Jimmy Buffett

Jimmy Buffett has died at the age of 76.

I don’t really know Buffett’s music at all, as I think I can identify maybe a half dozen of his songs total — let’s see here, Margaritaville, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Come Monday, Fins . . . I guess I’m running on empty after just four.

I will say that Margaritaville is a song for which I have always had tremendous affection, and Come Monday is a sweet little love song, but I have to confess that Buffett’s cult status was always mystifying to me.

For one thing, although he toured constantly for decades and apparently had a huge Grateful Dead-style fan base — dubbed Parrotheads in the 1980s by former Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmidt — I’ve as far as I know never met anyone who has been to a Jimmy Buffett concert, nor can I recall ever being in the vicinity of one, which seems odd given the relevant demographics.

But apparently a lot of people really loved his music a lot, which is cool.

A few random facts about Jimmy Buffett:

*Ironically, given his dissolute wastrel persona, he became an enormously successful businessman, with a net worth estimated to be in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. He made hundreds of millions from a combination of touring constantly, his music catalog, and canny investments of various kinds, including a chain of restaurants named after his most famous song. I’ve never seen one of those either, but I guess everything in this post is a reflection of the fact that I’ve spent maybe ten days in Florida and/or the Gulf Coast in my entire life, which, given current events, is a not a number I’m looking to expand any time soon.

*He graduated with a degree in history from Southern Mississippi in 1969.

*He invested in Berkshire Hathaway way back in the day, but was not related to Warren Buffett.

*He was born on Christmas Day. How many famous people have been born on Christmas? I can name one other off the top of my head: Rickey Henderson. I’m sure there’s a wikipedia page about this.

Given that his music was dubbed “Gulf and Western” — I wonder if anybody under 40 gets that allusion? — I assume Erik may have something to say about all this, as well as Elizabeth.

But what the heck, let’s listen to Margaritaville: