divine, “Good God Almighty, which way do I steer for my cheeseburger in paradise?”

I couldn’t believe it. At thirteen years old, I was in the throes of discovering my love for writing by doing as many do at thirteen years old, wiling away my evening hours composing terrible poems. I’d become fascinated with experimenting with rhyme schemes and searching for subjects outside of the norm (one of my favorites from those years: “An Ode to My Commode”).

And here was a professional singer/songwriter making a country-tinged pop hit with a song about his love for cheeseburgers.

My brother left the room to do who knows what, but I stayed behind and listened to the rest of the album, its title an admonition, warning me that I was already way behind where I was supposed to be in my knowledge of this artist: Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hits.

I once knew a poet
who lived before his time.
He and his dog Spooner
would listen while he’d rhyme.
Words to make ya happy,
words to make you cry,
then one day the poet suddenly did die

– Jimmy Bufett, “The Death of an Unpopular Poet”

He wasn’t a great songwriter. Even as a dedicated thirteen-year-old poet, I already recognized his use of “did [present tense verb]” as a lazy rhymer’s cop-out, a grammatical construction that signaled the writer’s reluctance to work the lines until he put “the right word at the right time.”

I didn’t hold it against him, however. The lack of attempted perfection spoke to me, and it boosted the mythical character that his songs implied: a well-intentioned, romantic pirate/smuggler who laughed in the face of the squares’ demand for discipline.

The other tunes on Songs You Know By Heart revealed that Jimmy Buffett was not a wanna-be Weird Al. While his songs weren’t afraid to be funny or to relish in puns, they also explored more emotional themes.

• “He Went to Paris” narrates the life story of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War whose biography involves the death of a wife and child and the loss of an eye
• “Son of a Son of a Sailor” connects the singer’s lifestyle to his grandfather’s, an honorific of multigenerational inspiration
• “A Pirate Looks At Forty” reflects on the loves and losses of an aging sailor, “an over-forty victim of fate, arriving too late” in world history for the life he desires to lead
• “Come Monday” shares the singer’s pre-Labor Day pining for his darling as he nears the end of a long summer tour
• “Pencil Thin Mustache” reminisces about the singer’s 1950s childhood, when he was “buck-toothed and skinny” and looking up to the star and starlets of the big screen

These empathetic songs were buttressed by humorous tunes, such as his beer-sodden proposal to a possible prostitute in the bar, “Why don’t we get drunk (and screw)?” or his 1979 calypso homage, “Volcano,” where the narrator wonders where he’ll go when the volcano blows, pleading to the gods not to end up on Three-Mile Island or anywhere near Iran’s newly empowered Ayatollah.

The album concluded, and I knew I needed more I dove into his oeuvre, scouring my local branch of Coconuts for tapes and CDs of his back catalog. I wanted to hear more stories of misfits living in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean islands, and the eastern shores of Central and South America.

His songs brought my imagination to a foreign land, and his values — fun, love, and lust, reflected on with sensitivity and humor — connected with my teenage brain in ways that other songwriters did not, and it was “the difference between lightning and a harmless lightning bug.“

We are the people they couldn’t figure out.
We are the people our parents warned us about.

– Jimmy Buffett, “We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About”

I spent the end of every summer in the second half of the 1990s celebrating the music of Jimmy Buffett with my fellow New-England-based Parrot Heads at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts, singing the songs that, by then, I truly knew by heart.

In those years, Jimmy and his Coral Reefer Band ended their summer tour at Great Woods, after which Jimmy would head down to Martha’s Vineyard for a few days before jumping in his plane and flying back south for the winter. We benefitted from the band’s celebration of the end of the tour. The band was always on fire — Fingers Taylor belting out on his harmonica, Mr. Utley pounding on the ivories, Robert showing us white folks what a pan drum sounds like in the hands of a bonafide master, and (over Jimmy’s career) nearly 70 other musicians, each of whom knew how to bring it.

My brother invited me and two of my friends to our first Buffett concert, where he met up with his college roommate and brought together friends from his high school. Several years younger than the rest of the crew, my friends and I wandered the parking lot, where we discovered a community of over ten thousand fun-loving, mostly middle-aged folks, each as welcoming as could be.

By the time I stopped going to Buffett shows in the early 2000s, they had become a massive affair. I’d have anywhere between three and ten friends with me, my oldest brother would have another dozen, and our middle brother would bring four or five. Our parents were there, as were our aunt and uncle and their three boys and their friends. Neighbors we’d known forever came with us as well. By the time all was said and done, we were throwing one of the largest parties in the parking lot, and just as I’d learned, we were as welcoming to strangers as could be.

Truly, some of my best family memories are set outside of a Jimmy Buffett concert.

All of the faces and all of the places
Wonderin’ where they all disappeared

– Jimmy Buffett, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”

Jimmy’s songs are pickled with nostalgia, so it makes sense for me to think back on those concerts with a mixture of fondness and sadness.

I can see the smiling faces of people I haven’t spoken to or laughed with for decades: Carolyn, Britte, Shea, Justin, Josh, Bill, Chris, Allen, Marty, and so many others. I follow some of their lives on Facebook, liking their posts and feeling proud of their children’s accomplishments, but some aren’t on social media, and so I’ve lost touch with them completely — people who were, in every sense of the phrase, my best friends.

I can also see my mother before Parkinson’s destroyed her ability to walk and talk and laugh with her whole body. I can see her singing along to the lyrics as she shimmies her butt, holding a mixed drink in a red cup, mixed for her by the Vin Man, one of her adopted children from the neighborhood and a trained mixologist. I can see my dad holding her hand as they dance, surrounded by their three boys and all of their friends, flirting with each other and as happy as can be.

I stopped attending Buffett shows when I moved to Vermont. Jimmy didn’t make it up to the mountains and Great Woods was too far away to drive. Plus, my college friends (all of whom were five to seven years younger than me) did not enjoy the “Gulf & Western” stylings of a baby boomer. As millennials to my Gen X, they found his lyrics and his music too corny for their Radiohead-tuned ears.

I didn’t let that stop me though. I played his songs at high volume in my dorm. I wore Hawaiian shirts when the mood struck me. And I proudly declared myself a Parrot Head (as well as a Dead Head and Phish Head — of course, the latter two fit more comfortably into the lifestyle of my new, marijuana-hazed college dorms).

The young ‘uns could chuckle all they wanted. I knew where I came from. Jimmy had given me memories of “good times that brought so much pleasure” and the cynicism of the millennials wouldn’t take them from me.

He died about a month ago,
while winter filled the air.
And though I cried, I was so proud
to love a man so rare.
He’s somewhere on the ocean now,
a place he ought to be.
With one hand on the starboard rail,
he’s waving back at me.

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Captain and the Kid”

Jimmy’s family announced his death this morning. They said he died surrounded by his family, friends, music, and dogs.

So thank you, Jimmy. You helped shape me into who I am. You gave me, my friends, and my family some of the best memories of our lives together. My heart is full, my eyes are crying, and I am so happy to have known you as the poet and artist you were.

Thank you, sir.