Friday Night Videos

Jimmy Buffett died last week from a rare form of skin cancer. This news has hit me surprisingly hard. I'm not one who normally obsesses over the lives (or deaths) of celebrities. I liked Buffett's music--or a significant portion of it--although I wouldn't consider myself a Parrothead. My affinity for Buffett certainly preceeded my love of tiki by a couple of decades (although Buffett isn't tiki, strictly speaking). I'd always wanted to see him play live, and for Christmas in 2019 Lisa gifted me with tickets to his show in San Antonio--for March 2020. We all know what happened next. First, the show was rescheduled. Then it was cancelled outright. When his tour ran through Austin last year at the new Moody Center, tickets were twice the price and I was in no position to go. Opportunity lost forever. Still, many of his songs speak to me in a way that's hard to articulate, but one stands out: "We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About." With this one, there's no difficulty in articulating. As I grow older I increasingly identify with this song, and the recognition of the ever-widening gap between who I am and who my parents wanted me to be will never be reconciled. Were I able to travel back in time 45 years, I really don't think my parents would like me much at all, regardless of whether they knew my identity. We are just very, very different people, and I wasted many, many years in a futile quest to try and please them. Knowing what I know now, I would live my life much differently and make different decisions. And I'm fine with that, mainly because this silly song helped me recognize blind spots in my own life.

Plus, Jimmy gets bonus points for the Gardner McKay reference.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Howard Jones.

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Friday Night Videos

It's fashionable in tiki circles to hate on Jimmy Buffett, and I can sympathize. His "brand" has gotten way too commercial, and the few times I've visited a Margaritaville location, I found them to be crass and noisy and couldn't leave fast enough. To make matters worse, they present a bastardized interpretation of tiki that begins and ends with thatch and drunkeness. That said, I'm a fan of Jimmy Buffett. I don't count myself as a Parrothead, however, but am rather more of a Church of Buffett, Orthodox type. I find his early songwriting fascinating, before he started writing every album specifically for that group of fans who demand to hear "Margaritaville" on constant replay. Case in point: "Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season" which is a masterful vignette that is a deft exercise in evocative scene-setting that conveys character, emotion and environment through the use of spare, precise language. The detail puts me there, on that beach. I smell, see, hear and feel everything that's happening, even though much of the detail in the song is merely implied. Amazingly, nothing much happens in this song--it's an interstitial, taking place between the bender the night before, and the storm yet to come. That he could so effectively make something out of nothing is a testament to his songwriting skills of the era.

So yeah, I'm sick of winter already. Bring on summer!

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Huey Lewis and the News.

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Friday Night Videos

Folks, we're got a holiday weekend of sorts coming up. Yeah, the Fourth is on a Tuesday, which means a lot of us have to work Monday, but still, it's a short work week! Who better to get us in the proper frame of mind than Jimmy Buffett? I remember when "Who's the Blonde Stranger?" came out in 1984. It was during Jimmy's country phase, and it was a decent hit for him on the country charts at a time when chart success had started passing him by. I remember it was a heavy rotation favorite on KULM that summer, and I heard it so often I knew the lyrics by heart. He's always had a kind of special relationship with Texas, which is to be expected considering the fact he wrote "Margaritaville" in Austin. I like how he gets the distinction of different parts of Texas in the song, and really, in the 80s Galveston was kind of a hedonistic Gulf Riviera, still trying to find its identity in the aftermath of the casino closures two decades before. Jimmy looks like he's having a blast making the video, and you have to appreciate the fact that "Frank" is wearing an A&M jersey. It's a silly song, with an even sillier video, and never fails to make me smile.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... ELO.

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Friday Night Videos

Class is in session, which means, for all practical purposes, that summer is over. Here's Jimmy Buffett to help us say goodbye to the beach with style with "Bama Breeze." I know it came out after Hurricane Katrina, but after visiting Galveston last month, it's just as apropos for the devastation left by Ike.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Muppets.

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