We will always have `Margaritaville’ thanks to Jimmy Buffet

Chapman Museum has a calendar loaded with events this fall

By Ken Tingley

There is no doubt there is a little Jimmy Buffet in all of us.

On those difficult days, we dream of a tropical island paradise dressed in shorts, sandals and a flowered shirt, sipping frozen drinks knowing it will soon be 5 o’clock somewhere.

When Buffet played his island music, we all wanted to be “parrotheads” for a couple hours, then head to “Margaritaville.” But make no mistake about it, Buffet did not waste his time there for long.

Beneath the “Let’s get drunk and screw” facade, was a romantic songwriter contemplating the girl who got away and later a best-selling author and saavy businessman who passed away Friday evening from skin cancer.

This story was told to me late one night in a trailer in Berea, Ky. some 45 years ago. My host was a local raising hogs and cultivating a little marijuana. We’d been drinking and he told the story about Buffet’s first show at the local university in the early 1970s.

Buffet was a little known singer/songwriter without a hit trying to find his niche. Few showed up at the small auditorium that night and the university wanted to cancel the performance. Instead, Buffet walked to center stage with a guitar in one hand a six-pack of Budweiser in the other.

When the beer was gone, so was Buffet.

I’ve never been able to confirm the veracity of the story. It is now part of the legend.

A few years later he made a name with a song called “Margaritaville,” promising there was nothing wrong with “wasting away” there. And for a time Buffet lived that life in Key West.

After putting out the weekly newspaper in college, it was Buffet my fellow editors and I turned to after the drinking started.

The reality was I knew the words to “Margaritaville” way before I had ever had a margarita or tasted tequila.

But when you looked closer at the artist, at the man -  especially as he  got older - the words could be profound.

In “Pirate Looks at 40” we all can contemplate our mortality:

Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years too late

The cannons don't thunder, there's nothin' to plunder

I'm an over-forty victim of fate

Arriving too late, arriving too late

My wife and I saw Jimmy in back-to-back summers at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in 1990 and 1991. We were in our 30s then and part of a crowd dressed in tropical shirts, shorts that actually wore stuffed parrots on their heads. Instead of beach balls, inflated sharks bounced around the amphitheater.

We were in the third row and got to see the Coral Reefer Band in all its glory.

A decade or so later, it wasn’t unusual to find my son and wife dancing around the kitchen while making dinner singing Buffet’s take on a world gone crazy. At one point he laments about religion “there is a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

Then he gets philosophical:

Where's the church, who took the steeple

Religion is in the hands of some crazy-ass people

Television preachers with bad hair and dimples

The god's honest truth is it's not that simple

It's the Buddhist in you, it's the Pagan in me

It's the Muslim in him, she's Catholic ain't she?

It's the born again look its the WASP and the Jew

Tell me what's goin' on, I ain't got a clue

My hope is that Jimmy Buffet passed knowing the unadulterated joy his songs gave to his legions of fans.

He led quite a life.

He squezed every drop of joy out of it and those of us who listened along smiled just a little bit more.

Let me leave you with this from “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes:”

Reading departure signs in some big airport reminds me of the places I've been

Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure makes me want to go back again

If it suddenly ended tomorrow I could somehow adjust to the fall

Good times and riches and son-of-a-bitches I've seen more than I can recall

Godspeed Jimmy Buffet and thank you.

Correction

On Friday, I recounted teacher Rosemary Armao’s post about her students lack of current events knowledge at RPI. Armao was actually referring to her journalism class she teaches at SUNY Albany and not RPI.

I  spoke to one of Armao’s classes at RPI last year and assumed she was still there. Never assume.

Chapman fundraiser

The Chapman Museum will hold its annual membership luncheon on Sunday, Sept. 17 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Queensbury Hotel.

Richard Timberlake will speak about techniques in early photography. Cost for the luncheon is $55 per person or $330 for a table.

It’s part of a busy fall at the Glens Falls museum.

ER waiting time

The Albany Times Union reported on Sunday about the long wait times for emergency room treatment in hospitals throughout the Capital District.

Albany Medical Center and St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany had the second and third highest wait times in the state while Ellis Hospital in Schenectady was sixth.

Patients waited an average of 5 hours and 45 minutes at Albany Med, 5 hours and 36 minutes at St. Peter’s and 5 hours and 15 minutes at Ellis.

The statistics were garnered last year as Covid was waning.

Glens Falls Hospital and Saratoga Hospital were a little better with Glens Falls showing a wait of nearly 4 hours and Saratoga 4 hours and 17 minutes.

The long waits were attributed to staffing shortages throughout the region.

It would be nice to know how local hospital management is addressing the problem.