Upon final reflection, Jimmy Buffett was my sun.
For 45 years, his tropically themed music delivered to me a sunshine state of mind.
My mental migration to Margaritaville is rooted to 1978 when a catchy new song, “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” crackled to life via our town’s AM radio station, WTCJ. The chorus was infectious. I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French-fried potato, big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer …
The following day at our river town’s local bait shop / record store, Dad bought a weekend’s supply of nightcrawlers, redworms, and crickets and my first JB album, Son of a Son of a Sailor, which harbored the cheeseburger song.
Graphic provided
The album was waxed treasure. At first, instead of focusing on its entirety, I hovered the turntable stylus over Side A’s first four tracks, gently setting the needle onto the fifth song. Careful to not scratch any grooves, I repeated this process until all ingredients of the paradisical “huge hunk of meat” became memorized. Later, in bed, I let the whole album unfold in the dark, flipping Side A over for Side B, then Side B over for Side A.
The album filled my impressionable young mind with high seas hijinks, a mango man, a jungle, daiquiris and faraway places like Trinidad, Marseilles, Porto Bello, Cane Garden Bay, St. Thomas, and Haiti. Sunny JB became this failed Catholic altar boy’s travel agent of the mind. The record’s rotation was as essential to me as our planet’s spin.
I was hooked on the happiness and pure escapism that only a JB album could deliver. I returned to town with lawn mowing money to attain his earlier albums that further tantalized me with distant, dreamy locales like Key West, Havana, and yes, a recently charted mental map speck called Margaritaville. I looked forward to each new release. Anxiously awaited new landfalls. My growth was not measured by pencil marks on a kitchen door frame but by a progression of JB albums thumbtacked to my bedroom paneling.
As I wrote in a glowing JB-themed column years ago, “His best songs are lyrical geography lessons enticing us to hold up our cardboard signs along life’s highway: Equator or Bust . . . Open Buffett’s musical treasure chest to discover mermaids and manatees, parakeets and palm trees, banana republics and banyan trees, beach bums and hurricanes, pirates and papayas, iguanas and coconuts, shark fins, shrimpers and remittance men, tanned crusaders and flip-flops, Mayan moons and gold doubloons. His hundreds of songs are virtual reality postcards, invitations to the tropics, life songs from the lower latitudes.”
Last weekend, while word of his death widened, several people that I hadn’t heard from in years reached out and thanked me for introducing his music to them way back. Apparently, I was a pretty good JB recruiter.
My favorite recruits are my kids, Austin and Delaney. Both write way better than I do, and both beat me to the finish line when it came to capturing their JB farewells on the page.
“I was born into Buffett, his music being perhaps the first I ever heard,” wrote Austin for Under The Radar magazine. “His songs were an integral part of my early upbringing, and what hazy, fragmented recollections I still carry of my parents’ marriage are scored by Buffett – the easygoing melancholia of ‘Come Monday’ providing the soundtrack to car rides through town, Mom and Dad up front, me in the back, watching the swaying fields of corn and soy pass by my window … the wistful yearning of ‘Island’ haunting my childhood bedroom at night, its shimmering harmonica catching me in that delirious eventide between dreaming and waking.”
Wrote Delaney (a JB song is her namesake), “(At 13) we were on a long road trip with the dark mountains of West Virginia glittering with May fireflies when our mother told us that she first knew that she loved our father while hearing ‘Coast of Marseilles’ at a Buffett show. She played us the song, and I can distinctly remember feeling so spellbound by that slow-moving lament that despite the white interstate lines rolling on around us, I could have easily been adrift at sea … Their marriage didn’t last, but together they had me and my brother, and because of that our family carried on with a mutual reverence for Buffett in tow. Maybe it anchored us.”
In 1986, my first story about JB earned an F in college journalism class. It was a fledgling’s attempt at a humor column about buying a beer for a fellow JB fan in a bar when it should’ve been a story chronicling the minutes of a local sewer board meeting. A few weeks later that same story was published in The Coconut Telegraph, JB’s Key West-based newsletter.
Although not appreciated by his college professor, Scott’s first story about Jimmy Buffett made the front page of The Coconut Telegraph in 1986. (Photo provided by Scott Saalman)
The headline: ARE YOU A PARROT HEAD?
By Parrot Head Scott Saalman.
My first real byline!
The columnist net was cast.
Here I am, 37 years later, writing yet another glowing piece about JB, albeit beneath darkened skies.
Scott is Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit grateful that he can still listen to Jimmy Buffett’s records. (Photo provided)
Still, our Sun deities live on | be alight, Sol | be ablaze, Helios | burn on, Buffett | play on, Son of a Son of a Sailor | play on!
As sure as JB’s records still spin, I’ll see him in my ears … for this, I’m Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit grateful.
Contact Scott at scottsaalman@gmail.com.