Jimmy Buffett’s career outside of the greatest hits

Hello everyone! I have a different opinion for this week, so I hope you all can bear with me. I won’t be reviewing a Jimmy Buffett album this time as I usually do, but rather, I want to recap some of what’s happened in his life throughout the mid 80s to the late 90s. This was quite a prolific time for him outside of his music, and I think it’s worth discussing in itself.

The West Indian Manatee, or the sea cow, is a beautiful creature. They live most of their life without doing much beyond foraging sea grass and searching for warm water. They are peaceful giants. Sadly, they have been under threat due to climate change, pollution and collision with speedboats in Florida. It’s the fear of their extinction that brought Jimmy Buffett and Florida’s then-Governor Bob Graham together in 1981 to form the Save the Manatee Club. Made with the mission “to protect manatees and their aquatic habitat for today and for future generations,” the Club exists still to this day where you’ll find them helping manatees recover from injury and protecting the ecosystem they call home. If you ever get the chance, go to a natural spring in Florida during Winter. You’ll see them by the hundreds; it’s stunning. That wasn’t the last we saw of Buffett’s environmental activism, since he also helped lobby for the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 in 1987.

There was a 5-year gap between Buffett’s last album of the 80s and first one of the 90s, and in that period, he spent a lot of time writing books. He made two children’s books, “The Jolly Mon” and “Trouble Dolls” with his daughter, Savannah Jane Buffett, released in 1988 and 1991 respectively. However, he made a bigger impact with his “Tales from Margaritaville” in 1989, which was a collection of short stories. What stories are real and which are fictional? Who can really say (unless you read the legal jargon on the first page). He expanded upon that universe in 1992 with “Where is Joe Merchant,” which is a mystery adventure in which we are searching for the “presumably dead” rock star, Joe Merchant. His next book came out in 1998, that being “A Pirate Looks at 50.” A reference to his song of a similar title, this is a memoir in which he reflects on his 50th birthday and the life events that brought him where he was. Out of these, I have read the “Tales from Margaritaville” and “A Pirate Looks at 50,” and I really enjoyed these. Of course I’m biased, but it is just interesting to read his writing and get inside his head and try to understand it a little better. These wouldn’t be the last books he made, but that is a story for a later time.

Herman Wouk was an American author who lived from 1915 to 2019; he is described by the Library of Congress as the “American Tolstoy” for his historical epics based around World War II. 1965’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival” is not a historical novel, but a “satirical comedy,” about a man who gave up his fancy job in New York to run a hotel in the Caribbean. Everything that could go wrong does in fact go wrong, and I’m sure you can imagine how it goes. It wasn’t seen highly in its time; however, it found a niche audience in the people who had a wanderlust for the tropics. One such person was Jimmy Buffett. He approached Wouk in the 90s, and they adapted the novel into a musical, with Buffett responsible for the score. He described in his memoir that the development of the stage play was an “aeronautical circumnavigation of the Caribbean.” The musical itself had a short run in Miami before ending, but not before Buffett could adapt the songs into an album of the same name, which he released in 1998. Musicals aren’t my forte, but if I had to point out standout songs, “Island Fever” and “Hippolyte’s Habitat” would be them. “Island Fever’s” instrumentals and lyrics perfectly fit into the rest of Buffett’s discography with its escapism messaging. “Hippolyte’s Habitat” lyrically has much to do with the plot of the musical, but it truly shines in its instrumentals, which are striking and attention grabbing.

Those are the main things that Buffett was up to during this time, though there are a few other things happening. He did what most musicians do, and he released a Christmas album in 1996, with it being called “Christmas Island.” In addition to some of the standard songs people do, he had three originals. “A Sailor’s Christmas” is very much a more mellow Buffett song, “Ho Ho Ho & a Bottle of Rum” is much more of the energetic Buffett we know and “Merry Christmas Alabama” is a far more reflective song. I would recommend all of these since they’re not only good as Buffett songs, but as Christmas songs too. Another thing that is minor but would snowball into something greater is that in 1985 Buffett opened his first Margaritaville, in Key West of all places. I am sure you could imagine where that would go from there.

That about wraps up what I wanted to touch upon. I’m sorry if this wasn’t as interesting as my typical opinions, but in telling the story of Buffett’s life, knowing these sorts of facts is instrumental in understanding him. Thank you very much for reading and have a lovely rest of your day.