Category: Interviews

The New York Times has an article and interview with Buffett: “Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle”

Mr. Buffett hasn’t stopped touring in his nearly half-century as a performer, but it had been a long time since he did a last-minute set at a bar. He had to get on a stage with a pickup band like in the old days and really get back into the original iteration of Jimmy Buffett.

That night, he went to the original Margaritaville bar in Key West, which he opened in the mid-1980s, unannounced, and played a three-and-a-half-hour set. He told stories between songs. He kept the audience active. It felt good to be back there, remembering who he once was.

Because that, in a coconut shell, was the problem. Jimmy Buffett is not really Jimmy Buffett anymore. He hasn’t been for a while. Jimmy Buffett — the nibbling on sponge cake, watching the sun bake, getting drunk and screwing, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere Jimmy Buffett — has been replaced with a well-preserved businessman who is leveraging the Jimmy Buffett of yore in order to keep the Jimmy Buffett of now in the manner to which the old Jimmy Buffett never dreamed he could become accustomed. And therein lies the Margaritaville® Mesquite BBQ Rub: The more successful you become at selling the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle, the less you are seen as believably living the Jimmy Buffett lifestyle.

Mr. Buffett and I both saw “Escape to Margaritaville” in New Orleans on Oct. 28, which is a day that fans have long since designated as Parrothead Day, though Mr. Buffett doesn’t know why. In the audience, fans wore feathers on their heads. When they sang along, it was in a unified hum, reminding Mr. Buffett of the recitation of prayers in church during his altar boy days.

After the show, there had been a big party where Mr. Buffett D.J.’ed alongside the movie producer Frank Marshall, who is his friend and one of the show’s creators. He had a tequila on the rocks and “a lot of water.” He’s 71, a married father of three adult children. He only occasionally drinks margaritas these days. “I don’t do sugar anymore,” he said. “No sugar and no carbs. Except on Sunday.” He doesn’t smoke pot anymore, either. Now he vapes oils, only sometimes after work.

A FEW WEEKS before the Broadway debut of “Escape to Margaritaville,” Mr. Buffett had breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental, next to his apartment at the Time Warner Center, where he stays when he’s in town. Once, a long time ago, he left Key West because it had become too commercialized. Now he lives at the mall.

Read the full article and interview at NYTimes.com

An article in June/July issue of Garden & Gun magazine lists Buffett’s favorite Gulf Coast Bars: “Why We Love the Gulf – Jimmy Buffett Drinks Here” (by Elizabeth Hutchison)

The son of a son of a Mississippi sailor, Jimmy Buffett got his start bouncing around Biloxi dive bars and New Orleans drinking dens before finding fame in Key West. “Culturally and historically, the Gulf is a unique stretch of water and land,” he says. “It always feels like home.” We asked the sun-
tanned troubadour to revisit his roots via his favorite coastal watering holes. “A place where you can have a cold beer and look out at the water,” he advises, “is the essence of throttling down.”

The list includes:
1) Bluegill – Spanish Fort, Alabama
2) Island Hotel – Cedar Key, Florida
3) Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar – New Orleans, Louisiana
4) LuLu’s at Homeport Marina – Gulf Shores, Alabama
5) Scranton’s – Pascagoula, Mississippi
6) Trapani’s Eatery – Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

From the San Diego Union Tribune: “Talking surf (and Tourmaline) with Jimmy Buffett”

Jimmy Buffett is a stand-up guy. Half the time, anyway. The massively popular singer-songwriter and Parrothead-in-chief has been in and out of San Diego of late, helping shepherd the La Jolla Playhouse world premiere of “Escape to Margaritaville,” a Broadway-bound musical built around his songs.

Now, if you’re a longtime surfer (as the 70-year-old Buffett is) who’s looking to try riding waves on a stand-up board (as Buffett was a decade ago), you might think about getting a board designed by the world-class waterman Laird Hamilton, who essentially launched the modern SUP phenomenon.

If you’re the actual Jimmy Buffett, you go ahead and buy the Laird board — and then have Hamilton himself teach you how to use it.

That was among the things I learned over the course of a long phone interview with Buffett, which was mostly devoted to “Margaritaville” but also detoured (happily) into a chat about his surfing and SUP exploits.

Q: Are you a full-time SUP guy now, or do you still do both?

A: I still do, because I think they both complement each other. I’ve probably been doing (SUP surfing) for 10 years, because it was the new new thing, and I surf mainly in the summer up in Montauk on the East Coast. There was like a Laird Hamilton 12-footer, so I bought one and I had no clue what to do with it.

You go out in the water and you watch the kids do it. And the first thing they told me was, get your balance on a lake and then go out. Long story short, I went out to a wedding in Malibu and ran into Laird, and so Laird actually taught me how to ride the board. And then I was hooked.

We just got back from Tavarua, which was amazing. I’m gonna have to scratch that off my bucket list. So I did regular surfing one day, and stand-up the other. We were doing two sessions a day. I think stand-up really helps your regular surfing, because you’re up (on your feet) so much — that’s the thing about it. I think your balance and your ability to be on the board and be comfortable on a regular board is accentuated by the amount of time you spend standing up on a stand-up board.

The thing of it is now, too, is that they have such great boards, Jim, that they didn’t have in the beginning. I’m riding a Naish, a 9-footer, but it’s 32 inches on the beam. And it’s a quad (fin). So you really can get into things so much faster. It’s not like before, where it was like having a tugboat on a leash.

I’ll tell you what, it keeps you in shape. But when we got to Tavarua down there, that was like a dream come true. I really caught a couple of great days out at Namotu. I know my limits now, but every now and then you’ve got that kid in you who wants to go. So it was amazing down there to get in overhead waves that just went and went and went. As fast as could be.

After a week of it, I went down to Australia to do some shows, and kept surfing down there, and then back to Hawaii. But I know that after that experience, to spend that much time on ’em, I can do bigger waves more comfortably, and feel comfortable on ’em. But I still get on my belly and paddle. I do both — it’s great!

Stars and Stripes talked with Buffett backstage after a meet-and-greet session with Yokosuka families.

On why he came to play the free shows: We’ve been doing shows around the world for quite a while and it was kind of a unique situation. My friend Caroline Kennedy, when she became [United States ambassador to Japan], she’s kind of a force of nature, so she got out here and she said, “You need to come while I’m here and do this.” And I’d never been to Japan.

Also, I have a lot of great friends in the Navy. You join the Navy and see the world, you can join this band and see the world — and it’s a great thrill to let people see a show that normally wouldn’t be able to get to one.

On seeing Japan: This sparked my interest to come back. I have a little place in Hawaii, and I’ll be in Australia in March. I’d like to come snowboarding [in Japan] and I’d like to see the countryside. There were nice waves in Okinawa … I might go back there. It would be certainly worth coming back.

In the works: I have a travel book — it started about two to three years ago when I went to China. I’m working on that, and hopefully I’ll try to finish that up this year. And then we have the play, the “Margaritaville” musical, which has been an ongoing thing we’ve been working on for six years. It’s actually opening in La Jolla [Calif.] in April. We’ll do it there and then take it on the road, and in about a year we’ll go to Broadway with it. But it’s fun because it’s little more diverse. I should go back and do an album soon — when it comes to me I’ll go. It’s been fun for me to do some other things.