6. Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett

            Ah, the introduction of a personal idiosyncrasy into the list, or is it? By any numerical measure – concert grosses, records sold, longevity – Jimmy Buffett can hold his own in the rock pantheon. But is he too much fun to be taken this seriously? Nah, who says rock can’t be fun. And certainly, establishing a fantasy lifestyle in one’s mind is one of rock’s great gifts, and on that score Margaritaville easily makes the top ten. For it is the national anthem of Jimmy Buffett’s tropical paradise, inhabited solely by like-minded Parrotheads, where a moral crisis is deciding what SPF-level sunscreen to put on today. Of course, there’s more than that: there’s love and friendship, missing you and Bahama breezes. I own 14 Buffett records, 8 CD’s and one tape, not counting greatest hits collections. His magisterial 4-disc compilation, aptly titled Beaches, Bars, Boats and Ballads wasn’t enough, so I made my own 4-disc collection and descriptively titled the discs “Lilt,” “Sleepy Time,” “The Philosopher” and “Good Times,” capturing the moods that Buffett mines time and again.

            As suggested, all Buffett songs are somewhat similar, but Margaritaville deserves to be singled out not only for the pride of place it’s accorded by its author and his fans, but because it was my introduction to his music, sealed when I heard it played in a New York City record store. So many Buffett themes are encapsulated in those three minutes: the weather (watchin’ the sun bake), food (nibblin’ on sponge cake) and drink (booze in the blender), existentialism (searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt) and lurking behind everything, the love of a girl. And lest you fret that Jimmy presents an excuse for an indolent existence, the story comes full circle, from “some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,” to “but I know, it’s my own damn fault.” And the simple story is told with a calypso-inflected beat that reminds me of every happy hour I’ve ever spent on a Caribbean vacation. And that is happy, indeed.

 

Sidebar: Favorite artists

            At 23 records and discs, my Buffett collection exceeds that of any other artist, but it also raises the question, how do I deal with artists whose oeuvre is in my top ten but may not have a distinguishing single song that makes this list. The first artists I collected, and this is a good example, were the BeeGees, starting with BeeGees 1st, the first album I ever bought, and on through such nonessential output as Mr. Natural. I liked them first of all because, while they may have copied the Beatles, they weren’t the Beatles, and I could assert my individuality by favoring them over the Beatles. Their orchestrations were lush, their sound was appropriately melancholy, even angst-ridden (“To Love Somebody,” “Holiday”), Barry Gibb was gorgeous and their melodies were, too. I’m not a lyrics person (see TK, above), so the fact that their words were routinely among the most inane in rock history (“and the lights all went out in Massachusetts”) didn’t bother me. But there’s no masterwork, just a great sound, and a general level of consistency, until they went disco. Next came the Moody Blues – anything they put out, I bought, even when they split up and issued their own individual records. But, as with Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, other great exemplars of orchestral rock, a song here or there might be better than others, but it was the overall album that was hypnotic and made me a fan. The opposite may be true of the great singer-songwriters of the ‘70s, led by Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Elton John and Billy Joel, each of whom I supported to the tune of a half-dozen or more discs. The sheer quantity of good numbers makes it hard to single just one out for this list, although until I get to the end “Piano Man,” at least, is in the running. The point is, in assessing my musical tastes, one can’t just look at my list of 25 singles.

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