Although I have lived in West Palm Beach, and I once saw Jimmy Buffett riding his bike near the ocean on Palm Beach Island, I claim absolutely zero personal insights into the philosophy and lifestyle of Parrotheads.
However, I saw a tweet by Ross Douthat pointing readers to an excellent New York Times profile of Buffett linked to the 2018 success of the jukebox Broadway musical celebrating his life. The headline: “Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle.” In a way, this feature by Taffy Brodesser-Akner can be read — I think this is what Douthat had in mind — as a kind of meditation on the long, warm Buffett obituaries that are running wherever Baby Boomers get their news.
At first glance, there is next to zero religious content in this feature. Then I took off my journalism-commentary glasses and read this feature through the eyes of the Denver Seminary professor that I was, briefly, in the early 1990s. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.
Now, read this large chunk of the Times feature and start looking for hints at the role that Buffett played in the lives of his, well, disciples.
One day he realized that even if you were the supply, you could also be the supply chain. “It’s up to you to figure out how to take advantage or to manage whatever you’re going to do,” he said. “Margaritaville” was a hit in 1977. But more important, on that day, Margaritaville® was born.
He established Mailboat Records, his record label, in 1999. He went from making $2.20 per album to making $6 an album, he told me. He built his own tour buses, because it costs five times more to rent equipment than to own it yourself. He then rented out that equipment to other acts. And he took charge of his merchandise. He didn’t do it because he was greedy. He did it because he could do it better than the people who were ripping him off with concert T-shirts that spelled his name as Buffet.
He sold his fans quality, spell-checked T-shirts. He played clubs all over the country, but it was the crowds in landlocked areas that seemed to love him most. In Pittsburgh, he and his Coral Reefer band mates noticed that fans had started wearing Hawaiian shirts, just like they did, to the shows. One night, in Cincinnati, his bass player Timothy B. Schmit (also of the Eagles) likened them to Deadheads, the way Grateful Dead fans would follow that band. And so they were christened Parrotheads, just as a joke, but then fans began to wear feathers and beak masks to shows. “In their minds they wanted to go to the ocean,” he said. He understood he was bringing the ocean to them. He was no longer just a singer. Now he was a guru.
So how could he serve his acolytes better?
Please do not see the following observation as any kind of attack on Buffett and his fans. I am trying to spotlight the Big Idea that runs through this entire Times piece.
The basic idea is that the singer-songwriter was a kind of guru-priest who was looking at the humdrum lives being lived by millions of Americans. He saw this and, looking out from the center microphone on stage during his never-ending tours, he had compassion on them.
After all, he had seen this relationship before. When fans sang along in the crowd, it created, as noted in the Times feature, a “unified hum, reminding Mr. Buffett of the recitation of prayers in church during his altar boy days.”
It the goal was to end up in the sunshine on the beach, maybe even for eternity, why not start now? And why shouldn’t he provide some of the sacred goods and services that would help people find their own oceans, even if they were hopelessly locked inland by the ties that bind?
What was Buffett doing? I was reminded of some media theory I learned long ago in graduate school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
I wrote this into an essay — “The Liturgy of Mass Media” — that wove together some themes from my old “Exegete the Culture” class. I think readers will see the connection to the Times profile of Buffett:
For millions of parents, and thus for their children, the use of media has become the liturgy of their lives. Entertainment and news media provide a kind of never-ending backdrop of sight and sound that influences how they spend their time and money, and how they make their decisions.
Let's briefly look at one omnipresent form of media: advertising.
We live in a numbing age of visual sermons. … One of the few things on which most Americans agree is that we are not influenced by advertisements. Yet most folks walking in the mall can chant dozens of jingles, fill in the blanks in hundreds of ad slogans and their likes and dislikes have been shaped by years of images, by a virtual video catechism of what it means to be alive.
But few ads today make their pitch using lines of type and linear arguments. Instead, they show us images. Some are funny and some are stupid, but they are almost always colorful and gripping. Truth is, these images are the first step in a kind of sacramental system. Step 1: See this image, experience this feeling, feel this need. Step 2: Buy and consume this product. Step 3: Accept, by faith, that using or consuming this product will help you become like the people in the images.
The goal is to be able to say, "I am the kind of person who consumes this product." Whether they realize it or not, millions of people are making professions of faith at the shopping mall.
Malls are everywhere, in one form or another, even in the digital age.
The Times noted that Buffett spent more time on the road than in his various paradise homes and, well, read this observation about the location of his apartment in New York City:
Once, a long time ago, he left Key West because it had become too commercialized. Now he lives at the mall.
He likes being on Columbus Circle. Central Park is right there. But also, can he just say it? “I love the mall.” He eats at Bar Masa and gets coffee at Bouchon. He likes to visit the Cole Haan, hoping that one day he’ll find the right boots for a New York winter. He stops in at Bose to see what kind of new headphones they might have. But also, his whole adult life he’s been touring, and in practically every city, there’s a mall. When you don’t have a home base, the sameness of a shopping center can be a comfort.
It’s easier, after all, to get to the mall than to the real beach.
This leads to one final chunk of the Times feature, stressing the fact that the singer’s songs often diagnosed some of the most painful “spiritual” puzzles of our age.
The bottom line: He wasn’t singing, most of the time, about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He was describing the sobering compromises of real life.
How many clergy people are willing to be this honest?
Mr. Buffett may no longer be Jimmy Buffett, but at one time he was. Most of the songs he’s famous for aren’t about love. They’re seemingly simple songs about how we spend our lives.
But listen closer. “A Pirate Looks at Forty” is about a middle-age crisis wherein a man’s skills become obsolete before he’s ready to retire. “I have been drunk now for over two weeks” seems like a party lyric but it’s not — it’s a crushing one. “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which he wrote after a precarious sailing trip, is about a cheeseburger, plain and simple, with a euphoric bridge that is just a list of condiments he loves. Where are our simple pleasures now, it asks without asking? Why has everything become so complicated? Why is life filled with so many things we don’t want and so few things we do?
But “It’s 5 o’Clock Somewhere” … man, that one’s the real heartbreaker. Take away the jaunty island beat and you’ll find a song about a man who is so miserable that he can’t bring himself to return to work from his lunch break. “I’m getting paid by the hour, and older by the minute,” it goes. “My boss just pushed me over the limit.” The guy hasn’t taken a vacation day in a year. He knows that there will be consequences tomorrow, but he doesn’t care. He can’t face it for another afternoon. Just keep pouring those Hurricanes.
Has any pop star identified this particular strain of existential crisis better than Mr. Buffett?
Read it all, and readers who are active in some form of organized religion might want to send it to the person who stands at the center microphone in their local sanctuary.
Just saying.
FIRST IMAGE: The essential sacraments on a Margaritaville At Sea cruise.