‘Margaritaville’ singer Jimmy Buffett dies at 76
NEW YORK — Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who popularized seaside bum comfortable rock with the escapist Caribbean-flavored track “Margaritaville” and turned that celebration of loafing into an empire of eating places, resorts and frozen concoctions, has died. He was 76.
“Jimmy handed away peacefully on the evening of September 1st surrounded by his household, pals, music and canine,” an announcement posted to Buffett’s official web site and social media pages stated late Friday. “He lived his life like a track until the final breath and can be missed past measure by so many.”
The assertion didn’t say the place Buffett died or give a reason behind demise. Sickness had pressured him to reschedule concert events in Could and Buffett acknowledged in social media posts that he had been hospitalized, however supplied no specifics.
“Margaritaville,” launched on Feb. 14, 1977, shortly took on a lifetime of its personal, changing into a mind-set for these “wastin’ away,” an excuse for a lifetime of low-key enjoyable and escapism for these “rising older, however not up.”
The track is the unhurried portrait of a idler on his entrance porch, watching vacationers sunbathe whereas a pot of shrimp is starting to boil. The singer has a brand new tattoo, a probable hangover and regrets over a misplaced love. Someplace there’s a misplaced salt shaker.
“What looks as if a easy ditty about getting blotto and mending a damaged coronary heart seems to be a profound meditation on the customarily painful inertia of seaside dwelling,” Spin journal wrote in 2021. “The vacationers come and go, one group indistinguishable from the opposite. Waves crest and break whether or not anyone is there to witness it or not. Every thing meaning something has already occurred and also you’re not even certain when.”
The track — from the album “Adjustments in Latitudes, Adjustments in Attitudes” — spent 22 weeks on the Billboard Sizzling 100 chart and peaked at No. 8. The track was inducted into the Grammy Corridor of Fame in 2016 for its cultural and historic significance, grew to become a karaoke commonplace and helped model Key West, Florida, as a definite sound of music and a vacation spot recognized the world over.
“There was no such place as Margaritaville,” Buffett instructed the Arizona Republic in 2021. “It was a made-up place in my thoughts, mainly made up about my experiences in Key West and having to depart Key West and go on the street to work after which come again and spend time by the seaside.”
The track quickly impressed eating places and resorts, turning Buffett’s alleged want for the simplicity of island life right into a multimillion model. He landed at No. 13 in Forbes’ America’s Richest Celebrities in 2016 with a internet value of $550 million.
Music critics had been by no means very type to Buffett or his catalog, together with the sandy beach-side snack bar songs like “Fins,” “Come Monday” and “Cheeseburgers in Paradise.” However his legions of followers, referred to as “Parrotheads,” repeatedly turned up for his concert events carrying toy parrots, cheeseburgers, sharks and flamingos on their heads, leis round their necks and loud Hawaiian shirts.
“It’s pure escapism is all it’s,” he instructed the Republic. “I’m not the primary one to do it, nor shall I in all probability be the final. However I believe it’s actually part of the human situation that you just’ve acquired to have some enjoyable. You’ve acquired to get away from no matter you do to make a residing or different elements of life that stress you out. I attempt to make it at the very least 50/50 enjoyable to work and thus far it’s labored out.”
His particular Gulf Coast mixture of nation, pop, people and rock added devices and tonalities extra generally discovered within the Caribbean, like metal drums. It was a stew of steelpans, trombones and pedal metal guitar. Buffett’s unbelievable ear for hooks and lightweight grooves had been usually overshadowed by his lyrics about fish tacos and sunsets.
Rolling Stone, in a evaluation of Buffett’s 2020 album “Life on the Flip Facet,” gave grudging props. “He continues mapping out his surfy, sandy nook of pop music utopia with the coolness, pleasant heat of a multi-millionaire you wouldn’t thoughts sharing a tropically-themed 3 p.m. IPA with, particularly if his gold card was on the bar when the final spherical got here.”
The singer made his first-ever cease in Bangor in 2016, with devoted Parrotheads gathering to tailgate earlier than the live performance. The 2016 live performance was a sold-out affair, with Buffett followers new and previous gathering to partake within the pre-concert revelry.
He made one other look in Bangor in 2022, the place a variety of individuals had been seeing the singer for the fiftieth, a centesimal and even two hundredth time in his years of touring.
Buffett’s evolving model started in 1985 with the opening of a string of Margaritaville-themed shops and eating places in Key West, adopted in 1987 with the primary Margaritaville Café close by. Over the course of the subsequent twenty years, a number of extra of every opened all through Florida, New Orleans and California.
The model has since expanded to dozens of classes, together with resorts, attire and footwear for women and men, a radio station, a beer model, ice tea, tequila and rum, residence décor, meals objects like salad dressing, Margaritaville Crunchy Pimento Cheese & Shrimp Bites and Margaritaville Cantina Model Medium Chunky Salsa, the Margaritaville at Sea cruise line and eating places, together with Margaritaville Restaurant, JWB Prime Steak and Seafood, 5 o’Clock Someplace Bar & Grill and LandShark Bar & Grill.
There additionally was a Broadway-bound jukebox musical, “Escape to Margaritaville,” a romantic comedy wherein a singer-bartender referred to as Sully falls for the way more career-minded Rachel, who’s vacationing with pals and hanging out at Margaritaville, the lodge bar the place Sully works.
James William Buffett was born on Christmas day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and raised within the port city of Cellular, Alabama. He graduated from the College of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and went from busking the streets of New Orleans to taking part in six nights every week at Bourbon Road golf equipment.
He launched his first document, “Down To Earth,” in 1970 and issued seven extra on an everyday yearly clip, along with his 1974 track “Come Monday” from his fourth studio album “Dwelling and Dying in ¾ Time,” peaking at No. 30. Then got here “Margaritaville.”
He carried out on greater than 50 studio and reside albums, usually accompanied by his Coral Reefer Band, and was consistently on tour. He earned two Grammy Award nominations, two Academy of Nation Music Awards and a Nation Music Affiliation Award.
Buffett was really in Austin, Texas, when the inspiration struck for “Margaritaville.” He and a buddy had stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant earlier than she dropped him on the airport for a flight residence to Key West, so that they acquired to consuming margaritas.
“And I sort of got here up with that concept of this is rather like Margarita-ville,” Buffett instructed the Republic. “She sort of laughed at that and put me on the aircraft. And I began engaged on it.”
He wrote some on the aircraft and completed it whereas driving down the Keys. “There was a wreck on the bridge,” he stated. “And we acquired stopped for about an hour so I completed the track on the Seven Mile Bridge, which I believed was apropos.”
Buffett additionally was the creator of quite a few books together with “The place Is Joe Service provider?” and “A Pirate Appears At Fifty” and added films to his resume as co-producer and co-star of an adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s novel “Hoot.”
Buffett is survived by his spouse, Jane; daughters, Savannah and Sarah; and son, Cameron.
Story by Mark Kennedy, Related Press. AP Leisure Author Andrew Dalton contributed from Los Angeles. BDN author Leela Stockley contributed to this report.
