RIP Jimmy Buffett

We all had those thoughts but the honest truth is, they'd have found someone else and continued to put the paper out. One lesson I learned in my 35+ years in the field was, everyone is replaceable, labor is just a piece of meat and nobody in management gives a crap about you when you're gone.

 

I bet the “dealing with daily unadulterated crap” line resonated too.

 

I've been on something of a vacation from devices this weekend, but when I started driving home, I put on Radio Margaritaville and of course, Migration was the first song that came on.

I discovered Jimmy Buffett as a freshman in college in frigid upstate New York, and from there, found Jerry Jeff, Steve Goodman, Mac MacAnally, Robert Earl Keen, and Steve Earle. For a while, I lived near where Jimmy grew up, drinking and fishing and doing sports media until I grew up a bit and went back to school.

Turns out I grew older but not up, because my novelist's eye is stronger than a [law] schoolboy's heart, and so I'm still trying to make a living at writing, hoping I don't end up like the unpopular poet. Between bus rides, planes, and being distantly in love for while, there have been more good times than bad, and plenty I can and can't recall.

Over the past few years, Jerry Jeff and Jimmy have gone offstage for good and Robert Earl Keen has retired from touring, and I feel older than I thought possible. Entering the late summer of my life, I hope I can just go on having fun until the end the way he did.

It's a sad irony that Jimmy Buffett left us right before Labor Day Weekend, the unofficial end of summer.

 

All I know is, some it’s magic and some of it’s tragic, but he had a good life all the way.

 

If you watch this (or some of the others he filmed in this series), you can see the red blotchy skin on the side of Jimmy's face. This was from a couple of years ago.

 

The real message of Jimmy Buffett is not to be brave enough to quit your job and run away.

The real message of Jimmy Buffett is to be brave enough to work your ass off at the thing you love most.

Like he did.

 

Of all people, Homer Hickam of NASA/Rocket Boys fame, chimes in with a pretty good perspective.

Reflections of a World without Jimmy Buffett - A Pirate looks at 80 looking at a Pirate who once looked at 40

 

He was going to Paris this year, and in hindsight that feels like another move made knowing that his window was closing. Possibly the Antarctic cruise/concert last year in which he had to pull out. Now I’m wondering if it factored into his return to Merriweather Post Pavilion last year after 20ish years of not playing there.

 

That’s the truth. 27 years in the business. Never got a cake when I left any of my 7 stations for the next job… always leaving for a better role/higher pay. Never went “across the street” to a competitor.

Always got a box.

 

One of the things I really enjoyed about Buffett's music was that it was clear that he actually read books now and then.

 

A1? Yes.

 

Why, he read dozens of them. About heroes AND crooks.