Jimmy Buffett

A friend who used to clean up the parking lot at an arena told me something interesting about the experience when I asked him whose fans were the worst to clean up after: Sabbath? Slayer? The Dead? His smile faded, his gaze drifted, and the color drained from his face as he answered, “Parrotheads.” The tailgate parties outside all concerts, he said, left a mess of puke, beer cans, and broken glass, but no one trashed a parking lot like Jimmy Buffett fans, who seemed to have deliberately set out to create a nightmare landscape of upset Porta-Johns and dented nitrous tanks.

Are you are a flabby, middle-aged white person who likes to get shitfaced and jet ski at the lake with your cousins? If so, you should consider becoming a Parrothead. There are benefits. Covering the parking lot scene at a 2008 Buffett show, the pop music critic for the Detroit News said that Parrotheads are like Juggalos, “except with 401(k)s and way better rum.” The FBI recently classified Juggalos as a gang, but Parrotheads pass as honest citizens because they are all related to law enforcement.

Tailgate party at 2008 Jimmy Buffett show in Clarkston, Michigan

Buffett is an unremarkable songwriter with a knack for marketing. On his third album, 1973’s A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, the singer and guitarist found a marketable persona as an ordinary jerk from Shit County, Alabama who likes to get tanked on the beach. The album goes like this: He asks the ladies, “Why don’t we get drunk and screw?” He takes a girl to a drive-in theater in his pickup truck, gets her drunk on gin and fucks her, then leaves her “all alone and cryin’.” He and his buddies shoplift peanut butter and sardines. It’s a scumbag’s life, but to Buffett, it’s all a big hoot. 1977’s “Margaritaville” launched his country-with-steel drums shtick into the top ten, and by the 1980s he was filling stadiums with herds of shithouse drunks in Hawaiian shirts.

“Margaritaville”

Over the last four decades, Buffett’s persona, based on the fantasy of a never-ending vacation on a tropical beach with an open bar, has developed into a saleable lifestyle. That shitty song that plays when the Dolphins score a touchdown and those novels he wrote are just chump change to Jimmy. He owns a chain of Margaritaville Restaurants, whose six franchises in the Caribbean are a great gift to the people of the West Indies. There is a Margaritaville Beach Hotel in Pensacola Beach, Florida, and a brand new Margaritaville Casino on the Vegas Strip. They all serve Buffett’s own brand of beer, LandShark Lager. His other restaurant chain, Cheeseburger in Paradise Bar & Grill, has locations in 16 states.

Cheeseburger in Paradise Bar & Grill ad

Dick Buckley, Jr., son of the great comic Lord Buckley, clobbered Buffett with an $11-million suit in 1983, alleging that Buffett’s song “God’s Own Drunk” was ripped off from Lord Buckley’s routine of the same name. Buckley alleged this because it was, in fact, true—the song is completely plagiarized. Buffett answered the subsequent injunction that prevented him from singing the song with a new number addressed to Dick Buckley and his counsel called “The Lawyer and the Asshole.” The final couplet: “I just bet your daddy used to beat you as a kid / If I find you in LA, I’ll repeat just what he did.”

“Cheeseburger in Paradise”