Jimmy Buffett - Buffet Hotel

Jimmy Buffett
Buffet Hotel
Mailboat Records
www.margaritaville.com


With apologies to Forrest Gump, Jimmy Buffett is like the anti-box of chocolates – you know exactly what you’re going to get. With every CD bought and every live show attended, the paying customer is guaranteed a sun-drenched, salt-rimmed good time. There are other places you can go if you want to be challenged or astounded, but sometimes you just want that familiar, comfortable cheeseburger. This year’s cheeseburger turns out to be pretty tasty. Bufett Hotel, Jimmy’s 42nd release, is inspired by a trip to Mali and the title comes from a hotel in Timbuktu where many Mali musicians got their start. The twelve tracks here are co-produced by longtime bandmates Michael Utley and Mac McAnally and guests include slide guitarist extraordinaire Sonny Landreth, Cedric Burnside and Will Kimbrough, who co-wrote four of the tracks and plays guitar, harmonica, banjo and mandolin.

In fact, full disclosure compels me to divulge that Will Kimbrough and Tommy Womack’s band DADDY is one of my personal favorites and they grab the opening track here. “Nobody from Nowhere” is a song that doesn’t romanticize rural, small town life so much as it simply accepts it for what it is, where “waiting for a car to drive by, just so you can wave hello” is the highlight of your day, and that’s okay.

Drummer Roger Guth contributes “Big Top,” a tune that gently acknowledges that the circus that is the travelling Parrothead roadshow is a bit out of their control (“I’m an accessory in front of the pack.”) and Kimbrough chimes in again on “Surfing in a Hurricane,” which takes the opportunity to slap in a few surf-guitar licks for good measure. Otherwise, the rest of the record is a pretty standard selection of familiar ballads, a couple of uptempo tunes that are obviously slated for live shows, a decent cover of Jesse Winchester’s “Rhumba Man,” Bruce Cockburn’s wistful “Life Short Call Now” and “A Lot to Drink About,” a pretty clever, topical “high-speed drinking song.”
As Buffett says in the extensive liner notes (printed on recycled paper), “when you are lucky enough to get to a point in your life where you can basically do what you want, the trick is to be able to enjoy it.” This is not the Buffett of 1973, who indulged in penny-ante shoplifting (“Peanut Butter Conspiracy” from A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean), it’s been twenty years since this pirate looked at forty, and Buffet Hotel won’t garner him any new fans (not that he needs any), but it’s a pleasant enough listen. Buffett’s gift is making his enjoyment of life infectious, and on Buffet Hotel, he does just that.

Curtis Lynch
Playgrounds Magazine January 2010
www.playgroundsmag.com

The Ballad of Hurricane Jimmy

Familiar music floats through the open windows, beckoning the bustling tourists to step inside. The bar is comfortably dark and shabby, with a concrete floor and a few weary tables and rickety, mismatched chairs. The bar has taps that promise Michelob Light but dispense…well, who really knows? It’s cold, it’s cheap and the out-of-towners and the rowdy Rangers don’t care. The crowd, such that it is, is peppered with a few locals, some friends of the bartender and a couple of gift shop employees trying to sneak a drink on their break. A large black Lab stretches out beneath one table.

Backed into a corner of the former cotton warehouse sits a man with long black curly hair stuffed under a doo-rag, playing guitar and yelling out the windows to passers-by. His drum machine keeps the beat while a baseball game silently plays on the TV behind him. He’s halfway through “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when the crowd’s attention shifts. The guitar player looks over his shoulder as Braves outfielder Otis Nixon climbs the wall and makes a spectacular catch. The singer turns back around, flashes a crooked smile and finishes the song, never missing a lick.

Such is the life of a musician in a bar on River St. Such is the life of Hurricane Jimmy.

Scrambling for gigs, Jimmy plays several sets a week downtown for the tourists, picks up a few shows on Tybee Island in the summer and an occasional trip down to St. Simon’s Island when he’s lucky. He knows that the rent’s due, and he knows what fills the tip jar, so “Come Monday” and “Brown Eyed Girl” are trotted out every set. To feed his pirate persona, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (And Screw)” and “The Asshole Song” show up so salesmen from Missouri can take a story back to the home office.

Over several years, a half-dozen original songs emerge, mostly derivative of a certain island-hopping, margarita swilling singer, but the songs are often clever (“I’ll be the captain, you’ll be the crew/we’ll get a Boston Whaler with an Evinrude”), sometimes self-serving (the pass the hat tune “Gimme Some Money”) and even includes a blatant attempt to get radio airplay by shilling a local station in the chorus. By and large though, the sets are filled with good-time covers so the tourists can drunkenly sing along, because that’s what keeps the crowds buying beers, and that’s the name of that game.

That’s the life of a working musician. That’s the life of Hurricane Jimmy.

Jimmy is his own boss, and entertaining a crowd, having a good time and partying till dawn is his job description. Playing a gig at Teeple’s in Thunderbolt, running his PA off his van’s battery because the restaurant’s power was out, that’s all part of a day’s work. You don’t play, you don’t get the pay is his mission statement.

Here in the 21st century, the lovable, scruffy musician who plays for tequila shots, tips and the sheer fun of it is an endangered species. His habitat has been replaced with karaoke nights and digital satellite jukeboxes, and there is little hope for his survival.

But once, just once, I wish you could walk into a bar, grab a cold beer and have Hurricane Jimmy tune up his guitar and play you side two of “A-1-A” straight through.

That’s the life.